What does it mean to be a mindful leader?

Leaders can use mindfulness to bring awareness to their thought patterns and leadership style, and as a result respond creatively rather than react to work life. This helps leaders to increase focus, emotional self-regulation, empathy, perspective and adaptability to changing and complex situations.

A mindful leader can also use their skills to improve collaboration, increase resilience, use awareness to make better informed decisions and be able to lead in complex, often uncertain and volatile work settings. So, how do you become a mindful leader?

‘I feel responsible for everything’

Many business leaders are locked in a mind-set of needing to ‘be on’ non-stop – they feel responsible for everything. Their minds do not know how to pause, reflect deeply and step back from the intensity of constant demands.

When we are caught in the pressures and complexity of rapid change, linear solutions fall apart. The impulse is to move faster and work harder, but the reality is that we need to step back, think more deeply and broadly, and learn to see and act in new ways. Margaret Wheatley – Amercian writer and management consultant who studies organisational behaviour

The neuroplasticity of the human brain allows us to retrain our habitual thought patterns and bring a more mindful attitude to the workplace.

When I train leaders in mindfulness they learn three core skills that are at the heart of Michael Chaskalson[1] theory of mindful leadership:

 1.    Allowing our experience to be what it is with kindness and openness; allowing what is the case to be the case.
2.    Inquiring into and exploring our experience with curiosity.
3.    Meta-awareness - observing our thoughts, emotions, sensations and impulses non-judgementally and with compassion.

These essential skills allow a leader to pause, to reflect deeply and to drop beneath the surface to explore the facts and hear their own quiet voice. This is the place of meaning - beyond the noise, distractions and demands of the everyday.

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom. - Victor Frankl, Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist

From this space they can respond (vs react) with wisdom (vs cleverness), creativity and compassion.

From this place leaders have better emotional self-regulation and are less prone to acting in a short-tempered way. For example, when they notice frustration, stress and/or fear arise in their body / thoughts, rather than withdrawing or taking it out on staff members, they are able to pause, to check in with themselves with curiosity, kindness and self-respect, take three deep breaths and acknowledge their emotion (vs berating themselves for acting unskilfully), feel it in the body and move into a place of calm, poise and clarity of mind and heart.

Some benefits of mindful leadership

Mindful leaders can take a broader perspective on things and understand others perspective and viewpoints better, empathise with others, become more flexible and adapt to change more easily and focus on one thing at a time.

And in turn, these skills can help leaders to collaborate more effectively through deep listening, understanding and dialogue, lead more effectively in complex, uncertain, volatile and ambiguous contexts and become more emotionally resilient, i.e. to bounce back from adversity more quickly.

Resilience – becoming more and more aware

Resilience does not mean being strong and tough, it means knowing one’s own heart and mind and responding wisely and compassionately moment by moment.

Part of practising resilience is becoming more and more aware (mindful) of three vital things (from Hetty Einzig’s important book The Future of Coaching, Routledge, 2017):

1. Knowing your circadian rhythm: what are your low points in the day? What do you do then? How do you react to and recover from periods or bursts of intense output of energy? When do you feel most vital and sharp: morning, afternoon or evening? When do you rest?

2. Personal triggers: what causes you stress? Is the trigger certain types of demand, certain people or situations or times? Or is it an accumulation of tasks? How do you deal with stress? Withdrawal, anxiety, anger, compensatory activity (eating, complaining/moaning/ranting, offloading to friend or colleague, sleeping)?

3. Relationship with the external environment: What places help you be your best? What environments bring you pleasure, which feel heavy or toxic, which feel light? What refreshes you? How much do you build this into your life? Where do you think best (desk, café, both, nature, museum, forest, while fishing …). Where do you feel at your most creative? Where do you hold work meetings (in a meeting room, over lunch, while walking, in a green space…)?

Engaging in a regular mindfulness practice sustains the spirit and helps cultivate and maintain the quietude that many leaders crave. It helps strengthen the capacity for ‘not-knowing’ – a capacity to tolerate and to be with the chaos of constant change, uncertainty, ambiguity and to take intelligent and wise action with the head and heart equally engaged.

Coming back to our senses

Mindful leaders know how to regularly come back to their senses – moving from conceptual/verbal awareness, to sensory, embodied awareness. They communicate, feel, act, and think from their present moment and the directly felt experience.

In this place they are more aware of their unconscious biases, are able to slow down to listen to others and create dialogue from which shared values can emerge, to set targets that arrive from fruitful, deep reflection vs knee-jerk, short tempered gut reaction.

Slowing down to speed up

At the heart of mindfulness there lies a paradox. When leaders can truly recognise it, then mindfulness can be transformational. The story of Thomas Edison illustrates this very well: Thomas Edison was a genius who invented the phonograph, the motion picture camera and the electric light bulb. But he was also a terrible fisherman. He used to spend an hour almost every day fishing but he never caught a fish.

So why was he so obsessed with fishing when he was so bad at it? Someone once asked him. His reply: “I never caught any fish because I never used any bait.”

And when they asked him why he’d fish without bait, he responded, “Because when you fish without bait, people don’t bother you, and neither do the fish. It provides me my best time to think.”

Mindfulness theory and practice offers invaluable practical tools for the mind and heart to live more meaningful, balanced, connected and satisfying lives as leaders in a complex, uncertain and fast moving world.

I offer six-week online mindfulness programmes for leaders as well as face-to-face bespoke mindfulness programmes for the workplace, corporate retreat days and coaching immersion days in nature for individuals and small groups.

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[1] Michael Chaskalson is a pioneer in the application of mindfulness to leadership and other workplace contexts, has developed a theory of mindful leadership.