INsight/ Mindfulness for Leaders

Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash.

Manila, 21 March 2023 — For leaders, there is more to mindfulness, especially on Nyepi and World Water Day.

Story

It’s happening in Bali tomorrow. I will be joining from Manila, where the warm summer is starting to make its presence felt. In Bali, it’s the New Year. Yes, another one. People around the world have traditionally followed different calendars and these are still observed. Several of my friends in Northern Pakistan are celebrating New Year today. Navroz Mubarak to them! The Balinese people also usher in the New Year this week, with Nyepi, their Day of Silence. And I will be silent with them tomorrow. Hence my weekly insight comes to you a day earlier.

Tomorrow, I will silently say Selamat Hari Suci Nyepi. Aum Shanti Shanti Shanti Aum. Shanti means peace, and we can say it three times for peace in the body, mind, and spirit. A day of silence is taking the practice of mindfulness a step further. Many of us have acquired some basic skills for mindfulness, which has become popular in countless workplaces around the world. These simple practices help us relax, for example by slowing our breath, calming our mind, and closing our eyes. Even when done for just a few minutes, this can produce a pleasing result, almost immediately. 

You may well have an app on your phone to help you practice mindfulness with guided meditations. There are many such apps nowadays. I hope you are putting the app to good use, and frequently. In this post, I’d like to invite you to join me on a leadership journey to take mindfulness a step further, to meditation. Because there is much more to learn about practicing meditation and its benefits. Especially for leaders. And especially tomorrow, on World Water Day 22 March 2023. Why? 

Challenge

I’d like to touch on several challenges, so bear with me. We’ll unpack what meditation can help us with. Yet the first challenge I want to mention is Water. After years of hard work around the world, we are still far from achieving Sustainable Development Goal #6 for Water. This week’s IPCC synthesis report underlines once again how urgent the need for decisive climate action is. Water actions are at the heart of the climate agenda. Yet we are not doing enough. That’s one reason why I will spend tomorrow in silence. Because I believe that we need to rethink, fundamentally, what we need to do differently and better about water actions for sustainability.

When it comes to water actions, I have observed over many years how practitioners get caught up in their own organizational agendas. The hardest thing to do in the world is to step outside the box to collaborate with other actors and stakeholders to generate better solutions together. It’s much easier said than done. The international water community often exemplifies this challenge when they talk among themselves instead of reaching out to learn the language of other stakeholders and engage them effectively. The results are evident. We are not seeing enough of the changes in water security that we want to see. And where there is progress, it is too often piecemeal and slow.

Addressing the world’s sustainability problems, including water, does not depend on only finance, technology, and laws. These are available. What is scarce is the number of people who can drive positive change and who understand how the process of influencing collective action works. They are called leaders, and we need more of them. Not only in high positions but at all levels in our organizations. And that’s my second reason for spending tomorrow in silence. While we know a lot, from research and experience, about developing leaders and leadership, we don’t know enough about doing it at the speed and scale that our world needs today.

Question

On to meditation. From the research available, I discovered that the challenge to benefit from meditation can be seen at three successive levels. The first level is to relax and de-stress. This is what simple mindfulness practices help us do in our workplaces and homes. It’s a great place to start and return to frequently. The second level is to refocus our personal attention from an expanded awareness of what really matters. And the third level is to regenerate life itself, with peace in our own body-mind-spirit and, together with others, in our teams, our communities, and the planet of which we are a part. 

I believe the quest for the second and third levels is what Albert Einstein referred to when he said that “we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when creating them.” We need to access a different kind and level of knowing. Einstein, from his personal experiences, knew exactly what he talked about when he mentioned human consciousness and a unified field in which we exist. He just wasn’t able to capture that field in a mathematical model, which was his passion as a scientist.

Since then, we have learned so much more. Yet to turn our knowledge into better solutions that will make our planet sustainable in the face of climate change, and bring peace to us all, we need more leaders who upgrade their level of thinking and awareness. Becoming silent and meditating for a day  — which we can repeat regularly — can be a start. So that’s what I will do on World Water Day tomorrow, following the Balinese Nyepi practice. You are welcome to join. And if you want to develop your leadership to the next level, and beyond to your full potential, go ahead to book a free strategy call so that we can discuss where to start. That’s for after tomorrow.