Mindfulness and Leadership Part One: Self-Awareness and Gratitude

Is mindfulness a trend or does it have real value in leadership? Mindfulness is everywhere, it’s all over social media, in the news and in people’s lives. And from the offset, all those who practice mindfulness (including myself) are adamant that practicing mindfulness has had a benefit in their live.

Although there are hugely popular and successful people who practice mindfulness, what I am curious about is where practicing mindfulness can benefit the everyday leader. The aspiring, seasoned or expert leader who everyday has to deal with a multitude of problems, decisions and people. Therefore, in this five-part series I will be discussing five areas of mindfulness and exploring benefits to leadership behaviours. Part one cover the first two areas.

Also, as a bonus to those who read the entire five-part series, I will build and share a mindfulness focus routine so that by the end of the series you will understand fully how easily you can adopt it into your life and leadership journey.

Why?

Up until about two years ago I didn’t practice mindfulness regularly. I was aware of it, but ignored its benefits. Today, I practice mindfulness every morning and I have felt that it has helped me become a better leader in life and business. In my industry, construction, I interact with dozens, and dozens of people every day and as I became a leader with more seniority I found that more and more people looked to me for advice (work and life), guidance and decisions. This posed a challenge because those people looked towards me as a consistent leader who behaved in the way that I advocate. I needed to be adaptable, display the correct behaviours and draw on my experience to do the best I could. The work and life create enough external influencers that this was becoming difficult to manage, so I started to research more into mindfulness which helped massively helped me. But, what I found is that most information was very surface level and focused on a couple of areas. That why I discovered five areas of mindfulness that I incorporated into my routine daily.

A couple of years ago I worked on a project where a new Director was brought in. His immediate mandate was to demand, bully and strike fear into those who didn’t do exactly as he said. As someone who strongly disagrees with this method, and the mistreatment of others, I clashed with the new Director (to the point he threatened to sack me). I knew that this relationship couldn’t continue in this way, so I looked inwards which led me to the first area of mindfulness: self-awareness & gratitude.

How?

Self-awareness, if you have read my book, was what I discovered to be the first step in any change. I realised that the relationship was destructive and needed to change. So rather that blame the Director, I looked at myself first. I realised that I didn’t take the time to understand why he was behaving in this way. By being self-aware of the situation and relationship I was able to come to the conclusion that I was part of the problem and not behaving in tune with my values. Being headstrong and direct myself I allowed myself to be drawn into behaving in the same way as the Director was, which I didn’t like. I was grateful for this.

This was when I discovered gratitude in leadership. I was grateful for the fact that by being self-aware I understood how destructive my behaviour was contributing to the problem. This gratitude also allowed me to adopt this as a learning experience so I could adapt and change my behaviours to become a leader more in tune with my values.

This is how mindfulness can help you as a leader. The steps, self-awareness and gratitude, allow you to remove your ego from the equation and look to yourself first to understand how you can adapt to the situation and become a better leader. Gratefulness allows you to appreciate the situation and be open to changing.

Unfortunately, this is what most people aspiring to become leaders lack today. They believe that others are the problem and that others should change. This is their ego talking. They then miss the opportunity for learning which stifles their progress as a leader. Will you allow this to happen to you?

What?

Step one in the leadership mindfulness routine is to be self-aware of your situation and be grateful for the positives. So what can you do to adopt these principles into your life? Here are some questions which will help you apply each of these areas to you as a leader.

Self-awareness:

1. What is the issue/ situation?
2. How do I feel about this?
3. How did I react to the situation?
4. What this reaction in line with my values?
5. What did I do poorly and why?
6. What did I do well and why?
7. What must I improve on?
8. Identify and log the answers.

Gratitude:

1. Despite the outcome, what is the positive in this situation?
2. What can I learn from this?
3. What will I do differently next time?
4. Identify and express gratefulness for this learning.

The answer to my earlier question, this area of mindfulness does bring value to your journey.

These questions, part of the full routine, will allow you to see exponential growth in your personal development and benefit your leadership development journey. If you are leader within an organisation then I encourage you to test these principles out within your company. Simple training will help employees within your organisation develop and grow. Growth and development can be simple.

Continue the process with part two: Visualising.

Thank you for reading, JT