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Are You Living on Autopilot?: How Mindful Leadership Training Can Bring You Back to the Present

BL00 - Are You Living on Autopilot

By Janice Marturano, guest contributor

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 with meeti…

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The 5 Abilities Mindful Leaders Cultivate

BL00 - Bringing Mindfulness into Your Leadership Practice

By James Van Auken, guest contributor

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 are o…

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Burnout and the Mindfulness Backlash

BL00 - Burnout and the Mindfulness Backlash

By Mo Edjlali, Mindful Leader's President and Chief Community Organizer

A couple of years ago I was invited as a guest to attend a Corporate HR Executive event on Resilience in the workplace. As the event went along, sometime towards the middle of the day during a Q&A period one of the attendees stood up and asked a question of the panel that left an impression on me (I’m paraphrasing) 

“We are overworked, our employees are overworked, how can we keep increasing people’s workload and just of…

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How to be Mindful of McMindfulness

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Professor Purser a cultural critic of mindfulness, explains the concept of McMindfulness and the concerns it presents with how mindfulness currently practiced in companies and society. Additionally, McMindfulness is a way to examine the potential commodification and mass commercialization of mindfulness, in how it has been reduced to be a form of self-help. Professor Purser, argues mindfulness can be a powerful tool to connect individual to system, civic, and social engagement.
 

This Free Sum…

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The Mindful Elite and Bringing Spirituality to Work

BL00 - The Appeal and Limits of Bringing Spirituality to Work

by Jaime Kucinskas, guest contributor

In many professional workplaces, mindfulness has become a seeming panacea. According to a recent survey conducted by the National Group on Health and Fidelity Investments, 35 percent of employers offered mindfulness classes or training, and an additional 26 percent were considering adding programs in the future. Advocates argue that it will not only help workers de-stress and improve their health but become more self-aware and self-actualized both in and ou…

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Five Mindfulness-Based Practices for Difficult Times

BL00 - Five Mindfulness-Based Practices for Difficult Times

By Rich Fernandez, guest contributor

There are many events taking place in the world today that challenge us severely, from the tragic and shocking news of mass shootings in the U.S., to ongoing challenges in places such as Hong Kong and Venezuela (to name only a few), to the latest report from the United Nations on the dire state of climate change.  

There are also many other challenges that don’t come across our screens or manifest on a global scale but can affect us daily and deeply. 

Like…

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What Makes a Great Mindfulness Facilitator?

BL00 - What Makes a Great Mindfulness Facilitator

By Wendy Quan, guest contributor

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 ba…

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3 Common Mistakes Launching Mindfulness at Work & How to Avoid Them

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The mindfulness initiatives in organizations are met with both excitement and resistance to creating programs in the workplace. There are three ways program facilitators can overcome the three biggest challenges to implementing mindfulness at work. These approaches can include formal and informal strategies to initiate programs. To build momentum and keep an audience engaged includes introducing various mindfulness techniques. Also, internal facilitation and program coordinator required leadersh…

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How Managers Can Beat the Summer Slump

BL00 - Summer Slump

By Karlyn McKell, guest contributor

Creating a culture of mindfulness at work is essential to connecting with your team. As a manager, keeping track of how different times of the year can impact happiness and productivity is one good way to stay on the same page as your team members. 

Five percent of the population will experience seasonal affective disorder, and doctors are still trying to figure out the cause. While typically thought of as a wintertime ailment caused by too much time spent i…

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Time to Grow Up: Adulting Mindfully

BL00 - The Joy of Living and Leading from our Adult

By Fleet Maull, guest contributor

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 helpful f…

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