Mindfulness is a state of awareness where you attach your attentiveness to the moment you’re experiencing. It is an effective tool for personal development, business improvement, and leading a richer life.
MINDFULNESS
This allows leaders to be present and attentive to what really motivates the people they lead. Research has found we are distracted from what we do 47% of the time. We’ve lost focus on the present. Attention deficit has become the norm for business. (Rasmus Hougaard, founder of Potential Project and co-author with Jacqueline Carter of a book called The Mind of the Leader). “Without focus, we can’t do anything well. It hasn’t always been like that. Our brains are wired for distraction but nowadays we don’t need to pay attention to distractions. One of the interesting things that we found was a direct correlation between people’s focus level and how fast and how high they rise in the organization. The vast majority of leaders we’ve worked with possess an above average ability to focus,” Hougaard explains, adding that the team’s research has found that 90% of leaders believe that more reflection time would enhance their mental clarity.
Become a mindful leader
To grow as a mindful leader, you must pay more attention to what is happening “inside” than what is happening “outside.” To become a mindful leader, regularly spend some to reflect your thoughts. Focus on your breath. Do meditation. Go for a mindfulness course or attend a workshop to understand mindfulness. Aldous Huxley remarked: “In all activities of life, the secret of efficiency lies in an ability to combine two seemingly incompatible states: a state of maximum activity and a state of maximum relaxation.”
Identify your talents and skills. Build your skills around your talents. People waste their precious time by building talents around skills. Remember, leadership is more of a talent than a skill. Additionally, leadership is a blend of both nature and nurture. Some are partly acquired through heredity (nature) while the majority is acquired through learning, experience, and practice (nurture)
Projects Taking Place
In your project management environment, whenever you build a project plan, create deadlines that allow for this “breather time,” create the necessary dependencies for each of the project’s tasks and subtasks, and assign tasks based on not only who’s best suited for them, but also who has the time. This way, your employees can collaborate efficiently with enough resources to do what they need to do, and they’re also able to handle any changes that come their way.
In the Digital Projects more than usual, the leadership should get a balance between resource allocation and purpose thinking, the new professional profiles demand proposal to engage. The collaboration thinking is much more present to daily base activities, to accelerate the learning curve and promote a knowledge environment.
