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.