Simply recognizing a gap between how you are living, working, and leading and how you aspire to live, work, and lead can be profound and transformative. Equally inspiring is acting to narrow these gaps in effective, practical ways. Mindfulness helps us in both efforts. It helps us identify and bridge these gaps.

I was fortunate to be assigned a seat next to Bill George, author of Discover Your True North and a professor at the Harvard Business School. During our dinner conversation, he told me something surprising about his experiences working closely with many Fortune 500 CEOs and high-level executives. He noticed that leaders needed to get in touch with their own deep sense of pain, vulnerability, and humility, and occasionally a deep sense of shame, in order to shift from being good leaders to becoming great leaders. At times, this was simply acknowledging the pain of being human, or the pain of feeling like they had let others down, which they had covered up, as many of us do. Other times it was the pain from difficult, imperfect childhoods, failed relationships, or traumatic events. Feeling this pain helped these executives glimpse how much more was possible by freeing up energy and

feelings that were being held close, which allowed them to be more authentic and caring leaders.

Whatever the reasons, the ways we act to protect ourselves in our relationships are fairly easy to recognize. We shield our feelings and our hearts from depending on others by doing exactly what we fear others will do to us.

• We don’t fully commit to a relationship or a group.

• We aspire to be strong and independent as a way to show we don’t really need a relationship or a group.

• We constantly search for another, better relationship (for better employees, partners, friends) or a better job; that is, we hedge our bets and withhold trust.

That is, meditation and mindfulness are not sought for our personal benefit alone, and they aren’t achieved solely through individual effort. The same is true of leadership.

Work gives us the means to create the physical safety upon which our lives depend. Work feeds and shelters us and those we love. Work can give us meaning. But work can also be a means of our suffering. By understanding what’s truly happening all around us, the ways our core belief systems influence our everyday experience, we can extract meaning from the suffering, coax the lotus from the mud, as the Buddhists teach. But this will happen only if we use those challenges that the calls to leadership make on us, not only to grow up but also help us discover our why.