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By Steven Cohen, guest contributor

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, Connecti…

The ongoing problems in business leadership have underscored the need for a new kind of leader in the twenty-first century: the Mindful Leader. Author Bill George, a Harvard Business School professor and the former chairman and CEO of Medtronic, will explore why mindfulness is essential to your performance as a leader, why organizations are focusing on developing authentic leadership, and how you can become a more mindful leader.

This Free Summit Talk has Expired

Bill George is a Senior Fell…

By Kathryn Goldman Schuyler, guest contributor

As the use of what is called “mindfulness” expands in the workplace, I have been reflecting on what mindfulness has meant over the centuries. Although mindfulness-based practices can be used to reduce stress, they have long been intended for more profound purposes. Rather than becoming a “technology” of stress relief, such practices can develop an understanding of interdependence and impermanence. This, in turn, generates compassionate connections …

By Marc Brackett, guest contributor

As we all know, our best attempts at calm, thoughtful reflection work only when we feel in control of our emotions. If you’re raging with resentment or crushed by disappointment, you’re probably not capable of the reasoning required to see a situation in a new light. You first need to bring down your emotional temperature, lower your activation, and give yourself the space required for rational thought. Maybe you take a few deep breaths, a few steps back, a w…

By Christopher Lyddy and Darren Good, guest contributor

If you’re like most people, you’ve had the experience at work of sitting at your computer and suddenly coming to realize that you haven’t typed a word in ages. Instead, you may have just been mindlessly ruminating about a past incident with a colleague, or imagining the next encounter.

Getting “stuck” in this thought process, according to numerous interviews we conducted in a study of working professionals, can really interfere with being…

See how neural mechanisms underlie unconscious bias and learn how to provide a framework for mindful and compassionate observation. Discover how to deconstruct your biases, and how to activate neural pathways that enable you to more effectively engage with people whose perspectives may be very different from your own.

This Free Summit Talk has Expired

By Rhonda Magee, guest contributor

What we call the self is shaped by the cultures in which we live. And because race is a cultural feature of societies built on racism, notions of self include notions of race. The racialized self is produced by and helps reproduce racism in our cultures. Mindfulness helps us understand and expand our notions of race. And yet, talking about race and racism and examining these through the lens of mindfulness is uncommon. This is not to say that it is not being d…

By Raj Sisodia and Michael Gelb, guest contributor 

The dominant narrative about business remains focused narrowly on generating as much profit and growth as possible. This is done by generating as much revenue as possible, which means selling as many products as possible to as many people as possible at as high a price as you can get away with, whether people benefit from these products or not. Since profit equals revenue minus cost, traditional businesses also look to minimize costs. They do …

By Michael Doyle 

Our careers provide us the opportunity to contribute to society, help us support ourselves and our families, and give us a sense of purpose of fulfillment. But for a great many people, the gap between this ideal scenario and their day-to-day seems to only get wider, as their working lives become more and more stressful and frustrating.

The benefits of bringing mindfulness into the workplace are well-documented, and yet it can be challenging to win over reluctant colleagues an…

By Mo Edjlali 

I've recently have had a great many questions spurred on by some of the critics of what is happening with Mindfulness. My conversations with folks like Professor Ron Purser, Professor Candy Brown, Assistant Professor Jaime Kucinskas, Professor David Forbes, and independent scholar Glenn Wallis have me thirsty for more intellectual debate. When it comes to mindfulness & meditation where can we find good debate and discussion? Have we created a tone that welcomes dialogue or that s…