Creating Mindful Leaders

Chapter 18Building EQ Skills for Others: Sharing a Better You

Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.

—Jack Welch

To this point, the steps we've covered on our way up the EQ stairs will have the greatest impact on us as individuals. Mindfulness practice leads to self‐awareness, which leads to improved self‐regulation, which opens us up to better understand our motivations and to live a life with greater intention. The next few steps will surely benefit you as a leader, but will also have a tremendous impact on those around you.

Empathy

Empathy is the ability to understand another person's feelings and perspectives. Compassion goes one step further by adding the desire to help the other person.

Effective empathy is understanding others' feelings while maintaining your own feelings and perspectives. When tough situations arise, we human beings tend to operate in packs. We want to enroll support and especially when it helps us prove we're right and someone else is wrong. As leaders, it's easy to get drawn into the chaos and to take a side early on. It's a far better approach to be empathetic while remaining open and curious about the facts and what is actually happening. By the time most issues get to a leader, emotions have gotten involved. When you take a perceived problem and mix in emotions, ...