Chapter 7

Setting the Stage for Transformation

IN THIS CHAPTER

Loosening the reins of others’ expectations by self-authoring

Looking at self-awareness and other tools of self-authoring

Preparing for your six-week WorkplaceMT training

Today’s leaders face a number of expanding challenges. Technological, social, and economic forces compel leaders to address these issues to stay ahead of the competition. As organisations become less hierarchical and increasingly lean and flat in structure, workloads have increased and more skills are required. Daily technological innovations are accelerating the avalanche of information, freely available not only to leaders but also to their competitors

In response to these challenges, many employees are working increasingly long hours. While little evidence suggests that cultures with long working hours benefit the bottom line, plenty of evidence suggests that stress is reaching epidemic proportions.

In 2010 and 2011, the UK’s Health and Safety executive (HSE) conservatively estimated the cost of stress, depression and anxiety at £3.6 billion. In a 2013 EU-funded project carried out by Matrix, the cost to Europe of work-related depression was estimated to be €617 billion annually.

New challenges demand new solutions. Mindful leadership is a new way of leading that can help you to become more productive, resilient and a better leader in times of rapid change. Becoming a mindful leader requires fortitude, commitment and a genuine desire to be the best leader possible. It’s a journey of self-discovery, applying insights gained to manage yourself better.

Understanding Self-Authoring

Chapters 8 through 13 guide you through a WorkplaceMT course, which, if worked through and practiced as directed, will give you a firm introduction to mindfulness. This, in turn, forms the basis for your mindful leadership. To get the most from your WorkplaceMT mindfulness training, you need to undertake some self-authoring.

Self-authoring is a process that helps you to start to loosen the reins of others’ expectations. It is a developmental process that can help you to re-write your own identity.

Leaders need to be able to adapt quickly and effectively to the world around them. Self-authoring is a phase when you become the author of your own identity. The ability to self-author is becoming recognised as a critical leadership skill.

remember Becoming more mindful – that is, being present and aware of yourself, others and the world around you – helps you to self-author, recognising at any given moment your own perceptions, resulting potential biases, emotional reactions and the actions needed to deal with what’s going on in the moment more effectively.

Many stories tell of people with glittering careers who experience bad luck and misfortune and tumble into a negative spiral of thoughts, dwell on negativity, and start to think that they’re useless, stupid or a loser. The problem is that the more you think it, the more you believe it. The more you believe it, the greater the impact on your actions and decisions. You can literally become what you think. Other people experience rags-to-riches success largely because they strongly believe and reinforce the fact that they can achieve anything. Working with this mindset, they overcome all the barriers and hurdles ahead of them.

Your thoughts, of course, are simply mental processes within your brain. You and you alone are responsible for your thinking. If you view the latest round of change initiatives at work as a bad thing, your brain will pay a lot of attention to things that further substantiate this view. It may even reject or ignore information to the contrary. Your thoughts about the change being a bad idea will become hardwired into your head. The more you reinforce these thoughts, the stronger the physical neural pathway in your brain and the more dominant and influential this thought becomes, thus impacting your decisions and perspectives. Conversely, you may see the change as offering you new and exciting possibilities, and your brain will pay extra attention to the benefits of the change.

remember If a pattern of thinking is no longer serving you well, the good news is that you can replace that pattern of thinking and behaviour with one that serves you better. The trick to cognitive and behavioural change is recognising dominant patterns of behaviour and thought. This awareness gives you choices and allows you to consciously take control and change the way you think.

Developing the Tools for Self-Authoring

The ability to self-author and to change the way you lead starts with self-awareness. Six weeks of mindfulness training, as detailed in the next six chapters, can help you to enhance your self-knowledge and use this to manage yourself better. The next few pages provide some hints and tips about how to improve your awareness of your leadership preferences, decide what’s working and what’s not and use this knowledge as a basis for self-authoring.

Understanding your leadership style and preferences

Gaining a clear idea of your leadership preferences is a great basis for developing mindful leadership. If you haven’t completed a self-diagnostic or psychometric on your leadership style and preferences recently, now would be a good time to do it.

tip Check out a free, simple leadership style and preferences diagnostic, designed for readers of this book, on the Resources page of my website (www.aheadforwork.com), along with some other handy tips for self-authoring.

Deciding what’s working and what’s not

The old adage ‘if you always do what you have always done, you always get what you always got’ is very true, especially when applied to your leadership. Different results require different ways of thinking and behaving.

Having gained a clearer indication of your current leadership preferences, it’s worth asking yourself if they are currently serving you well. In some cases things that worked in the past are no longer effective. Are you comfortable to self-author your future leadership self, or is your acceptance within your social group a restricting factor?

Feel free to create your own unique hybrid that allows you to be the most authentic, effective leader you can be.

Setting your intention

Good leadership is about leading your people – coming up with the best solutions with the resources available to you. What often gets in the way is the desire to be accepted – your place within your social group.

Experienced mindful leaders know that your intention shapes what you consciously or unconsciously pay attention to. If your intention is to be the best leader you can be, this shapes your lens on the world. Your brain starts to pay more attention to approaching this challenge, making you aware of barriers that need to be overcome and new ways of achieving your goal. Your position and status within your social group remains important, but it becomes less of an influence on your decision-making. You start to become more comfortable at stretching the boundaries of your leadership, and at times standing outside your social group, acting as a lone voice for what you believe in.

remember Your intention drives your attention. Your attention influences your awareness. Your awareness gives you increased choices. Choices drive actions, and actions drive results.

Harnessing the power of neuroplasticity

Self-authoring is a process of change. Neuroplasticity, as we discuss in Chapter 3, is a process of hard wiring change into your brain. Anyone can harness the power of neuroplasticity. It’s simple and straightforward but does require some effort. The following five-step model gets you started.

  1. Define what you want to change.

    Be realistic, and be specific. For example, say that you want to change your mindset about a proposed change at work.

  2. Approach and explore.

    What are the facts about the thing you want to change? Seek out information on exactly what’s proposed, including costs, facts, figures, and who will be impacted. Research what worked and, more importantly, did not work for other companies in similar situations. Ask yourself, what opportunities does this change offer? How might this help me and my team develop?

  3. Suspend judgment.

    Make a conscious effort to suspend judgment without getting annoyed or blaming yourself. Suspending judgment allows you to be more objective, seek further information and gain a clearer picture of what’s going on.

  4. Link with positive emotions.

    Emotions release powerful hormones in the brain, so they have a powerful impact on neuroplasticity. If possible, try to link your desired change to something positive, fun or rewarding. Pause to soak in and fully experience any positive emotions generated. If you’re a visual person, try to visualise your desired change. Focus on each specific positive aspect of the change, and try to attach it to a positive emotion. Picture the positive changes and all they’ll bring as vividly as possible.

  5. Reinforce regularly.

    Repeat all or part of this exercise as many times as possible. The more you practice, the stronger and more dominant the neural pathways become. The more dominant patterns of thought and behaviour then become the norm, and previous neural pathways become less dominant with lack of use.

Taking Your First Step Towards Mindful Leadership

If you’re a leader who is new to mindfulness, your mindful journey starts here. If you’ve practiced mindfulness in the past or do so sporadically, this six-week mindful leadership programme should prove to be an excellent catalyst for success.

WorkplaceMT training structure and rationale

Your Workplace Mindfulness Training (WorkplaceMT), detailed in Chapters 8 through 13, is structured as follows.

Week 1: Focusing your attention

The first week is about recognising how autopilot is currently ruling your life, noticing habitual patterns of thought and behaviour that are no longer serving you well, starting to train your attention and identifying autopilot in action.

Week 2: Observing the mind-body connection

This week focuses on understanding the interplay of thoughts, emotions and your body on your leadership and harnessing these to improve your leadership and life quality.

Week 3: Minding the gap

In Week 3, you discover how to use mindfulness to observe your hidden patterns, build on your successful strategies, and proactively work to replace unhelpful patterns of thought and behaviour with more helpful ones.

Week 4: Recognising that thoughts are not facts

Using mindfulness to observe the storytelling mind, the techniques you explore in Week 4 help you to better manage your emotions, recognise your inner bully and deal with frustration.

Week 5: Turning towards difficulties

In Week 5, you discover how to use mindfulness to help you approach and explore things you find difficult in a more productive way and decide how to pick your battles more wisely.

Week 6: Developing intention

The final week is about harnessing the power of mindfulness to gain balance and perspective and become more resilient, intentionally cultivating happiness. Mindfulness becomes part of your daily routine.

WorkplaceMT training requirements and expectations

Your WorkplaceMT course has been designed specifically with the busy people in mind, irrespective of sector seniority or executive education to date. We’ve pared it down to the bare minimum to ensure that it’s accessible to all – however busy you are. It contains the core components of a standard eight-week MBCT course but is pared down to six weeks with new shorter practices that research suggests produce desirable workplace outcomes. Each week builds on the preceding one to help you progressively develop mindfulness, which, when applied to your leadership, will help you to review and refine your leadership and become a more mindful leader.

Each week, you will need to read a chapter, give the suggested activities a try, and practice both formal and informal mindfulness each day. It’s simple and straightforward and should not take you more than 20 minutes a day. Here’s an overview:

  • Five minutes informal everyday mindfulness practice spread across the day: In reality, you don’t need to make time for this because all you need to do is everyday things that you normally do – just more mindfully.

  • Eight to 15 minutes formal brain training practice and reflection at home or in a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed for at least 15 minutes: We encourage you to use the MP3 recordings provided to guide you and keep you on track.

    tip Feel free to practice longer than 15 minutes, but be sure to practice formally for a minimum of 8 to 15 minutes a day. If you do miss a day, don’t give up; just start with a clean slate the next day.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that mindfulness is a Band-Aid or magic cure-all. You need to find time to work, reflect, recharge (have fun!) and get sufficient sleep. Although you can take steps to make your working hours more productive, sustain your attention for longer, make fewer mistakes and better decisions, don’t think mindfulness will fix problems caused by toxic working environments. Be the change you want to see. Start a gentle mindfulness revolution to change working practices and culture for the better. If this doesn’t work, maybe it’s time to reconsider what’s really important in life.