Seven Practices of a Mindful Leader

This career is living a mindful life.

My ideal retreat schedule is to do a half-day or full-day retreat each month and a five-to-seven-day retreat each year.

other words, fine is a socially acceptable form of stonewalling or being defensive. We don’t have to accept fine as an answer, though. We can recognize this gentle form of avoidance and do what I sometimes call looking under the hood: Rather than just skim the surface of feelings, we can encourage people to be real and share their transitions, challenges, and pain. We can be curious about and face, rather than avoid, fears and doubts, including our own. Without prying, and with respect, we might explore the myriad difficulties and challenges of life, including the feeling that we don’t belong and that we often feel safer hiding what hurts.

ORSEMEN

Dr. John Gottman studies the factors that lead married couples either to remain together or to divorce, and he has demonstrated that after observing couples for five minutes, he has a greater than 90 percent chance of predicting which couples will stay together and which will split apart. Dr. Gottman names four behaviors as key indicators for predicting which marriages will not survive: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stone-walling. He calls these the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

book Be Here Now by Ram Dass was published in 1971, when I was nineteen, and it had a major impact on me. It presented the possibility of finding a meaningful life by going beyond conventional ways of seeing ourselves and the world.

what the other person is saying. We’ve been listening our entire lives, but how often are we really hearing what the other person is saying, feeling, meaning? How often do we seek to learn what is invisible to us?

What I think of as “filters” often clog our ears and distort what we hear, or what we understand someone to mean. These filters relate to the three apes: They might be the nervous ape’s fears or perception of a threat. They might be the imaginative ape’s story of our expertise, leadership, priorities, and goals, of what needs to be accomplished. They might be the empathic ape’s assumptions and mistaken beliefs based on what we sense, feel, and see in the other.

In your conversations, explore listening with beginner’s mind — without judgment and expectation. This is much like generative listening. Being willing to be surprised by

Many people, especially leaders, believe that they need to be self-critical and tough with themselves in order to be motivated and successful. When faced with a problem, or with failure, we often feel that the best response is judgment and punishment directed at ourselves. I find, however, that the opposite is often more effective and successful.

for everyone. It is central to all our relationships, and yet it generally receives surprisingly little attention. In many of the trainings I’ve led, regardless of the industry, position, or culture of the participants, I find that people are stunned to discover the power of listening. And they are surprised to discover how rarely they truly listen — listen without interrupting, without planning the “right” or any response, just being fully present, without any agenda. Listening to another person can take us out of the narrow, self-centered world that we often unknowingly create and open us to another person’s experience. This can shift our experience of ourselves and foster a connection with another person that fulfills the empathic ape’s need and longing for trust and openness.

Listening may be one of the most underappreciated activities and skills, not only for leaders, but