Mindful Leadership For Dummies

Introduction

Mindfulness is a mental discipline that has been practiced for thousands of years. Modern science has researched the impacts of mindfulness on health and well-being over the last 40 years. In recent years, researchers have turned their attention to exploring the benefits of applying mindfulness to the way people work.

Nowadays, hundreds of corporate organisations, from Google to General Mills, from Dow Chemicals to the UK Parliament, use mindfulness to help their employees boost their resilience, productivity, emotional intelligence, focus and well-being. Leading business schools now recognise that mindfulness provides the foundation for effective leadership and routinely offer mindfulness training to MBA students and those in search of new approaches to the challenges of the modern-day workplace.

A lot of hype and myth surrounds mindful leadership. Simply put, mindful leadership = mindfulness + leadership.

A mindful leader is simply a leader who uses mindfulness to gain deeper knowledge of himself and makes a conscious effort to use this knowledge to manage himself better, taking personal responsibility for his actions and striving to be the best leader he can be.

Mindful leaders provide calm, clarity and a clear sense of direction, carefully balancing the needs of the organisation with the needs and aspirations of the workforce. Mindful leaders monitor themselves to maintain a focus on present- moment reality, their impact on other people, and their reactions to ...