Mindful Leadership For Dummies

Chapter 8

Week 1: Focusing Your Attention

IN THIS CHAPTER

Determining whether you’re mindful or mindless

Understanding how your brain’s drive for efficiency can cause you problems

Recognising habitual patterns of thought and behaviour

Discovering how to focus

Exploring WorkplaceMT exercises for Week 1

The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

In this chapter, you find Week 1 of your WorkplaceMT learning and exercises.

Mindfulness or Mindlessness: Discovering the Difference

The following story illustrates how clever people can behave in mindless ways.

• James had always been a high achiever. His father was a serial entrepreneur, and it was expected that he would follow in his father’s footsteps. James worked hard, excelled at school, and later completed his MBA at Cambridge University’s Judge Business School. Despite his father’s repeated executive-level job offers, James was determined to make his own way and secured an executive position in a global financial organisation.
• For the first year, all went well. James exceeded all his targets and was rewarded with a pay increase and greater responsibilities. In response, James worked harder, a strategy that had served him well in the past. His days were filled with web-based meetings at all hours of the day and night, travel, working on his computer, and evenings out with colleagues and business contacts. To make time for his work, James set aside ...