The Nine Benefits of Mindful Leadership: Mindful leadership cultivates a richness of experience; ordinary, everyday work can feel heightened, meaningful, and at times extraordinary.
It removes gaps between mindfulness practice, work practice, taking care of people, and achieving results.
It considers learning from stress, challenges, difficulties, and problems to be an integral part of the process of growth and not something to be avoided.
It helps us recognize and work with contradictions and competing priorities to cultivate flexibility and understanding.
It helps us experience timelessness, effortlessness, and joy even in the midst of hard work and exceptional effort.
It can be applied to any activity to cultivate both confidence and humility.
It embraces individuality and unity — everyone has a particular role and yet all make one team, supported by and supporting one another, practicing together
It considers true success twofold — in the character and compassion of the people and in the quality and results of the work.
It allows us to shift from a narrow, egocentric, fear-based way of being to becoming more open, curious, connected, and able to help others.
Mindfulness is a way of being and of seeing that shifts our perspective. It is pragmatic — endlessly so, in my experience — since it helps us solve everyday problems in effective and efficient ways. It also develops our way of being, adding depth and richness to the experience of life itself. With mindfulness, every task is approached with both humility and confidence, with hope and with letting go of hope. Ultimately, mindfulness is mysterious, plunging into questions of consciousness, birth, death, and impermanence — while providing us with direct experience that, when we let go of our fears and habits, what arises is composure, a deep sense of love, and a profound sense of meaning and connectedness to life.
This article was excerpted from Seven Practices of a Mindful Leader, by Marc Lesser. This article was published on Mindful