Chapter 14

Leading without Boundaries

In This Chapter

Focusing on the bigger picture

Taking a more creative approach to leadership

Using simple solutions to deal with complex problems

Mindful leadership is all about being fully in the present moment, experiencing life, warts and all, including moments of success and failure. Mindfulness is all about being the best you can be, ensuring that your leadership style is in harmony and alignment with your values. This style of leadership involves being reflective; having the ability to stop, be silent and learn. Mindful leadership is about knowing yourself, your thinking patterns, how you feel and behave. It encourages you to engage more fully with the world around you, adopting an open and flexible approach. It encourages empathy, understanding, and kindness to yourself.

In this chapter you find out how you can apply these attitudes and approaches to your own leadership style. The first section starts by clearing the decks and creating the space to lead.

Creating the Space to Lead

When leading in times of complexity and change, you can easily become engulfed in day-to-day work challenges. Sometimes it can feel like you don’t even have a moment to draw breath. Taking time out to stand back and observe the bigger picture is always important and even more so when you’re really busy. The busier you are, the more you need to really know yourself, be kind to yourself and make the most of the limited time and personal energy at your disposal. Unfortunately, when busy, you may start to focus too much time and energy on what you think is important at that moment in time, failing to see the bigger picture. Project deadlines and important meetings may become disproportionately important in comparison to taking time out to be kind to yourself. A weekly massage, exercise, going to the theatre or meeting with friends can become distant dreams. In times of high pressure, ensuring that you’ve a sense of balance in your life is vital.

Seeing the bigger picture

When you’re really busy, believing that you don’t have a second to pause is all too easy. You start to think that every second counts and that you mustn’t waste time on things like eating lunch, pausing to enjoy something beautiful or even allowing yourself a few seconds to pat yourself on the back for a job well done. Time away from desk or office equals lost productivity (or so you think!). When working in this mindset, you may feel as though you’re being a bad employee or setting a bad example by ‘doing nothing’. The reverse is true.

When the going gets tough, the tough get mindful! Recent research showed that mindfulness can widen your attentional breadth, making you aware of more things simultaneously; and lots of research demonstrates that mindfulness helps people see situations from a broader perspective.

Mindfulness helps you to notice patterns of behaviour and thoughts in yourself and others. Most importantly, creating a gap to think before responding allows you to put things into perspective and helps you to focus on what’s really important and the best use of your precious time and energy.

Mindfully seeing the bigger picture

Try this activity to gain a sense of perspective. Follow these steps:

1. Find somewhere where you will not be disturbed for 15 minutes. If this is impossible at work, try doing the activity at home, or arrive early, park at the far end of the car park and sit in the car.
2. Close your eyes or cast your eyes downwards. Spend a little time steadying your mind and stepping back from your brain chatter. Start by counting your breaths. Count 1 on the in-breath, 2 on the out-breath. Continue until you reach a count of 20. If your mind wanders, smile and gently escort your attention back to focusing on breathing, and restart your counting at 1.
3. Focus your attention on what your organisation does. What services does it offer or what products does it make? Try to visualise these services or products and place them on the workbench of your mind. Spend a couple of minutes exploring them with playful curiosity.
4. Focus your attention on how your work contributes to the organisation’s success. Place your role on the workbench of your mind and explore it.
5. Explore all your work tasks, looking at them impartially without starting to think about and deal with them. If helpful, picture these tasks as boxes, each sealed with a label, on the workbench of your mind. Consider:
   • Which of the boxes are really important from an organisational perspective?
   • Are there any boxes that invoke strong emotions?
   • Are any of the boxes taking up more space on the workbench than they need to?
6. Return your attention to your breath. Focus on the breath coming in (count 1) and the breath going out (count 2) for a count of 10.
7. Open your eyes and spend the last few minutes reflecting. Consider:
   • Which work tasks are really the best use of your time?
   • Are there any tasks that you’re focusing on more than you should because you like them or avoiding because you don’t like them?
   • Is the time you’re allocating to each task appropriate when you consider how great or little impact it has on your department and the company as a whole?

Try to do this activity fairly regularly, at least once a month, to help you stand back and look more strategically at how you spend your working time.

From time to time you can easily become overwhelmed with things to do, all of which seem both important and urgent. At times like this, try using the a variation of the three-minute focus break (see Chapter 5), as described below.

• Close your eyes or hold them in soft focus. Spend a minute observing your thoughts as mental processes and then letting them go.
• Focus your attention on how your heart feels, pumping blood and oxygen round your body. If you cannot detect this, focus your attention on the air entering and leaving your body through your nostrils.
• Expand your attention to the sounds around you, in your body, in the room and outside. Observe how your whole body feels, sitting in this room in this moment.
• Ask yourself, ‘What is the very best use of my time in this present moment?’ Open your eyes, and reprioritise your work for the rest of the day.

Making time to be yourself

When was the last time you took time out to be yourself? Maybe you’re already an authentic leader and are really comfortable in your own skin. Maybe the essence of who you are and what you stand for is the same both at work and home. If this is true, congratulations! You probably have mutually supportive and trusting relationships with your colleagues. Because of this your actions and ideas are favourably received, leading to better outcomes and results.

Possibly your authenticity has led to you having a higher profile in the organisation. By being authentic and true to your values, your life is probably easier and you’re happier as a result.

If this doesn’t sound like you, don’t worry. Despite numerous articles being published on the subject, relatively few truly authentic leaders exist out there in the real world. Trying to be something you’re not, day in, day out, can be hard work, but being truly ‘authentic’ as a leader can have its downside too. If the real you is a jerk, ‘being authentic’ becomes simply an excuse for bad behaviour!

Assuming that the real you is quite a sound, intelligent person, how can you spend more time being you? Indeed, are you really aware of who the real ‘you’ is after so many years of wearing the costume of ‘the leader you think you should be’?

A good place to start is looking at what happiness and success mean to you personally (as opposed to how society, your friends or family view them) and what really makes you ‘happy’. Doing so takes courage, honesty and a true desire to be free of the opinions of others.

Do you measure your own personal success in terms of money, status or possessions? Or do you measure it in terms of relationships with others, family, happiness, personal growth and development, or the difference you’re making in the world? No right or wrong answers exist here; everyone is unique. We’ve all had different childhoods and different experiences along the way that have helped to shape who we are and what we value. Decide what’s right for you.

Finding the real you: step 1

Practise some mindfulness and, after 10 minutes or so (when hopefully you’ve activated your rest and relaxation parasympathetic nervous system, and have shifted brain mode from avoidance to approach), ask yourself these questions:

• What really makes me feel happy in life?
• What does success really mean to me?

With each question, allow time for the answer to emerge. You might wish to imagine the questions dropping like a pebble into a lake, and the ripples circling out. Try to observe the answers without thinking about them too much. Don’t worry, you won’t forget them, and you’ll have time to think about them more later on.

After finishing this mindfulness practice, jot down what the answers that emerged. Write the happiness themes on one piece of paper and the success themes on another. As you reflect on them, you may wish to add more thoughts to the page or turn the page into a mind map.

You may need to repeat this exercise several times over a week or more before you’re happy that you’ve got the genuine answers that really resonate for you.

Finding the real you: step 2

When you’ve a clear idea of what makes you happy and what personal success looks like for you, you can repeat the exercise, focusing this time specifically on your work.

What makes you happy at work? It may be gaining promotion or increasing your status. It may also be about developing and supporting others to take on new roles or get promoted or even eventually take on your job when you leave. At a simple level, happiness at work may depend on gaining a sense of personal mastery of your work, knowing that your unique input into a task was what made the real difference.

Similarly, what does success look like for you? It may be much the same as your idea of success in your personal life or as simple as meeting most of your work deadlines. It may be about increasing profits, turning round a failing part of the business, growing your customer base, increasing customer satisfaction or improving employee satisfaction.

Every day authenticity

Try to have a mindful, authentic moment every day. It may be:

• Saying no when you would normally say yes as a result of peer pressure.
• Taking a few moments out of your busy schedule to be yourself – eating that ice-cream, practising mindfulness to bring things back into balance or taking time to enjoy a coffee with a true friend.
• Making a little time each day to focus on making a difference in the workplace – putting in place things that align with your personal values, slowly over time changing the organisation’s culture.

Take a stand each day and you’ll be happier, healthier … and attracting the life that you really want.

Being good to yourself

At school or as you grew up, you were probably taught to be kind to others. Do you treat yourself as well as you treat your friends and members of your family? Research into ‘self-compassion’ shows that most people find it much easier to be kind to others than to be kind to themselves. This is true for a variety of reasons. Self-compassion may be viewed as self- indulgence or as a weakness. People may fear that, by being kinder to themselves, they’ll become weak or lose control. Some people regard self-compassion as being selfish.

You may work in an organisational culture that celebrates long hours and the need to be ‘seen’ to be busy at all times. You may feel, especially when busy, the need to push yourself harder to get things done. In the current economic climate businesses need to provide better services or products using fewer resources, which compounds this type of organisational culture.

In this environment, cultivating self-care and befriending ourselves can be difficult. Befriending yourself may seem a pink fluffy thing to do. However, sound scientific reasons exist for cultivating self-care, including:

• Many people are unconsciously in a constant state of threat, which over time can lead to long-term serious illness. Recent neuroscience research into self-compassion and kindness suggests that self- compassion can reduce or neutralise the brain’s reaction to threat.
• Practising self-compassion can reduce shame and self-criticism.
• People who score high on tests of self-compassion tend to be happier and more optimistic.
• Research conducted in 2012 demonstrated that cultivating compassion increases activity in the right amygdala, which helps decrease depression and anxiety.

Learning to be kinder to yourself can be hard at first; after all, you’re asking yourself to unlearn the habits of a lifetime. Chapter 5 describes a mindfulness activity to help cultivate self-compassion.

Managing your time and energy

Over the years you’ll have found ways of managing your time that work for you and get results. However, these patterns of time management may become entrenched and stored in the brain as habits. Because they’re habits, you find yourself repeating them without even being aware that you’re doing so. To adopt a more mindful approach to leadership, you may need to throw away your old rule book.

Table 14-1 compares some old approaches to leadership with more mindful workplace practices.

Table 14-1 Comparing old leadership habits to new mindful approaches

Proactively manage your energy levels throughout the day so that you’ve the physical stamina to deal with everything you need to do.

Did you know that:

• Complex tasks such as prioritising and decision making use the newest parts of your brain, which require significantly more energy to run than the more primitive areas of your brain.
• Your brain consumes energy at 10 times the rate of the rest of your body per gram of tissue.
• Glucose is the main energy source for your brain. As the size and complexity of your brain increases, energy requirements increase.
• If the energy supply to your brain is cut off for 10 minutes, it causes permanent brain damage. No other organ in the human body is as sensitive to changes in its energy supply.
• Researchers asked runners on a treadmill to exert as much force as they could on a bar in front of them. They measured the force, then gave them simple sums to do. The amount of force they were able to exert reduced significantly as their brains processed the sums.

The above examples graphically illustrate the need to actively manage your energy levels. Practising mindfulness helps you to get to know yourself better. Specific mindfulness practices such as the body scan (see Chapter 6) put you in touch with the signals that your body is sending you. As a result, you become more aware of its needs – for hydration, for food to top up energy supplies, or for movement to ease physical tension.

Time taken to be kind to yourself and manage your energy will be more than repaid by increased productivity, reduced duplication and a more positive mindset.

Enhancing Leadership Creativity

Never has there been more of a drive for leaders to be creative. Few would argue that businesses are experiencing change at an unprecedented level. Products have shorter and shorter life cycles; some high-tech products need fundamental redesign every 6 to 12 months. Work life has become more unpredictable and less stable. Most people will change jobs 11 times before they hit their mid-forties. The demand for creativity at work is increasing. Many education experts and leaders from top companies now argue that creativity and innovation have become crucial 21st-century skills.

As you practise and develop your own mindfulness exercises, your ability to be creative also grows. Research shows that mindfulness can enhance flexible and critical reasoning skills, reduce cognitive rigidity, improve insight and refine problem- solving skillsFind out how in this section.

Thinking without boundaries

Remember when you were a child and invented stories about fairies, spacemen and super heroes? You generally think of children as being more creative than adults. Worryingly, research carried out in 2010 based on 300,000 creativity tests going back to the 1970s concluded that creativity has decreased among children in recent years. Since 1990, children have become less able to produce unique and unusual ideas. They’re also less humorous, less imaginative and less able to elaborate on ideas. Researchers blame the current focus on testing in schools, and the idea that there is only one right answer to a question, leaving little room for unexpected, novel, or divergent thought.

Many neuro-scientists believe that creativity is innate – it can never really be lost but it does need to be nurtured. As adults, notions of right and wrong can cause creativity to decline. So how, as an adult, can you increase your creativity and discover how to think again without boundaries?

Learning from your own experience is critical to help you adapt and survive. Consciously or unconsciously, you improve your performance based on previous experiences. But experiences can also hinder your performance if you get stuck in the past and your thinking becomes rigid. This is where mindfulness comes in. By practising mindfulness, you can reduce your mental rigidity. Mindfulness encourages you to let go of habits and find alternatives when appropriate. By observing thoughts as mental processes and letting them go without further mental processing, you create a pause. This pause allows you to decide on the most appropriate response rather than defaulting to old ways of thinking and behaving. The act of noticing habits and using habit releasers (see Chapter 7) can be powerful. By consciously observing what happens when you do things differently, you start to break down cognitive rigidity and increase cognitive flexibility.

Feeling a little uncomfortable when doing new things or trying to do things differently is natural. Your inner voice may be screaming at you ‘this isn’t the way to do it!’ Two key reasons for this response exist. First, the old way of doing things feel safer. Your brain has evolved to maximise reward while minimising threat. From your brain’s perspective, defaulting to old, tried and tested ways of doing things feels safer and more rewarding. Second, if you’ve done something a certain way for three months or more, the process has probably become hard-wired into the primitive areas of your brain. This means that you can repeat the behaviours without any conscious thought, and little energy is needed to run this mental programming. Doing something new involves use of the newer areas of the brain, which take much more energy to run.

Over the next few days, try to notice some of your habits at work. These habits may include:

• Always tackling your emails in a set order
• Using a speaker phone in an open plan office or talking too loudly
• Using electronic devices during meetings
• Being late for meetings and appointments
• Always listening to the same radio station or CD on the way home

Select one of these habits and try doing things differently. Observe:

• The impact of your action. What thoughts, emotions or bodily sensations develop?
• The impact of this action on others around you.

Doing things differently isn’t usually the real challenge - your mental resistance to it is. Simple exercises like this help you to make your thinking and behaviour patterns less rigid, opening up a world of creative possibilities.

Tapping into your intuition

An increasing number of senior leaders are now questioning why business decision making should always be strictly analytical. They argue that sometimes it should be intuitive; in other words, they suggest going with their ‘gut instinct’. Not long ago this type of thinking would have been dismissed as nonsense but that’s no longer the case. Conventional decision making has many limitations, which is why leaders faced with unprecedented challenges are now open to trying a new approach. The business environment is often ambiguous and there isn’t enough information on which to base a rational decision.

Until recent years, intuition was confined to the realm of philosophy. In recent years, psychology and neuroscience research have discovered more about the way in which we make decisions, so intuition has become an area of academic study.

According to cognitive experiential self theory, we routinely process information in parallel; we use rational processes such as logic and analysis on the conscious level, while relying on instinctual and emotional cues on the non-conscious level. This means that you’re probably already using reason and intuition simultaneously, but are unaware of it.

Mindfulness is a way of directing your attention on to something you choose such as the breath, your body, sounds or thoughts. By focusing your attention in this way, understanding or insight (although not the aim) is often the result. Insight and intuition have much in common. Insight is a sudden knowing of something, or understanding of some aspect of your life. Intuition can be described as knowing something immediately at a gut level without conscious reasoning.

For example, when I (Shamash) was practising a mindful exercise whilst travelling on a holiday in New Zealand last year, I had a strong feeling I should contact an old business partner. So, on my return, I did so. From that contact, we developed a completely new business model that went on to be extremely successful. Without mindfulness, that insight may not have had the space to arise. Can you think of an example when a flash of insight arose when relaxing in a bath, watching a sunset or going for a calm stroll?

Managing Complexity with Simplicity

Few would argue that the ability to ‘manage complexity’ is now an essential quality for leaders and managers alike. You can manage complexity in two ways – you can work in harmony with your brain or battle against it, trying to bend it to your will. In this final part of the chapter, we look at ways that mindfulness can help you manage complexity with simplicity.

Recognising that the past is history and tomorrow is a mystery

In the words of Alice Morse Earle, ‘Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That’s why it is called the present.’ If today is a gift, why is it that so few of us spend time appreciating it? When seeking to manage complexity, you need to keep things as simple as possible. You need to try to confine your precious energy to focusing on present-moment facts rather than reliving the past or trying to crystal gaze into the future.

Most people think that they’re fully in control of everything they do and fully aware of everything that’s happening as it happens. This is a common misconception – most cognitive tasks are done unconsciously. Research by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, using fMRI brain scanning technology, demonstrated that your decisions are made seconds before you become aware of them.

Numerous research studies also demonstrate that, even when we think that we’re fully in control of our actions and behaviours, our brains may have other ideas. In one experiment volunteers were asked to catch a remote control helicopter flying round a room. Each developed their own mental strategy to do so – each one different from the next person. However, when their movements were tracked on computer, they were all using similar movements to catch it – despite thinking they were doing completely different things. In effect their brains had worked out the most efficient way of doing the task, without the volunteers’ awareness.

You cannot stop this unconscious mental processing from happening, but you can be aware of it. Most of the time your neural circuitry serves you well, even though you’re not always fully aware of what’s going on. But at times your brain can make bad decisions based on old programming. By practising mindfulness you can develop the capability to jump into the present moment when you need to and see what’s happening, moment by moment, and consciously decide what happens next. This is a useful capability to cultivate if you wish to stay ahead of your game.

Working mindfully with your brain

A senior executive I (Juliet) worked with, let’s call her Kate, was struggling to cope with an increased workload. She was managing multiple teams based in six different countries. She was expanding into new markets in the East, while trying to diversify products sold in the West. Scheduling conference calls at a convenient time for all often involved working early or late, not to mention frequent flights to offices abroad. Trying to manage multiple teams simultaneously, coupled with long working hours and constant connectivity, was making her increasingly stressed. Her colleagues were beginning to find her behaviour erratic, and becoming concerned.

Kate heard about mindfulness from a friend, and her company was happy to pay for mindfulness coaching to unpick the causes of her stress and give her the tools she needed to manage her mind better. Here’s what Kate discovered:

• Working memory capacity is limited, so you need to consciously manage this precious resource.
• When your mind wanders, you may lose critical information from your working memory.
• Multi-tasking is a myth and a waste of energy – constant multi-taskers are less productive due to re-working and duplicated effort.
• Tasks that take most mental energy need to be done at the start of the day, ideally one at a time – this way you get more done more quickly.
• Constant connectivity can exact a huge mental toll. It often leads to a high state of arousal for long periods, which can lead to a significant drop in performance and serious illness.

Kate recognised just how little of her time she was spending in the present moment and how much her mind was wandering. She also noticed the tension she was carrying in her body. Kate started to practise mindfulness for 10 minutes when she got up in the morning, and 10 minutes when she got home as a mental segway between work and home life. This practice helped Kate reduce her stress levels and focus better when at work.

Kate also restructured the way she worked. She scheduled in time to do the most mentally taxing tasks at the start of the day. She grouped similar tasks together. In-between different tasks or before some meetings she used the three step focus break (see Chapter 5). A combination of these changes helped Kate to focus and remain productive for longer.

Kate timetabled in certain times when she was not contactable, informing her colleagues and teams in advance in order to manage their expectations. Kate also put a stop to some of her really early and late conference calls. Giving herself a break from constantly thinking about work allowed her time to stop, relax and recharge, further reducing her stress levels.

Over the next few months Kate discovered to her surprise that most of her work could be fitted into an 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. timeframe. On the few occasions when it was essential to hold meetings outside of office hours, she reclaimed the time on another day. With more spare time at her disposal, she was able to engage with her rest and relaxation more frequently, which led to her feeling better in herself. She was able to catch up with friends she’d been neglecting and put some fun back into her life.

As you can see, the volume and complexity of Kate’s work did not decrease; rather, how she managed it and her attitude towards it are what changed. By finding out how to work wisely with her brain, and developing awareness of her thoughts, emotions and physiology she was able to thrive on the challenges of leadership, while taking better care of her own well-being.

• Get to work on your most mentally challenging tasks when your brain has most energy at its disposal. Also try to group similar tasks together – you’ll get more done in less time.
• Practise the three-minute focus break at work in-between different types of tasks or before important meetings. Put on your headphones and pretend to listen to your iPod if you feel self-conscious.
• When you’re in a meeting, be in the meeting! Monitor yourself to make sure that you remain fully present – you’ll get more done and make better decisions.
• Schedule in ‘only contact me in an emergency’ times and let everyone know about them. Switch off the phone, computer and other electronic means of communication. Although it may initially feel like going ‘cold turkey’, switching off in this way encourages your body to switch off its fight-or-flight response and help you regenerate.

Maintaining clarity and focus

The more complex and challenging the world becomes, the more you need to work on consciously maintaining clarity and focus. This chapter touches on a number of ways in which you can work with your mind and use mindfulness to help you maintain this clarity and focus.

Here are a few mindful tips to help you remain calm and focused in the increasingly frantic world in which we live:

• If you really need to focus and you really can’t, try closing your eyes or holding them in soft focus. Doing so blocks out visual stimulation, giving your brain one less thing to process and thus making it easier to focus.
• Pick a sensory experience (for instance, focusing on an object or playing with a stress toy or focusing in on the sensations in your body). Focus all your attention on it – dismissing any incoming thoughts as ‘mental processes’ and kindly letting them go. Focusing in on a present-moment experience like this helps to slow your brain chatter and bring you to a clear, alert state of mind.
• Use mindfulness to help you recognise when your mind starts to spiral into elaborated thoughts that are coupled with emotions. ‘If I miss the deadline, my boss will think I’m useless and I’ll be next for redundancy’ is an example. These elaborated thoughts can have a powerful negative impact on your life. Acknowledge them as simply ‘mental constructs’, works of fiction created by your mind, and not facts. Kindly acknowledge them, congratulate yourself for recognising them and let them go.
• Remember that your phone and computer have both on and off buttons. Don’t let the off buttons start feeling neglected! Use them more frequently. Technology is supposed to be there to assist your performance, not hinder it. Having times when everyone knows you’re non-contactable helps you focus better on the present-moment task you need to complete, and get more done in less time.

Hopefully this chapter has given you a few ideas on how to remove your self-imposed boundaries and become the best you can be. To paraphrase Charles Darwin, it isn’t the strongest species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the most adaptive to change. Mindfulness cultivates your awareness - this awareness is the key to changing the way you think and behave as a leader while simultaneously taking care of your well-being as a human being.