Mindfulness-Based Leadership Development

This article is about mindfulness-based, not mindfulness. For all it’s heralded and undoubted benefits – for example in the management of stress, the successful treatment of chronic depression and its application in sports (most notably golf, the NFL and rugby union), mindfulness has not made an impact in business.

Sure enough, we hear about the isolated incidence of enhanced results and wellbeing, we’re told about the Googles or Facebooks of this world encouraging mindfulness by provided quiet spaces and meditation areas, but that is encouraging the development of what I would describe as pure mindfulness and, until mindfulness is contextualized, pure mindfulness is a million miles removed from what this article is about… mindfulness-based initiatives.

Mindfulness-based initiatives lead to purposeful mindfulness – the application of pure mindfulness in context… it could be the context of business goals and objectives, work/life balance goals, personal goals, short-term goals, grand goals… the point is that pure mindfulness amounts to precious little until it is contextualized and directed by goals. The really interesting this about the contextualization of mindfulness is that goals and mindfulness feed off each other… the more mindful you are, the more effortless your goals, the more effortless your goals, the more your further developing mindfulness leads to enhanced or grander goal setting. This dynamic is never more in evidence that when it comes to leadership.

Now, I don’t mean leadership in the manner in which psychology approached it for half-a-dozen decades – the use of styles and intelligences (IQ, EQ, CQ… pick a Q, any Q!) or the manipulation of others using tricks like NLP… I mean what modern (the last ten years) cognitive psychology calls Authentic Leadership. I don’t like the word, too many people who use it freely are not! But it does mean real – and people will only really achieve grand results when things get real. As one leader (a real leader) with whom I’ve worked for the last decade says, “People will walk through walls with you when you’re a proper human being and you treat them as proper human beings too.”

Nothing will develop realness more effectively than mindfulness – mindfulness, awareness, self-awareness are synonymous. And nothing will leading to crowning results like mindfulness allied to the kind of goals that awareness enables us see as possible or, when you really get your head in the zone, inevitable.

I’ve spend more than half a working life developing, refining and teaching what I call Purposeful Focus (or Mindfulness) – a marriage of mindfulness and goals. Not only have many with whom I’ve worked achieved grand goals, they’ve been able to measure their mindfulness, focus, discipline, state of mind and self-perception empirically… and business people love to measure things!

So, I’m on a mission… I want to spread what I think is the good news! If you’d like to know more about Purposeful Focus, click the link below to download a free 40-page report that I’ve put together… yours for keeps!! And, together, perhaps more and more people will discover that mindfulness really is a business proposition (and one for life!).