The role of mindfulness in leadership and in daily life

The concept of mindfulness as being present to the ongoing current physical experience and not letting the mind wander and therefore making more meaning from a situation and getting more done is really interesting.

This is perhaps the one driving principle of effective coaching. The ability of the coach to be mindfully present in the coaching conversations: listen to every nuance, feel the emotion, make meaning from gestures, tonality and words, cross checking often, is perhaps the key to his/her ability to appreciate what’s going in the coachee’s world, and then to the interpretations that the coachee has made to his/her life’s incidents and circumstances. If on the other hand the coach’s mind gets triggered into his own reflections and projections without sensing the complete coachee’s experience, he/she may completely misread the situation.

Mindfulness seems an essential component of any good relationship. The ability to be present in an experience, to really appreciate the happenings in the moment, with all your senses allows one to gather more information and not miss something significant or a nuance which may be hiding a more intense aspect underneath.

While on field trips in the market, amidst heated discussions in meetings, during client visits – more ‘presence’ in the moment will allow more grasp. I remember a CEO – who everyone respected a lot, because he had the knack of asking the right questions during a presentation, or a review or while in one on ones. He always seemed to get more out of these interactions. His ability to cut through the clutter and reach out for the most important pieces of the jig-saw was perhaps in his skill in keeping his mind chatter to a minimum and his ability to concentrate on the issue/ situation at hand. He perhaps had worked on the ability of looking for ‘what’s the new’ in an often repeated situation. 

Cultural Intelligence

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The Reality of Dreams!

While you sleep….

As you climb the Great Wall of China, Fernando Alonso races past you in his glistening Ferrari, chasing an extinct species of a deer and Salma Hayek awaits at the summit in the most exotic outfit imaginable, when suddenly the alarm bell rings, bringing you back to reality with a Time to get up! Or consider this; the physics problem that you were chewing on the entire day, having tried every theorem you’d ever known, suddenly gets solved in your brain with all the numbers and variables falling in place while you are asleep. You just pulled an Einstein!

Though they seem to be perfectly real as they occur, we always tend to question their authenticity upon gaining consciousness. Dreaming is a Natural yet often Unbelievable phenomenon.

There has been a great debate over the years over the reality of dreams, how they happen, why do they happen and if there is any basis in reality for what goes on in your head as you sleep. Out of these many debates, a chosen few have been termed acceptable, yet most have been discarded without even giving them a second look.

Could there be a different way of how we go about interpreting our dreams?...As Ravi  (Storyteller & MD - NeoSynapses) usually says, let’s first talk about the things we can agree on.

The process of dreaming occurs in the Brain Stem, which takes care of all the automatic body functions like breathing, heartbeat etc. It has also been established that Dreams take shape when we are in the 5^th stage of our sleep, with our body paralyzed and when REM (Rapid Eye Movement) has taken over (almost 90 minutes from when we first dozed off) – Our heart rates go up, our blood pressure rises, and our brain activity is raised to the level it’s at when we’re awake. Our Limbic System, which plays an important role in controlling our emotions and beliefs, also plays an important role while we dream, which is why, every once in a while, you wake-up from a dream only to find yourself drenched in a pool of sweat.

Now, let’s talk about abstracts. Ahem…..

Some researchers believe that dreams mostly occur out of the ‘Declarative Memory’, which comes from the Hippocampus. Hippocampus is the part of the brain where short term memory exists. This means that most of our dreams are about instances or things that have recently occurred – may be excerpts from the movie we recently saw clubbed with our experiences in offices in the previous weeks and so on.

Some other very prominent and renowned researchers believe that dreams occur out of the information that is left over in our brain (you may call it the Sub-conscious) that our pre-frontal cortex, the active brain information centre, has not registered when we were awake, which also tells us just how and why we get solutions to some problems in our dreams and why we see un-related random images as we sleep.  Research suggests that very few dreams are actually about people or places the dreamer knows of or has encountered in real life. Most—that is, 80%—are actually random events or people the dreamer doesn’t know in any way whatsoever.

Does all this also hint to what many Spiritual Leaders have been saying for years – The Power of the Subconscious is much greater than the Power of the Conscious Mind? Is it also possible that we in our dreams can actually talk in a language we have never learnt, but just heard a couple of times?

There is still no agreement on what happens and why, but the best way I can suggest to answer this for yourself is to stay wide awake while you dream.