Seven Practices of a Mindful Leader. Marc Lesser
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proved to be a failure.
THE POWER OF PRACTICE
I’ve always appreciated the corny joke about the out-of-town visitor to New York City who asks a stranger: “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” Without hesitating, the stranger responds, “Practice, practice, practice.”
When people ask me, “How can I bridge the gaps between where I am and where I want to be?” I’m always tempted to give the same answer: “Practice!” It’s humorous but true.
Practice has several meanings, depending on the context. As the joke implies, you can’t succeed at anything without practice, or learning the skills you need by exploring them over and over. Whether playing the piano or playing tennis, preparing for a performance or writing a report, you only improve through repetition. By doing. In this sense, practice is an intentional activity designed to increase learning, skill, and competency. In medicine or law, those who practice enough get to run their own practice, which refers to one’s professional work. In this sense, your “practice” represents your business or your professional role, which can involve a lifetime of study and work to achieve.
During the years I spent living (and practicing) at the San Francisco Zen Center, the word practice referred to a way of life — it referred to the practice of meditation as well as to the expression of our deepest and most primary intentions. The aspiration was to integrate meditation and mindfulness practice with our relationships, work, and day-to-day activities. In this sense, our “practice” was our perspective. Our practice sought to integrate all our actions with our values and intentions.
I decided to name the seven competencies in this book “practices” for all these reasons. They are meant to be practiced in order to build skills and support integration. And they describe an approach, a way of life, and an expression of our deepest intentions. Through practice in each of these seven areas, we can transform pain into possibility.
Practices are values and intentions expressed in action. Practices are like habits, since they build a muscle memory over time. But they are more than good habits. Practices express our intention to transform our life toward our highest aspirations, for realizing our full potential and for helping others.
THE SEVEN PRACTICES: MINDFULNESS IN ACTION
Mindfulness can be (and has been) characterized in many different ways. However, for the purpose of training mindful leaders, I’ve distilled seven mindfulness practices:
• Love the work
• Do the work
• Don’t be an expert
• Connect to your pain
• Connect to the pain of others
• Depend on others
• Keep making it simpler
These aren’t your typical mindfulness instructions. To me, mindfulness is so much deeper and wider — so much more profound, messy, and mysterious — than is usually portrayed. To me, the point of mindfulness isn’t to succeed at meditation, or to understand certain concepts, or to create inner peace by holding the busy world at bay. Rather, the point of mindfulness practice is to cultivate a more alive, responsive, effective, and warmhearted way of being within the world as it already exists and within the life you already live.
What makes mindfulness somewhat challenging to explain and understand is that it involves a certain amount of paradox. For instance, the renowned Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki once said, “You are perfect just as you are, and you can use a little improvement.” This is similar to the somewhat paradoxical goals of the woman I described earlier in the mindfulness training: She wanted her experience of everything to change (or improve) without changing (or letting go of) anything in her experience.
Thus, mindfulness practice sees and embraces two worlds at the same time: the universal and the relative, or Big Mind and Small Mind. On the one hand, the aim is radical acceptance of yourself and your experience. You are perfect as you are in the grand, universal scheme of things. Yet this is distinct from the relative world, and only here do you need some improvement. From the absolute perspective, you really are perfect, including your struggles, pains, desires, and aversions. Yet a core part of mindfulness practice is becoming familiar with your individual patterns and tendencies, your fears and dissatisfactions, and engaging with them to transform the everyday problems of life instead of ignoring them or pushing them away.
In this book, each of the seven practice chapters includes a variety of exercises, experiments, and activities to help you understand and realize the practices in your life. The seven practices also build upon one another, and I’ve grouped them into three categories, which I call “investigate, connect, and integrate.” The first four practices focus primarily on the inner work of self-exploration and self-awareness. The second two practices focus primarily on relationships: your relationships with other people, with your work, and with the greater world. And the seventh practice focuses on integrating all of the practices. Ultimately, all seven practices work together to help you realize what is most important in any given moment and then make the most effective decisions. Altogether, they constitute a guide or workbook for developing yourself as a mindfulness practitioner and a mindful leader.
Here is a brief description of what the seven practices are all about.
INVESTIGATE
• LOVE THE WORK: Start with inspiration, with what is most essential. Acknowledge and cultivate aspiration — your deepest, most heartfelt intentions.
• DO THE WORK: Have a regular meditation and mindfulness practice. Learn to respond appropriately at work and in all parts of your life.
• DON’T BE AN EXPERT: Let go of thinking you are right. Step in to greater wonder, openness, and vulnerability.
• CONNECT TO YOUR PAIN: Don’t avoid the pain that comes with being human. Transform pain into learning and opportunity.
CONNECT
• CONNECT TO THE PAIN OF OTHERS: Don’t avoid the pain of others. Embody a profound connection to all humanity and life.
• DEPEND ON OTHERS: Let go of a false sense of independence. Both empower others and be empowered by others to foster healthy group dynamics.
INTEGRATE
• KEEP MAKING IT SIMPLER: Let go of a mindset of scarcity. Cultivate awe and wonder. Integrate mindfulness practice and results.
THE ORIGIN OF THE SEVEN PRACTICES
I did not develop these seven practices on my own. They emerged out of the Search Inside Yourself (SIY) mindfulness-based leadership training program I helped develop at Google. This evolutionary process was integral to what these practices are and my approach to them, so I think it’s helpful to tell that story.
In 2006, as a leadership consultant, one of my core clients was Google, where I was coaching several engineers on leadership and team building in regular sessions at their headquarters in Mountain View, California. One day I received a phone call from Chade-Meng Tan asking if we could meet. A few people at Google had referred to me as someone with “ten thousand hours of meditation practice, an MBA degree, and many years of leadership experience.” Meng, as everyone calls him, was a Google engineer.
Meng is passionate about mindfulness and meditation, and he felt that the way to create a more peaceful world was to massively spread meditation. He decided to use the 20 percent of his variable work time (Google encourages employees to spend up to 20 percent of their time exploring projects outside of their core areas of responsibility) to create a mindfulness program and offer it at Google. Nothing like this existed at the time, and he invited me to be part of the team to develop the program.
At this point, he had gotten as far as settling upon the