Seven Practices of a Mindful Leader. Marc Lesser
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found that meditation and leadership have much in common. Both mean living with our eyes wide open. As a practice, meditation sounds deceptively simple: just stopping, sitting, bringing full awareness to body, mind, and heart; letting thoughts and emotions come and go; cultivating kindness and curiosity; touching life’s pains and disappointments, its joys and possibilities; cultivating an appreciation for being alive and for all of life, along with a radical sense of belonging and connection. Another way to describe meditation is the practice of being your true, authentic you by letting go of your ideas and identification with self.
Meditation helps us live with an appreciation of the power and preciousness of our human life. Meditation practice and all contemplative practices can be described as cultivating depth and sacredness in our everyday lives. This is what makes it mindful: Our practice helps us see what is going on, all our gaps, all our pains and possibilities, the full catastrophe.
Through meditation, as we stare, pry, listen, we learn to recognize, not only how to get things done, but how to get the most important things done with the least amount of resistance or unnecessary effort. We recognize what we can influence and what we can’t, and so act more effectively. We connect more deeply with others and become better listeners. At times, meditation means fiercely struggling for change, and at times it means practicing radical acceptance. Meditation teaches suppleness and adaptability, confidence and humility. Perhaps most important of all, meditation helps lighten our hearts, helps us let go of cynicism, and opens us to our profound lack of separation from ourselves, from other people, and all life — which are important qualities for leadership and for life.
AVOIDANCE IS NATURAL BUT SELF-DEFEATING
At times, staring and focusing can be painful, and we usually avoid what is painful; that’s a natural reaction. But this avoidance can keep us from achieving what is possible, since this requires naming and transforming what is painful. Avoidance is often one of the main obstacles to mindfulness, to mindful leadership, and to creating a supportive organizational culture.
We have to choose to stare, to open our eyes and wake up. When we don’t, and when avoidance becomes a habit, we stop wholeheartedly engaging with ourselves and with life. We become numb, fall asleep to what is, and stop seeing clearly. This is more than a leadership or workplace issue. It’s a universal human problem, one that’s almost inherent to who we are as evolved beings: We can’t see everything all the time, we naturally turn away from what causes pain, and we don’t like change. Avoidance can sometimes feel like self-preservation, but it’s actually self-defeating. Learning to look directly at what is, as much as possible, even when we don’t want to, is a powerful skill that challenges us, changes us, and transforms our lives.
For example, I think of myself as having been asleep through much of the early part of my life. I grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey and lived what I considered a fairly “normal” life. I got good grades, played sports — bowling, golf, football, and baseball. I watched many hours of television and worked during the summers, caddying on golf courses, stocking items in a lumberyard, and working in a local hospital laundry room. The food I ate was mostly packaged and canned.
This numbness, ignoring, or turning away from anything that was uncomfortable was in place as part of my birth — my mother was highly medicated as I was entering this world, so that she would experience the least amount of pain possible — and it continued at school, where we had regular nuclear bomb practice drills, duck and cover. It included my visits to the Veterans Administration Hospital, where my father received shock treatments for bipolar disorder, which I now suspect was post-traumatic stress disorder. My father fought on the front lines in France and Germany during World War II, but along with my feelings, aspirations, and doubts, this fell into the category of things no one talked about.
I didn’t know it growing up, but I was between worlds: between the world of feeling separate to emerging to a world of connection; from being asleep and unaware of my own pain and the pain around me to a world of intense feelings, tears, grief, celebration, and joy. From a world of ignoring the depths of the aspirations of my heart, pretending that everything was just fine, to a world of longing, struggling, and loving. Learning to love the “full catastrophe” of this crazy mixed-up world and the struggle of attempting to make sense of it all.
A similar narrative is at play today. We are between worlds and the need for mindfulness and mindful leadership has never been greater. I imagine that this is always true, but the stakes and intensity appear particularly profound at this juncture: Climate change, nuclear weapons, inequality, and terrorism are at the top of the list. Major changes in world economies, politics, health care, and our food and water systems are collapsing and being reborn at the same time. All are being catalyzed and transformed with this same power — the power of shifting from autopilot and denial to greater attention, awareness, and wakeful consciousness; the power of acknowledging our pain and the possibility of transforming this pain through staring, prying, not turning away.
We are beginning to wake up to what is and to what is possible. It’s not easy. This awareness — of love, of gaps, of the poignancy of passing time, of the fact that we are not here long — can crush my heart. At the same time, the very experience of life, the pain and possibility of this human life in its totality, exhilarates me. Appreciating your life — seeing, accepting, and enjoying your life to the fullest, including all of its pains and possibilities — is what this book and the seven practices are all about.
THE SEVEN PRACTICES OF MINDFUL LEADERSHIP
In 1995, Daniel Goleman’s groundbreaking book Emotional Intelligence was a catalyst that inspired businesses and executives to embrace the importance of emotional skills and competencies. Goleman’s work sparked a revolution in interest in emotional intelligence that was quickly adopted by corporations worldwide and used in leadership trainings.
It’s easy to understand why. Despite the fact that it is difficult to quantify or measure “emotional intelligence,” we know it is essential and we recognize it when we see it. There are five key areas or competencies that make up emotional intelligence, and there is a great deal of agreement about (and research confirming) the benefits we get when we cultivate these areas:
• SELF-AWARENESS: knowing our internal states, preferences, resources, and intuitions.
• SELF-MANAGEMENT: turning compulsion into choice; managing our impulses, resources, and intuitions.
• MOTIVATION: knowing what is important to us, aligning with our values, and knowing when we are not in alignment with our values; cultivating resilience.
• EMPATHY: awareness of the feelings of others; cultivating connection and trust.
• SOCIAL SKILLS: cultivating our communication skills, especially listening, engaging skillfully with conflict, and leading with compassion.
All this sounds excellent. It paints an attractive portrait of the ideal business leader, and many predicted that emotional intelligence training would lead to a revolution in the workplace, creating just the type of positive corporate culture Peter Drucker and other experts say we need. What’s interesting, however, is that despite the widespread adoption of emotional intelligence programs in the United States and globally, that revolution never came. Leadership, workplace environments, and employee well-being did not become transformed.
Ten years after publishing Emotional Intelligence, Goleman published a follow-up book, Working with Emotional Intelligence. In the chapter “The Billion-Dollar Mistake,” Goleman describes what went wrong. Companies attempted to train leaders in emotional intelligence like any other subject, primarily through lectures and reading. They taught the concepts, and yet very few of these trainings ever practiced or embodied the concepts. Emotional intelligence programs explained a lot and did very little. People did not practice the core underlying competencies they needed to learn in order to actually shift emotional intelligence — such as focusing one’s attention, exploring how individuals construct reality, and actively practicing selflessness and compassion. All these things are fundamental parts of mindfulness practice, but they were not