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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Developing mindfulness as manager is a learning process. Learning ensures that an experience, a moment consciously lived in the here and now, can influence your future behavior. With mindfulness, you build resilience. That offers you the possibility of consciously choosing between action and reflection. And so you learn to approach the future with an open