Why is Mindfulness an Element of Good Self-Leadership?

What is it about mindfulness that makes it so popular and what can it really help with?

What is mindfulness and why do so many people talk about mindfulness for leaders? What is the difference between mindfulness and meditation? Why might someone want to become more mindful? In this episode, Kate discusses the practice and theory of mindfulness and talks about what becomes possible once you have started practicing.

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Why is Mindfulness an Element of Good Self-Leadership
Episode 9

Podcast Opening over Theme Music:
Hello and welcome. This is Kate's Nuggets, the podcast where I share bite-size nuggets of wisdom about self-leadership. I am your host, Kate Arms. I invite you to listen lightly, let these ideas wash over you. Take what you take and let the rest go. You can always come back and listen again.

Kate Arms:
Today I want to talk a little bit about mindfulness and when I talk about mindfulness, I always like to talk a little bit about meditation and what makes mindfulness and meditation different.

The reason that I want to do this is that mindfulness and meditation, if you choose to do meditation, are incredibly valuable ways of developing mental capacities that help us lead ourselves well.

The image that most people have of meditation is sitting cross-legged with your back straight, eyes either gently lowered towards the ground or closed and then just sitting there.

Most people also know that there are specific meditation techniques like counting your breath, following the inhalation and the exhalation that can be done.

There's also a tradition of guided meditation that is a form of hypnosis or suggestion where you drop your body into a trance-like state and feed it information that you want to learn, that you want to have become part of your unconscious experience of living in the world.

Guided meditation of this hypnosis variety is not something that I am going to talk about much.

That kind of guided visualization can be very powerful as a way of putting images into your brain that your brain can then access as information for processing the world, and it can be a way of changing the way that you relate to the world unconsciously.

It can lay down pathways as if you had learned through physical practice what you are visualizing.

This process can be used to imagine yourself successfully going into your boss's office and asking for a raise, going into a difficult negotiation with your spouse, your children or a friend. Doing mental preparation gives your brain something to use as a memory to connect to when it's trying to figure out how I should behave in this situation when you're there in real life.

Meditation is a kind of practice.

Meditation is a form. You meditate on something.

Meditation is a time and space and activity during which you put your mental focus in a specific place, and part of what the practice is, is keeping your focus on the point of focus of the meditation.

You can meditate while walking, while standing, while sitting, while lying down.

What your body is doing is what your body is doing, and the meditation practice is what is your mind focused on while your body is doing whatever you're doing.

Mindfulness on the other hand, is a quality of practice. Mindfulness is compassionate awareness of the present reality. Being mindful is being consciously aware of something.

You can combine mindfulness and meditation practices by sitting, putting your point of focus on your breath and following the in breath and the out breath and being mindful, compassionately aware of your breathing. This is in fact a very common form of both mindfulness practice and meditation, which is where the confusion of vocabulary comes from.

It is helpful to distinguish between mindfulness and meditation, however, because mindfulness can be practiced without meditation, and meditation can be practiced in ways that are not mindful.

For example, meditation can be used as a way of trying to become less mindful.

Mindfulness is awareness. Meditation can be used to try and avoid awareness.

You may know people who have been longtime meditators, who seem somehow stunted emotionally, who seem not completely all there, who seem very disciplined and under control, but also non-responsive to the world.

Meditation, if the goal of your meditation is to practice shutting down your thoughts and shutting down your feelings, longtime practice, doing that will enable you to not feel feelings and not think thoughts. This is not a mindfulness practice. Many of the recent developments in psychological therapies include mindfulness practices as part of psychological growth. So, mindfulness can be used in the service of psychological health, but it isn't always.

Meditation is not necessary.

There are ways of practicing mindfulness that do not involve any sort of formal meditation practice. How can this be?

This is because mindfulness is compassionate awareness and you can be compassionately aware whatever you are doing. It is however much easier to be compassionately aware of what is going on in the world.

To be compassionately conscious of this world becomes much harder as you engage in more complex situations.

One of the prime virtues of sitting meditation focused on the breath as a way of practicing mindfulness is that it is very simple. It is very clear when you are following the breath and when you are not, and the distractions are limited.

Now, if you've ever practiced meditation and struggled, you know that the distractions are always around. There is always a level of distraction that you can find, so it's easier to practice while you are sitting still, but that doesn't make it easy. Luckily, we start getting benefits by practicing. We just keep getting more mindful over time.

What is going on with mindfulness? Why is it so powerful?

Taking the time to slow down and pay attention to our breath or to slow down and become mindful of anything that's going on engages our parasympathetic nervous system. Our parasympathetic nervous system is the part of our body that is creative and inventive and adaptable and flexible and imaginative and curious. If we are operating under stress, that is a level we can't manage and we feel under threat and our fight, flight, freeze, fawn responses have been activated, mindfulness cues our body that we are not under threat and that allows our amygdala to stop producing stress hormones and we then relax.

It is not surprising that the most surface level use of mindfulness practices is to increase relaxation, and if that is all that you want to get out of mindfulness and that is your intention, that is probably what you will get. The mental shift that happens when the parasympathetic nervous system is engaged more of the time than it isn't is optimism, curiosity, and a sense of possibility for the future.

A sense that all sorts of things, good things might happen is possible with the parasympathetic nervous system and is not possible when the sympathetic nervous system is being powered by our adrenal glands.

When we are under threat and under that level of stress, we just cannot think about the positive future. We're marshaling all of our bodies' mental and physical resources to get away from danger. Mindfulness requires slowing down.

Mindfulness is a way of breaking habitual patterns. Habitual patterns are fast. Conscious thinking is slow.

Mindfulness actually triggers the slow thinking, which is incompatible with the fight, flight, freeze, fawn response, which is inherently fast and reactive, reflexive because that's what is required when we are in serious danger that needs to be run away from or fought against.

One of the things that happens with mindfulness practice is in our bodies we have stored, sometimes in very subtle ways, physiological artifacts of many experiences we've been through, particularly the experiences that were painful that our mind body systems wanted to make sure that we learned from, and that learning is in our bodies physiologically. Part of what is embodied in that memory is the stress of the moment and the pain of the moment.

One of the things that can happen in mindfulness practices is some of those pains come to consciousness. If we are compassionate with ourselves when those thoughts and feelings and memories resurface, we do a couple of things.

Firstly, if we get distracted by them and then we need to go back to the point of focus of the mindfulness, we practice not being hooked. We strengthen our ability to not be hooked when those old knowings happen.

Secondly, experiencing those things from the past in the present, from a place of relaxation actually adds relaxation to the memory, and the next time we remember the thing, there's going to be an element of relaxation associated with it that wasn't there before.

So over time, past things that have caused us harm and that cause us harm when we remember them, if we remember them during a mindfulness practice, our feelings of negativity around that past event soften and we can carry that memory around with less present pain and suffering, with more ease. This by itself is a good reason for having a mindfulness practice or a series of mindfulness practices as part of your habits in your life.

Other things that mindfulness can help you with are if you turn your attention, your compassionate awareness to your own thought processes, you can develop a sense of yourself as the inner observer of these thoughts that you have, and you can create a sense of distance between who you are at the core and these thoughts and emotional experiences that you have.

The power of cultivating this inner observer, this inner witness is hard to overstate.

When you have cultivated this sense of yourself as the witness of these experiences that you have and not as defined by each experience that you have, several things happen.

The first is you start to be able to have choice about who you want to be at a really radical level because you realize that who you are is separate from your behaviors and you can choose to be that core creative self that has choice in each moment, and you can choose to cultivate practices and behaviors that are how you want to be in the world and not the ones that are the habits that come from how you were conditioned to be in the past or habits that you have based on what was rewarded and effective when you had fewer resources. In addition, this inner witness piece when it's applied to your inner self is absolutely crucial for two really, really important things.

The first is when you're having the experience of, part of me wants to do this and part of me wants to do that, without this inner witness being alive and activate-able, it's easy to believe you have to choose between one of those two paths.

Often, however, the part of you that wants one thing sees that as a solution to a need that all of you has, and the part of you that wants the other thing is also trying to solve a need that the wholeness of you has, and the inner witness can actually help negotiate between those parts or with those parts to find a third solution that accomplishes at least most of what both of those parts of you want so you can find a more nuanced way of acting that incorporates trying to meet both those needs simultaneously.

This increases your flexibility.

This increases your ability to choose what you want to do in the moment based on your long-term goals and your values and your principles, and not based on what feels good in the short term.

There are a variety of mindfulness practices that you could undertake. There are ways of applying mindfulness through your daily life.

You could have a body scan practice, which is just a way of applying mindfulness to your whole body, starting at your head and moving to your feet or starting at your feet and moving to your head. You could have a breathing focused mindfulness practice, you could have a mindfulness practice in which you become mindful of what you are aware of through any one of your five senses or even from your senses of proprioception and interoception, or you could practice mindfulness where what you are paying attention to is your own thoughts.

In future episodes of the podcast, from time to time, I will do a deeper dive on one of these mindfulness practices or on an element of mindfulness or meditation that might be useful beyond this general overview.

For right now, what I encourage you to do is start noticing in your daily life, your physical experience, your thoughts, and bringing conscious, compassionate awareness to what is going on in your body or your mind right now, and now, and now.

This will take practice to become habitual, it is something that eventually it is possible to cultivate an awareness such that you are simultaneously aware of what is going on in this present moment and interacting with the world and getting things done, early on in the process of cultivating mindfulness. At first, however, you'll probably find it too hard to focus on having an interaction with another person while you are practicing this awareness.

You may find it hard to be compassionate with yourself, so for now, notice that and find whatever things you can do to try and be compassionate with yourself.

This is hard mental training. It takes time and repetition to become habitual.

To be a beginner for a very long time is normal.

There is magic in noticing that you have stopped being aware and refocusing your awareness on whatever it was you were planning on focusing on during that period of mindfulness practice. Simply building the habit of going back to what you wanted to be focused on when you notice you have drifted is magic.

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Here's to Thriving! Catch you next time.
Kate's Nuggets is a Signal Fire Coaching production. The music is adapted under license from Heroic Age by Kevin McLeod.