12/30/2015
I recently had a conversation with a client named Claire, who shared that her company had been touting the benefits of mindfulness, and she was giving mindfulness a try with a meditation app. But she was frustrated that it wasn’t helping her feel more relaxed — instead, she was actually a bit more agitated of late. While the situation was clearly a source of consternation for Claire, it didn’t mean the meditation app wasn’t working.Now that mindfulness has hit the mainstream, it’s been defined in a variety of ways: moment-to-moment awareness, being in the here and now, relaxing fully into the present. And somewhere along the way we’ve come to equate mindfulness with “good feeling” emotions such as joy, relaxation, and happiness.While mindfulness can lead us to experience the good things in life more fully, this only tells half of the mindfulness story. In fact, becoming truly mindful and aware means that we are also able to see, name, and more fully experience things when we are angry, sad, jealous, anxious, vulnerable, or lonely — this, too, is mindfulness.Therefore, we have to redefine mindfulness as more than feeling good, and instead see it as having an increased capacity to sit with the full spectrum of being human, experiencing it all — the good, the bad, and the ugly — and learning to be less reactive so that we can make better choices each day.I told Claire two stories about leaders as a better way of understanding mindfulness and leadership choices.The first is about a leader named Randy, who is working on elevating himself as a leader. Over the course of the last year, he hired good people and helped them get up to speed. Now he wants to take time to be more strategic in his role and build more visibility for himself and his team, but he admits that he hasn’t made much progress. Sometimes, he says, it just feels like he “can’t help himself,” and he dives into the details instead of delegating or empowering his team.Then there’s Natalie, who is working on becoming a more patient leader. Over the course of the past year, she received feedback that her hard-changing style rubs others the wrong way. The tone of the feedback suggested that if she didn’t make some measurable changes, she could derail her career. Sometimes, she says, it feels like she “just can’t help herself,” and she lashes out with a negative tone and body language.For both Randy and Natalie, cultivating mindfulness means being able to see the patterns at play, become less reactive, …
