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C.E.'OMS: VISIONARIES OF MINDFUL BUSINESS

Great leaders have three things; inner light, inner vision and inner strength.

—AMIT RAY

Incredible visionaries are leading the way for mindfulness in business. I call them C.E.'Oms and coined the term to represent a leader who takes charge with mindfulness. (Chief. Executive. Om. Representing yoga-inspired mindfulness/consciousness/well-being, a universal vibration.) Their stories are inspirational because they each show the impact that just one person can make when he or she decide to share his or her passion for mindfulness with authenticity and a contagious enthusiasm. I deeply admire the voice that these leaders give to spotlight the benefits of mindfulness and wellness in the business sector—not as an add-on but fully integrating it as the ethos of business. Infusing humanity back into our highly tech-driven business sector is no easy feat, and many of these C.E.'Oms started as a party of one and have simply shared their own experiences in a way that resonated with enough people to get funding and support from large organizations. It's exciting that corporate brands are much more open to the benefits of breath, mindfulness, and meditation in business because there are data to support the investment now.

Each of us can be a C.E.'Om wherever we work. Some of the C.E.'Oms featured in this chapter made such a difference within their large organization that either they felt compelled to leave their current position and take on a fulltime mindfulness role or they left to take their “show on the road,” and continue to be a voice for workplace wellness by launching their own consulting business or nonprofit to continue the mission. They've all been making massive progress. By sharing these C.E.'Om stories, I'm hoping other entrepreneurs, CEOs, executives, and employees will speak up where they lead or work and bring mindfulness to their colleagues, organizations, and teams. The time is now. Our minds are moving way too fast. Our internal speed cannot continue at the speed of digital. People are craving breath, meditation, stillness, mindfulness, well-being, and connection. Companies that offer wellness benefits and in-office perks will be the ones that attract and keep the best talent.

Being aware of the collective energy at work is powerful. These visionaries are leading the way for better business practices and more meaningful work from a place of positivity and benevolence—the collective greater good. Hopefully we'll see more full-time positions of Chief Mindfulness Officer and the like as we move into a new way of doing business that neutralizes the technology factor and emphasizes the humanity factor. I'll continue to share C.E.'Om stories online. In the meantime, here are just a few featured stories that inspire me.

C.E.'OM: YVON CHOUINARD, FOUNDER OF PATAGONIA

One of the most inspiring and longest-lasting examples of mindful intention, company culture, and leadership that I know of is the from the founder of Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard. He's been a C.E.'Om for over forty-five years. He's a self-proclaimed “reluctant businessman” who does everything with mindfulness to support what he truly values: high-quality products, environmental sustainability, and outdoor living. He has said that he and his original mountain-climbing business cohorts were “rebels from the consumer culture.” He is definitely an inspiring case study in the “following your gut” school of business. Patagonia will continue to operate with those same core values well into the future as it is still a privately held, family-owned company and, as mentioned earlier, the B corp certification will keep those intentions intact for many years to come. Chouinard, now 79 years old, wrote a poignant book in 2005 titled Let My People Go Surfing about his company culture. The title gives you an idea of one of his core values and intentions. Patagonia headquarters is in Ventura, California, a beautiful beach town perfect for mixing business with pleasure. His passion for outdoor adventure, sustainability, and quality and his unique leadership style make Patagonia what it is today: a beloved billion-dollar global consumer brand. Here are highlights from his book and also from his C.E.'Om story in a terrific podcast segment from NPR, “How I Built This,” with Guy Raz.⁶¹

CORE VALUES LEAD THE WAY

At his core, Chouinard is a a surfer, a craftsman, and an avid mountain climber, and says that growing up he played every sport. His entrepreneurial life began like many entrepreneurs—out of necessity. He and his mountain-climbing buddies needed a higher-quality piece of climbing hardware, so he taught himself how to be a blacksmith and made metal, reusable climbing pieces. These were to be the upgraded version of the single-use ones from Europe that were not the best quality. Even though their hardware cost ten times more than the European ones, Chouinard's product owned 80 percent of the market. Consumers agreed with Chouinard's priorities: producing top-quality products that also served the environment. The success from the initial climbing product led to expanding into clothing for the same customer base. A rugby shirt and climbing shorts were the first products that evolved into building a clothing company.

Realizing that he was in fact becoming a businessman without a college degree or any experience in clothing or business, Chouinard began to study business by reading books on Japanese management style and Scandanavian businesses. He wanted to find a better way to do business than what he saw in the United States. He says that he never “respected the profession.” He wanted to do business in a way that felt good, that respected people as well as the planet. He says, “One of my favorite quotes is ‘If you want to understand entrepreneurs, study juvenile delinquents.’ They get creative and break rules, doing things their own way. They figure out something that nobody has thought about and do things differently. I love breaking the rules, that's the fun part of business.” He and his wife were ahead of their time with a family-friendly office in the 1970s, offering maternity and paternity leave, flexible work schedules, and a childcare center at the office, where employees all interacted with the kids. Their company culture was authentically built around Chouinard's priorities of enjoying life while earning a living and doing business in unconventional ways for the greater good. As the years went by, Chouinard only held tighter to his intentions of being socially and environmentally responsible.

THE MORE YOU KNOW, THE LESS YOU NEED

Chouinard told Raz during his NPR podcast that his guiding philosophy has been as a student of Zen Buddhism most of his life. He's a believer in what he says is “the more you know, the less you need” philosophy. He's used this principle in his own life on many levels, including his ideas on clothing. He doesn't have a closet full of shiny new Patagonia outfits. That wouldn't feel right. He's content wearing clothes that are several years old because they're still useful. He feels a deep sense of responsibility to use Patagonia as a resource to share the philosophy of quality over quantity. Patagonia offers lifetime guarantees on its clothing. As Raz says, “Unlike most founders of a consumer product, Chouinard requests that people really think about things before they buy them and they don't advertise much at all.” He was not driven by money, like most of his entrepreneurial peers. Patagonia now has the largest garment repair center in North America; it'll repair every piece of Patagonia clothing indefinitely. Patagonia also repairs any piece of clothing, whether Patagonia or not, from their mobile garment repair center that travels around. Patagonia became focused on more environment-friendly materials in the early 1990s, and mindful sourcing of fabrics is top of mind, too.

ANT COLONY LEADERSHIP STYLE

Chouinard's leadership style is hands off. He says this style made sense after hearing an analogy from a Stanford researcher who studied ant colonies and “found that they don't have bosses, everyone knows what their job is and they get it done.” Chouinard says, “Compare that with dictatorship; it takes tremendous effort. Instead we hire motivated young independent people and leave them alone.” Chouinard says that many companies have studied their culture and want to follow suit; but he says, “It won't work unless you begin with the first employee. A psychologist has studied our employees and says they are so independent they'd be unemployable anywhere else.” Chouinard chuckles with pride on the podcast, knowing that doesn't matter; those employees aren't going anywhere. This leadership style allows him to take off every June through November for fishing in Wyoming. And when he's away, he's away. He says he might call in three times in the five months.

REPLACE THINGS WITH KNOWLEDGE AND TECHNIQUE

Using his “the more you know, the less you need” philosophy while fly fishing taught Chouinard the vale of simplicity, and he says he caught more fish than he's ever caught in his life. “The hundreds of thousands of fly patterns, colors, shapes are totally unnecessary. You can replace all of that with knowledge and technique. That was a good lesson for me. The hardest thing in the world is to simplify your life because everything pulls you to be more and more complex. If we are forced or we decide to go to a more simple life, it's not going to be an impoverished life. It'll be a really rich [life].” Podcast host Raz reports that “While endless growth may not be Chouinard's thing, Patagonia had their best year yet in 2015 with a quarter billion dollars.” Chouinard's leadership style and ideals about challenging consumer consumption while protecting the planet have made him the type of businessman he knew he needed to be. No business degree required. Just mindful business.

C.E.'OM: AETNA CEO MARK BERTOLINI

One high-profile corporate C.E.'Om who is making a major impact by leading with mindfulness is Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini. I interviewed Bertolini in December 2017. His full story is featured in an article I wrote for Huffington Post titled “Mindfulness is Aetna CEO's Prescription for Success.” Bertolini leads Aetna's 49,000 employees from a place of calm, compassion, and mindfulness that he arrived at only after recovering from a near-death ski accident that left him on seven different narcotics and pondering the fact that he couldn't go on in pain both mentally and physically. Yoga and meditation felt a bit too New Age, but Bertolini (who no longer had the physical ability to do his preferred running and weightlifting) tried craniosacral therapy, yoga, and meditation because he was at the point of having to be open-minded to get some relief. He says it saved his life. He was able to get off all medication and become a new version of himself.

BRINGING MINDFULNESS AND WELLNESS TO 49,000 EMPLOYEES

Soon after becoming CEO, Bertolini began Aetna's mindfulness-based wellness programs with a study. He says, “We measured heart rate variability to establish stress levels for approximately 250 employees. We put them into quintiles and the highest quintile of stress was spending upwards of $2,000 a year more on health care costs than the average. We invested in 12 weeks of yoga and mindfulness training in a set of practices established with eMindful and Gary Kraftsow of the American Viniyoga Institute. At the end of that study we saw dramatic drops in heart rate variability and an increase in presenteeism and productivity. The employee's journals were the most compelling part; they led us on our discovery to see exactly what factors were causing high-stress levels.” The study and journals showed that stressors for employees focused mainly on their pay and benefits. To address this issue, in 2015 Aetna raised the minimum wage for its employees, increasing wages for more than 5,700 employees, while enhancing health benefits for thousands of employees at the same time. Bertolini says, “We decided that we needed to raise our minimum wage from $12 to $16 hour, and we saw that this change directly impacted their health benefits. So, we agreed to erase that health benefits cost if they agreed to take care of themselves through company programs and health initiatives. We call this the Aetna Social Compact.” They also learned that those stressors were causing anxiety and lack of sleep. Bertolini is an advocate of a good night's sleep and wanted to show the importance of getting at least seven hours of sleep per night, so Aetna began incentivizing employees to sleep better. For every 20 nights that employees slept those 7 hours, they would receive $25, and could receive up to $300 over the course of the year for this incentive. The program was completely voluntary and on the honor system, and more than 15,000 employees have taken advantage of this incentive over the past three years.

THE VALUE OF INVESTING IN GOOD HEALTH

Bertolini says, “It's critical to invest in the human machine in trying to eliminate stressors to build resiliency. In our world, the only thing that's going to happen with change is that it's going to get faster and the organizations that have capable people need to have them be resilient in order to be able to make it and change, adapt and move forward. Part of creating change in an organization is creating this resiliency.” Aetna built a Mindfulness Center at its corporate headquarters in Hartford, Connecticut because they wanted to have a place for people to practice mindfulness inside the building. They even have some pet therapy, where pet therapists come in with animals for employees to spend time with. But Bertolini notes that although the center is new, Aetna has had a Chief Mindfulness Officer (Andy Lee) for more than three years. Lee's focus is to continue to enhance the mindfulness programs for Aetna employees, while also promoting the use of mindfulness programs among Aetna's customers.

It's likely no coincidence that the Aetna stock price has multiplied more than six times since Bertolini has been at the helm. Not only has he focused on his own health and wellness, but he's an authentic advocate for all 49,000 employees. As for his chronic pain, he describes how the power of breath allows him to move through it daily. Bertolini still suffers from neuropathic pain in his left arm. Since a long session of meditation isn't always an option on his schedule, he can tap into a meditative state quickly, even in just a few deep, well-intentioned breaths. He says, “I still have intense pain from my left ear to left fingertips most of the day, but when it becomes a distraction I can take one deep breath and much like prana (the Sanskrit word for breath, life force), pull the pain up, then exhale a breath out while pushing the pain out. One more breath in and then out releases the pain. That's my personal technique, realizing that by being present and understanding that my pain is actually not in my arm, it's in my spine looking for feedback from my arm. When I use breath in a way to push my pain out, I can eliminate the vast majority of the discomfort.” Bertolini can sound more like a yoga teacher now than a high-powered, high-profile CEO. He spends quite a bit of effort speaking publicly and sharing the benefits of mindfulness because it's had such a profoundly positive impact on his life and it's a big part of who he today as a leader. If Bertolini can manage his chronic pain from his desk like that with a few well-intentioned deep breaths, imagine what you can begin to control with breath at your desk.⁶²

The technology sector seems to be particularly open to the idea of mindfulness and meditation. It is the best antidote to our tech-driven lives. The following three C.E.'Oms have done impactful work and continue to lead the way in showing the corporate sector the value of mindfulness in business. These three C.E.'Om's are also connected with each other: Chade-Meng Tan (former Google engineer, and reator of Google's Search Inside Yourself program, the book Search Inside Yourself, and the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute), Peter Bostelmann (former business program delivery manager and now director of Mindfulness at SAP, which is now the largest client of Cheng-Made Tan's Search Inside Yourself organization), and Bill Duane (a former Google engineer, he attended Search Inside Yourself at Google and is now a longtime well-being expert, organizational consultant, and student of Buddhism).

C.E.'OM: FORMER GOOGLE ENGINEER CHADE-MENG TAN

Let's start with Chade-Meng Tan because he's the OG! (urban slang for trailblazer or innovator). Tan was an early Google engineer (Employee #107), and after being there for several years, he wanted to share his desire for happiness and mindfulness. He developed curriculum for Google called Search Inside Yourself. His advocacy for mindfulness led to him to a new full-time position: Google's “Jolly Good Fellow.” His Search Inside Yourself program (a mindfulness-based emotional intelligence course) became a best-selling book in 2012. Tan left Google and in 2013 launched a nonprofit called the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, where the program is now open source to other corporations. Tan is on a mission to contribute to world peace. In his 2010 TED talk, Tan says that the Search Inside Yourself program worked at Google because Google thrives on idealism, and because of that, compassion is organic and widespread. He explains why a company culture of compassion fits at Google and how you can make it fit at your organization too:

• Expressions of corporate compassion follow a pattern at Google. Tan explains how because of their highly independent work model, a very small group of people can take an idea or initiative and simply start something grassroots. They don't ask for permission. Eventually, if it's for the greater good, it will be noticed, and if it's successful and big enough, it can then become official. Example: The largest Google community event happened where “Googlers” around the world volunteered in their local communities. It was organized and launched with just three people, but the idea of participating resonated far and wide; it got so big and so popular that it became official.
• There are several philanthropic initiatives that all came about because of a very small group of passionate and mindful employees. “There was so much organic social action happening around Google that the company decided to form a social responsibility team just to support these efforts. This idea came from two Googlers who wrote their own job descriptions and volunteered themselves for the job. It wasn't formed as some grand corporate strategy, it was two people saying, ‘Let's do this’ and the company said, ‘Yes.’”
• Tan says, “Googlers find compassion to be fun and there are real business benefits of compassion. It creates highly effective business leaders with two common traits: humility and ambition. They are ambitious for the greater good, it's not ego driven. Another benefit is it creates an inspiring workforce. Employees mutually inspire each other towards greater good, the atmosphere is energetic and vibrant where people admire and respect each other.”

Tan's case study at Google is a great example of doing something when you know it's going to help people. It's like the adage that it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission. If it's your calling to speak up and share your mindfulness, do it!⁶³

C.E.'OM: SAP'S DIRECTOR OF MINDFULNESS PROGRAM, PETER BOSTELMANN

Peter Bostelmann was working at the Palo Alto, California office of SAP (a German-based multinational publicly traded software company with nearly 90,000 employees) in 2012 when he began dreaming of bringing his personal mindfulness practice to SAP. He had two friends at the Germany headquarters who were also mindfulness advocates, and he began talking with them about the idea. They ended up testing with small pilot programs in Palo Alto, and it resonated. Chade-Meng Tan came to SAP to speak to an audience of hundreds of interested people at SAP. As the idea began to scale through other pilot programs, Bostelmann chose Tan's Search Inside Yourself program to be the official program at SAP globally. It's been so successful that it turned into a new full-time position for Bostelmann, who moved from business delivery manager to director of Mindfulness Program at SAP. SAP also became Search Inside Yourself Institute's biggest client.

MINDFULNESS IS CONTAGIOUS

Similar to Tan, Bostelmann was just one person within a huge organization who was passionate about mindfulness and made it happen from the ground up. He experienced great benefits from his own practice but had never talked about it at work, until he realized that it was important to share the wealth of knowledge because his colleagues would also deeply benefit in from the self-awareness and practice. SAP now has a waitlist of 5,000 people signed up for their workshops and teacher trainings. It sounds like people are crawling out of the woodwork to get involved because either they want in on a new practice or they want to deepen their practice by attending the teacher training. In his “How to Bring Mindfulness to a Company” talk in 2016, Bostelmann describes how you can sell a mindfulness program to your organization:

• Find someone who has both business and mindfulness background because they need to sell the idea to employees and executives. This takes drive, persistence, and courage, and it's helpful to think big from the beginning. SAP created mindfulness ambassadors and volunteers globally.
• Create a specific pitch for your organization that will resonate with the needs and goals of the company. You cannot have a one-size-fits-all approach. Link the pitch to objectives that are meaningful to your company and show how mindfulness will help reach their goals.
• Speak from potential enhancement perspective rather than speaking about curing deficiencies. Meditation is usually part of a wellness or health department, but Bostelmann says, “If you want to attract the alpha male and female, they define themselves by their capacity to perform; they're not attracted by the idea of health problems. If you approach it as an enhancement program: i.e. increases cognitive capacity, proven by science, increases leadership and social skills . . . then people get interested. Choose your language carefully, talk about it in a way that's compelling.” He shares an anecdote about the importance of lingo. He worked as a coach and recommended meditation exercises to a client who became offended; she wasn't interested in “that hippie stuff.” A few weeks later he suggested they do “attention training” exercise. She enthusiastically agreed. They were, of course, the same exercise. “She overcame her bias because she related to the science-based language. Language within the business context should not be esoteric, religious or spiritual. You want to attract the skeptics too. Frame it as scientifically proven mental strength training.”
• Get strong testimonials; when a German VP of sales at SAP says the course can change your life, that helps. He recommended it in the office and people were curious.

Bostelmann has grown the program and now has a team. They have meaningful data that he shares publicly at conferences to illustrate the value of mindfulness in business for employees and for the health of large organizations. From grassroots to a global mindfulness practice, it has become an integral part of the culture at SAP. The investment is paying off in many ways that include less absenteeism and higher well-being as well as better engagement, focus, and trust. Bostelmann hopes to inspire other individuals to start like he did and for other companies to consider the SAP data and bring mindfulness into their global organizations.⁶⁴

C.E.'OM: FORMER GOOGLE ENGINEER BILL DUANE

Bill Duane was a Google engineer who took the Search Inside Yourself course in 2007 and then also studied mindfulness-based stress relief in 2008. Like Tan, he transitioned from engineer to become a Google Well-Being expert and a mindfulness and organizational consultant (for Google and then on his own for other big corporate brands). He worked twelve years at Google and now has ten years of consulting experience in healthcare, manufacturing, finance, telecom, and media with studies in neuroscience, team effectiveness, mindfulness, and well-being science. Duane is one of the leading experts in mindfulness within the corporate arena. In April 2018, I interviewed Duane. Here's some of his advice on bringing mindfulness to business professionals.

MEET PEOPLE WHERE THEY ARE

“Your Type A client's key constraint in life is going to be time. If you come at them saying, ‘Hey, you should devote time to this thing (mindfulness or meditation), that on the surface appears to them to be nonproductive; it's a nonstarter. Instead, we need to explain the good news that these skills offer in regard to self-awareness, self-regulation, and connection, how they're good for cognitive performance, strategic visioning, and stress reduction. In order to get in the door, you have to understand the group of humans that you're dealing with and help them solve a problem, and ideally this should be a business problem. You can't lead with information where the client has no context to understand it. If someone wants to work on these skills, it's useful to pick something very specific and then use that as the lever. If you tie it to a specific problem that they desperately want to solve, they'll be willing to invest time in self-awareness and meditation.”

EXECS NEED TO UNDERSTAND THEIR EXECUTIVE PRESENCE

“In terms of self-awareness for Type A, one of the things that leads to the doorway opening is executive presence; someone who is clueless about how they're being received does not have good executive presence.” Duane recommends the “Johari Window” technique for helping executives better understand their relationship with themselves and others and says that the concept helps in developing the self-awareness for good executive presence.

OVERTIME ISN'T ALWAYS PRODUCTIVE

“When I teach, I share that the ROI for time at work becomes neutral and then decreases depending on where you are. There are times when the most productive thing to do is stop working . . . but that feels radically unsafe. The reason we blow past the ROI on time at work and it becomes neutral and then negative is because we lack the self-awareness of ‘I'm making mistakes.’ For me, I know the flavor of mental exhaustion and when I start tasting that flavor of experience, I know I'm going to make terrible decisions, gonna piss people off and ending up having to make good. You know the quote? (by [“Justified” character] Raylan Givens): ‘If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole.’ Without self-awareness you'd actually misplace the source of it.”

THE BEST PROGRAMS ARE THE ONES YOU DO

“With mindfulness and meditation, we have ‘medicine’ that works and yet the vast majority of people won't do it. That's why the best well-being programs are the ones you do. Whatever practice it is, if you're doing it even if it may not be as effective and you may be leaving a lot of potential for well-being on the table—if you're doing something, it's great and it may be a path toward something deeper.”

Duane's life changed while he was working at Google in 2008 and dealing with an intense job along with the stress of his father's heart issues and subsequent death. Duane says, “I was taking the (mindfulness-based stress relief course when my father died in 2008, which was a massive inflection point. It was the overall, ambient stress that got me willing to check mindfulness out,” and then seeing the positive effect it had during this difficult time made him consider doing it full time. Duane says, “There's no way I would have considered meditation had I not been promoted far beyond my comfort level and had my dad also not died. Tibetans say ‘May you have the appropriate amount of difficulty.’ Without the appropriate amount of difficulty you don't get knocked out of [your] comfort zone, particularly if you have a lot of privilege—either wealth, gender, race. If you have the ability to insulate yourself from reality, you lose these opportunities. There's a training that needs to happen around adversity and how to deal with it. If you can always buy your way out of discomfort, you don't have that opportunity.” Duane is currently studying to be a Buddhist teacher.⁶⁵

C.E.'OM: SALESFORCE CEO MARC BENIOFF

One more C.E.'Om from the tech space. If you're in the business sector, you're probably familiar with Salesforce, the publicly traded cloud computing software company. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is known for being a long-time meditation and mindfulness advocate and practitioner. It's said that Steve Jobs had a big influence on Benioff appreciating meditation. Steve Jobs would likely be proud of how Benioff has brought that philosophy directly to his 7,000 employees in the new Salesforce headquarters in San Francisco. Benioff didn't come up with all of the design ideas on his own, though; he brought in Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh and an entourage of thirty monks to consult. The new Salesforce building stands out from the outside because it's the tallest skyscraper in San Francisco, but it's unique on the inside as well because Benioff built meditation rooms on each floor along with mindfulness zones. He's hoping the time spent in meditation will result in more innovative thinking. Benioff says via a Business Insider article: “There's a mindfulness zone where employees can put their phones into a basket or whatever, and go in to an area where there's quietness. I think this is really important to cultivating innovation in your company. You can go there and not have kind of a chitchat going on in your mind for a few moments. That's more important today because we're in this always-on economy.”⁶⁶

MAKING SPACE WITH MONKS FOR MEDITATION AT THE OFFICE

Benioff also recently invited the monks and nuns from Plum Village (a French monastic community) to the annual 170,000-person Salesforce conference. They offer mindfulness and meditation techniques to all the attendees from a big tent outside the conference. Having such accessible meditation spaces for employees to breathe and find a few minutes of unplugged time adds real value at Salesforce on so many levels: quick energy and perspective shifts as well as boosts of creativity and clarity that will no doubt lead to more better communication, relationships, and collaboration. Dedicating space to the idea of mindfulness is certainly admirable and speaks volumes about the priority that Benioff places on employee workplace wellness.⁶⁷,⁶⁸

C.E.'OM: LT. COL. JANNELL MACAULAY, U.S. AIR FORCE

Lieutenant Colonel Jannell MacAulay, U.S. Air Force, had simultaneously been an Air Force pilot, the wife of a serviceman who also gets deployed, mother of two children, and a squadron commander. She's proud to be the first person to speak openly about bringing meditation and mindfulness to the Air Force as a tool for leadership and performance. I spoke with MacAulay in April 2018 about how this came about and the legacy she leaves as she retires. She says, “A critique I often get is that mindfulness will make the military soft, when in reality it gives us our edge; it keeps us on the edge because it helps us live in the moment. Greatness happens in the moment.”

SELF-AWARENESS FIRST

MacAulay has led a life full of incredible successes that would send most people into a tailspin, but she found herself in a place about eight years ago where she didn't feel successful. She felt as if she had lost herself. It was during a particularly stressful time; her husband was deployed, she was working full-time as a leader and a pilot, and she had a two-year-old child. She began to ask herself questions like, “What's wrong? Why is success so hard? Why is life so challenging? How can I sustain this?” She realized that she had achieved everything she'd ever wanted; she fulfilled a childhood dream and became a pilot, she received her PhD, and led a squadron, but she still felt as if she was falling short daily. She wasn't being the best version of herself. She began to write it off as just part of aging and as a result of parenting and professional responsibilities. But that didn't sit well with MacAulay; she knew better. She has an undergraduate degree in biology and a master's degree in exercise physiology. She was ready for a full self-transformation to get to a point where she could sustain her success and begin to feel good again.

She tried yoga and says, “It became this space where I could just be me—not anyone's boss or mom. In the military especially, and in business, we can suffer from ‘decision fatigue.’ In yoga nobody was asking me questions, nobody needed anything from me, there were no expectations tied to yoga.” She found that breath off the mat also helped her make better decisions. Along with yoga and the idea of silence and solitude came eating healthy whole food and finding time for self-reflection. Everything had come back together for MacAulay; she felt strong and whole again. She says, “I personally found mindfulness and a focus on human performance to be such a powerful force in my life that that's how I wanted to lead.”

EASING HER SQUADRON INTO THE IDEA OF MEDITATION

“I didn't want jump in and say to my 400-person unit, ‘Hey, I meditate and now so will you.’ That certainly won't work. Instead, I led by example and demonstrated those behaviors as a leader; I was present, connected, situationally aware and focused. I built trust first, which opened the door for me to then introduce yoga. Then I introduced them to the concept [of] mindfulness and living in the present, so when they were in an aircraft or an air traffic controller, they would be able to handle the stress, make better decisions and perform at higher levels.” She had developed a simple practice that she called “Going to the Cloud.” “It meant stepping back, taking two deep breaths (but if you need more, take more) or sometimes you may need just one deep breath. With flying, it's high stress, high speed, life-or-death things happen quickly and one single deep breath can anchor me.” Fifty percent of the people MacAulay led were under age 23, so she wanted them to understand that when they felt the physical signs of stress—clammy hands, heart racing, butterflies in their stomach—that's when they should immediately “Go to the Cloud.” “Then they could respond instead of react. It started there and they latched onto the term too.”

MacAulay uses mindfulness as a tool for self-awareness and self-reflection. She says, “We should all understand who we are, what we believe in, and what guides us in life. I ask people, ‘What are your guiding principles?’ That's also where my two deep breaths in my morning began. Instead of checking email or social media, where I might feel judged or inadequate or stressed or angry and then interacting with my kids first thing while on edge, instead of reaching for my phone, I take two deep breaths and do self-reflection on my guiding principle and personal mission statement: Who Am I? Where Am I Going? It takes a while to develop, but once you have it it's your grounding in foundation. It's a powerful exercise for people. That's where I live from every day and I try to help others figure those things out too.”

MINDFULNESS FOR THE WIN!

MacAulay then started introducing mindfulness at different group meetings, including once a month with all 400 in her squadron. Then at the senior staff meeting with about twenty people once a week, she'd do a minute of breathing before the meeting began to focus attention on the task at hand. She would call it a “cognitive preparation,” and would always present science-based research so that the other senior staff understood the value. MacAulay could see the effects of mindfulness in concrete ways. She says, “Everyone becomes more aware of better interactions. Not only did our culture shift but performance increased; we won several awards. Five airmen were selected for officer training school out of one squadron in one year, which is unheard of. We also won ‘Airfield of Year’ for the entire Air Force. It wasn't because we meditated, but meditation was the pathway to high performance. It was the means for our ability to perform at high levels and perform as a team. There's still a stigma attached to yoga in the military; we tie weakness to slowing down. That's what led likely to my executive fatigue and burnout. We don't realize value in slowing down. We need to slow down, though, and that's, interestingly enough, the more courageous choice.”

We're sure to hear more from Jannell MacAulay as she retires from her current job at PACE (Profession of Arms Center of Excellence) and will be writing books and continuing to speak and teach about mindfulness in business.⁶⁹

C.E.'OM: JANICE MARTURANO, FORMER VP AT GENERAL MILLS, NOW FOUNDER OF THE INSTITUTE OF MINDFUL LEADERSHIP

Janice Marturano is another former corporate executive like Chade-Meng Tan and Bill Duane, who left corporate life to build their own mindfulness-based business. Marturano, a former vice president at General Mills for 15 years and now founder and executive director of the Institute of Mindful Leadership (since 2011) left corporate life after a very intense eighteen-month period at General Mills where she was working eighteen-hour days, seven days a week for months on end to complete an acquisition. She also suffered the loss of both of her parents during that time. “It was a perfect storm of an extraordinarily difficult time,” she says in an interview with Arianna Huffington. Marturano says that there was no time to grieve for her parents because she was responsible for the jobs of 10,000 people during this acquisition. After that transaction she was sent on a retreat called “The Power of Mindfulness: An Intensive Retreat for Executives,” and that changed the course of her life. She says, “We have an amazing wealth of wisdom within us, and it gets covered over by being distracted yet we have this innate capacity in our minds to reflect, to actually allow the inner wisdom to arise and to help us make those conscious choices.”⁷⁰

Marturano began to see the difference in herself as a leader after the retreat, and her colleagues saw a change, too. They wanted to bring similar changes to their lives, so Marturano shared her knowledge. Now, with the Institute of Mindful Leadership, she is dedicated to “bringing mindful leadership curriculum to people around the globe. It doesn't take a monumental shift; the small step or the small change is really important to us beginning to turn into the kind of society that we need.” I asked Marturano how to best integrate mindfulness to teams who saw mindfulness as too “out there.” She responded, “I have taught thousands of leaders over the past 12 years and I am often asked how to bring this to a skeptical team. First, model the behaviors of leading as a mindful leader: focused, clear, creative, and compassionate (these are the four Fundamentals of Excellence that the Institute's curricula train). Second, introduce the practices with a reputable organization that can customize the training for the culture. Finally, demystify this work by comparing it to training the innate capacities of our body. This is training for the mind.” Marturano travels the globe, sharing her insights and experience about mindful leadership with a variety of organizations, from corporate to academic institutions, nonprofits, and the military.

C.E.'OM: KATE ROSS LEBLANC, CO-FOUNDER OF SAJE NATURAL WELLNESS

Kate Ross LeBlanc cofounded Saje Natural Wellness over twenty-five years ago with a passion for both the power of nature and connecting with community. Kate knows the feeling of community from growing up in her mother's fabric store on small-town Main Street in Ontario, Canada. She's had a longtime spiritual practice that is at the core of her mindful leadership, and it can be seen in their company culture, from product development to the aesthetic and vibe of the stores. Even in the age of eComm and Amazon, Kate, her husband and Saje cofounder Jean-Pierre LeBlanc, along with daughter Kiara LeBlanc (vice president of Creative) are focused on opening more storefronts. They believe that people still want and need to connect in person. I interviewed LeBlanc for Thrive Global; here's an excerpt.

AUTHENTICALLY CONNECTING WITH CONSUMERS

“One of our natural human desires is to have our lives witnessed. That's important for me to do anywhere, and as a retail company we have an opportunity to not just witness lives, but make a difference in someone's wellness through our stores. We can look our community members in the eye and ask them meaningful questions about their lives and their wellness. They can be heard. Our driving force will always be about connection, really seeing people and creating a space where community members can feel like they are part of something bigger; inspiring people to be the best version of themselves. I'm confident that when people leave their house and venture out, whether they know it or not, they are looking for connection and that's what will keep them coming back.”

HER DAILY PRACTICE

Mindfulness informs the way LeBlanc approaches the world. “Empowered by that deep knowledge and understanding that we are all writing our own stories, my interaction with both community and my team members is intentional and mindful. I know I can always shift my mindset, learn from something, see it on a different dimension as opposed to getting jostled around. I've developed my own breathing and visualization techniques for any situation where I feel my emotions in a non-supportive way. I take time to close my eyes, breathe, visualize what it is that I want to manifest. Within thirty seconds or a minute, I shift and have a connection with my higher self. I don't even realize that I do it any longer, my breath, visualization and energy managing is naturally part of what I do as as I move through the day.” Saje Natural Wellness is based in Vancouver with 71 locations across North America and 1,200 team members, and has plans for retail expansion.⁷¹

C.E.'OM: OPRAH WINFREY

Anyone who knows me knows that I've been deeply inspired by Oprah for decades and credit her television show back in 1992 for giving me the inspiration to launch my Moisture Jamzz business. I continue to be in awe of her work ethic, creativity and meaningful success that stems from her intention to bring out the best in people. Oprah Winfrey is the epitome of a C.E.'Om. It's hard to fathom the extent of change and innovation that has been a direct result of her inspiring, educating, and supporting such a diverse audience for so long. She's all about positive energy, human connection, and mindful intention in business and in life. She's shown us that we are all more alike than we are different. Her mix of business savvy and drive to connect and inspire people to live their best life has allowed her to grow and scale in different mediums but with the same hope of creating impactful and meaningful work and art. After four decades in the broadcasting industry and as a mindful entrepreneur, Oprah has touched, changed, and inspired millions of lives in a way that's authentic and heartfelt—all the while, becoming the world's first African American female billionaire. Coincidence? I think not.

KEEN SENSE OF SELF-AWARENESS

An inspiring story that Oprah shares highlights her keen sense of self-awareness and intention even as a child. I was lucky enough to hear her share this anecdote in person recently, and she tells it slowly and mindfully because it's those “aha” moments that Oprah wants us all to tightly grasp onto. Oprah was about eight years old, sitting on a rural southern porch watching her grandmother hang laundry out to dry. Her grandmother told her to watch carefully so that when she did this for people, she'd know how to do it correctly. Both Oprah's mother and grandmother were domestic workers. Oprah immediately responded, “I'm not going to be doing this.” She knew. That feeling was strongly embedded into her and she moved through her life accordingly. Up against extremely challenging odds in the broadcasting industry, Oprah disrupted by unapologetically being her authentic self. Her journey is a powerful example of mindfulness, intention, transparency, and good old persistence and tenacity. Working her way up from reporter, to anchor and host of the most successful talk show ever in America for twenty-five years, she became powerful in business because she was more than the show's talent. She owned the production company for “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” Her business savvy was right up there with her empathy and humility.

WHEN YOU LOVE WHAT YOU DO, YOU KEEP ON DOING IT!

After forty years of nonstop, hard work, most people would retire and relax after signing off from that show. Not Oprah. Thank goodness! She simultaneously ended her show while launching the OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network) television network in 2011. She has said that the new venture was a major uphill climb and more difficult than she ever imagined it could be. But again, she knew she was “called” to build a platform that would fill people's soul, building the network she felt was missing in the marketplace and sharing her deeply ingrained spirituality that she began talking about on her show long before people even knew what mindfulness meant.

On the last episode of the “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” Oprah said, “I've talked to nearly 30,000 people on this show, and all 30,000 had one thing in common: They all wanted validation. . . . Understanding that one principle, that everybody wants to be heard, has allowed me to hold the microphone for you all these years with the least amount of judgment. . . . Try it with your children, your husband, your wife, your boss, your friends. Validate them. ‘I see you. I hear you. And what you say matters to me.’” This lesson certainly has business applications.

Oprah exemplifies the qualities of mindfulness in business not only through her own personal climb to success but in her leadership at Harpo, OWN, and the Oprah Winfrey Girls Leadership Academy in South Africa. She walks the walk. Oprah is an outspoken meditation advocate and leads a free twenty-one-day meditation series with Deepak Chopra a few times every year. On Oprah's Super Soul Conversations podcast recently, she talked with Amy Schumer about their mutual affection for meditation. Oprah said, “It's one of the most life-enhancing things I've ever done. The ultimate in going in.” She's also an avid intention setter. Oprah has said that she will not start a project, a meeting, or even phone call without having a clear intention of what's going to transpire. She's an activist, philanthropist, actress, producer, CEO, leader, entrepreneur, and whatever else she decides she wants to be! She is tireless and on a mission to create meaningful work that continues to inspire and change people for the greater good. She will no doubt leave a never-ending legacy.⁷²

Speaking of Oprah, one last example of a brand that is very recently innovating with a new purpose and focus on wellness is the company formerly called Weight Watchers. The 55-year-old company is now known simply as WW, with the tagline “Wellness That Works.” Oprah is a recent investor in the brand, and the influence that she has in regard to mindfulness as a big part of well-being aligns perfectly with the new philosophy of WW, which focuses on wellness rather than weight loss. That's a big shift for a big organization; they're listening to the marketplace. Time magazine named WW President and CEO Mindy Grossman on its list of the 50 Most Influential People in Health Care for 2018 as she is helping to redefine wellness. This is one more brand that sees the SOS for a new way to live in 2018 and beyond. If we don't take the time to focus on our health, we're going to have to spend time healing from ailments that develop from overextending ourselves with constant digital connection. Grossman is quoted in a Forbes article: “The vernacular of wellness has definitely evolved. The way we think about it is very holistic. It's what you put in your body, how you move your body and how your mind supports your efforts, but the big thing that has changed is people want to define what healthy is, too. We've done a lot of consumer work over the past number of years and synthesized it down into a number of things that have really influenced how we're moving forward. And people want inspiration. It's not just information. There's too much conflicting noise happening right now. So if you can both give people the information and inspiration then, what we like to say is, healthy is the new skinny and that's very empowering for people. We want to help people be the healthiest version of themselves.”⁷³

While these and many other C.E.'Oms have made incredible traction and set admirable examples, there's still a lot of work to be done with bringing mindfulness and well-being to the business sector. But there's hope now because science, awareness, conversation, data, and funding all lie behind initiatives now. We just need to keep pushing them forward, one deep breath at a time.