Mid-life often serves as a crossroads, a juncture in life's journey that invites both retrospection and future planning. This period, while potentially daunting, can be approached as a season of rejuvenation and positive transformation. In this article, we’ll offer some recommendations that aim to guide individuals through this phase, ensuring a rich blend of self-awareness, enrichment, and positivity.

In a world where stress is an inevitable companion, mastering the art of stress management is not just a skill, it's a necessity for maintaining balance in life. This comprehensive guide — courtesy of Mindful Life, Mindful Work, Inc. — illuminates the path to understanding and managing stress, beginning with the identification of its triggers. The journey continues with a blend of traditional and innovative strategies.

In today's fast-paced world, maintaining our wellness and self-care goals can often seem like a daunting task. However, it's essential to prioritize our well-being to lead a fulfilling life. In this comprehensive guide presented by Mindful Life, Mindful Work, Inc., we'll explore practical strategies to help you stay on track with your wellness and self-care objectives.

Personal growth requires some goal setting, as well as motivation to keep going once you set your mind to do something. Whether you want to learn a new skill, develop a more positive mindset, or work on your patience, there are several things you must do in order to achieve your desired outcome. Start by writing out some of your goals and include a few pros and cons that may come with the journey; for instance, you might find that taking on a particular hobby is a great way to relieve stress but is far too time-consuming for you to practice it every day. Looking at your goals in a practical way will allow you to narrow down what you really want to do and find ways to work them into your schedule realistically.

Optimal living enables optimal performance. Individuals and organizations shooting for sustainable excellent performance and individual satisfaction need a well-developed program.

I was recently asked, "What makes you different than the many other coaches offering services in the mindfulness and wellness space?" Thinking about it, what came to mind was that while mindfulness and wellness are critically important, they are means to the end of optimal living and performance. This is not a new concept. I addressed it in my book, The Zen Approach to Project Management and came back to it in my books on the application of mindfulness to conflict and expectations.

The entrepreneurial lifestyle can be challenging, lonely, and unpredictable. However, that’s why building your physical and mental health is crucial to yourself and your business. If you're an entrepreneur, you must create time for self-care to avoid burnout. Read on for ways you can do just that. 

As a new business owner, you have many responsibilities and concerns, including the well-being of your employees. An essential part of being an effective boss is encouraging self-care among your employees so that they can focus on work and be as productive as possible. Here are six ways to promote employee self-care in your workplace.

Provide Ergonomics

Office ergonomics create an environment where employees thrive, are more productive, and feel comfortable. Ensure desk chairs offer good back support and armrests to ease some of the body’s strain.

In the last decade, leaders have been encouraged to provide feedback in the workplace. Some of them have done so in the form of fierce criticism or “radical transparency,” a practice that has been adopted by many companies, including Netflix. The streaming giant developed the “Netflix Way,” which “encourages harsh feedback”, and subjects its employees to “intense and awkward” real-time ‘360’ feedback, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The most successful leaders are ones who leave remarkable impacts on their workers.

Every employer should make their staff feel secure, valued, and respected. Through good performance management, their gratitude will translate into substantial levels of performance.

Business leaders should aim to create a positive and mindful work environment. By meeting these standards, they can ensure goals are met–fairly and with reason.

It's essential to discover how supporting your employees can increase performance and productivity.

The truth is, maybe, we need a bit more imbalance. The times when I’ve had a blast, and I was at my happiest, were those when I was unbalanced – fasting, falling in love, going on 7-day retreats (and festivals), leaving everything behind to travel the world, working like a dog to deliver articles on time. All these extremes required full bouts of attention and complete immersion.

Sometimes, it feels like we’re the “tired generation” – how many times have you heard from people around you that they’re feeling exhausted, or that they are struggling with insomnia and anxiety or something similar? The list is by no means exhaustive.

Not only do I hear these things, but I find myself saying some of them quite often as well. There are many reasons why people struggle with tiredness. Regardless of the cause, we can agree that the symptoms are most likely the same – brain fog, lethargy, fatigue, sleeping problems, just to name a few.

Working remotely has become the reality for most employees since the beginning of the pandemic. The abrupt change took people by surprise and as many companies sent their employees home to work virtually, remote work had a Big Moment.

What may have created panic at first soon became the norm, as it was quickly apparent to many office-based teams that employees could be productive and focused – even when not in the physical workplace.

Organizations have recognized the promise of mindfulness to improve performance. They provide courses to teach mindfulness meditation to give employees tools to promote clear thinking and manage stress and burn-out. Those efforts are most effective when they are part of a broader program that recognizes that mindfulness has profound effects on individuals.

Mindfulness is the capacity to objectively observe everything that is going on externally and internally while being fully immersed in it. Mindfulness-based meditation increases concentration, objectivity, and attention, while reducing stress and anxiety. It is a foundation for emotional intelligence and healthy relationships. 

Burnout is a thing and it dates back to way before the pandemic hit the world. The Covid-19 pandemic, in fact, served as a catalyst to dismantle “the burnout culture.”

What many people believed was caused by the lockdown and the work-from-home lifestyle, had actually been a reality for workers for quite a while. That’s because the real cause of worker burnout isn’t the pandemic. The problem is overworking, and workplace cultures that support, expect, and demand it of their personnel.

How many times have you heard someone saying that they’re “jammed with work,” or “overwhelmed,” “slammed,” or “so busy?” Or how many times have you yourself said just that? I admit, I must have said “I’m so busy” about five times in the past few days.

Somehow, our society praises those who are constantly on the grind, looking for the next thing to do, racing to clear up the ‘to-do list’ asap, constantly working to achieve the next goal. We seem to be steadily living in the race for the future, and busyness is seen almost as a status symbol.

Where did the time go? Do you often find yourself wondering how you spent your time each day? By the end of the day, we often find ourselves mentally or physically exhausted by our daily activities – work and personal commitments with friends and family leave us with little-to-no time for our own self-care.

There are so many books and training materials on time management – the sheer volume can make the topic seem complicated, when in fact it can be very simple to incorporate better habits into our daily lives. However, in practice, when time passes by and we don’t feel accomplished, we often don’t pause or take a step back to examine the reasons for our distraction or lack of focus.

Successful performance is measured in accomplishing objectives and managing change and transformation in any organization, as well as in personal life. Depending on personal and organizational values the objectives will include health and happiness, social responsibility, profits, and sustained growth.

The ability to manage emotions is a critical success factor. It promotes responsiveness rather than reactivity. With responsiveness comes the ability to perform optimally in the face of challenges like annoying co-workers, unplanned change, complexity, and uncertainty.

Let’s face it: working from home isn’t for everyone. Some people love it and others hate it. I personally love it and feel privileged to work at my own pace while not needing to engage with others — I’m an introvert, and working alone increases my productivity and creativity.

But as I said, not everyone enjoys the work-from-home lifestyle. And that’s okay. I chose to work remotely way before the pandemic hit the world. I’m a digital nomad, and I've traveled the world while working from my laptop.

However, as much as I love it, it comes with several hidden challenges that most people don’t see behind my Instagram picture of me drinking a coconut and working.

If you rely only on your own knowledge and experience when tasked with making a decision, you are missing an opportunity to get to an optimal outcome. As smart as you may be, you can only gain by getting information, opinions, and experience from multiple sources with meaningful diverse perspectives.

While there are some decisions that must be made in the heat of the moment, at work and in other parts of your life you have the time to consider multiple facts, opinions and feelings. The more impactful the decision, the more you want to combine analysis and intuition to come to the right choice.

Compassion and the corporate workplace seem to be things that can’t coexist harmoniously together. For many of us, pairing these two things sounds more like an ideological concept than a realistic possibility. But it’s actually not.

We’ve already talked about the toll that the pandemic has taken on our mental health; that’s why we need to be more empathic and compassionate towards fellow colleagues now more than ever. In an article published by the Harvard Business Review, it's reported that our compassion oftentimes goes out the window during stressful situations. 

Focused skills training is a necessity. However, unless skills training is part of an overall program to optimize performance it is likely to go to waste or be far less effective than desired.

The Kirkpatrick training evaluation model rates training in four levels:

1. Reaction (Did participants like it?)
2. Learning (Were skills and concepts learned?)
3. Behavior (Were learned skills applied?)
4. Results (Were desired performance improvements realized?)

The theme for our June 2, 2021 Moment to Moment Mindfulness Discussion (M2M) session was using body awareness to bring mindfulness to the present moment. Coming to presence is enough to make a difference in the way you act in the world and are perceived by others, and work is a challenging place to practice mindful awareness. We choose to take on the challenge because mindful awareness enhances our ability to perform optimally, and using the body as an object of mindfulness is the primary way to cultivate moment to moment awareness at work, at home, or anywhere. It also provides opportunities to cut through habitual behaviors and to differentiate between thinking about experience and instead being in the experience itself.

So, my friend, how was your May? Great----how does June look? Many of you who are reading this work somewhere in the revenue chain of a company. Sales, sales management, customer success, consulting. And, as we all know, we are as good as our last 30-day productivity metrics say we are. If they are favorable, we have the privilege of being employed for another 30 days, and are asked to produce even more.

The problem is, there is nothing in the

natural world that operates that way!

Rising, falling, this is the way of nature. The tide goes out, the tide comes in. The leaves fall, the branches are bare, buds appear, leaves blossom again. My hair, once brown, is decidedly no longer so and continues to trend toward the white end of the color spectrum.

Excessive stress gets in the way of individual, team, and organizational performance. To optimize performance, reduce unnecessary stress by changing the environment and ultimately better enabling individuals and teams to handle the unavoidable stress that remains.  

Changing the environment means adjusting workloads, working conditions, roles, and structures. Better enabling individuals begins with applying mindful awareness to better manage their own stress, and in turn to be less likely to increase the stress of those around them. Teams that collectively apply mindful awareness exponentially enhance its benefits in service of their goals. 

Maybe you’re feeling anxious, sad, burnt out, unmotivated, or some combination of these many feelings. Perhaps you don’t even know what to call what you’re feeling… “just feeling ‘meh’ recently”, I hear some of my friends saying.

The pandemic has raised many unknown feelings and pushed some buttons in many of us. Feeling ‘blah’, is one of them. Even if we don’t know how to describe this general malaise that some of us have been feeling during the pandemic, there’s actually a good term for it... ‘languishing’.

Your "mood" is contagious. We are all tuning forks. We express the way we feel in our tone of voice, facial expressions, body language, and subtle chemical reactions. These vibrations affect those around us. And the vibrations of those around us, as well as our environment, affect our own mental state. 

Mood contagion takes place in shared physical spaces, in virtual environments, and even through writing - this occurs everywhere tone and body language operate. 

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, stress and anxiety levels are going through the roof. According to Statista, a wave of stress has hit the workplace and the numbers raise several concerns. Statista researched the percentage of workers reporting higher stress levels since the coronavirus outbreak in 2020 —  67% of respondents said their stress levels went up significantly.

Some Fortune 500 companies such as Apple, Nike, LinkedIn, and Intel adopted mindfulness in the workplace to help their employees to manage stress and increase overall productivity. If these big corporations are sold on the idea, what could this mean for you and your own work?

The word “mindful” can be used in many ways, but it’s often used when someone is facing an unexpected or even dangerous situation. For instance, one might be told to be mindful about their expenses or the traffic jam. But can we also apply the word “mindful” to leadership? Is there such a thing as a mindful leader?

Communication is vital to cultivating connections and mindfully engaging with people in our personal and professional lives. In project management practice, stakeholders are those who are impacted by or can impact the project positively or negatively. Creating a successful flow of information ultimately enables more effective communication and better project execution in working with what at times is a diverse collection of project stakeholders. Additionally, the importance of the project manager’s emotional intelligence and self-awareness cannot be overstated, as it is this capacity for connecting with stakeholders on a deeper level that allows for empathic and systemic understanding to pivot as a project develops.

When I walked in for the job interview, I realized several things right away. I noticed how I felt in response to the beautiful views from the windows, relaxed attire, flowers on desks, and the open space. As this was a small company, I could see many of the people at work at their stations. It felt engaging and welcoming at the same time.

Just paying attention to the “vibe” of the place helped me quickly understand the culture and feel like I was a good fit. That is a great state of mind to be in to start an interview. I had the thought, “I’m so glad I’ve trained in mindfulness or might have missed this.”

We are more aware of the importance of our health and well-being amidst COVID-19 concerns. Personally, and professionally we are learning to live and work in new ways. Even during the "best" of times, creating a wellness culture at work and home can be challenging. Time never feels on our side. But there is time, and we can choose to use it for our self-care. We can make choices that positively impact our physical, mental, and emotional health – our well-being, whether at home or work. Now more than ever, it is essential to take care of yourself.

Many lawyers know this trick with legal research: you know you’ve found the leading case when you see the same name cited over and over again. By following this judicial bread crumb trail, lawyers can find a lynchpin to leverage a transition from novice to proficient as they try to navigate legal issues for their clients. When I started down my own path of learning about mindfulness, I did the same thing. I didn’t know much about the subject, so I just started reading and listening to podcasts or watching YouTube videos. When a title popped up multiple times, I made a mental note to go read it. One of the first titles added to my mental list was Zen in the Art of Archery  by Eugene Herrigel, but it took me years to finally go read it. Reading the book didn’t make me want to try archery or change my meditation practice, but it made me consider how its lessons might apply to other aspects of my own life. In particular, the first thing that came to mind was how I use LinkedIn. This may make no sense to you at all, but please allow me to explain.

“Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky.

Conscious breathing is my anchor.”

― Thich Nhat Hanh

Life-threatening asthma was my first dharma teacher.

My asthma gave me direct experiences with impermanence, vulnerability, working with fear, and finding the present.

My childhood journey through needles, doctors and emergency room visits was a kind of training that now—in good health and many years into formal practice—I am coming to appreciate.

What can happen when you gather ten Power Women in your living room to take on one of this generation’s most complex issues?

The email invitation from Lily Kanter, the CEO of Boon Supply and co-founder of Serena & Lily, said, “I’m inviting the most influential Women change makers I know to join me for a Living Room discussion and to spark a national conversation on what smartphones are doing to humankind.”

Happy 2019!

In the first month of the year, I'd like to talk a little about New Beginnings.

As mindfulness practitioners, we know that it is a practice of renewing one's awareness, again and again. When one first wakes up in the morning and opens one’s eyes, there’s a moment: there is the sensation of having sight, before the content of what’s seen is registered, before the sense of self coalesces again… In that moment there can be a simple and deep pleasure of having this sense perception, an appreciation of being alive. One can experience this new beginning frequently in meditation, a practice of renewing one's practice, in the moment, as losing concentration is the nature of our practice. In life as well--we will lose our grounding countless times, and if we're committed to practice, we simply begin again, and again.

Summary: Even regular mindfulness practitioners can struggle to tune in amidst the hustle and bustle of day-to-day life. Plug into your inner zen with a quick but powerful self-check.

I have done a fair share of yoga and meditation in my time, and I will be the first to admit that tapping into the present moment when I’m knee deep in to do’s and riding the emotional rollercoaster of entrepreneurship can be a big challenge.

“It's perfectly safe to stand nowhere.” -Ram Dass

When I began my career nearly 45 years ago, the road to success may have seemed a little long, but it was paved in concrete and well-illumined.

Today, however, you can be cruising along at 80 miles an hour only to find the road ends abruptly in a pool of darkness and you find yourself in a farmer's lane with only a jug of cheap whiskey to light your path back to civilization (I grew up in the Amish Country, so cut me a little slack with the metaphors.)

Mindfulness has become a bit of a buzzword over the last few years.

But just what does being mindful mean and how does it work?

In this guide, you'll learn why being mindful matters and how to practice it.

A major global movement is taking place to make corporations more people centric as a way of achieving great results.

The world is facing a global leadership crisis. 77% of leaders think they do a good job of engaging their people, yet 88% of employees say their leaders do a bad job with engagement. There is also a high level of suffering in the workplace: 35% of employees would forego a pay raise to see their leaders fired.

This is an enormous waste of human talent –despite the fact that $46 billion is spent each year on leadership development.

Decision-making is an important element in our lives that determines the course of our future actions and experiences. All of us have to make decisions every day, whether we have to decide what kind of breakfast to have in the morning or to take the stairs on your way to work. These small decisions do not require a lot of thought and are easily determined by our previous choices and intuitive processing. However, there are situations in which we have to make important decisions like choosing our career path or moving to another country. In these situations, a decision requires a more complex rationalization.

Finding the time to exercise is hard if you don't have a lot of spare time. If you’re a single parent, chances are you don’t have a lot of time to devote to your own fitness. Even if you do have a moment of free time, you’re likely exhausted from life’s never-ending responsibilities. And on top of that, getting in shape is expensive, right? What if money is tight? While it would be disingenuous to say that tending to your own fitness as a single parent is easy, it can be done. Here are some tips for the overworked, overbooked, and overextended.

The business of mindfulness has extended beyond $1 Billion today, excluding revenues from various apps out there. Researchers are also getting immersed in the area, in terms of health benefits at work, yet very little exists on the impact mindfulness has on leaders at work and most studies are done in a clinical setting.

As an organization consultant in the corporate arena, I know that companies will increasingly ask about the ROI of mindfulness programs, as blasphemous as that may seem to some of you! To address this, I conducted a study to understand the value in which mindfulness programs may have in the workplace, specifically on leaders.

Imagine that I just handed you a financial report. Let’s say it’s a “Profit and Loss” report for your business. What might arise in you mentally, emotionally, even physically, as you read the report? How do you interpret the numbers on the page? For many of us, even just reading numbers is much more than a neutral experience, internally. They’re just figures...literal place-holders of some sort of value. Yet something like reading a financial report can lead to tremendous pain and self-judgment for some.

These days, mindfulness is constantly discussed at networking luncheons, presented on by professional panels or touched on in informative online think pieces. Despite the fact mindfulness has become such a ubiquitous concept, many people forget that these techniques have application outside of the business world. Here at Maryland Recovery, a top addiction treatment facility In the United States, we see how mindful meditation can impact a person struggling with addiction on a daily basis.

Dr Adele Krusche and Chris Jack, PhD candidate at Queen Mary's, have just finished the report on the quantitative study of the impact of the Mindfulness-based Organisational Education (MBOE) programme we delivered for staff at the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital (ROH) last year. We've used a measure from Self Determination Theory, Basic Psychological Needs at Work Scale (which is comprised of competence, autonomy and relatedness) to assess its organisational impact.

Many difficult discussions need to be had in the NHS and more broadly in wider society about health care. The objective of the course we've trialled with ROH is to educate staff about importance of human emotions in the workplace and how to work with them.

While mindfulness proponents often state that practitioners can reap benefits from the concept being infused with Buddhist wisdom, they typically swiftly clarify that mindfulness is secular and not religious. This contradiction has been pointed out by critics¹ who encourage a a broader notion of mindfulness that includes not only being attentive to the present moment, but also being attentive to those around us and the planet we live on.

In my final post exploring the connection between oral health and imbalances that may affect your brain, we look at the importance of HOW we eat. Even when we are mindful about what food we choose to eat, the act of eating can increase or decrease how your body absorbs and utilizes the precious nutrients within each meal and the result will not only be healthier teeth but a healthier mind and body.

In my last post I focused on the connection between dental health and brain function, I explored how deficiencies in Vitamins B₆ and D₃ can cause adverse symptoms in your mouth as well as lead to mental health and cognitive impairment. If you are experiencing symptoms of oral diseases, mental health imbalance or cognitive decline, this post will shed some light on two more evidence-based methods to improve outcomes within your brain and mouth.

 Often my role as a parent merges with my role as a practitioner due to the nature of my work which focuses on the underlying mechanisms of optimal health and longevity. As a mother and a nutritionist, I approach my kids and clients similarly with a curiosity that seeks to understand how symptoms tell a story about biochemical processes that lie within the blind spots of the body. This approach, based in functional medicine, aims to piece together the clues that our bodies offer in an effort to uncover the root causes of imbalance. For a practitioner like me, this means that nothing is ignored and even the smallest sign might be the hint that offers answers.

My son gets cavities. Ever since he was a little thing, it is almost sure that he will have a cavity at each visit to the dentist. From a holistic nutrition side, I hit the roof each time this occurs because, while my kids get their fair amount of sugar, they also eat an organic whole food diet rich with vegetables, nuts, seeds, and grass-fed meats. They don’t drink soda or juice and they brush and floss regularly. This week, once again, we saw the dentist only to find out that there were a few more cavities to fill. This set my mind spinning because in the world of functional medicine and holistic nutrition, when something is out of balance, there are little warning signs and if those warning signs are not met with a response that rebalances the body, then the imbalance will lead to many more problems, often much more severe and sometimes irreversible. The question I wanted to answer was this; what if my son’s tendency to cavities is indicative of an imbalance that may cause him greater harm later? What if his cavities are the canary in the coal mine? So, I began to research and this is what I found…Cavities may be a symptom of imbalances that are also linked to depression, nervousness, insomnia, irritability, confusion and impaired mental concentration.

Michael Sapiro, PsyD lives and works on the frontier of spirituality, social justice, science, and psychology. He earned his Doctorate in Clinical Psychology from John F. Kennedy University and holds a Master’s in English Studies. He is a consultant with the Institute of Noetic Sciences and is on faculty at Esalen Institute. He specializes in PTSD with an emphasis on combat trauma for returning veterans. Michael is the founder of Maitri House Yoga and was trained for 20 years in both traditional Yoga philosophy and lifestyle, and Buddhist meditation. He has lived in Zen temples and was ordained for a short period as a Buddhist monk in Thailand. He and his wife lead cultural immersion trips to Thailand with teachers such as Richard Miller, Christine Carter, Terry Patten, and Sarahjoy Marsh. He offers trainings, workshops and retreats for individuals and organizations on meditation-based interventions in clinical settings, employee self-care and sustained well-being, and on practices for awakening to full human potential. He can be reached by email - click here - or at his website: maitrihouseyoga.com

Integrating mindfulness into business and leadership practices is no longer a novel concept. Mindful eating, however, is less commonly associated with entrepreneurial success stories, but I believe that is about to change. There are two major aspects to mindful eating that can propel you and your business to the next level by improving focus, mental sharpness and stamina leading to more moments of brilliance and efficiency.

The Leadership Multiverse
I spend a lot of my time in the UK working with leaders drawn from across the private, public and not-for-profit sectors and with increasing frequency they get what it means to be a “Good to Great Leader”. They are comfortable with Covey and have sought first to understand then be understood. And they’re down with Hertzberg, Drucker, Kotter, Schlezinger, Blanchford, Hamel, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Semler, Heitfetz & Minsky, Morgan, Peters, Scouller, Goffee & Jones, Maxwell… Of course, I could go on but I won’t & for the simple reason there are, if you care to Google it, 800 Million hits for leadership.

A few days ago I had an experience of a lifetime. After all these years fly-fishing western rivers, it was my first experience standing in the stream just feet away from a great blue heron. But it wasn’t just the proximity. It was the duration: for more than an hour we stood together and fished. And despite shifting strong winds and rain we stayed, and we caught fish: I on a size 22 trico at the end of my line and she right smack on the point of her strong, spear-like beak. After a while I laid down my fly rod and just watched, awestruck. Her display of focus and agility quite simply blew me away.

I want to be just like her – fierce and yet completely at ease, strong and gentle, able to move fluidly and decisively from a place of instinct rooted in a deep, visceral intuition.

I was on the Acela Express last week, sitting next to a high-level HR benefits consultant, and I opened up to him about my desire to move full-time into being a mindfulness trainer. “Ah, mindfulness,” he replied. “Well of course there is great interest in that right now, but you’re going to find it very tough out there because there are a ton of people in the field.”

I smiled. Many of us on this site have engaged in discussions and debated whether or not the “McMindfulness” phenomenon is a good thing for business or a bad thing. Here’s my take on it: It’s a good thing, but it’s not nearly enough.

A comprehensive new review of research on mindfulness, carried out by doctoral candidate, Christopher Lyddy, at Case Western Reserve University, has shown that investing in a corporate culture of mindfulness has a plethora of benefit for employees and employers – including better concentration on the tasks at hand, improved behaviour and greater attention during working hours. Lyddy notes that traditionally, Western companies were reticent to invest in mindfulness, which was viewed as an esoteric practice that had few practical benefits. The new research has shed light on the many ways that mindfulness can enable teams to work together towards common goals, without letting distraction or stress steer them away from their intended path.

Being mindful is a complex activity. A mindful existence requires us to be actively and consciously aware of our surroundings, perceptions, feelings, state of mind, physical body and relationships. Mindfulness further requires an understanding and mastery of our ultimate responsibility to choose in each and every moment. When interacting with others, there is a special attention on our choice of language and our choice about when to speak and when to listen. As someone who spends a lot of time teaching leaders to coach, I am keenly aware that a coaching approach to leadership requires a shift into mindfulness.

The future is definitely not going to look at all like the past or present.

Herb is a 24-year-old manufacturing engineer, he has been out of school for two years and he is on his second company and third job. He has been told that he has promise but he knows that means nothing in light of the constant shifting landscape of companies in his career niche.

To be able to do what we love, to know and be who we truly are, and to be generously supported and compensated for our unique gifts are all essential to designing a life that is satisfying and sustainable. And to be able to do all of this while creating a world that is better off than we found it... this in essence is the focus of conscious capitalism and in turning our attention to mindfully engaging with money and money-related matters. When our livelihood is 'right', it feels right and fulfilling, and only we can know for ourselves when we are aligned with what matters most to us, be it individually, socially, or globally.

Our minds are subject to fear, worry, resentment, and endless loops of rumination and negativity. Each person has developed their own mixture of coping mechanisms to live with this incessant chatter, some of these strategies are more supportive of well-being than others. Our minds bully us, tell us stories that aren’t true, replay dramatizations of events that happened decades ago and just generally try to hijack our attention and our emotions. How can we make friends with this mind? Allow it to become our ally rather than our adversary?

Mindfulness is a very personal practice. I like to tell people “You can’t do it wrong.”

What that means is, each person can practice in ways that work for them. You may find that some of the classic mindfulness exercises that are designed to be good self-care practices actually make you more anxious.

The number one rule is: Do what you need to take care of yourself!

Risk taking is vital to career success and
there is never security so get used to risk.

In the span of less than two years a very large spin off of a long established company was halved in terms of revenue. Thousands of jobs were eliminated, whole departments decimated, projects terminated or not started.

The Learning and Development department’s budget was cut so severely that all programs for leaders, managers and employees were threatened.

A very risky situation indeed. One that most people would be thinking about new places to work or alternately putting their head in the sand.

Everyone wants to be heard. Everyone.
We all know when we’re being heard and when we’re not. Some of our colleagues pretend to listen, while some don’t even bother pretending.

Good listeners listen actively and can repeat back the words they hear, but great listeners listen attentively. They are the ones who develop a reputation for being able to hear the unspoken messages that often lurk behind other people’s words.

Too many companies bet on having a cut-throat, high-pressure, take-no-prisoners culture to drive their financial success. But a large and growing body of research on positive organizational psychology demonstrates that not only is a cut-throat environment harmful to productivity over time, but that a positive environment will lead to dramatic benefits for employers, employees, and the bottom line. Although there’s an assumption that stress and pressure push employees to perform more, better, and faster, what cutthroat organizations fail to recognize is the hidden costs incurred.

I’d like to share with you the story of John.

John has not stopped for a long time. He’s always on the go.

After graduating he went from one job to the next. Eventually landing a well-paid corporate job, he worked hard and saved for a home.

He got married, but that didn’t last more than 3 years. After the divorce, he decided to quit his job, sold his home and travelled the world. He kept searching for something - happiness I suppose, but he didn’t say it.

We live in a competitive society where the desire to do better or achieve more than others drives us to take action to attain our goal with a sense of ensuing pride and pleasure in one’s achievement. The type of motivation is called the Achievement Motive.

Here we’re looking at how the individual orients himself towards objects or conditions that he does not possess. If he values those objects and conditions, and feels he must possess them, then he would strive to perform to acquire them. He may then be regarded as having an achievement motive. For example, a student who values coming first in his class would be driven to work towards his goal and would have an achievement motive.

Julio came to me for coaching because he was getting extremely stressed about his main MBA project. He’d often get completely stuck, making no progress for days on end, even as the deadline loomed.

As he described what was happening, he told me about the thoughts in his mind at the time:

- "I’m never going to get this done in time”

- “I can’t do this”

- “I’m no good at this subject”

- “I’ll never get my MBA”

With thoughts like this, no wonder he was stressed!

Having been looking at lots of material recently on the subjects of Mindfulness and Emotional Intelligence, the penny suddenly dropped...

All this stuff about self-development and wellbeing - which is said to reduce stress, improve cognitive function, generally making you a more fulfilled person - can all be boiled down to one simple principle...

And in a sense, if you can do this - or at least aspire to it - everything else follows. Simple, but not necessarily easy.

Mindfulness is largely about being aware of the movements of mind. And commonly, when you interrupt normal consciousness to look at what's going on, you'll find plenty of influences taking you away and back to the noise and activity that is so familiar and strangely comfortable.

We live in a fast changing world and I’m willing to bet that there are few people out there who don’t feel the pressures coming at us from all directions. Many don’t like their jobs, others, especially children, feel saddened by the environmental and social crises happening all around us. Despite the prevalence of communication tools and allopathic remedies promising a quick fix to human maladies, we seem to be heading in the opposite direction – that of illness, exhaustion and disconnection. Adding to the cocktail of mental and emotional stress, are heavy pollutants found in our food, air and water.

This post is composed of the Sunday Self-Reflection and the Monday Talk and Guided Practice, two of the three parts of my Mindful Awareness Practice Support Membership (MAPS) from the week of March 20th, 2016. For more information about MAPS Membership please click here.

Self-Reflection Practice

This Self-Reflection was inspired by a quote I heard a few years back from actress and author Jane Fonda:

"…we are not meant to be perfect, we are meant to be whole."

How did you respond to this quote? What does being perfect mean to you? What does being whole mean to you? When you reflect upon each quality, how does each one make you feel? What thoughts, memories or physical sensations arise? Take some time to reflect upon and/or journal about your experiences, with a spirit of learning and increasing self-awareness.

As a leader, to become more aware of our own participation in our relationships with our team, both as a whole and also with each individual member, requires that we begin to notice the 'position from’ or manner in which we listen – i.e. do we listen passively, actively, blankly, judgmentally, as a potential helper, or in some other way? When listening to anyone (whether leading them or not), if we can begin to notice our own private experience and inner sensations during listening, then we can begin to feel more capable and balanced in how we participate in the relationship and its needs – this helps to make our personal and professional relationships vehicles for increased efficiency and productivity. Mindfulness helps us create these new conditions and behaviors, both internally and within our greater workplace culture.

You’re sitting at your desk at work when you realize that you feel disconnected from yourself, you feel anxious and tense, and your mind is full of half-formed thoughts. You seem to have lost your presence of mind, your inner equilibrium thrown off.

At such times, a simple exercise in awareness can totally shift the energy and change your perspective. The Mindful Reset can take as long as 10 seconds or one minute to do.

According to neuroscience, our brains are wired to focus on the negative as a survival strategy, so we are more likely to obsess over a snide remark made by a colleague, than we are to focus on a compliment given to us moments later. If we are in physical pain, we are likely to focus intently on what hurts, rather than surrounding parts of the body that are at ease. Since we are wired to judge and focus on the negative, we can find some relief by showing more compassion to ourselves when we recognize this familiar pattern.

Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in mindfulness meditation. What is it? If you reduce it to its most basic elements, mindfulness meditation involves directing attention from thinking to sensory input while sitting, standing, lying down, moving or stretching. Why on earth would anyone want to do that you may ask?

We are increasingly bombarded by information. Often this comes with some kind of attention grabbing sensational story. It could be just an email. It could be a hundred emails. Modern life keeps us busy. Lunch break spent checking social media. There’s a never ending list of things to do. The mind is constantly on the go. If there’s little going on we look for some kind of distraction.