Meditation For Leaders

In this track we discuss the benefits of meditation for leaders is business, sports, and life in general. Meditation improves communication, creativity, empathy, and motivation, all of which help with leadership.

Some of the best meditations for leaders are: loving kindness, anapanasati, vipassana, open meditation, and trait mindfulness.

Transcript

Today on the daily meditation,

We will be looking at how meditation can make you an excellent leader I'll share a powerful meditation for leadership skills And I'm going to explain why I personally believe that mindfulness is the absolute absolute number one tool for leaders So here's the truth of it Absolutely,

Anyone can become a good leader whether it's in the workplace on the sports field or with your own friends and family you have the power to be a leader a leader with vision a leader with integrity and a leader of confidence and Even though some research Suggests that some leadership skills are genetic I personally do believe that anyone can achieve great leadership skills,

But precisely what our leadership skills well Generally the best leaders exhibit the following character traits.

They have confidence in their abilities and their ideas They have excellent communication skills excellent management skills,

Especially recognizing their own strengths and weaknesses and Very importantly and perhaps the most important part is emotional intelligence understanding their team members Knowing what truly motivates their team members and I don't just mean,

You know financially I mean humanistically Psychologically what really matters to the members of your team?

You need to be able to To recognize those things in order to truly motivate people on a deep level it's also about empathy and compassion as Thick not Han once said the right leader uses their power Compassionately to cultivate the happiness and the well-being of all members of the team It's about imagination so that you can see opportunities It's about keeping a level head and it's about having excellent decision-making skills So all the the skills that go into making a great leader are psychological So no wonder that meditation can help but how exactly does meditation help leaders?

Well meditation can help to improve all All leadership skills it can improve communication skills It can increase your ability to connect with your employees or whichever,

You know Team members you have whether it's on the sports field or your friends Meditation helps you to make better better decisions and just so much more but just forget about that for just one one sec just forget about that for one sec because Perhaps the most important thing is the fact that meditation helps us to overcome the absolute number one problem that many leaders have and that is Ego so I'm researcher and author Jim Collins once conducted studies from which he Determined that the number one issue that interferes with a company's sustainability is what he called the presence of a gargantuan ego why well for starters Egotistical leaders are likely to shut down from any constructive criticism that other members of their team might give them they also run the risk of devaluing any creative idea that is not that they did not create themselves and Last but not least they forget that success is About the success of the team They become too concerned with their own successes and they forget that a team success is a success for everyone in that team so to put it simply ego kills teams,

But Meditation can help Indeed if you look at traditional texts on meditation,

Which are predominantly Buddhist most of them involve ways of Reducing or completely removing the ego and achieving oneness Now don't get me wrong.

We don't necessarily have to go to those spiritual lengths but the fact remains that meditation can help us to overcome an ego problem and Indeed when I've worked with executives and teaching them to meditate Many of them have admitted to me that meditation did help them overcome their own ego and that that massively improved their leadership skills But honestly,

That's just the beginning because you have to consider other benefits of meditation for leaders as well You have to for instance consider the effect the meditation has on emotional intelligence Daniel Goleman for instance says that emotional intelligence is an absolute necessity for leaders and He says that mindfulness significantly helps with emotional intelligence because emotional intelligence is mostly about awareness and of course Mindfulness meditation are about awareness That's also backed by research So research shows that meditation increases EQ and makes us more aware of both our own emotions and those of other people Plus it makes us less reactive to our emotions and that helps us to maintain level-headedness Um scientifically speaking we can say that meditation strengthens the insular part of the brain which is essential for managing emotions That is particularly true of we pass in a meditation Which is a meditation technique in which we observe our thoughts and feelings and then label them Another benefit of meditation for leaders is that it strengthens the prefrontal cortex That's the part of the brain that is the logical reasoning part of the brain In fact,

That's that's one of the main reasons why meditation will help you to have better decision-making skills now when you combine the strengthening of the prefrontal cortex with the thickening of the cortices in the insula That essentially means that meditation empowers us to stop to pause and to reflect even at times when most people Would panic into making rash decisions.

So for instance if something goes terribly wrong at work if You meditate you are much less likely to panic you're much more likely to be able to remain calm and with that calmness make a Good decision that will solve whatever problem it is that has happened I also just want to mention conflict avoidance and resolution as a leader We should be the ones who are sort of cultivating calmness And cultivating compassion and and you know,

Just creating a positive environment now certain meditation techniques for instance loving-kindness meditation and I would say Karuna meditation,

Which is another meditation based on compassion from Buddhism They have a massive effect on our empathy and our compassion By making us more empathetic and more compassion that in turn empowers us to see things from other people's point of view Which as I'm sure you can understand Is very helpful for avoiding and for resolving conflicts yet Another reason why meditation is amazing for leaders is that it helps with creative thinking so research shows that meditation improves divergent and convergent thinking Which in a nutshell basically means that it helps us to create new ideas that is particularly true of Attending called open meditation now open meditation is basically a meditation where you don't focus on any one specific thing Instead you open your mind to the entirety of your surroundings Actually,

This is one of the meditation techniques that I've taught her kind of artistic creative types writers and people like that And I've seen that it can even help,

You know people to overcome the worst of creative blocks Now finally and I think this final point goes without saying but meditation obviously will make you a much calmer leader as well So I just like to mention some of the meditations some of the techniques that I would personally recommend for leaders So to start with I'm a firm believer In compassion in general and I definitely believe that Compassionate teams teams where each member of the team is compassionate to one another I'm gonna be so much stronger just because of the sense of bond,

You know the sense of belonging That that helps us to create So with that in mind you might like to do loving kindness and other compassion based meditations such as Karuna Which was touched on earlier now Definitely we have to acknowledge that leaders do face a lot of pressure a lot of stress and for that reason Mindful breathing is always going to be useful in fact Scott shoot who was the former vice president of customer operations at LinkedIn He now heads up the company's mindfulness program he has spoken about how Meditation massively changed his ability to handle stressful moments and to stay calm at work and how that Was really beneficial for his leadership skills.

So definitely mindful breathing and a panasati Any breath work really that will help us to stay calm is always going to be beneficial for leaders again,

I'm open meditation as I mentioned earlier for creativity and You're definitely just gonna want to practice what is called trait mindfulness.

So as you may know,

There are two forms of Mindfulness one is state mindfulness,

Which is the actual sort of formal practice of meditating and the other is trait mindfulness Which as you can probably appreciate is the trait of being mindful the general quality of being mindful So as well as having like a 20-minute meditation session per day,

Just try to be more Generally mindful while you're working and those I would say are the best Meditation techniques for leaders and indeed that is this episode on meditation for leadership Being a leader is really is a privilege and a in also a responsibility We enjoy our positions of leadership But we have to make sure that our own egos don't interfere with our leadership that we're able to be empathetic and compassionate to every member of the team and also that we have both the creative vision and the clarity of mind to be able to Communicate that vision to the team and meditation can help with all of that I've seen in my own meditation lessons how much of a difference it can make to leaders just just by Clarifying the mind I would say it's a big thing,

You know calming the mind And making us more aware because meditation just strengthens the kind of the core qualities of a human being It's immensely Powerful for leaders.

Thank you for listening to this episode My name is Paul Harrison And if you would like to book a lesson with me,

You may do so on the daily meditation calm Thank you for listening until next time stay sensational