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Mindfulness

Mindfulness

Mindful leader – How to introduce mindfulness into your day?

Today I encountered this wonderful text of Pema Chodron on mindfulness and meditation and I would live to share some thoughts with you. What I can recommend from is to introduce pauses into your busyness.

Throughout your day you can pause, take a break from your usual thoughts, and wake up to the magic and vastness of the world around you.

Pema Chödrön says this easy and spacious type of mindfulness practice is the most important thing we can do with our lives.

Every day of your life, every morning of your life, you could ask yourself, “As I go into this day, what is the most important thing? What is the best use of this day?” When we look back at the day, and it seems like it passed in the snap of a finger. That was a whole day? What did I do with it? Did I move any closer to being more compassionate, loving, and caring — to being fully awake? Is my mind more open? What did I actually do? I feel how little time there is and how important it is how we spend our time.

What is the best use of each day of our lives? In one very short day, each of us would become more sane, more compassionate, more tender, more in touch with the dream-like quality of reality. Or we could bury all these qualities more deeply and get more in touch with solid mind, retreating more into our own cocoon.

One of the most effective means for working with that moment when we see the gathering of our habitual tendencies is the practice of pausing. We can stop and take three conscious breaths and the world has a chance to open up to us in that gap. We can allow space into our state of mind.

Mindful Leadership

Being both a practitioner of mindfulness and professionally involved in leadership development, I would like to reflect on the mindful leadership as I can clearly see the benefits of it.

Let me first quote Bill George, the professor of Harvard Business School as I find his quote a very good definition of mindful leadership:

“Mindful leadership is a secular idea that enables people to sustain effective leadership throughout their lifetimes. It enables them to be fully present, aware of themselves and their impact on other people, and focused on achieving the goals of their organizations. Mindful leadership aims to develop self-aware and compassionate leaders by combining Western understanding of authentic leadership with Eastern wisdom about the mind, developed from practices that have been used for thousands of years.”

Another definition was coined by Janice Marturano, Executive Director of the Institute for Mindful Leadership and author of ‘Finding the Space to Lead: A Practical Guide to Mindful Leadership‘, who stated:

“A mindful leader is someone who embodies leadership presence by cultivating focus, clarity, creativity and compassion in the service of others.”

The mindful leaders can truly transform the workplace and the community by creating an environment of engagement, happiness and productivity as mindfulness, selflessness and compassion are the critical qualities to achieve them.

What are the key characteristics of mindful leaders?

The literature on mindful leadership suggests some key characteristics of mindful leaders as they are:

  • fully present
  • self-aware and understanding others
  • conscious, authentic and compassionate
  • making thoughtful decisions
  • staying focused
  • value-driven
  • inspiring and creative
  • cultivating focus, clarity, and creativity
  • open and non-judgmental
  • empowering and trusting others
  • accountable with non-blaming attitude
  • vulnerable and honest

Mindful leaders are equipped with the virtues to transform individuals, teams and their organization, which often leads to breakthrough results.
The interest for mindfulness is growing and the number of scientific papers show an exponential growth. See the picture of AMRA below.

Research has shown that regular practice can result in creating the better workplace with increased happiness, focus, engagement and greater productivity.

Mindfulness may be a useful tool for enhancing the personal and business success of leaders.

The most highly rated training in Google is about mindfulness. The other leading companies like Apple, Facebook, Instagram, Intel, Linkedin, SAP and Twitter incorporated mindfulness into their programs.

Will you give mindfulness practice for yourself or mindfulness programs for your company a try?
If yes, please feel free to either send us a mail or contact us via this form.

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