Keeping your mind in shape to reach your full potential

Since last month’s newsletter, I’m back from a well-earned holiday with the family. I spent a couple of weeks with the kids at home (and yes, did have to make reference to?intentions and behaviours?once or twice!), and a couple of weeks at our favourite spot on the Atlantic coast (incidentally where the Managing Talent Newsletter was born 12 months and 32 editions ago). On arrival on the first day, once we were unpacked, had bought the food shopping and the kids were tucked in bed, I took myself off for a stroll to the beach and sat and cleared my mind taking in the comforting sound of the ebb and flow of the waves on the shore, and watched the sunset : at that moment the holiday vibe kicked in and I let my “work brain” fully switch off. I’m very grateful that France has an excellent approach to vacation time, and culturally has a period from mid July to August where many people are on holiday, life slows down, and there’s time to reflect and take perspective before easing back to work in mid August before the inevitable rush of “la rentrée” in September.

I’ve tried various methods over my career so far, from taking short breaks little and often, to a couple of weeks with a bit of dipping into emails along the way to keep the inbox manageable for the return. I’m convinced that my current ability to fully disconnect from work over the summer is the healthiest so far for me. There’s something hugely liberating in turning off the notifications to all the work apps, hiding the red notification sticker for new emails, disabling Teams notifications, and activating the out of office message. In previous jobs this level of disconnection (both literal/digital and psychological) hasn’t always been possible, and it probably won’t be in some future jobs. Of course many of my readers run their own businesses, or live in countries with less generous leave entitlement, so let’s take a look at how we can all keep our mind in shape and ensure we are best prepared to reach our full potential.?

I’ve written often in previous articles about the importance of harnessing your?EQ and particularly self-regulation?as a means to safeguard your development potential. I’ve also previously introduced the idea of finding the right balance between arousal and flow in your work,?just outside of the comfort zone?but with a manageable level of positive stress to ensure you keep learning and developing. To be able to take a step back and manage our emotions, and keep a learning mindset to turn potentially damaging stress into a positive development challenge, it is important to be able to be able to focus on the present and leverage it to the best of your ability without anxiety, stress or other internal noise getting in the way of your progress.

Summer holidays offer a bootcamp to reset any internal noise, however time off once every few months isn’t enough and our mental wellbeing needs regular training if the effect of time off is to be sustainable. For those who don’t have the luxury of some vacation time off, then regular meditation (or mindfulness as it is often also interchangeably referred to, despite?not being exactly the same thing), can be just as effective. The key is regular practice to train your mind and improve mental fitness and resilience, and a great way to do this is through daily meditation.?

In my past jobs when I was running leadership development programmes and working with professors and academic faculty from world renowned business schools to co-design the content, we identified that it was important for our leaders to know how to master self-regulation to ensure they handled the pressures in their jobs and operate efficiently and interact effectively as manager-coaches with their teams or as individual staff members with their colleagues. This is all the more true today in a constantly changing world that can throw up so many challenges. The academic team working with me suggested we implement a short sequence of guided meditation. I was a total novice back then and hadn’t encountered meditation, and certainly wasn’t an open supporter of the idea at the time. For me it sounded too zany a practice to be implementing in a business leadership development programme in a global industrial energy company.

I recall nervously observing the first sessions where we included it. From my vantage point as an osberver at the side of the room I watched as 80 or so leaders were guided to close their eyes, focus on their breathing and their bodies. My initial fears were proved right on this first experiment. The facilitators, whilst excellent coachs with glowing credentials, were approaching meditation with a heavy zen influence, using Tibetan bowls, and playing fully into preconceived stereotypes and reinforced my view that “this wasn’t for us”. Many people seemed to share my view as people shuffled in their seats and eyes started to peak open and flit looks around the room, and I recall sensing a palpable and collective feeling of discomfort in the air. I took time however to discuss with delegates informally over the break times after the session and gain their feedback through the formal evaluation, and realized that some people had found great value in the session, whilst others already practiced meditation. Almost all were surprised to find meditation as part of a corporate leadership development programme, and many agreed it took them out of their comfort zone to meditate. This helped me to decide to keep the sequence, change the facilitating team and adjust the delivery method through various iterations in the following sessions. We ended up with a guided meditation session run by a psychotherapist and leadership consultant which worked much better and who’s sessions were much more aligned to the company culture and appreciated by the leaders in the programme.?My key learning from this : for meditation to be effective it needs to feel right.

I’d had my mind changed sufficiently on the benefits of meditation to start learning more about it, and I undertook Monash University’s course on?Mindfulness and Peak Performance?and a further course in?Wellness Coaching?by the Institute of Wellness Education. I also had the great pleasure of spending time talking about meditation and mindfulness on an unforgettable trip to the San Francisco Bay Area on a visit to the picturesque redwood forest at Muir Woods with my host, a successful senior executive at global energy businesses (Areva/Orano, and Aggreko) and also a board member at Google spinoff?Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute?(SIYLI). This experience, over and above an extremely generous investment of his time and sharing his leadership wisdom, left me with the firm belief that mindfulness and meditation has a very credible place at the center of leadership excellence and is a skill that helps managers and employees alike.?

Why meditate?

If my own convictions don’t persuade you, perhaps then some of the work by Dr Emma Sepp?l? PhD might sway more weight to why meditation is good for managers to hone their leadership skills as manager-coaches and why it is equally good for individual team members to boost performance and their development potential. Dr Sepp?l? is a lecturer at Yale School of Management and Science Director of Stanford University’s?Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education and she described the multiple research-based and proven benefits of meditation in her?2015 Harvard Business Review article?as including:

• Resilience and decreased anxiety, boosting performance under stress
• Emotional intelligence and self-regulating negative emotions (eg anger) and improving patience and composure
• Creativity
• Relationships
• Improved focus

How to meditate?

As with learning any new skill, it helps to be guided, and thankfully there are some great apps that can help. I’ve previously had subscriptions with?Headspace?(14 day free trial currently available) and currently use?Balance?my favorite so far (1 year free subscription offer currently), but there’s plenty of others out there such as?Calm. Even my Apple Watch actually helps with the Watch OS?Breath?app.?

1. Find somewhere quiet that feels calm to you.
2. Set a time limit. I’ve generally started with 3 or 5 minutes before working up to longer sessions of 15 or 20 mins or more, but as with swimming don’t try jumping in the deep end, start small and build up.?
3. Normally meditation takes place sitting comfortably (on a chair, on the floor, on a rock by the sea, whatever works!), I’ve actually had some very mindful experiences meditating whilst walking alone.??
4. Bring conscious attention to your breathing, feeling as you inhale and exhale. If walking then focus also on the lifting and falling of your feet, the movement of your body.
5. Recognise when your mind wanders, as it will, and bring your attention back to your breath/body. No need to worry or give up because your mind has wandered or started thinking about or concentrating on something else, just bring your focus back to your breathing and your inner self. The trick is to focus on the things your body normally does on auto-pilot and be conscious of them rather than other thoughts or preoccupations in your mind.
6. When your time comes to an end, if sitting then gently open your eyes and refocus your gaze, or if walking then be conscious of how you feel, noticing any sensations in your body and your emotions or thoughts.?

I’m certainly still not an expert in mindfulness, and sadly I can’t even claim that I meditate or practice as consistently as I should, and indeed the very times I’ve practiced the least are the times I needed to the most : for instance in 2019 when I changed roles and became part of the steering committee defining and rolling out our global people ambition, a very challenging year both professionally and personally. I remain however convinced that meditation is a crucial skill, and I continue to work on my own mindfulness practice to help me self-regulate my emotions and inner dialogue and keep focus. I hope that this article might inspire those readers who are as skeptical as I once was to give it a try and I truly believe that those who do will reap benefits for their own development and professional wellbeing and, for those who are manager-coaches, that also of the team they manage.

Let me know what you think. What is meditation for you: An invaluable element in your talent toolbox? Or anyone see it as mumbo jumbo? All views and experiences are welcome in the comments below.?

Alan Lambert, Fellow of the Institute of Leadership and Management, is an International HR leader currently working at the Corporate HR Strategy division of a global energy major.

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