Creating Mindful Leaders

Introduction: Being a Leader Is Amazing. And It Kinda Sucks

The problem with being a leader is that you're never sure if you're being followed or chased.

—Claire A. Murray

I spent a 20+‐year career as a global COO in high stress, high performance Fortune 500 companies. Like so many professionals, decades of high stress took a toll on my health and mental wellbeing. According to the World Health Organization, stress is considered a worldwide health epidemic.¹ The American Institute of Stress links stress to the six leading causes of death (heart disease, accidents, cancer, liver disease, lung ailments, and suicide).² If you're concerned about your own wellbeing, you are not alone. The stress business is booming. And it's getting worse every year.

At the beginning of this decade, I started a mindfulness and meditation practice to help manage my own stress. Shortly thereafter, I was brought in by a venture capitalist to turn around a startup called Headspace, a now‐famous app to help individual consumers learn to meditate. It was an odd career turn for me, going from public company life to running a tech startup that featured a former monk with a “learn to meditate” training program based in Tibetan Buddhism. That unexpectedly put me on a path to go beyond a simple consumer app and into understanding more about the human brain than I ever thought possible. It also led me back to my corporate roots with a mission to help other professionals boost resilience and improve their mental ...