Moving Toward Mindfulness

Mindfulness is an essential quality of an effective leader. It’s also often severely misunderstood, not least because so many people have jumped on the bandwagon, confusing it, for example, with teaching people meditation techniques. The word “mindful” doesn’t help: Having our minds constantly full and preoccupied is the problem the approach aims to solve, not the solution. Equally, being mindful is not about emptying the mind of thought—that’s mindlessness.

Mindfulness is in reality about awareness: greater awareness of what is happening (and not happening) around us and greater awareness of what is happening within us, physiologically, emotionally and intellectually. When people are more aware, they make better decisions, are more empathetic toward others and act more in alignment with their personal values and beliefs. They are better able to connect with their internal and external worlds and to explore and understand the connections between them. Mindfulness therefore involves creating the time and space for allowing insight and wisdom to occur.

Helping someone become more mindful (that is, more aware) involves several interconnected elements:

• Creating the environment where mindfulness is possible.
• Developing deeper skills of constant self-awareness.
• Developing deeper skills of observing and listening.
• Using intuition as a starting point for more effective reasoning.

The Mindful Environment

Quality thinking time is hard to come by in most office-based occupations. Even if we find a quiet space, we are bombarded with interruptions to our thinking from phones, emails and so on. When we do find quiet thinking time, we tend to use it for specific problem-solving, not for acquiring wider understanding. By limiting our awareness in this way, we tend to make decisions based on the information we have, rather than on the information we could have if only we sought or paid attention to it.

A pragmatic first step for anyone wanting to become more mindful

is to create blocks of thinking time, where we can recalibrate our emotions, priorities and awareness. When we are faced with numerous demands on our attention, our awareness narrows. Simply creating two or more blocks of “mindfulness time” during the working day, when we can recalibrate, can make a substantial difference.

Some useful questions for the coach to pose in this respect include:

• How many times a day do you stop and ask, ”What am I doing and feeling and why?”
• Where can you go (physical location) that will allow you to find quiet time for reflection in a busy day?
• How can you contract with other people to support you in creating and protecting time for mindfulness?

Increasing Self-awareness

While psychometric tests can help develop self-awareness at a very basic level, they can also undermine mindfulness. When we label a behavior, character trait or preference, we tend to mentally tick it off as “understood, and therefore sorted.” But human behaviors are also influenced by context and are much less fixed than a simple interpretation of the psychometric would suggest. When most helpful, they are a signpost toward greater self-understanding—a starting point for observing ourselves and how we interact with the world around us.

Many managers and leaders can be described as blissfully unaware of how lacking in self-awareness they are—even if they have a box full of psychometrics! Developing self-awareness takes time and improved skills of reflection in three stages:

• Reflection before action (thinking about what you are going to do or say before you do it).
• Reflection during action (being aware of what you are doing or saying and the impact this is having on yourself and others, as you do it).
• Reflection after action (thinking about what happened and looking for patterns, connections, cause and effect, common cause [the situation where two things are separately influenced by the same stimulus, appearing connected but giving a false impression that they are linked by cause and effect], and useful lessons).

The coach can help the client think through how they reflect in each stage. What space do they create? How do they become internally aware of their emotions, physical feelings, assumptions and intentions? How do they become externally aware of what is happening around them and within other people? The aim here is to raise the client’s awareness of their awareness, so that they can develop the habit of greater mindfulness.

Recognizing trigger points (stimuli that push you toward or away from self-awareness) is another core skill. There is a difference between being consciously aware and thoughtfully aware. Being thoughtfully aware enables us to recognize and respond to stimuli that tell us we should pause and step back from what we are doing, as a prelude to in-the-moment reflection.

Useful questions for the client to ask themselves at this point include:

• What am I feeling right now?
• What emotions or concerns am I trying to hold under the surface? What’s causing me to do that?
• What’s truly important to me now and what is just a distraction?

Useful questions for the coach to pose as a starting point to identify triggers include:

• When are you at your most and least energized and engaged with your work?
• When do you feel most and least purposeful in what you are doing?
• When do you feel trapped? Liberated?

Observation and Listening

There are at least five levels or perspectives of listening, but the ones that have most relevance in terms of mindfulness are listening to understand how you make sense of what the speaker is saying, listening to how the speaker makes sense of what they are saying, and listening beyond the words or content to encompass the wider context of everything, from body language and voice tone to unseen presences in the conversation. Listening from one’s own perspective is mindful when it leads us to be aware of our own internal thoughts and emotions. What unbidden associations or comparisons am I making? Am I being truly nonjudgmental? Am I letting what I think is important overlay what’s important to the person I am listening to?

Being mindful of someone else’s perspective and their attempts to make meaning helps build greater awareness, increases empathy and opens up greater potential for genuine dialogue. Again, the client can develop these skills by allocating time to think and perhaps introducing a change of environment (e.g., by taking a walk). They can also create simple rules to follow, such as, “Whenever you offer your own

thoughts, ask the other person for theirs.” Or they can develop their curiosity (e.g., by asking, “What is the unique knowledge or perspective that this person has about the issue at hand that I don’t have?”)

Observing the wider context requires all the senses to be switched on. Mindfulness training is replete with exercises to develop this capability. One that is relatively simple for managers to adopt, however, is the habit of “choosing to notice”—deliberately opening awareness to things that they would otherwise tune out, exploring the familiar as if it is new. Asking the question, “What am I aware of that I didn’t notice before?” can provoke valuable insights into both internal and external contexts.

Some useful questions coaches can ask include:

• In meetings, when and how do you create opportunities to step back mentally and observe?
• What can you do to be still from time to time?

Intuition and Reasoning

There are two basic views of intuition. One is that it comes from reflection on past experience and is primarily unconscious, instinctive learning that allows us to recognize and react to patterns we don’t have time or explicit data to process. The other is that intuition results from moments of exceptional connection with another person, where their brain waves synchronize with ours and they appear to be thinking the same thoughts as we are.

There is probably quite a lot of truth in both of these hypotheses. Certainly, neuroscience has confirmed that rational thinking and decision-making require emotional

input so that we can assign valence to different choices. Some of the ground rules for helping someone develop greater intuitive ability include:

• Help them reflect on how much they already use intuition (e.g., by reviewing how they made recent, complex decisions).
• Encourage them to test their intuition, using questions such as, “Am I sensing that … ?” or statements like, “I’m feeling that there is a lot more going on here than you are acknowledging.”
• Reviewing with them examples of when they have been genuinely influenced by intuition and when they are simply projecting their own fears or wishes on someone else.

The more comfortable people become with accepting, understanding, using and questioning their intuition, the less likely they are to come to hasty or rash decisions. This is because intuition is no longer something you react blindly to, but something you build into the way that you think consciously.

The Bottom Line

Of course, everything said here applies equally to coaches themselves. By developing our own mindfulness, we become more aware of ourselves and the interaction with our clients. When we model mindfulness, that’s also a way to help the client learn how to be more mindful themselves.