Do you consider it a priority on how to be a mindful leader? How important is this leadership characteristic in your mind?
I have held leadership positions in the military and business for over 40 years. In my opinion, there are few if any, more important leadership characteristics to achieve.
Leadership is a struggle by flawed human beings to make some important human values real and efficient in the world as it is.
-Steven Snyder
Here are some of the more important ways to strengthen this skill:
How to be mindful … avoid multitasking
Multi-tasking is trying to do two or more tasks at the same time or switching back and forth between tasks. Nobody can multi-task well, but many, many people try.
In reality, your brain is madly switching from one thing to the next, often losing data in the process. A highly unproductive way to manage your time and performance.
You must enable employees.
How to be mindful at work … enable employees to deal better with complexity
Enhance employee self-regulation of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors and make them more resilient when facing challenges.
Improve both you and your employees’ task performance.
The mindful leader … help employees develop active strategies
There are many things to consider, such as:
Strategies for dealing with highly stressful environments and work pressures
How to be mindful all the time … overcoming blind spots
There’s no escaping it: Everyone has blind spots. No matter how hard we try to be self-aware, everyone—including the best leader—has unproductive behaviors that are invisible to us but glaring to everyone else.
Our behavioral blind spots create unintended consequences: They distort judgment, corrupt decision-making, reduce our awareness, create enemies and silos, destroy careers and sabotage business results.
Leaders are particularly vulnerable. They often buy into the overpowering belief that they should have all the answers and quickly handle challenges great and small.
They exploit their powers of self-confidence at the expense of introspection and self-questioning. For many, the need to be right trumps their mandate to be valid.
Rethinking stress
Yes, your beliefs about stress affect how they impact your health and wellbeing. If you want to stress your friend, you need to change the way you think about it and, in turn, your body’s response to it. How?
Observe these biological responses and shift your attitude:
Choose positivity over negativity
Be grateful the stress response is energizing you
Slow down to speed up
When active leaders, employees, as well as entrepreneurs, slow down and react to make the best decisions and actions – they slow down to speed up. That’s a mindful way of working.
Apparently, rest can increase efficiency. If you do manage to get about seven hours of sleep and achieve a certain amount of work, imagine what would happen if you also did a few mini-mindfulness exercises during the day?
Mindful leadership … put gratitude to work
Did you know the human brain has a natural negativity bias?
Essentially, we are hard-wired to dwell more on the things that go wrong than the things that go well. The antidote? Gratitude.
There is plenty of evidence suggests that actively practicing gratitude:
Makes you feel better
Has a positive impact on your creativity
Improves health
Improves work relationships and quality of work
Makes both labor and home more positive experiences
Be accepting of things you can’t control
Oh, that’s a tough one, isn’t it? But it’s a powerful tool to have in your work-life toolkit. The starting point of self-improvement and personal development, in the workplace and home, is self-acceptance.
Self-acceptance is embracing all facets of yourself – your weaknesses, shortcomings, aspects you don’t like and those you admire. When you accept yourself, and even missteps at work (and everyone makes them):
You cut down on energy-draining self-criticism
You’re able to enjoy your successes and smile at your shortcomings
You can achieve clarity of mind that allows you to work on those aspects of yourself you wish to improve
Always be humble.
Becoming a remarkably mindful leader … be humble
How is humility linked to mindfulness? Mindfulness is about accepting yourself just as you are and being open to listening to and learning from others.
Mindfulness is also synonymous with gratitude – you appreciate how others have helped you. And someone who is grateful for the contribution of others is naturally humble.
To develop a little more humility, try to:
Show appreciation
Value other people’s opinions
Adopt a growth thought process
Coach yourself and employees at being completely open to new possibilities and opportunities. Consider all feedback without dismissing out of hand.
Seek out new challenges, as they represent opportunities for growth for yourself as well as employees.
The mindful leader … build on a positive experience
Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.
– Bill Gates
Success boosts confidence—and while it can feel especially good, it can lead to errors in thinking. So be careful in its use.
Don’t forget your values
When your attitude and emotions are out of sync with your values, you become uncomfortable and unbalanced—a state psychologists call “cognitive dissonance.” In short, what we say and do is incongruent with what we believe and who we are.
Values blind spots can occur on a personal or group level. They are particularly insidious when you’re somewhat aware of them, but fail to take appropriate corrective action.
Make use of conflict
Conflict can be healthy in relationships and organizations where trust has been established. Diverse perspectives challenge tunnel vision and the status quo while promoting learning and innovation. When issues are constructively debated, new solutions emerge.
You must reactivate your higher intelligence to find your way out of conflicts. Slow the discussion; perhaps even take a break. Breathe deeply and re-center you.
When you return to discussions, acknowledge common ground instead of focusing on gaps. What problem do you both want to solve? What goals and values do you share?
The bottom line
The universe grants the curious person unusual access to extraordinary greatness. So never be scared of being curious. It is the roots of discoveries and inventions. It opens up options. You think and expand possibilities.
Through curiosity, you can move from the ordinary to the extraordinary. Just by being curious, you make your life interesting, you are always self-motivated to learn, and your imagination is always fired up.
Finally, remember that To become the true winner that you were created to be, you need to strongly desire to learn and know more by not accepting things the way you see them or the way they are presented to you.
Winners are curious people.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And this struggle gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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