Blog

20 June 2023

Between Fat Me and Diluted Man

Meditation and the courage of commitment


Have we become hypersensitive? It seems. Where we now unconcernedly expose our inner turmoil on social media, the flip side is that we no longer able to bear questions or comments – let alone criticisms – because they directly threaten our existence, our being. Have we lost our way in the unrestrained public expression of

24 March 2023

David Hockney and the Meaning of Meditation


Meditating has brought me a lot of good: easier access to peace and tranquility, more clarity of mind, and a more productive and beneficial way of dealing with emotions. And yet I regularly wonder what the point of meditation is. Spending time on a pillow paying attention to my physical and mental experiences. Why should

18 April 2020

Hope, When Things Are As They Are


Hope is a theme not often mentioned in mindfulness. In mindfulness, we observe experiences in the moment. We try to stay away from ruminating about what could have been or from daydreaming about a bright future. We try to acknowledge every experience, without judgment. Seeing every experience as it is, moment by moment. That realism

4 January 2016

Mindfulness at work: the fallen celebrity of 2016?


Over the last few years, thanks to big corporations, the media and enthusiast practitioners mindfulness training at work has reached celebrity status. It’s promoted as a solution to many or most of our daily organizational problems and demands like stress and burn-out, bad communication and cooperation, creativity and high performance. What is the truth about

27 April 2015

Handling stress for leaders: stretching without striving


The impulse toward stress is almost constantly present in the life of a manager. The art is learning to cope with stress. Being able to make contact with the being mode, as we did with in previous exercises, is essential for this. Learning to switch mentally between doing mode and being mode is the next

24 April 2015

Responsability: key to mindful leadership


Mindful leadership of your team begins by taking responsibility: do you dare accompany your team into the green zone of mindful teamwork? And if you do, what does your role look like? I would like to pause at the attitude of responsibility, the intention with which you set to work. As manager, do you allow

5 March 2015

The big leadership pitfall: constantly sacrificing yourself


Persistence and perseverance are criteria for the selection of managers, but the pressure of the organization and the will-power and perseverance of the manager himself can be so great that he easily finds himself in a negative spiral of working too much and too hard and taking too little rest. You accept the pain and

5 December 2014

When do you start mastering mindful leadership?


Teams and organisations are constantly changing. High performance is expected, more intensive teamwork and profound innovation, not only to serve customers better but also to address important economic and social issues. One of the first management gurus, Peter Drucker stated that it was crucial for the survival of organisations that they systematically let go of

26 November 2014

Mindful leadership is impossible!


Mindfully leading your team starts with a simple choice. As a leader, do you allow circumstances to rule or do you take the lead? Do you choose unconditionally to ensure that your own resilience is up to the mark, so that your team can also build on you or do you neglect the balance in

19 November 2014

Mindful Leadership: beyond the autopilot


Agreeable work with less stress, achieving higher reliability of operational processes, much more intensive team work with horizontal responsibilities and a greater call for creativity and innovation. We also have high expectations of managers, for they can guide their teams and organizations in the proper direction or they can slow them down in the delivery

12 November 2014

Mindful leadership: confronting your own demons by taking unconditional responsibility


Last week I talked an evening on mindful leadership with a group of 40 leaders from various backgrounds. Some leading big corporations, others from health care providers, some from very innovative start-ups. All curious to learn how to focus their teams’ attention on what really matters. Eager to learn how to build a capability as

4 November 2014

Can we overcome fear of change through mindfulness?


The examples of leaders struggling with change are countless. Many leaders choose to continue to work too hard with all the consequences this has for their personal life and for the teams they lead. The reason things so often go wrong when we, as leaders, instigate change is because we do not really fully understand