Overworked and Overwhelmed: The Mindfulness Alternative

IntroductionOverworked and Overwhelmed? Welcome to the Mindfulness Alternative

The Backstory

It was 7:30 on a Sunday night on the campus of one of the world's best-known companies, and I was the guest speaker for a group of about 80 of the company's top high potentials. They had just finished the first week of a two-week leadership development program that wrapped up with a weekend project two hours earlier. Week two was set to start the next morning at 8:00 AM. So, it was the time slot that every guest speaker covets, right? (In retrospect, I was lucky to be there at all. Just two years earlier when I made the first presentation I ever gave to leaders in this company, I doubted if I was even going to be able to physically stand long enough to deliver the talk. We'll get to that later.)

My goal that night was to offer up a few ideas and tools that these leaders could use immediately to get stuff done and still have a life. I dived right in by asking the group if they were interested in seeing the results of some leadership behaviors research that I had conducted with a couple of hundred executives in their company. High-achieving people almost always enjoy comparing themselves to a norm, so this group of high-potential leaders was immediately hooked. As I shared the slide for the most highly self-assessed behaviors for their company execs, we looked at a graph that was all about accountability, open communication, and making timely decisions. The headline I shared with the ...