Seven Practices of a Mindful Leader

My main job was to support a culture in which everyone in the kitchen worked with a sense of urgency, focus, generosity, confidence, and composure. In other words, as the head cook, I had twin goals: to create a radically supportive, loving, and productive work environment and to provide great meals (on time). Neither goal could be sacrificed for the other.

Tassajara looks much like a well-run business conference center. I responded that the brains behind this business was that the people working here didn’t view it as a business. Tassajara is a place of practice, of service, of cultivating mindfulness — which means letting go of wanting things to be different than they are and bringing awareness to one’s full, moment-to-moment experience.

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).

I’m still often asked: Why do executives and companies work with you? What motivates them to explore mindfulness?

I usually answer this question with two words: pain and possibility. It can be painful to step outside of our role and to be more in touch with our vulnerability, with the tenderness of our heart. Additionally, we usually sense when our values, aspirations, and work are not in alignment or when we are not living up to our full potential.

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’ve posed this question — How do you give away your power? — to hundreds of people from many walks of life, and here are some of the answers I’ve received. Are any familiar to you?

• I say yes when I mean no.

• I rush from one thing to another to get to the “important” stuff and don’t appreciate what I am doing in the moment.

• I overthink decisions, and then overthink my overthinking.

• I feel helpless and hopeless in light of what’s happening in our world today.

• I get impatient and frustrated with myself and others over petty issues.

• I underestimate my abilities.

• I don’t make clear requests or ask for help — either because I feel like I need to do everything myself or I am afraid that others won’t respond to my needs.

• I avoid expressing strong emotions and often ignore my gut feelings regarding what I want or what I believe is right.

• I talk to fill space, fearing an uncomfortable silence.

• I check email, social media, or find other distractions when I feel the least bit sad or anxious.

• I am critical of myself for making mistakes or for making decisions that don’t turn out well.

• I don’t consistently take care of myself — I don’t get enough exercise, enough sleep, or enough healthy food.

• I avoid having deep conversations or discussing topics that make me feel vulnerable.

• I compare myself to others when it comes to appearance, money, and status.

• I sometimes feel like a failure, stuck in the gap between where I am now in my work and life and what I know in my heart is possible.

These are difficult, challenging problems for anyone, yet we sometimes feel them most acutely when we are in positions of leadership, when others depend on us and have high expectations of us. These statements often represent entrenched underlying patterns and habits. There are no quick fixes to resolve or transform them. However, just the act of naming how you give away your power can be very empowering! This is the power of awareness, the power of mindfulness practice.

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.

Emotional intelligence programs explained a lot and did very little. People did not practice the core underlying competencies they needed to learn in order to actually shift emotional intelligence — such as focusing one’s attention, exploring how individuals construct reality, and actively practicing selflessness and compassion. All these things are fundamental parts of mindfulness practice, but they were not included in emotional intelligence training at that time. Thus, without the component of practice, the revolution proved to be a failure.

In this sense, practice is an intentional activity designed to increase learning, skill, and competency. In medicine or law, those who practice enough get to run their own practice, which refers to one’s professional work. In this sense, your “practice” represents your business or your professional role, which can involve a lifetime of study and work to achieve.

For instance, the renowned Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki once said, “You are perfect just as you are, and you can use a little improvement.

Love is the quality of attention we pay to things. — J. D. McClatchy

While there are many kinds and definitions of love, I’d like to focus on four qualities or practices that make up love. In Buddhism, these teachings are known as the four immeasurables, since it is said that, as you practice them, each of these elements and the four together will continue to grow beyond what can be measured. These four qualities are:

• loving kindness,

• compassion,

• joy, and

• equanimity.

Research has shown that we often judge ourselves harshly and that we tend to experience negative emotions more quickly and with greater intensity than positive emotions. The nervous ape doesn’t like to be vulnerable or ask difficult questions. Reality can feel threatening. Of course, we may truly believe that loving the work and seeing more clearly is the better approach — the true path to sustainable safety, satisfaction, and success — but the nervous ape needs calming and convincing to go that route.

Seen in a positive light, these “three apes” represent three core human needs: safety, satisfaction, and connection. They also make useful metaphors for our three primary centers: body, mind, and heart. Yet the three apes also tend to react first, or express themselves initially, in negative ways: The nervous ape easily feels fear for personal safety. The imaginative ape easily feels dissatisfied with self and others. And the empathic ape easily fears and fosters division.

Leadership is about problem solving and inspiring and empowering others — all qualities that are directly supported by mindfulness practice.

GENERATIVE LISTENING — listening with curiosity and openness. Listening underneath and in between the words and feelings for clues as to what the speaker may be implying or moving toward. This form of listening sometimes arises as a feeling, image, or intuition. It is a way of helping another person see more clearly; it is not advice giving or problem solving.

TRY THIS: Take six minutes to write a letter to yourself, as if from the perspective of someone who knows you well, understands you, and wants the best for you. What would he or she say about the challenges and opportunities you are facing?

TRY THIS: To help shed some light on alignment, write for seven minutes on this topic: In what ways are my work and life aligned with what is most important to me? In what ways am I not in alignment? What actions might I take to be more aligned?

We are limited by our perspective and frequently wrong. Therefore, it is useful to practice being attentive and curious in order to increase our understanding of others. Usually, the more familiar we become with others, the more we assume we “know” them. We risk believing we are “relationship experts.

The practice of beginner’s mind, of not assuming we know, is a way to build greater understanding and trust, especially when we have a disagreement or conflict with someone else. Listening is a key skill in creating that trust and connection.

The 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. I was introduced to the concept of not being an expert, of beginner’s mind, through what Ram Dass called “the most exquisite paradox” — as soon as you give it all up, you can have it all. When you relax thinking that you already know, there are many more possibilities.

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.

The most effective way to transform difficulty and pain is by shedding light on the feelings and associations of this pain, to shed light and increase understanding. The same can be said for most emotional and physical pain — greater understanding leads to more choice and more freedom.

TRY THIS: Choose one of the moments you identified as a low point on your timeline. Write about this event for at least twelve minutes. Just write, without editing or overthinking. Afterward, read what you wrote. What do you learn? How might these insights positively influence your life?

TRY THIS: Write about your own feelings of belonging and not belonging.

What groups do you belong to?

When do you feel as though you don’t belong?

What undercuts your feelings of belonging?

What supports your feelings of belonging?

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.

Even though nearly everyone engages in these negative behaviors at some time, I think it’s worth defining them to clarify the strategies they employ.

CRITICISM — Making disapproving judgments. Often this is a way to show that the other person’s pain is their fault, which relieves us of an obligation to help.

CONTEMPT — To despise or dishonor; to question someone’s honesty or integrity. This is usually used to deny the pain or undermine its validity. We don’t have to share what doesn’t exist.

DEFENSIVENESS — Putting up barriers to avoid a challenge or criticism; disagreeing over circumstances or facts. Like criticism, this is usually used to deny fault or personal responsibility and thus our obligation to help.

STONEWALLING — Delaying or blocking by refusing to answer questions or by giving evasive replies. In other words, when all else fails, we simply ignore what we don’t want to see or deal with.

Often our conversations go like this: How are you? Fine. How are you feeling? Fine. How is work, school, your relationships? Fine. A psychologist friend has suggested that FINE could be an acronym standing for “feelings inside not expressed.

As Plato said, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

During the Search Inside Yourself two-day training program, we sometimes show a video to give participants the experience of compassion. The video features a young woman singing the “Star-Spangled Banner,” the U.S. national anthem, before an NBA basketball game. During the early part of the song, the woman forgets the words and freezes in embarrassment. One of the basketball team’s coaches, Maurice Cheeks, steps forward and joins her, so she is no longer standing there alone. He seems to barely know the words, and singing is clearly not his forte, but his support helps to jog her memory, allowing her to continue and complete the song, which ends in celebratory cheers throughout the arena. Each time I watch this video — and I’ve now seen this clip more than twenty times — I still feel the woman’s terror and embarrassment, and I also feel moved by experiencing the compassion of another person boldly stepping in to help her during her vulnerability and distress.

CONNECT TO THE PAIN OF OTHERS: KEY PRACTICES:

• Remember that a leader’s job, by definition, is to cultivate community and connection.

• Recognize the “Four Horsemen” that seek to avoid connecting to the pain of others: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling.

• Practice seeing similarities and offering kindness.

• In conversation, look under the hood of others by asking about difficulties and challenges.

• Practice tonglen, or giving and receiving meditation.

• Foster empathy in order to inspire, and lead with, acts of compassion.

A classic definition of leadership is inspiring others to perform and achieve a shared vision. This is true, but I would rephrase this definition of leadership as the art of building trust and meaningful connections in an environment where results matter. The leader is in charge of supporting the team, and this requires interdependence: being in relationship with others who depend on you just as you depend on them.

Much to their surprise, Google discovered that the behavior of the leader does significantly matter in both the productivity of the team and the well-being of the team members. Google found that leaders from the most successful, highly rated teams all shared three common behaviors:

• COACHING: A good leader takes the time to meet with each person on the team and act as a coach, which involves both building trust with and also challenging each team member. A good leader demonstrates real care for each person and for their career development.

• EMPOWERMENT: A good leader empowers the team and avoids micromanaging — guiding and supporting the team, trusting the team to do what’s required, and providing the team with a good deal of freedom. A good leader seeks the balance of providing what the team needs to succeed while being careful to not frustrate or get in the way of the team’s functioning by managing too closely.

• LISTENING: A good leader creates an inclusive environment and shows concern for both success and well-being by listening to each team member. A good leader brings awareness to any inherent tensions between the team’s success, the company’s success, and the individual’s well-being and finds ways to resolve them and support success on all levels.

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.

TRY THIS: Do a brief audit of the people who depend on you. Acknowledge and write about the ways that others depend on you. At the same time, notice and reflect on how you depend on others. Let yourself sink into and fully embrace the mutual support you’ve given and received. Let yourself feel safe and held by other people in your life, and acknowledge the ways you’ve given this to others. In your journal, reflect on the meaning and richness this has provided. No one is perfect; others have sometimes let you down, and at times you’ve done the same. No matter. For now, fully appreciate your most important relationships, whatever role they play in your life.

Once you’ve identified your predominant style, try answering these questions in your journal:

1. What is special and important about your role?

1. What do you want the other roles to know about what you do and achieve?

1. How do you think your role is misunderstood or not fully appreciated by the other roles?

Google’s final report stated that these positive norms include psychological safety, structure and clarity, dependability, meaning, and impact.

PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY: Team members developed a high level of trust and vulnerability. No one person dominated the discussions; everyone on the team spoke roughly the same amount of time during discussions. Team members showed a high level of emotional intelligence as measured by the ability to read facial expressions. In a sense, any and all mindfulness practice is a tool for developing greater psychological safety. At work, this means that each person on the team is open, curious, and vulnerable. They are engaged in the practices of not being an expert, connecting to their own pain, and connecting to the pain of others.

STRUCTURE AND CLARITY: High-performing teams exhibited clear goals and clear roles for team members. This was something that was done really well in the Zen monastery kitchen: we set clear goals and gave concrete assignments. It seems obvious but is often not given the attention it deserves — the importance of each person knowing exactly what success looks like for them, for their team, and for the organization.

DEPENDABILITY: Agreements were honored, and communication was clear about deadlines and expectations. My experience, such as with the open-leave policy at SIYLI, is that this requires putting regular systems into place regarding reports, measures, and feedback.

MEANING: The work the team was doing had some personal significance for each member. Identifying what’s meaningful is an ongoing process for the leader and for all team members, and it requires regular storytelling about aspirations and about successes and failures. For the leader, this means inspiring others, whether they are cooking meals or coding a search engine. It also means focusing on the personal growth and well-being of each member as part of the team’s mandate.

IMPACT: The work of the team was purposeful and seen as contributing to a positive impact. Impact can be experienced on a variety of levels: how working together improves the well-being of each team member and of the team as a whole, how the team is impacting the division or company, and how the organization impacts its customers and society.

It really doesn’t matter what companies do or produce: If you want to shift or improve organizational culture, focus on the way leaders run meetings

TRY THIS: Evaluate the meetings where you work. Whatever your role, how might you incorporate mindfulness and help meetings function better? Ask yourself the following questions.

Is the purpose of each meeting clear? If not, how might you help clarify the purpose?

Are all meetings the same type? How might you vary the types of meetings so each aligns with its purpose?

Do you and your team look forward to meetings? If not, what steps can you take to improve expectations and the experience of meetings?

What are the cultural and behavioral norms in your workplace and in your meetings? What is the level of trust, vulnerability, and joy? What stands in the way of these?

How might you use and integrate mindfulness practices with your meetings to improve any and all of these aspects?

Instead I said, “We don’t do busy. We aspire to work in a way that is focused, engaged, and spacious.

For me, the antidote to busyness is remembering to be mindful and to practice being focused, engaged, and spacious. What does this mean?

FOCUSED: See what matters most, your ground truth, your creative gap, the most important thing, and focus on that. Come back, over and over, to the simple, yet difficult question: What is my priority right now? What is the most important thing to accomplish in this call, this day, this week?

ENGAGED: This refers to your level of energy and attention. Whatever the task, engage with it fully till it’s time to move to a new task. In general, I find I can remain fully engaged with tasks in forty-five- to ninety-minute increments, then it helps to take a short break of five or ten minutes. When working, engage with your full energy, then completely disengage and relax.

SPACIOUS: This refers to bringing your attention away from concerns about yourself and noticing the space and openness, literally, that exists around you, wherever you are. At the same time, notice stress without becoming stressed. Expect stress, anxiety, and fear to arise at times, and let them go when they do. Studies show that stress and busyness aren’t the real problem; the problem is our relationship with stress. In one study, people who believed that stress was inevitable and positive had greater well-being than those who believed that stress was negative and something to be avoided. Further, those who had a positive attitude about stress lived longer than those who experienced relatively little stress in their lives.

My suggestion is to explore thinking differently about the true nature of your career. I believe we all have only one career. It’s a career that spans and integrates work, relationships, and all parts of our lives. This career is living a mindful life.

Helping others is leadership. It means noticing what is needed in a group, family, company, or community. It means noticing when others need assistance or attention and trying to provide it. It means cultivating empathy, listening, and being open to other people’s experience, and looking for ways and opportunities to be of service. Leaders regularly ask: How might I help?