Mindful Leadership For Dummies. Adams Juliet
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Bill: So are we going to sort out the bullying?
Sally: No. We’ll make Jim take a mindfulness course so he gets better at controlling his emotions.
Mindfulness training shouldn’t be made a mandatory part of a leader’s development programme. Mindfulness training alone may not fix unwelcome behaviours at work. If leaders are open to learning about emotions and how they inform their behaviour and relationships at work, then it may help. However, mindfulness is not a panacea for all leadership ills.
Mindfulness alone is unlikely to fix systemic workplace or personality problems. In the same way that you can’t force someone to lose weight by giving them a Weight Watchers membership, behavioural change can only occur if leaders are willing to rewire their brain by engaging in the exercises with curiosity, self-compassion and discipline.
For a rare few, unexpected effects sometimes surface when they explore their experience by using mindfulness exercises. A lot of people keep themselves distracted and busy as a way of coping, maybe because they’re afraid to look closely at their experience, so shining a light on emotions and bodily sensations during mindfulness exercises may bring up feelings of anxiety or even panic.
Natural emotional responses can be pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. This doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong but may indicate that you need to explore your unpleasant emotions in an especially safe and compassionate way, particularly if they involve feelings of dissociation and enduring discomfort. This means seeking the advice of your doctor, occupational health team, or, if you have one, your mindfulness teacher.
The mindfulness meditation exercises aren’t meant to be relaxing, but nor are they intended to cause unnecessary alarm or discomfort. If that is your experience, pull back from the edge of discomfort and seek professional support where you can discuss these side effects.
For a small minority, exercises that place focus on the breath may be disturbing, especially if you’ve had a history of breathing difficulties, asthma or panic attacks. If the latter or exercises involving breathing are a concern for you, seek medical support from your doctor and consider getting a mindfulness teacher. If you still want to explore the exercise, you can make the point of focus the sensations in your feet rather than the sensations of breath.
If you have a history of depression, alcohol or drug abuse, psychotic episodes, PTSD or any other clinical issues, you should check with your doctor before engaging with these exercises. If in doubt, pay attention to your concerns and check with your doctor. This advice is the same as if you had acute asthma and wanted to train to run a marathon – you’d be wise to seek medical and professional support first.
Chapter 3
Harnessing the Neuroscience of Mindful Leadership
IN THIS CHAPTER
Discovering the potential and limitations of your brain
Becoming conscious of your unconscious
Recognising your hidden drivers
Exploring how mindfulness works from a neurological perspective
Take much of what you know about how the best leaders operate and forget it. Much of what we ‘know’ about the best way to get things done at work is being called into question by the latest neuroscience research. A basic knowledge of a few aspects of how the brain works and its hidden rules can prove invaluable if you want to improve your leadership impact while retaining your sanity!
This chapter offers you the basics you need to know in a practical and accessible format.
Grasping the Potential and Limitations of the Executive Brain
If you hold a position of power and authority within your organisation, you have responsibility for making key decisions upon which the future success of your organisation depends. With this comes responsibility for your employee’s prosperity, not to mention your supplier’s prosperity and the people who supply goods and services to your suppliers.
Recent neuroscience research is shining a spotlight on how the brains of the most effective leaders differ from the norm. It’s still early days for this research, but studies indicate that many of the things you may think enhance performance are probably the opposite. We talk more about this in the final section of this chapter.
Setting aside these neurological differences, in the main, the executive brain is very much the same as anyone else’s brain. This means that as a leader, you’re blessed with the same incredibly powerful brain as the rest of your workforce – a brain more powerful than the most powerful super computer ever built, that’s ever changing and evolving from the day you’re born until the day you die, that’s capable of re-authoring its own internal operating system and figuring out how to put man on the moon and how to split the atom.
Despite the unlimited potential of your brain, it does have a number of limitations. First, it doesn’t come with an instruction manual. And unless your leadership education was very recent or you have a particular interest in neuroscience, you may have very little knowledge of what your brain is doing or why. So here’s a little introduction to the human brain, its complexities, adaptability, and limitations.
Humans have big brains. In the last 7 million years, the human brain has tripled in size. The fossil skulls of ancestors around 1.9 million years ago had an average brain size of 600 millilitres. More recent 500,000-year-old fossil skulls show a huge increase to around 1,000 millilitres. Modern brain size is around 1,200 millilitres, weighing around 1,300 grams or more. In comparison, a gorilla’s brain is around 500 grams, and a chimp’s brain, around 420 grams. The modern human brain evolved to have much larger regions devoted to planning, communication, problem solving and other more advanced cognitive functions.
To manage your mind better and understand its hidden rules, it’s important to gain a basic understanding of how the brain is structured. See Figure 3-1.
© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
FIGURE 3-1: The human brain.
At the base of the brain is a cluster of structures referred to as the reptilian brain. This part of the brain controls your most vital functions, such as sleep, heart rate, breathing and the like. Its innate and reflex control programs help you to survive.
Above this is a cluster of structures referred to as the limbic system, which are associated with social and nurturing behaviours. While reptilian brain structures rely heavily on instinctive behaviours, the limbic system adds an emotional dimension. Emotions are the brain’s way of remembering how different situations affect you.
The limbic system and reptilian brain combined are often described as the primitive brain.
At the top of the brain, the neocortex (the wrinkly bit you see in pictures) is a cluster of brain structures involved in advanced cognition – the mental process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience and the senses. These structures are responsible for special human traits, such as planning, decision-making, reasoning language, thought and impulse control. They enable you to