The Mindful Leader

7 Practices for Transforming Your Leadership, Your Organisation and Your Life

Michael Bunting

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780730329763
• eBook ISBN: 9780730329770
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

The ultimate guide to becoming an extraordinary leader – while finding happiness, gaining authenticity, and banishing stress

Integrating proven mindfulness practices and world-class leadership theory, The Mindful Leader is the essential guide for self-aware leadership. The book simplifies mindfulness principles and links them solidly to business benefits. It provides a practically-grounded template for leaders to develop unprecedented levels of self awareness, wellbeing and effectiveness.

Research findings throughout the book detail the positive impact of mindfulness from the perspectives of brain science, psychology and leadership. International case studies from a variety of industries illustrate the everyday implementation of mindful leadership. You'll learn easy mindfulness practices that you can implement today and a practical framework for everyday mindful leadership. You'll also be given access to online resources for vision reflections, values clarification, mindfulness practices and more.

Mindful leadership is a hot topic – but it's not as simple as "when you become mindful, great leadership will spontaneously happen." This book serves as both mindfulness training and leadership training, clarifying the parallel while guiding you through the many points of intersection.

• Improve your leadership skills via context-specific mindfulness practices
• Learn mindfulness from a practical perspective, with real workplace skills
• Discover how leaders from around the world practice mindful leadership every day
• Understand the neuroscience link between mindfulness and great leadership
• Learn practices that deliver a deeper sense of integrity, authenticity, fulfillment and bottom-line results improvement

Mindfulness provides real, practical tools for self-awareness, mental wellbeing, stress reduction and more. When practiced through a leadership lens, it becomes much more than just another leadership guide. Mindfulness transforms leadership as a whole, delivering real, lasting change that transcends typical leadership training. For a clear, concise framework of mindfulness at work, The Mindful Leader is the ideal guide for those serious about effective, sustainable leadership.

Chapter 1
Be here now

The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will. No one is [competent] if he have it not. An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.

William James, The Principles of Psychology, 1890

I once heard the great Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh say, ‘When we are well, our wellness spills onto others. And when we are unwell, that too spills onto others. Be well.' The behaviour of leaders has an enormous impact on those they lead, and the more senior they are the greater the impact. Leadership is both a privilege and a burden. It is incumbent on leaders to be well and to lead from a centre of wellness and non-reactivity. Leaders set the tone for the whole team or organisation: when they are calm, confident, open and relaxed, the team is more likely to feel the same. Likewise, when they are stressed, fearful and closed, it breeds the same emotions among team members.

In later chapters we will cover the integrated mindful practices that support specific leadership development challenges. But before we get into the subtleties of this transformational practice, we'll start with some basics so we can build from the ground up.

I usually start mindfulness foundation training by asking leaders an open-ended question: ‘What state are you in when you are at your best as a leader?' The answers are remarkably consistent: Physically, they are relaxed, rather than tense. Mentally, they are clear and calm, as opposed to being plagued by racing, frantic thoughts of regret, doubt and worry. Emotionally, they feel openhearted and courageous, as opposed to closed, hardened or fearful. Of course, this state is vital not only for great leadership but in all areas of our lives. Interestingly, most leaders agree that this state is in fact what we yearn for the most. It's the promise behind all our goals and longings.

So how can we deliberately cultivate healthy physical, emotional and mental states and become the captain of our own ship in this respect? How can we manage our internal world regardless of what is happening in our external world? Being dependent on external conditions for our inner wellbeing creates a constant underlying angst because we have little, if any, control over our external world. We can influence it, but we can't control it.

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Mindful leadership means deliberately cultivating a state of wellness and being a beacon of goodness, responsiveness and clarity, even in the toughest circumstances.

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Absentmindedness: the opposite of mindfulness

The first step toward managing anything is to be aware of what it is we're trying to manage. Try tidying up a room in the dark: it's obvious we cannot manage what we cannot see clearly and objectively. In the case of mindful leadership, we're trying to manage our state: our body, mind and heart, and by extension our words, actions, behaviours and habits. Using the previous analogy, what keeps the room ‘dark' is absentmindedness.

Most of us spend a substantial amount of time lost in thoughts about the future and the past. The science is clear that this habit is damaging for our health and wellbeing — particularly ongoing negative thinking (‘I should have said … ', ‘Why did I forget that?', ‘I hope my investments are going to be okay'). As one study concluded, ‘[A] human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.'¹

Absentmindedness, defined as being inattentive or distracted or zoning out, undermines our awareness and keeps us ‘in the dark'. Put simply, we cannot be self-aware or truly aware of others when we are distracted by our thinking (mentally preparing our answer while someone is speaking to us, for example, or rehashing meetings or interactions in our mind). Over the years of teaching mindfulness to thousands of leaders I have invited them to put what they have learned to the test in their own context. Invariably they have found that awareness and absentmindedness are mutually exclusive, but their greatest shock is realising how much of their lives is spent in an absentminded state.

During an interview, neuropsychologist and bestselling author Dr Rick Hanson told me that being consistently lost in thought is one of the most damaging things we can do for our mental and emotional wellbeing and our brain health. Most of our thinking typically defaults to negative patterns — in part based on our collective biological history.

As Rick explained, the brain's negativity bias evolved because our ancestors lived when lethal dangers were real and ever present. In a world where the ‘carrots' were sex, shelter and food and the ‘sticks' were snakes, lions and injuries (which generally meant death), it paid to focus on the sticks. If you missed a carrot today, you'd have another chance tomorrow. But if you missed a stick, well, no more carrots … ever.

In the modern world life-threatening situations are relatively unusual. But given our natural tendency to focus on the negative, combined with a habit of inattention and being lost in thought, we spend much of our time in a mentally constructed fight, flight or freeze mode. This unnecessary and inappropriate activation response leads to our accumulating wear and tear of the body and mind — called allostatic load — which is a major cause of physical and mental health problems, including depression, anxiety and stress-related illnesses. In the context of leadership, the negativity bias and allostatic load rob us of self-awareness and energy, over-focus us on threats and make it harder to learn from positive experiences. It's like wanting our brain to perform like a Ferrari while we drive it through the mud every day.

We are all well-practised experts in absentmindedness. We can eat, drink, sit through meetings pretending to listen — all while fixated on our own thoughts about the past and future. We can arrive at our destination in the car and not recall the journey at all. The critical point is that absentmindedness pulls us from reality, which prevents us from seeing things clearly, within ourselves or others. It's a thoroughly ingrained habit for most of us.

A deeper way to look at this subject is to examine the three underlying ways we lose connection with reality:

1. Resistance/Avoidance: This is an ‘anything but this experience' attitude. It can manifest as fear, anxiety, worry, procrastination, avoidance, frustration, irritation, complaining, arguing, judging, even hostility or hatred. Things are not good enough or safe enough for us. Our thoughts can be mildly resistant (‘I wish it wasn't so dull today!') to intensely resistant (‘I can't stand anyone who disagrees with me!'). There is a definite sense of argument, and mild to extreme unease with our life as it is (or was). That argument with our life adds unnecessary stress to our system.
2. Clinging/Idealisation: Children know this one very well: ‘Are we there yet?' As adults we play the ‘I'll be happy when …' or the ‘When … then …' game. We are unconsciously restless and dissatisfied with what is in front of us. But instead of focusing on the negative, we yearn for the ‘next ideal thing' — that next promotion, car or holiday house. ‘When I get x, then I'll be happy!' This sets up an endless quest for the ideal experience — we want the room neither too hot nor too cold, and if it's not just right (which it very rarely is) we suffer and crave a more ideal experience. Another aspect of clinging is greed. We cling to prized possessions, people, ideas, prejudices, jobs, status. In that clinging there is a fear of loss, and therefore a consistent stress in our system.
3. Delusion/Numbing: We can call this zoning out or becoming numb. It does not have the aliveness or strong ‘itch' of the other two, but it is very much a form of absentmindedness. It's a deadening of ourselves. This could be as simple as overeating, drinking too much alcohol, excessive TV watching or overusing our phones, for example. But on a more subtle level it is a kind of habituation, a sense of neutral passivity. Things aren't fresh or alive or exciting, they are just kind of okay. Daydreaming is a good example of zoning out, as is driving your car to work on autopilot and not remembering the journey.

Sadly, I have worked with too many good people who have become numb, burned out or alienated from their families and their team members as a result of a steady diet of clinging, avoidance and numbing. In their quest for success they have indulged in endless worry, obsessive planning, values compromises, aggression and more. Eventually they come to recognise that these habits cannot produce the inner wellbeing they long for, and their lives are living evidence of this.

Ironically, the deep and personal longing behind their business goals — happiness, a clear mind, an open connected heart, a sense of wellbeing — progressively decreases as their bank balance increases. This relentless sense of dissatisfaction and stress is not success. Yet it is possible to gain both outer success and inner wellbeing.

Presence: the antidote

We can overcome the detrimental effects of absentmindedness by learning to cultivate our capacity to be truly present to what is happening in ourselves and the world in real time.

Through mindfulness we develop, both internally and externally, a clear-eyed view of the world. We see reality as it is, not as we want or don't want it to be. We are present to what is happening in front of us, right now, at this very moment: the breath under our nose, the colours in the room, the texture of our clothes. Right now is real. Everything else is memory of the past or imaginings of the future. Reality is always now. And mindfulness is living and being fully present in the now.

Descriptions of people who convey how they feel when they are truly focused in the present, and who have relinquished all thoughts of the past or future, are strikingly familiar: calm, clear, open-minded, open-hearted, relaxed, engaged, productive, ‘in flow'. As one of my clients, Kim Phillips from the pharmaceutical company AbbVie, put it, ‘It is such a relief when I remind myself that I can only be here now. When the workload is overwhelming I remember that the best thing I can do is just be present and do what is in front of me. It is so incredibly helpful. The stress melt...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Free Bonus Resources
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• About the author
• Introduction: How mindfulness impacts leadership
• Chapter 1: Be here now
• Chapter 2: Take 200 per cent accountability
• Chapter 3: Lead from mindful values
• Chapter 4: Inspire a mindful vision
• Chapter 5: Cultivate beginner's mind
• Chapter 6: Empower others to shine
• Chapter 7: Nourish others with love
• Chapter 8: Transforming for good
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Index
• Advert
• EULA