In the years that VIM Executive Coaching has been working with clients, there is a question that tends to repeat itself from time to time. It usually goes like this:
“While I appreciate ideas such as mindfulness meditation and developing compassion, I am in a high stress work environment. Won’t all that ‘feely-touchy stuff’ make me weak?”
The Ancient Smile
The question always makes us smile. The smile is not done out of unkindness or pretentiousness, mind you, for we know it is a logical question (to the Western mind). In truth, we have known many, high-ranking martial artists, boxers, professional football and basketball players, ski jumpers, track athletes and racecar drivers who engage in mindfulness meditation prior to hard practices and competitions. While they are all affable people away from the ring or playing field, I believe it would be ill-advised to walk up to one of them and call him or her weaklings!
We would also say (again from personal observation), that away from the field of play, many athletes and martial artists engage in numerous, unseen acts of compassion (be they causes or spiritual endeavors) and a surprisingly large percentage are artistically inclined (art, writing, music, dance and so forth; basketball player Kareem Abdul Jabbar immediately comes to mind, as do Olympic marathon runner Deena Kastor or Ginger Huber, a cliff diving champion. All three meditate and are engaged in serious athletic and creative pursuits. Ultimately, they want to “win,” and the clarity created by meditation helps them to do so.
What is it then, that techniques such as mindfulness meditation can yield to an executive leader?
How Still are You?
Why would a NASCAR driver, interior lineman or figure skating champion engage in mindfulness meditation? To still the mind. Indeed, there is nothing weak about stilling the mind to gain clarity. Quite the opposite.
Stilling the mind, taking as little as five or ten minutes a day to create a space in the clutter of work to push away all that is non-essential gains us clarity to see situations for what they are, and how-to better deal with them.
Therefore, if we take something as tricky to navigate as a workplace disagreement or a complex acquisition or the launch of a new brand, the island of calm we can create through techniques such as mindfulness meditation can be invaluable.
There, with clarity, if two managers who have disagreed bring a serious problem to your attention, you would be more inclined to go with truth rather than bias; in visualizing how an acquisition candidate might be brought into the fold or how a new branded line of products could mesh with your existing product selection, it is not much different than a fencer envisioning scoring points against an opponent, or how a novelist might see two characters interact with one another.
Rather than mindfulness, and the culturing of compassion making an executive leader weaker, the clarity of creating a space in the clutter of decisions, makes us all stronger. Obviously, mindfulness and compassion leading to a level-headed response are the opposite of a blind reaction.
Decision making is never easy and, at times, there will be some favored and some disappointed, but ultimately, we want to strive for a sense of fairness and what is right in the moment.