How can you use meditation to improve your leadership skills during a career transition?

The starting point for any sort of a change is self-awareness. You need to understand your reasons behind a career transition. Connecting with your body and calming your mind using a meditative technique provides a pathway for you to reflect upon what worked, what didn’t work, what needs to be embraced and what needs to go.

One thing I find helpful in hindsight is to give mindfulness and meditation the respect they deserve in all areas of life. Even I have committed the blunder of thinking it to be something like a softer thing to do for a corporate career. Now, I advocate mindfulness for self-mastery. Only when we learn and master ourselves through mindfulness, do we come to a point to embody leadership during a career transition. Picture this - If I am unaware of my core values, key strengths, and unique life experiences, what perspectives or learning can I create for the career transition we need to make to achieve fulfillment? Success alone is incomplete. Individuals need fulfillment in life. And for that, we need to cultivate meditation.

Meditation will help most if you understand the biology behind why it helps. Being able to feel in control of your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system will in turn help you to feel calmer and more in control of your emotions. It can you feel more able to cope with change and uncertainty during a transition, and minimise stress related issues such as losing your focus, anxiety, forgetfulness and mood changes. It'll help you stay logical and assess situations more effectively if you are able to calm your SNS and switch over to your PNS with deep breathing, meditation, visualization and other similar approaches.

Regular meditation practice helps us to understand we are not our emotions. We are so much more and emotions come and go. Over time meditation enhances different areas of the brain. Our response is less reactive. That impacts directly on stress management and emotional reactions.

Meditation allows us to refresh our thinking. Deep meditation helps us to access different brain wave states where we are able to find creative solutions and come up with new ideas. Regular practice makes this process easier and faster.

Change is often difficult for most people. Humans don't like change because they like to be able to predict what will happen in the future with accuracy. If there is any doubt about what might happen, the brain will want to try to fix and this can cause a spiral of overthinking and stress. Mindfulness, when used most skilfully, can help you learn to let go of any negative thinking that can get in the way of your confidence, performance or decision-making. Any leader with mindfulness skills will be able to make a career transition much calmer and easier.

Meditation impacts different areas of the brain. Some of the most interesting areas are: Gray matter, which is involved in muscle control and sensory perception (including emotions, memory, speech, seeing, hearing, and decision-making) The prefrontal cortex, that is responsible for decision-making. Amygdala, which controls emotional response. And hippocampus, which is responsible for memory and learning. No doubt meditation should be interesting to anyone who wants to improve their brain, health, or life in general.

Great ideas on the hopeful outcomes of meditation. I would try a really target it with phases eg 5 minutes get present 5 minutes deep appreciation for all the people in and around your team. 5 minutes visualisation I would reflect on my definition of leadership before meditation too.