Maria Gonzalez Blog
Mindful Leadership

Mindful Leadership Book Launch

It gives me great pleasure to invite you to the Book Launch of Mindful Leadership: The 9 Ways to Self-Awareness, Transforming Yourself, and Inspiring Others. It will be held on Thursday, March 29th 6:00-7:30pm at Ben MacNally Books.  Below are the details.

Please RSVP below.

I look forward to seeing you there.  Please click here to RSVP

Best regards,
Maria

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Mindful Leadership in Action – Tip of the Week – By Training Yourself to Just Listen, You Develop Clarity

You will find plenty of opportunities to improve your clarity as you move through everyday life. For example, if you are in a meeting, you can choose to work with sight (what you see, such as the person who is speaking or other people in the room) and sound (the voice and tone of the person speaking). Be sure that you are hearing what is being said and not internalizing your filtered interpretation or assumption about what they must mean or intend. You might think this sounds absurd. But you would be amazed at how much we filter. Has anyone ever said to you, “I never said that,” but you are sure they did? It’s possible that they said what you believe they said. But be open to the possibility that you interpreted what was said rather than heard it.  The key is to just “listen”.

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Clarity of Mind Enables Good Judgment and Decision Making

As a leader, it is essential to be clear—clear about your personal purpose, your company’s vision and strategic direction, your motives and intentions, your thoughts and emotions, and your expectations for yourself and others. Essentially, when I talk about clarity, it applies to everything, both internally and in the world at large. Being clear is closely linked to being aware of what is going on within you and around you.

Being clear allows you to make better decisions. You are also more likely to be able to identify opportunities for your business and to discard proposals that are not in line with your vision. After all, a great opportunity that doesn’t fit your strategy isn’t a great opportunity for you. It will merely cause you to take your eye off the ball and may cause you to spread your resources, including people, time, and money, too thinly. Being clear means too that you are better able to determine who will be the most appropriate strategic partners for your business. It enables you to be proactive and to resist being driven by short-term goals or results at the expense of sustainable outcomes. When making decisions, it’s important to know what is driving the decision. The clearer you are, the better you will be able to determine whether a decision is sound or based on any of the five hindrances. You will be completely aware if it is based on your purpose and strategy or on someone else’s.

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Mindful Leadership in Action – Tip of the Week – Develop Focus by Doing One Thing at a Time

The ability to focus means you can be in a meeting from beginning to end without losing concentration. It means you are able to stay present when you are having a conversation or negotiating a deal. It means you can drive without your mind wandering. And it means that you can play a round of golf without thinking about the miserable shot on the last hole or the hole in one you made yesterday. It means that you can focus on what matters most to you in any given moment.

And how do you do this?  Start by training yourself to focus your attention on one thing at a time.  When you are in a meeting just listen to those speaking and interject when necessary.  Do nothing else.   When you drive; just drive.  Don’t plan the shopping list.  When you play golf; just play one shot at a time.

If you take care of this moment the next moment will take care of itself.  With practice, soon you will find that you become much more effectively and efficiently in every aspect of your life.

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To Be Focused Is to Be Effective

Many people think that the ability to focus or concentrate should come naturally and that when we don’t focus it’s because we’re not trying hard enough—if only we would try harder, it would happen. This is an erroneous view and an incorrect conclusion. The untrained mind has huge difficulty in concentrating on anything for more than a few seconds, let alone a couple of minutes at a time.

However, when you train your mind, you are able to concentrate on whatever you wish, for as long as you wish. This makes you highly effective and efficient. And with training and practice you can stay focused, whether under stress or in the presence of multiple opportunities or distractions. The ability to keep your eye on the ball makes all the difference between winning and losing, between utilizing and wasting resources, which can be key to successful leadership.

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Mindful Leadership in Action – Tip of the Week – Changing the “Failure” Mindset

In order to really learn from a situation it is helpful to change the “failure” mindset to a mindset of “changing course”.  As a Mindful leader, how you handle a situation that has not met your expectations will seriously impact how those around you will approach opportunities.  If your team thinks that they always need to be successful at everything they attempt, they are likely to not be willing to take calculated risks.  What this means is that creativity and innovation will likely be compromised and that you are unlikely to distinguish yourself from the competition.

True success lies in being able to change or adjust your course of action as the facts before you change.  This means that your attitude becomes one of constantly learning rather than constantly judging.  An attitude of learning enables you and those around you to assess outcomes that did not meet expectations and improve upon these situations.

When you find yourself in a situation where you judge an outcome as a failure, become internally aware.  What’s going on in the mind?  Are you blaming yourself or someone else? What’s going on in the body, in “feel” space?  This is key because if you can not let go of the failure in your mind it is likely that you are experiencing sensations in the body that are perpetuating this state of mind.  Just observe what is going on.  Awareness is the first step in being able to change a pattern that may not be serving you well.

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There Is No Such Thing as Failure, Just the Need to Change Course

As a leader it is important not to get caught in the trap of viewing outcomes as failures.  When you perceive something as a failure your ego is inextricably linked.  This can cause you to enter the blame game (blaming yourself or others) which never results in a positive outcome.  It also does not allow you to make optimal decisions and to be open to new opportunities.

Rather as a Mindful leader, you are aware that some things work and others things don’t work as well.  So your mental attitude becomes one of changing course in a direction of educated exploration, in an attempt to arrive at a desirable or intended outcome.  Imagine that you are sailing, you have plotted a course and the winds suddenly change.  You wouldn’t view that as a failure.  You would merely realize that conditions have changed and that you need to change course to work with that reality.  In this example there is no failure, just changing course.

I am particularly fond of a quote by Thomas Edison on this topic.  “I have not failed.  I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

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Mindful Leadership in Action – Tip of the Week – In that Place of Stillness Is Your Greatest Power

The reality is that calmness and relaxation generate mental and physical power.  They enable you to make better decisions because you are more able to be present and aware.  Consequently, you are less likely to be impulsive and more likely to be able to widen the gap between stimulus and response.  In that gap is your power — it affords you the opportunity to choose a response rather than impulsively react to the circumstances or your mistaken interpretation of the circumstances.

In that gap you can become aware of a stillness that is always there.  That is the place where wisdom arises from.  Here is the source of your brilliant ideas and moments of inspiration, your great discoveries.  All you need to do is listen.  It is very unlikely that you will ever experience that stillness if you are stressed, anxious, or agitated.  That is one of the reasons why cultivating that stillness is so important.

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Reduce Stress to Experience Greater Fulfillment

One thing that stress does is rob you of pleasure and fulfillment, at work and at home.  If you are stressed at work and are unable to decrease and manage the stress, it will also impact your personal life.  You will be less likely to be present with your spouse, engaged with your children, or attuned to your pets.  And as I have mentioned previously, life only happens in the present.  Miss this present moment and you miss life.  In its extreme form, you will find you are not really a part of your family’s life; instead simply an outsider who goes to work and comes home, never really connecting with others.  This may sound extreme but unfortunately it is more common than you think.

There are two aspects of dealing with stress.  The first is to decrease or eliminate unnecessary stress.  The second is to effectively manage unavoidable stress.  Life will regularly and unavoidably present us with challenges and, at times, with calamity.  That is what it is to live life.  However, and you may not like to hear this, but much of the stress we experience in a given day is avoidable.  What I mean by this is that we bring it upon ourselves, like when we pack more into an hour than is humanly possible to accomplish, when we give ourselves 15 minutes to get to a destination that is 45 minutes away, when we double book ourselves for meetings or commitments.  How can you possibly be relaxed when you are in one meeting and know that you are expected to be down the hall at another meeting?  Or when you are at the hockey rink with one child and know you also need to dash to be with another child for their concert performance.  Any normal human being would be tense under these circumstances.

The first step toward achieving calm and enjoying greater fulfillment is to examine your life. Honestly assess where there is avoidable stress and eliminate it.  You may experience some resistance to this.  If you do, know that one or more of the hindrances are at play.  You know what to do with this.  Be honest with yourself and work to change your behaviour.

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Mindful Leadership in Action – Tip of the Week – Listen to the Body to Create Calm in the Mind

The body and the mind are constantly communicating.  Sometimes you will be conscious of what they are saying and sometimes you will be unaware.  Your mind looks to your body to see if there is a reason to be concerned.  If your body is tight, your mind will interpret that there is need to be on alert.  In turn, your body looks to your mind for clues.  If your mind is agitated, your body will become tighter. And this quickly becomes a vicious cycle.  If the cycle is not broken, there is the possibility that you will feel anxious and, potentially, out of control.

The most effective and direct way to stop this cycle is to deliberately relax your body.  No matter what is going on in your mind, work to relax your body — your mind will eventually follow suit.  It’s very difficult to create calmness through the mind.  The body is your most effective route to relaxation and anxiety reduction.  With practice you can train yourself to maintain a relaxed body at all times.  So that at the first sign of muscles tensing up you can just release.  This will create the gap you need to determine if you need to eliminate avoidable stress or if you need to manage unavoidable stress more deliberately.

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