Creating Mindful Leaders

How to Power Down, Power Up, and Power Forward

Joe Burton

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781119484783
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119484790
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Unleash your inner mindful leader

Mindfulness, emotional intelligence and resilience are the "must have skills" for modern leaders—yet many professionals are too stressed to know where to start. Creating Mindful Leaders provides deep insights and easy practices based in neuroscience, brain training and positive psychology to help professionals thrive in the "age of disruption."

Written by a global COO turned successful tech entrepreneur, the book provides a roadmap to greater health, happiness and performance. It speaks to every professional wanting to reduce stress, achieve greater success and enjoy life more.  

• Offers immediately actionable techniques for professionals at all skill levels
• Provides relatable, real-world advice
• Helps build resilience while changing your relationship to stress
• Shares a roadmap for sustainable performance in the face of ongoing change

Creating Mindful Leaders provides an informed, humorous and expert peak into the sources of stress caused by the modern pace of living and offers practical, actionable tools and techniques as the antidote to manage stress, increase resilience, and improve your wellbeing, performance, relationships, sleep and physical health. 

Part I
FOR YOU

Chapter 1
What Is Mindfulness and Why Should I Care?

Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand—and melting like a snowflake.

—Francis Bacon Sr.

The answer to this chapter's question changed my life, my approach as a leader, and the direction of my career. May it do the same for you.

This is why I care.

I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the youngest of six kids, and a twin. Our father was an unemployable alcoholic. Our mother has a form of muscular dystrophy and a walking disability. An older sister married a construction worker come drug dealer. Three generations lived under the roof of my grandfather's home. Early on, we had alcohol, drugs, and occasional violence in the home. I learned to be a fighter. I was the first person in my family to go to college. I started my career at Price Waterhouse (now PricewaterhouseCoopers). I thrived on their up‐or‐out culture; survival of the fittest. When it came to fight or flight, I always chose fight. That mentality helped me to achieve more in my career than I ever thought possible. Being a fighter served me well. Until it didn't.

When I was 32, I herniated the L5‐S1 disk in my lower back while playing basketball. At 35, I herniated both the L4‐L5 and the L5‐S1 discs again. Not by playing sports, but by—wait for it—picking up luggage. By the time I turned 40, I'd been suffering from eight years of chronic back pain. I was stressed out, traveling constantly (50 countries, yippee!) and routinely worked 12‐hour days and weekends as a badge of honor. And my health and mental wellbeing was slipping fast. Sound familiar?

Figure 1.1 The author (more handsome as an illustration)

Following my second back injury, I was using a cane, limping into my well‐appointed office at Ogilvy & Mather and closing my office door several times a day so that I could lie on the floor, sometimes crying through the pain. Over time, chronic back pain lead to insomnia. Insomnia lead to asthma. Constant pain, failing health, and family challenges lead to anger, fear and a bad attitude. At 37, I lost my sister Mary, a long‐time drug user, to a heart attack. At 38, my twin sister, Julie, committed suicide. She had been a long‐time addict. I had another kind of addiction but I didn't know it at the time. At 40, I was the global COO within a division of Interpublic, a $7.6 billion public company in advertising and personally responsible for managing over $500 million in annual revenue. My declining health and wellbeing were not a good recipe for success. The worse I felt, the harder I worked. I wasn't in survivor superdrive mode. But being a workaholic is how I'd handled setbacks in my life. I was frustrated, angry, competitive, and hurting. I wasn't mean or taking it out on others, but I was certainly commanding, impatient, and not much fun to be around.

None of my training had equipped me to think about my own emotional and mental wellbeing, let alone that of our 50,000 employees around the world.

I was making over $650,000 a year. In my mind, the promotions, bonuses, and stock rewards confirmed that I was great at what I did. But I knew I couldn't continue. So did my amazing wife, Sarah. After our first son was born, instead of being elated, I was a stressed‐out, deeply unhappy workaholic, who was in constant pain and missing out on my life. I had hit a wall.

It impacted my performance to the point at which I was basically being paid to fly around the world to stress people out. Try putting that on a business card.

Skip the Hippy Dippy. At the time, Dr. Alex Eingorn, a chiropractor in New York City, recommended that I try meditation to help manage the pain. As a Type A personality, this just made me angry. The idea of mindfulness or especially “meditation” conjured up the worst woo‐woo images in my mind. It took me many years to escape Catholic guilt. I wasn't looking to replace that with what I mistakenly thought were healing stones or a membership card to the local neighborhood Buddhist society. Other doctors were recommending spinal fusion, drugs for pain management, and a myriad of Band‐Aids you don't want to hear about in your early forties. Ultimately, I was desperate. I would have tried anything. I did. And then I tried my doctor's prescription for mindfulness. It changed my life.

It can change yours too. Together, we're going to discover how the right mindfulness practices can open up health, happiness, and a more engaged life even for the most skeptical and driven professional. We'll explore practices to improve every aspect of your life and career. Don't worry. You don't have to join a cult, say “Namaste,” sit in lotus position, get a spirit animal, wear Birkenstocks, or find a new religion. We're going to learn how mindfulness relates to the natural functioning of the brain: what you think about, you become. Not only will we avoid the woo‐woo, I've found that a modern attention training practice can create a competitive advantage for yourself and your company culture. You can become the leader you aspire to be: happy, confident, committed, energized, connected, charismatic, lovable, intentional, compassionate, and purposeful. For your team or company, you can be the driving force in creating a sustainable high performance culture.

Will you commit five minutes a day to change your life?

I Love My Work and It's Really Hard

We like to start off our Creating Mindful Leaders (CML) Workshop with a discussion. Attendees pick a partner and they speak for five minutes on two topics: What do you love about your work and what are some of your biggest challenges?

I highly recommend doing this exercise with your own team. It's an eye...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Praise for Creating Mindful Leader from CEOs, HR, and L&D leaders
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction: Being a Leader Is Amazing. And It Kinda Sucks
• Part I: FOR YOU
• Part II: FOR YOUR COMPANY
• Part III: EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE (EQ) FOR EVERYONE
• Free Whil Resources
• About the Author
• Index
• End User License Agreement