Mindful Leadership: An Origin Story

How the Buddhist ideal of the Bodhisattva offers modern day business a fresh model for skillful, compassionate and impactful leadership

Transcript

I'd like to welcome you to mindful leadership training.

And it's a real honor for me to have this time with you and to be able to work with you on what I consider to be some very,

Very important principles in bringing sanity,

Goodness,

Inspiration,

Playfulness to the workplace.

And I thank you for choosing this training and I look forward to working with you over the next several hours.

So a little bit about myself,

My background,

How this mindful leadership training came about and how you can engage this for your own sense of development and wellbeing.

My name is Michael Carroll and I have been practicing Tibetan Buddhism,

The Khagyun Yingma School of Tibetan Buddhism since 1975.

I'm trained as a teacher in that lineage.

My root teacher,

Chögyam Trimprinbache,

Was very kind to me and he trained me along with many other teachers to be able to practice mindfulness awareness meditation and also bring it into the workplace.

And I've been doing that for quite some time.

How that happened is kind of a funny story.

When I got out of college,

I came to New York and met some Tibetan teachers and I was very excited about wanting to learn more about Tibetan Buddhism.

And I heard about Chögyam Trimprinbache and wanted to study with him and I got accepted to Buddhist seminary and that was a big deal.

He was very generous in guiding our training and we completed it and received certain transmissions.

I thought to myself,

Wow,

I'm such an advanced student and studying with such a famous teacher.

Maybe I'll ask his advice on what should I do next?

Maybe he'll tell me to go on retreat and do some advanced practices or maybe become a monk or go study with the Karmapa who is a very famous Lama.

So I was expecting him to give me some great advice about becoming a deeper spiritual person.

So when I went to Rimche,

I told him that I spent all my savings.

I left my job.

I came here really dedicated to meditation.

What's my next role?

And he says to me,

Go get a job.

At the time I felt,

Well,

Maybe he's missed something.

Maybe he doesn't know I'm this great student.

And I explained again and he said,

You can do it.

Give it a try.

And that was probably some of the best advice I ever got because at the time my spiritual aspirations were really just my own misunderstanding and arrogance,

Frankly.

His advice was really to explore what is really sacred,

Which is our ordinary lives.

And sure enough,

I left seminary at the time.

I felt like I was thrown out in the cold,

But I went back to New York,

Got a master's degree and got a job on Wall Street for about eight years and did some very interesting stuff there.

And then moved over to publishing where I held pretty senior jobs in human resources and had about a 25 year career.

And at the same time,

I was also practicing Buddhism,

Completing the practices required from graduating from seminary and also being trained as a Buddhist teacher.

These were parallel lives and they informed one another and they shaped one another.

At one point,

I vividly recall this.

I was teaching some class on Buddhism in New York and a young person raised their hand and said,

Excuse me,

How do you work in a corporate job and at the same time be a Buddhist teacher and practice Buddhism?

Like started unfolding more and more about how did you apply Buddhism to work?

And it began to become a bigger conversation and eventually a colleague of mine said,

You should write a book on this.

And I wrote my first book,

Awake at Work.

Since then,

The whole notion of bringing mindfulness into the workplace has grown enormously and it's a much larger conversation.

It's a very exciting time.

But I came to business as a Buddhist practitioner and at the direction of my teacher to bring these principles alive in everyday life and in enterprises and in where we work.

That's how this entire issue of mindful leadership unfolded.

What I had found when I was in the workplace was an irony that on the one hand,

Work is really cool.

I mean,

It's fun.

I mean,

Everybody's there having a good time doing cool stuff.

You meet some of the brightest people.

You make friends there.

It's an amazing thing.

It's exciting.

Work is really cool.

Simultaneously it's terrifying.

It's toxic.

People are frightened.

People are worried.

And this contrast as a Buddhist,

I was very curious about it.

Why is it that something that is so exciting is at the same time so terrifying?

Why is it that work is this invitation to be creative and we're all so scared and worried that we're going to lose our job or things are going to go wrong?

Often it even feels like it's a matter of survival.

And this tension between enthusiasm and fear,

Creativity and panic was very,

Very powerful for me as a practitioner because it epitomized the spiritual challenge of waking up.

So I brought all of my training to how does this work?

Why are we so frightened?

That's something that's so cool.

Over time it struck me that the model of leadership in Buddhism could be very helpful in the workplace.

And that model is the model of the Bodhisattva.

This tradition of enlightened leadership or mindful leadership has been around for quite some time.

And those principles,

As they became alive in my own life,

I increasingly applied them at the workplace.

And much of what we'll be speaking about throughout this program is what I've learned.

What have I seen?

How does it apply?

And it appears,

Given where we are now in the mainstreaming of mindfulness meditation in the workplace,

Is it applies quite well.

And it can be quite helpful.

I think we'll see throughout this program that these principles can be readily applied and they can actually make the difference about bringing health and well-being into the workplace.

The interesting thing about mindful leadership is fundamentally it speaks to qualities that we already have.

Mindful leadership fearlessly proclaims that we're all hardwired to lead.

You don't have to be a CEO or run your own business.

That's fine,

By the way.

I think it's fantastic.

But we're all hardwired to lead from the point of view that we're designed to inspire the best in one another.

That's the core of mindful leadership.

How do we inspire the best in one another?

That can be done by anyone,

Anywhere,

Anytime.

A child does it all the time.

They're always trying to bring the best out of adults and each other.

They're always trying to inspire the best.

This can be done by just having a good meal with a neighbor.

So this quality,

We want to bring it fully alive.

In order to do that,

In the tradition of mindful leader,

The fundamental gesture we're going to go through in quite detail in the program is this practice of mindfulness awareness meditation.

When we combine that practice with this natural quality of the human spirit,

Mind,

And heart of wanting to inspire the best in one another,

When we combine those two,

It comes alive.

It begins to actually become quite infectious.

It can be very powerful and very enlivening.

It can relieve a lot of the toxicity and difficulty and frustration and clarify why would we want to go to work?

Why is this such a rare and inspiring opportunity to be human,

Be alive at this time,

And actually work with each other to bring about a great world?

So the issue is combining this natural quality of the mind to inspire the best in others with the discipline of mindfulness awareness meditation.

When you combine those,

Our natural qualities begin to shine.

It's not about becoming someone else.

It's actually being fully who we are.

Reviews

I lijed his “matter of fact” approach.

Just what I needed to get the thoughts moving about in preparation for my meeting tomorrow. Thank you!

Very helpful. Thank you for sharing your experience and wisdom. It is so needed in the world righ now on so many levels. 🙏❤️🙏

Just what I needed to hear today
Thank you

Needed to hear this...helps to reaffirm my beliefs thank you..☺

Very inspiring 🙏

Is there more of this good stuff?

Quite interesting and relevant in the context of better leadership in corporate activity.

Appreciate this talk, looking forward to hearing more.

As others commented, I'd like to hear more. I liked the empowering statement that we are all leaders, the qualities of leadership are inherently within. Thank you!

Inspirational. 💕

Finally, a business person on here I can relate to. Thank you!!!!!

Interesting! I wish I had found this 40 years ago.

I want more... this is my calling!

Inspiring. Thanks 🙏

excellent talk !!

Cannot wait to learn more on this subject matter!

This is exactly what I'm designing to bring into the space of working with women. Great reminders.

Yes, where do we find more if this awareness training?