Mindful Leadership For Dummies

Chapter 10

Week 3: Minding the Gap

IN THIS CHAPTER

Discovering how to mind the gap

Engaging an approach mode rather than an avoidance mode

Becoming more aware of your patterns of thought

Exploring WorkplaceMT exercises for Week 3

In this chapter, Week 3 of your WorkplaceMT training, we recap learning to date, explore how to work smarter, not harder, and show you how to ‘mind the gap’.

In Week 1 of your WorkplaceMT training, you consider how your brain’s drive for efficiency can cause problems. It can lead you to live much of your life on autopilot and respond to life challenges with restrictive thinking and behaviour that can inhibit creative opportunities. Over the last two weeks, via your formal and informal WorkplaceMT exercises, you’ve discovered just how much of the time your attention isn’t where you want it to be. You’ll hopefully have started to observe that although thoughts aren’t facts, they nevertheless can have a powerful influence on your life. You should also be noticing the stories your brain constructs and practicing separating these stories (mental constructs) from present-moment facts.

If you’ve followed the suggestions in the last few chapters, you’re experimenting with suspending judgment and the urge to instantly jump into doing mode. You may have started to pause, stand back, and decide how to deploy your limited attention resources more wisely. You may be accepting and parking things that can’t be changed (or are in truth not worth the effort) and making ...