Mindful Leadership

According to Gallup’s Workplace Well-Being Committee, mindful leadership leads to a 10% – 12% increase in performance and a 21% increase in business revenue.

Ever wondered how mindful leadership can skyrocket performance and revenue? Join me as I chat with Bob Martin, a former mob lawyer turned mindfulness guru, about the transformative power of mindful leadership.

You can learn actionable tips on practicing mindfulness, developing self-awareness, and fostering a supportive work environment.

You can learn more about Bob Martin at:

https://awiseandhappylife.com

00:00 Introduction to Nine to Five Wellness Podcast

00:30 Exploring Mindful Leadership

01:30 Meet Bob Martin: From Mob Lawyer to Mindfulness Coordinator

02:58 Characteristics of a Mindful Leader

04:50 The Practice of Mindfulness in Leadership

07:10 The Importance of Mindful Leadership

19:11 Embracing Mindful Leadership: Tips and Techniques

28:06 Conclusion and Resources

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Transcript

  Welcome to the nine to five wellness podcast,  a show about corporate wellness solutions with innovators and forward thinking leaders who are at the forefront of the workplace wellness movement.  I'm your host Ayesha Tahir. 

 Hello, and welcome to nine to five wellness podcast and LinkedIn live show.  Today, we are going to talk about mindful leadership.  You know what, according to Gallup's  workplace wellbeing committee,  mindful leadership leads to a 10 to 12 percent increase in performance and 21 percent increase in business revenue,  and it's still something that.

I believe that all the organizations and leaders, especially,  are not aware of. So that's why I wanted to talk about it on our show today. And today we are going to explore mindful leadership, its objectives and importance, the characteristics of mindful leaders, and ways to practice mindful leadership.

This is a topic that I want to learn about more too, so I am really excited to talk about this with Bob Martin. Bob Martin is our guest today, and Bob's journey started as a mob lawyer to a devoted, mindful, and spiritual guide, and that is a powerful testament to transformation.  He has been guided by the Taoist master,  Hua Jing Ni.

Yeah, I had to practice this name. Um, and Bob helped me with that. Bob embraced a life of self discovery, leading to his current role as a Mindfulness Coordinator at Elon University. With over 40 years of experience as a criminal trial lawyer and a certified meditation teacher, Bob blends brain science, psychology and spirituality to help others break free from limiting beliefs and cycles of suffering. 

Welcome to the show, Bob.  

Thanks for having me. It's an honor to be here.  

Oh, thanks for being on the podcast. I'm so excited to be talking to you about this topic. So I want to dive right in.  In my experience, I've worked with many leaders. And, you know, when you work with a mindful leader,  Versus someone who is not aware of, aware of environment and, and their own self.

It's a different experience. So I believe like a mindful leader has a unique set of characteristics that distinguish them from traditional leadership styles. So who is a mindful leader? 

 Let me, let me start off by  giving you the answer that I asked my teacher watching me once about that. And I said, how do you lead a mindful life? 

And he said, Oh, it's very simple. It's very easy. No problem at all. All you have to do is be completely aware of all of the forces that are acting internally, then You need to be completely aware of all of the forces that are acting within the other.  Then just be completely aware of all of the forces that are acting in the environment around you, and then simply remove all of the distinctions between them so it's a unified whole.

Upon which we all cracked up laughing and we said, yeah, easy, right? But, uh, what he was pointing to, though, was a certain awareness that, Can be learned and practiced where you actually do start to get a feel and a touch for exactly those three spheres. Learning, you know, what's going on inside you. So, you know, think of the situations where maybe you're a little bit frustrated with the situation or you've given somebody instructions two or three times and they still seem to be struggling with being able to, you know, Produce according to that way.

You start to get a little, , frustrated. You start having judgments about it. They're not listening. And these thoughts are going through your head. So these are forces that are acting on you,  from the inside.  So the mindful leader would be someone that is aware of those things. 

Yeah. 

And has, , has developed the skill of being able to step back from them.

And we kind of say,  the mindful person would be the person who has the skill of seeing themselves engaged in life and at the same time observing that engagement. 

Okay. 

So that they can be evaluating themselves even as they are acting. 

Yeah. 

So that's a skill that can be learned. Uh, it's not very difficult to learn it.

It really doesn't take a long time. , we call it kind of stepping up on the bank of your consciousness. 

Yeah. 

Sitting on the bank while you're watching the flow of your thoughts go through and your feelings.  So that's, that's, that's the first step. You know, place that you want to be, have some awareness. 

And then as you become more aware of your own feelings, your own sensations, your own judgments, your own thoughts, and your own responses and reactions to things, you start to be able to identify those same things that are happening in others. So you actually can kind of be over there with the folks that you're leading. 

You understand where they're coming from, what forces are acting on them.  Um, and then, you know, there are things in the environment around you,  uh, deadlines that are imposed by the very nature of your work, , physical constraints of what you can accomplish. Things that are outside of your control.

These have effects both on you and the folks that you lead.  So being aware of those and seeing them  kind of as energetic forces that are acting on the situation, rather than being sucked up by them, I suppose is,  the, the gravamen of mindfulness, recognizing things that are acting upon us. 

Being caught in them.  

 Yeah. So what I'm hearing is that a mindful leader is someone who's deeply attuned to the present moment. They possess like this heightened sense of,  self awareness, which enables them to process their own feelings, emotions, thoughts, actions, even because our thoughts lead to actions. 

And then what you're saying is In real 

time. In real time. 

Oh, that's a good one. In real 

time. Yeah. 

So you mean okay,  let's talk about this in real time. So in real time, like you mean in the present moment, right? Not about the past, not about the future. Is that right? 

Right, right. So how many times, how often is it that we do something?

And then, you know, later on we say, gee, you know, I don't know if I should have, or I could have, or I didn't say that.  As we develop the skills of mindfulness, that time lag shortens and shortens until we are almost being able to realize that we're not doing something that would be more helpful, even as we're doing it, and we can make that adjustment and shift. 

I kind of think of the metaphor of the yoga practitioner who is doing tree pose. They have one leg up on their knee and the other foot is on the ground, but it's not stable there. It's adjusting and readjusting, and it's making these tiny little readjustments to get back into balance.  So it's kind of, with your thinking, doing that.

Yeah, I like the analogy. I'm a yoga instructor myself, and I teach yoga classes. And tree pose is my favorite pose, my students will tell you that. And I do cue them all the time that, you know, even if you get out of this pose, you wobble and get out, come back right in, because that's the whole point of it.

That's the whole point of practicing yoga period, but especially balancing poses because we don't have perfect balance. We cannot  even the expert yogis, they don't have a perfect balance for certain poses, in certain poses. Like, you know, for them, tree pose might be super easy, but there are other poses they might not be able to hold for a long time, 

or they 

might come out of them.

Just because, you know, they don't have that balance, the balance is missing in that component. So what you're saying is they are constantly, mindful leaders, are constantly aware of their emotions and thoughts and the actions they're taking based on those thoughts. And if they have to pivot, they do it.

Right.  Those little adjustments. If you are paying attention to the little adjustments that you need to make, then there are no real big adjustments that you have to make. But I want to go back to what you were saying and saying that the skill of learning mindfulness is not about maintaining focus, just like As you mentioned, it's not about maintaining balance.

It's about realizing that you're out of balance and being able to come back and regain balance. It's the noticing and coming back where the healing occurs. And it's also. The place where you deal with your own self criticism and your own self,  judgment because, oh, I felt the yoga practitioner who loses their balance and starts beating themselves up. 

is lost.  You have to be gentle with yourself and say, Okay, well, I lost my balance. Now I just have to go back and do it again, and I'll lose it again, and I'll do it again. The process of mindfulness is  almost identical. We form an intention to put our attention on our breath or a candle, and our mind goes crazy, and it wanders.

And at some point, we noticed that it wandered. And then gently we come back and  place our attention and it wanders and we come back and it wanders and we come back and it wanders and we come back. It is in the waking up in the coming back where the healing occurs and where the self knowledge and self actualization grows.

It's not. in the ability to maintain the focus. It's in the waking up and returning. 

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I really like how you explain that it's not in the ability to maintain focus for a long period of time.  It's a Getting out of it, getting out of focus, and then coming back in, and that applies to everything in life, just in general, not just to our work and our,  projects,  it also applies to our family life, it applies to our personal lives, , our health and well being,  and I, and, I want to highlight something that you said earlier, which was that once you have a leader who is mindful of their own thoughts and actions, then they can foster a deeper understanding of their team members needs,  their motivations,  what is missing in their awareness so that they can probably fill in the gap and then lead them accordingly.

 You know, in that way, mindful leaders have the ability to remain calm and composed, even in high pressure situations. You said this earlier, that, you know, when you're frustrated, you, how are you acting like when you're frustrated?  So that in itself is a reason enough to have mindful leadership  in a workplace.

But, I want you to expand on this idea. Why do we need mindful leadership? 

 Well, you know, the other side of it would be mindless leadership and quickly, you know, if I say, well, he's a mindless leader, you say, well, how would that be? So, obviously, we all practice some form of mindfulness. We think about what we're doing to some extent. 

I would just say that when we talk about mindful leadership, we're just taking what we do normally and we are honing the skill. We're sharpening the blade.  Uh, we're just getting a little bit better at being more aware. You know, I, I tell you a little story that  I'm brought to remember my, uh, wife. 

We have a blended marriage. So we're both second marriages. We all each have our individual kids and her kids were, there, there was some conflict going on and it came to be Christmas time and , she wanted everybody to be happy and everybody to be good and enjoy the Christmas season and the like, and she was kind of pushing herself on having them be nicer.

Okay. 

And, uh, and so she was fighting against it. And I said to her,  honey, let me, let me suggest something. Why don't you just pull back,  you know, pull back from them and give them a call and say, you know, instead of exchanging presents, why don't you just drop the presence on our front door? And, uh, let me give you some space.

Yeah. 

And the moment she started giving them some space, they started to feel the distance between them and their mom, and they wanted to close that distance, so they came to her, and it resolved much more effortlessly than a conflictual way of resolving it.  So that is,  it would get into that whole idea of going with the flow. 

Yeah. 

You know,  and we could talk about going with the flow for a little bit. 

I know that could be a separate episode,  just in this instance  the example you gave with your wife and her children, what I'm hearing is,  you asked her to let go. And you asked her to give agency to her kids. 

So now it's not an imposed decision on them. And I talk about this a lot because autonomy and agency is a big part of being a mindful leader,  what are your thoughts on that? 

When I finished my, well not finished, but after eight years of studying with master knee, I was a different person than when I started.

Tell me more. Tell me more about it.  

Well,  it was, it was a process of learning to go with the flow and learning, the philosophy of,  understanding the flow  and the characteristics and the nature of the flow and then learning how to align yourself with it. That's what, that's what Taoism teaches.

And that's what Master Ni taught me.  So coming out of that, as a criminal defense attorney, I had clients, of course. And I kept seeing them going through the revolving door of offending and reoffending and being rearrested and like. And,  You know, when you cultivate compassion and loving kindness, what you want to do is you,  you just want to ease the suffering of others.

It's just who you become. And I was committed to making a difference in their life, not only in their legal issues, but in their personal issues as well.  So there were three things that I committed to.  One was making sure that I heard them, that they felt heard, that they were given agency. In other words, they could say their piece and I would listen to them and respect it.

Second, that somebody had stood up for them and third, that they completely understand why what was happening was happening to them. I'll tell you that it made a huge difference in their lives. Even today, I have some of my old clients will come up and tell me, Mr. Martin, the last time I got in trouble was the time that you represented me.  so that is, those are some of the, what I think are qualities of leadership. You, you have to listen and, and a person has to be heard before they're willing to listen.  

Yeah. And 

that takes patience and compassion. and understanding.  They have to feel that you're on their side, even if you are asking them to do things they're uncomfortable with. 

But then you're on their side.  And two, they really do have to understand the system that they're working in. And if you can provide those things, then it's amazing how people will rise up and completely surprise you by what they're offering. Potential is  

 I absolutely agree. And this can apply to the entire organization.

Leaders can create an environment where employees feel respected, valued. Empowered and  if you have these,  important traits in place and within the company,  and the company culture, then you have a place where, people want to work. They're engaged, right? They are, they want to come to work.

They have improved performance and,  a strong and more cohesive. Team to  so I I really like that. Thanks for explaining this. How can,  we embrace mindful leadership? Give our listeners a few tips.

I think the first, you know, the first  cut of the chain, blocks us and prevents us is that we live within our thoughts.

We have an idea, judgment comes up and we become that judgment. You know, you see a person and they don't. Talk the way that you talk and all of a sudden you have a judgment about them, whether you like them or don't like them, you see something. I like this. I don't like this. This is black. That's white.

And  

 You mean preconceived biases. Is that where you're getting to? 

Well, yeah, we I mean, we are the product of our conditioning. And at the same time, there is an authentic self that lies underneath that. that we can, you know, work towards. But what I'm what I'm speaking to now, though, is, though, that these these thoughts that come up kind of automatically out of our database, they they are, we are them.

You know, if I if I say I like this, then it's I like it. But  the fact of the matter is we even in our common diction, we say I had a thought. 

Yeah. 

Well, who is it that had the thought? 

You said 

I who is the I that had the thought and the fact of the matter is that we are not our thoughts Our thoughts are just little blips of electrical activity that go through our mind and then they're gone.

You can't hold them. You can't sell them. You can't trade them. They're, they're really very powerless except for the power that we give them. 

Yes. 

And, and we are used to living a life where we empower our thoughts to the point that they control our lives.  And what we need to learn is that we are not our thoughts.

We are the creator of our thoughts and it is possible. To have a say in the matter of your thinking  and it may take, you know, a little  discipline and it may take a little practice and it may take a little skill building.  But the science says that you can do that. 

 Okay. So I like the idea that we are not our thoughts. You explained it very, very well. Like it's just an electrical current passing through your brain. How, however, it has so much power over us. How can we flip the script where we have more power over our thoughts and we control, especially I'm talking about automatic negative thoughts. And I think people  mostly about that.

Yes, there are some positive thoughts too, and you should entertain those.  Yeah, we're not talking to eliminate those. necessarily.  What can we do? What can we do to flip the control switch here? 

Well, I mean, all I know is that you engage in practices, you know, that help you to become self more self aware.  Um, and there there are many different kinds and types.

I found the ones that I teach  You know, to be very effective.  And my clients, my students range from I teach on campus college students and I see them liberate.  I teach corporate executives and I teach kids coming out of the foster and juvenile justice systems.   It works equally well for all those demographics. 

It's just the process of  stepping back with a little guidance to start with, of stepping back from watching your thoughts. Can I give a metaphor? Do we have time? 

Yes, please. Of course. 

The metaphor that I like to use is this, is that we have a sensation that there is a flow of consciousness that goes through us. 

I liken that to a river.  And then on this river there are twigs and branches and leaves. I liken that to our individual thoughts.  And they come from somewhere, I don't know where, from somewhere upriver. And then they flow and then they're present in front of us for a while and they go down. And most of us live our lives like we are floating on belief. 

And if the river is calm, life is good. If the rivers turns into whitewater, it's a little rocky. And if there's a waterfall in the future, then things are pretty anxious, but we're riding that leaf  and what meditation teaches you the skill it teaches you is to get up off the leaf and go up on the bank of the river  and be able to watch yourself on the leaf so that you're engaging and watching at the same time.

Yeah. 

And this practice is a very simple practice and it doesn't take a lot of time. 

10 

minutes a day for a couple of weeks and you get it.  

And 

it's not a big investment. It doesn't cost a lot.  So there are books, there are apps, but I'll tell you the truth. There's nothing like a coach.  

True. Yes. True.  Initially I think you need guidance and then you can learn skills and you'll have tools in your toolbox that you can apply yourself. And you'll be independent and mindful on your own.  And I want to add to this.  Some of the, what, how I see mindfulness is pausing and stopping in the moment, especially when things aren't going your way. Although you should pause and stop regularly, I believe, and I  try to do that.  If things aren't going your way, if there is a conflict, if, you can't meet the deadline.

Yeah, exactly. I love that. Yes, Bob has a bookmark up. It says stop, look and listen. And I think it's really important especially when I'm in my business, when I'm running the business and working on it, I have to stop  so many times during the day.

 Same thing with my kids, you know, I have three teenagers and there are many times I have to stop and think and pause,  and evaluate, like, how am I going to deal with this situation? So I tell my clients, thinking, reflecting, and especially slow and long breathing, like long breaths  that really fill your diaphragm because you're oxygenating your muscles, you're oxygenating your brain.

In that case, you're increasing your focus and that focus is going to turn in words, which we talked about earlier,  is key.  And you can make it as A habit. Initially, you'll have a hard time. Any, good habit, any habit that you want to adopt. It takes some time, but if you start taking small steps today, maybe it's writing in a journal, like two sentences early in the morning or at the end of the day, or whatever it is.

Maybe bookending your days with reflection,  and then breathing is huge. I am always like, whenever you're in doubt, just take a few deep breaths and you'll be centered. You'll come back to your center, your ground yourself,  and the answer will come to you. It just does.  There's a lot of wisdom in breathing. I say wisdom comes from breathing and just, you know, taking a pause. So if you do it, You will be on your way to being a mindful leader 

and honestly, It's, it's just as simple as that, yet it's complex to do, so you might need help of a coach, you might need help of someone,  who can guide you through this, who has your back when you fall , and mindful leaders look honestly at themselves, and they try to lead without ego, they're willing to put interests of others before themselves, but And that is what is so important.

And if the leader themselves are practicing mindfulness, they're gonna instill it in their team, you know, they're gonna instill it in, the people they're working with.  And if it eventually becomes a habit and part of the company DNA, part of,  your household if, you know, houses a company to,  or if you're running your own business, you're doing it in your own business and you have that ripple effect.

Not only in your own life, but on the lives of others who you touch. So this was really, really good. Thank you so much for talking about mindful leadership with us. Where can our listeners and viewers find you?  

 I have, you know, people ask me all the time about mindfulness and meditation. So I wrote a little 40 page, ebook.

That's free. No obligations. You can go to my website. and download it for free and it will give you answers to all of the questions that we've been asking, how to get started, where the resources are, what some good apps are, all that stuff.  And you can find it at a wise and happy life. com. 

A wise and happy life.

com and I'll include it in our show notes, Bob, thank you so much for joining us and viewers and listeners, thank you so much for watching us and listening to us.  Bye. 

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