Juliet Adams
Mindful Leadership For Dummies
Mindful Leadership For Dummies®
Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, www.wiley.com
This edition first published 2016
© 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Chichester, West Sussex
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ISBN 978-1-119-06877-8 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-06879-2 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-119-06880-8 (ebk)
Introduction
Mindfulness is a mental discipline that has been practiced for thousands of years. Modern science has researched the impacts of mindfulness on health and well-being over the last 40 years. In recent years, researchers have turned their attention to exploring the benefits of applying mindfulness to the way people work.
Nowadays, hundreds of corporate organisations, from Google to General Mills, from Dow Chemicals to the UK Parliament, use mindfulness to help their employees boost their resilience, productivity, emotional intelligence, focus and well-being. Leading business schools now recognise that mindfulness provides the foundation for effective leadership and routinely offer mindfulness training to MBA students and those in search of new approaches to the challenges of the modern-day workplace.
A lot of hype and myth surrounds mindful leadership. Simply put, mindful leadership = mindfulness + leadership.
A mindful leader is simply a leader who uses mindfulness to gain deeper knowledge of himself and makes a conscious effort to use this knowledge to manage himself better, taking personal responsibility for his actions and striving to be the best leader he can be.
Mindful leaders provide calm, clarity and a clear sense of direction, carefully balancing the needs of the organisation with the needs and aspirations of the workforce. Mindful leaders monitor themselves to maintain a focus on present- moment reality, their impact on other people, and their reactions to stressful situations.
Mindful leaders experience the reality and vividness of what’s going on in any given moment, without knee- jerk reactions based on negative mind states (such as anxiety, fear or anger) responding with a calm awareness and care for themselves and others.
Mindful Leadership For Dummies offers a highly accessible and practical guide for busy professionals. It includes all the basics you need to know, such as what mindfulness is and how it works (Chapter 1) and the underpinning neuroscience (see Chapter 3). It includes a full six-week WorkplaceMT course (Chapters 8 through 13), which you can use to teach yourself mindfulness or as a course workbook if you decide to attend a WorkplaceMT course. It includes practical guidance on improving your presence and influence (Chapter 14), leading in a digital age (Chapter 15) and mindfully leading change (Chapter 16). For those looking for ways to introduce mindfulness to their organisation, you can find pragmatic advice and guidance in Chapter 17.
We hope you enjoy reading Mindful Leadership For Dummies and that it leads to improvements in the way you work, your happiness and well-being.
About This Book
Whatever your reason or level of engagement, you’ll find something in this book for you. It’s designed to be practical and accessible, full of real-life examples that you can start applying straightaway. For some, this book will prove the catalyst for major change; for others, the messages in this book may be less resonant.
This book provides you with the information and guidance you need to make up your own mind and decide how mindfulness can help you become a better leader. We encourage you to read with an open mind and a sense of exploration. In the spirit of mindfulness, suspend judgment as you read and experiment with some of the concepts and techniques described in these pages, and then take from it what works best for you.
Foolish Assumptions
When writing this book, we have made a number of assumptions about you, the reader:
❯❯ You’ve picked up this book because you’re committed to becoming a more mindful leader.
❯❯ You have experience working in a professional role.
❯❯ You’re ready to change the way you work for the better.
❯❯ You’re just curious, or even sceptical, about mindfulness.
❯❯ You’ve read about mindfulness in the business pages of your newspaper or an article in your trade journal and you want to know whether the hype is justified.
Icons Used in This Book
Like other For Dummies books, this one has icons in the margins to guide you through the information and help you zero in on what you want to know. The following paragraphs describe the icons and what they mean.
