The idea of mindful leadership is not exactly new. In an essay entitled “Instructions to the Head Cook,” Dogen, the founder of Zen in Japan during the thirteenth century, advised that the head cook embrace three core practices or “three minds” while leading the kitchen. These are Joyful Mind (the mind that accepts and appreciates everything), Grandmother Mind (the mind of unconditional love), and Wise Mind (the mind that can embrace the reality of change and be radically inclusive).

There are five key areas or competencies that make up emotional intelligence, and there is a great deal of agreement about (and research confirming) the benefits we get when we cultivate these areas:

• SELF-AWARENESS: knowing our internal states, preferences, resources, and intuitions.

• SELF-MANAGEMENT: turning compulsion into choice; managing our impulses, resources, and intuitions.

• MOTIVATION: knowing what is important to us, aligning with our values, and knowing when we are not in alignment with our values; cultivating resilience.

• EMPATHY: awareness of the feelings of others; cultivating connection and trust.

• SOCIAL SKILLS: cultivating our communication skills, especially listening, engaging skillfully with conflict, and leading with compassion.

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.

In learning to meditate, albeit from some of the best teachers I could find, I came to appreciate that once I understood the basics, I had to teach myself how to do it. I had to take what I had learned, in terms of the formal techniques, and then make it real from the inside. Only then could I begin to appreciate what meditation could and could not accomplish.

The Buddha’s teachings run counter to this tendency to find fault. He normalized feelings of inadequacy and threw responsibility back onto the individual to sort them out. He taught mindfulness as a method of probing the self and found that impartial attention to moment-to-moment experience yields surprising but predictable insights into the self’s

contingent and relational nature. These insights, which precipitate spontaneously out of concentrated attention and mindful reflection, make abundantly clear that our habitual efforts to defend ourselves against our intrinsic groundlessness make things even worse.