From Mindfulness to Compassionate Leadership - 5 insights from the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Training
I had a blast during the Search Inside Yourself Training in Amsterdam last week.
I’m happy to share 5 insights with you.
1/ Leadership skills are highly trainable
High Emotional Intelligence* (EQ) is a key skill for great leadership. This training put mindfulness* as a foundation for developing your EQ skills, so you can look at mindfulness as a great tool to develop EQ.
Both Emotional Intelligence and mindfulness are trainable.
*Mindfulness = paying attention to what is happening in the present moment, in the mind, body, and external environment, with an attitude of curiosity and kindness.
It helps you to become aware of your auto-pilot and allows you to break the automatic chain in your thinking, feeling and acting. It creates a moment of choice between stimulus and response. With mindfulness, you build the skill of acting consciously in contrast to reacting automatically.
*Emotional Intelligence = the ability to monitor one's own and others' feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions.
Emotional Intelligence is more than being able to read emotions or have empathy. It consists of:
Self-Awareness,
Self-Management,
Social Awareness,
and Relationship Management (Social Skills).
To grow in any of these areas, you need to have grown in one or more of the previous areas. For example, you will not be able to manage your thoughts better if you are not aware of them. This process captures my life’s mission to help people work on themselves first to then have a bigger impact on their environment. Working on yourself is difficult but fun! Frustrating but also very satisfying 😊.
See also this small video I recorded with my view of Emotional Intelligence (before the program 😊) in Dutch.
2/ Start small
As with all new habits, starting small is the best way to go. For example, to train your mindfulness skill, you could start with just paying attention to one breath. Or take 20 seconds before you jump into a meeting to calm yourself and reflect on your intentions.
Small practices give you a great first taste of the benefits of mindfulness and emotional intelligence.
But don’t forget
The most difficult part for me: even though it can be a small practice, you still need to remember it which is not always obvious when we roll into our busy days. If you’re like me, what helps is to create a visible queue (big indication in your agenda, small item you carry in your pocket, sticker, post-it, walking through a certain door,…) so it becomes easier to remember your mini-practice.
3/ More happiness and higher performance
Studies have shown that increased EQ leads to:
Outstanding Leadership (see insight 1)
Stellar performance
Happiness
And doesn't that cover my favorite topics in the world 😊?
4/ Emotions are fantastic guides
The better you learn to become aware of your own emotions and feel them in your body, the better you will be understanding what you really are experiencing and what you really want.
It can therefore be a huge contributing factor for your decision making process. Will it feel expansive and good in my body when I think of the decision? Or rather contracting? Being aware of this can guide and help you to do the right thing, i.e. to do the thing that will give you the most joy and happiness in the long run.
By the way, emotions and feelings in the body are present before the rational, conscious brain kicks in. We often override our initial emotional reaction with thinking, which obviously is a good thing when it comes down to managing strong emotions like anger, stress, etc. However, it can also make us indecisive because the thinking brain is throwing counter-arguments against your gut-feeling.
A recent experience:
“I love this jacket!” was my immediate feeling when I tried on a jacket last week. Then I’m trying on another jacket and my wife loves it, and I think it's nice 😄. So my thinking brain pops in: Jan, this second jacket is a more multi-purpose jacket, it's more “you” apparently (these words came from someone else), it's warmer, your wife thinks it looks better on you (who am I to go against that and think I know better what looks good on me). So I’m basically finding rational arguments to not go with my gut-feeling although I’m pretty sure I will feel better in the first jacket.
This is just a small and irrelevant example where the decision honestly will not make a huge difference in my life, but keep this in mind when you’re thinking of bigger decisions in life like a new job opportunity that makes you very excited. Are you throwing in rational elements that drive you away from your gut-feeling?
5/ Olympic brain-training
Meditation is brain-training. Training yourself to understand better how the brain and the mind works. Training yourself to observe without reacting, breaking the automatic reactive patterns and habits. Training yourself to be present now. Training yourself to feel better what is happening in your body at all times. Training yourself to focus (see also this post I wrote about it). Training yourself to better control your thoughts. Training yourself to return to a stable mind quicker once emotions take over.
Meditation is one of the ways you can train your mindfulness-skills.
It's such an amazing investment to train your brain and such an wonderful skill to build a happier, more productive life.
If the word “meditation” by itself gives you some kind of aversion: it’s just a word, you can call it any of the above for me. Find a wording that doesn’t create aversion for you and get to it. It’s life-changing.
Conclusion
Build up your emotional intelligence with the help of mindfulness and you will grow your social skills, which are a foundation for good leadership. In the process of building up your social skills, you will develop your empathy muscle which can lead to more compassion (i.e. not only feeling and understanding the feelings and actions of others (empathy) but also have a drive to alleviate the suffering on their side (compassion) ).
You’ll become a better human being when doing this personal investment. You’ll become a better leader of your own life and will increase your impact on the people around you. A compassionate leader! And you’ll be experiencing more calm, more joy and more happiness in your life.
An ROI positive investment if you’d ask me 😊.
Thank you
One last thing before you go: connecting to like-minded people gives me an incredible boost of happiness and energy. If you have that too, are you seeking out enough interaction with like-minded people?
I think I do too little, so time to pick this up! Let’s connect on Instagram , Facebook or LinkedIn!
You can also subscribe to my newsletter if you want to receive regularly some tips and tricks on how to boost your happiness and performance.
A big thank you to the trainers Yves & Simone and all the wonderful people I got to meet.
Jan Aquarius - Live. Grow. Matter