Mindful Leadership

By Art Kleiner, Jeffrey Schwartz, and Josie Thomson

Have you ever had a difficult executive decision to make? This is the kind of choice where the best options aren’t obvious, the consequences aren’t crystal-clear, and the outcome could affect hundreds of people or more. Maybe you’re a leader of a company, contemplating a round of layoffs; or an up-and-coming entrepreneur offered a lucrative deal that doesn’t seem right.

The tension you feel is between an expedient...

By Tyler McCune

Life is complex, communication is too

For most of human history, communication has been between small groups that share similar cultural ideals. 

Yes, there were scrolls of papyrus, chiseled steles, and hieroglyphs adorning blocks of stone. But until the advent and subsequent takeover of the printing press, the vast majority of people couldn’t read, which meant that one-to-one or one-to-a-few communication was the norm. 

Now we’ve created vast webs of...

By Laura Berland 

This year’s Sixth Annual Mindful Leadership Summit in Washington, DC brought a fresh set of voices and perspectives to honestly assess the current state of mindfulness in leadership. The rich presentations, conversations, and connections all contributed to a stellar experience of new learning, ideas, and practices. Read our main takeaways from the conference below.

Commitment from the top is necessary for organizational impacts. Or is it?
There were a number of...

By Ilona Balagula, Kalina Kourdova, Roxanne Moslehi, José Ramos, and Jeremy Scharf

As MBA students at MIT Sloan School of Management, the five of us are exposed to an immense array of opportunities outside the classroom. From finance groups to consulting clubs to an endless number of industry treks, how we choose to spend our time is perhaps the biggest decision we must make at school. Despite so many offerings at our fingertips, we have found that we rarely participate in programs...

How do you foster the advancement of mindfulness and compassion in the workplace?  The benefits can be immeasurable, as many people learned this weekend at the sixth annual Mindful Leadership Summit. The summit kicked off in downtown Washington, DC at the Grand Hyatt with a diverse array of speakers and attendees.  Hundreds of attendees came from all over the world for the experience and the chance to learn about workplace leadership and community. 

The four-day summit, held...

By Steven Cohen

As more people meditate regularly, we are seeing the benefits more clearly. Can meditation make you more effective at work? Absolutely.

Core leadership traits such as self-awareness, focus, creativity, listening, relationship development, influence, grit and having a growth mindset can be developed through meditation, thus improving professional performance. These fundamental leadership traits can be grouped into four foundational pillars: Awareness, Connection, Perspective,...

By Janice Marturano 

Is it September? What happened to the summer?

Stop for a minute. Do you ever feel this way? How could it already be September? It feels like it was just May.

Or do you ever look at the time and wonder, how could it be 6 pm? I’m exhausted, but I’m not sure what I accomplished today. My “to-do” list seems just as long, maybe longer, than it was this morning.

This certainly was often true for me. As a senior executive, my days were always filled...

By James Van Auken

People constantly wrestle with themselves. An impulse, a habit, an expectation—juxtaposed by a limitation, governance, or imposed denial of desire—all create disorienting dilemmas that can drive behavior and diminish mental resources. And in this internal wrestling contest of impulse, desire, and habit on one team and moral reasoning, responsibility, and “doing the right thing” on the other, a cyclical battle pervades.

In our contemporary society, we...

By Wendy Quan

Mindfulness facilitators in the workplace all have one thing in common:  they are passionate about helping their co-workers or client organizations cultivate a calmer and reduced stressed existence.

But what makes a great facilitator?  What do they specifically do that makes their following grow and flourish?

In training and certifying facilitators, I’m blessed to watch these compassionate individuals shine their light to help others, whether on a volunteer basis...

By Fleet Maull

We often associate being an adult with burdens and unwelcome responsibility.  Perhaps some part of us longs for a Peter Pan life, where we imagine we would be happier if we never had to grow up and deal with the challenges of living life as an adult.  Most of us know only too well that a Peter Pan life strategy is actually a prescription for suffering. Nonetheless, truly embracing true adulthood is another matter.  Transactional Analysis offers a very...