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INTRODUCTION

Culture eats strategy for breakfast.

— PETER DRUCKER

This famous quote by Peter Drucker, a world-leading business management writer, teacher, and consultant, may be one of the best-known and least-disputed aphorisms of business. It captures the truth that company culture is ultimately more important than business strategy for achieving success, and the wisdom of this statement has only become more relevant in today’s tumultuous business environment.

What makes up company culture? People. Human beings working together to solve problems. I sometimes call this the “dirty little secret” of the business world, one that’s easy to lose sight of in the midst of the daily pressures, anxieties, and busyness that so frequently overwhelm us. Business is people working together, and business success depends on how well we interact, collaborate, communicate, and care for one another. That’s the essence of what Drucker means.

I think we recognize this, and further, I think this is what we search for, both in the workplace and in general in our lives. We want to create and be part of a supportive, positive culture — a culture of real trust and care, of transparency and integrity, of accountability and achieving results. This type of culture helps us as individuals and collectively to act with clarity, to not hold back, to show up as fully and completely as possible in all our relationships, to flourish and grow, to better serve others, and to reach our goals.

Achieving this isn’t easy. Being human isn’t easy. Working with others can be immensely challenging. Some difficulty always arises, whether that’s painful emotions, stress and uncertainty, budgets and deadlines, interpersonal conflicts, political and marketplace strife, or the unexpected obstacles that appear whenever we pursue meaningful work.

So what do we do? How do we create and sustain what everyone says we need?

In this book, I explore these questions, and I hope to guide and inspire you using the seven practices of mindful leadership that I teach to executives, entrepreneurs, engineers, doctors, teachers, and everyday people around the world. In recent years, mindfulness and mindful leadership have exploded in popularity, but interest in mindfulness does not necessarily translate into becoming a mindful leader. Understanding mindfulness can be challenging; even more difficult is embodying and regularly practicing it in everyday life. In addition, what mindfulness means and how it’s practiced can sometimes get watered down in the context of work, when it isn’t dismissed altogether. Of course, ancient contemplative practices weren’t developed in order to improve business. They are meant to shift our consciousness and way of being in the world. Yet these practices are essential to mindful leadership and to creating the type of supportive organizational culture that allows businesses and people to thrive.

My experience is somewhat unconventional. For most of my adult life, I’ve had one foot in the contemplative world and one foot in the business world, and my approach to mindful leadership has been shaped by both: from my experience as a longtime Zen practitioner and meditation teacher and as a leader, trainer, and consultant helping businesses cultivate mindful leadership and workplace well-being. Most recently I helped create the Search Inside Yourself mindfulness-based emotional intelligence program inside of Google, and I cofounded and led the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, which has become one of the world’s most prominent leadership training companies.

This book’s seven practices were developed within the Search Inside Yourself program. One thing this experience has taught me is that people are drawn to mindfulness practice in the business world for the same reasons people practice mindfulness and meditation within any contemplative tradition — to transform their lives; to become more aware, focused, and flexible; and to shift from a narrow, egocentric, fear-based way of being to becoming more open, curious, connected, and able to help others. People seek these capacities to help them in every context and relationship, at work and outside of work.

However, the seed for these practices and for my approach to mindful leadership was sown long before, during the ten years I lived, worked, and practiced at the San Francisco Zen Center. These included two years at the City Center in San Francisco, three years at Green Gulch Farm, and five years at Tassajara, the first Zen monastery in the Western world, which is located in the Los Padres wilderness in Central California. At Tassajara, and in the Zen tradition, work is viewed as a vital part of integrating meditation practice with daily life; work is a place of service and a container for continual learning. My first summer at Tassajara, I was the kitchen’s dishwasher, and in following years I joined the kitchen crew, becoming the bread baker and the assistant to the head cook. Then, when I was twenty-eight years old, I found myself as the head cook in the Zen monastery’s kitchen — aspiring to practice and embody mindfulness and mindful leadership as I supervised up to fifteen people in the daily preparation of meals for the center’s seventy residential students and the seventy to eighty overnight guests.

Every day during the summer guest season, our task was to make three simple vegetarian meals for the students and three gourmet-quality vegetarian meals for the guests. Standards and expectations were, and remain, high. Tassajara has a more than fifty-year tradition and reputation for serving delicious, wholesome, and creative food, and it was the foundation from which Greens Restaurant of San Francisco originated, which is still regarded as one of the world’s finest vegetarian restaurants.

Nevertheless, though I was responsible for overseeing a restaurant-quality kitchen and feeding all the students and guests, my primary responsibility was to support a culture of mindfulness practice. My main job was to support a culture in which everyone in the kitchen worked with a sense of urgency, focus, generosity, confidence, and composure. In other words, as the head cook, I had twin goals: to create a radically supportive, loving, and productive work environment and to provide great meals (on time). Neither goal could be sacrificed for the other.

In fact, in a Zen monastery, the kitchen is a central hub of mindfulness practice, and it sits in close proximity to the other central hub, the meditation hall. The kitchen and the meditation hall are considered profoundly interconnected places, places of embracing effort and effortlessness, self and selflessness; places that build community; places for expressing and celebrating care, sustenance, and spirit. The kitchen is a place of work and a place of working together — so that everyone is fully supporting and supported by everyone else — and it is also a place to bring the spirit, awareness, and approach of meditation into the world of activity.

As head cook, I found that most of the time what appeared to be two activities felt like one activity — while being present, aware, and caring for people, we made food and ran the kitchen. Other times, the goals of mindfulness and the need to get things done felt competing, as if we couldn’t achieve both and had to prioritize one over the other. All restaurant kitchens, even Zen kitchens, are fast-moving, dynamic, and stressful environments. They involve lots of prep work with detailed and often complex processes, teams working together in close quarters, shifting priorities, and tight, interconnected, sometimes unreasonable deadlines. Particular to Tassajara’s kitchen is that the staff are all Zen students and not professional cooks or kitchen workers. The location is remote — during my time as head cook, if we ran out of anything, whether that was not having enough eggs or any other key ingredient, the nearest store was more than two hours away. So we had to adapt and improvise. In addition, the kitchen had no electricity. Everything was prepared by hand.

I look back and wonder how we were so successful. I remember one summer afternoon I sat at a table with a group of guests I had not met as we ate lunch in the guest dining room. A woman across from me introduced herself as a graduate business school professor, and her first question was, “Who is the brains behind this operation?” She had never been to Tassajara before, and she was impressed by the quality of the food, the quality of the service, and her overall experience. In many ways, to visitors, Tassajara looks much like a well-run business conference center. I responded that the brains behind this business was that the people working here didn’t view it as a business. Tassajara is a place of practice, of service, of cultivating mindfulness — which means letting go of wanting things to be different than they are and bringing awareness to one’s full, moment-to-moment experience.

Today, I regard the Tassajara kitchen as a model for what mindful work and mindful leadership mean in any context, of how we can experience great joy and great love right in the midst of pressure, exhaustion, and overwhelm. The monastery’s foundation and integration of mindfulness practice provided an essential context and container for everything we did in the kitchen. There was something almost magical about the level of care, learning, and playfulness, not to mention the joy and satisfaction of providing sustenance for the people we served.

It is possible for mindfulness practice, work, and leadership to be contextualized as one activity, right in the midst of many activities. This requires self-awareness, awareness of others, awareness of time, and awareness of the quality of one’s efforts. Mindful work and mindful leadership both require and cultivate the essential skills we need to thrive, and this dynamic is the guiding principle of this book. In it, I have distilled what I have learned across the breadth of my experience into seven core practices that I hope will help you merge mindfulness and leadership in your everyday work life. In addition, I know that the benefits of meditation and mindfulness support our entire well-being, far beyond the needs of the workplace. They help us thrive in any endeavor.

BIG MIND AND SMALL MIND

The idea of mindful leadership is not exactly new. In an essay entitled “Instructions to the Head Cook,” Dogen, the founder of Zen in Japan during the thirteenth century, advised that the head cook embrace three core practices or “three minds” while leading the kitchen. These are Joyful Mind (the mind that accepts and appreciates everything), Grandmother Mind (the mind of unconditional love), and Wise Mind (the mind that can embrace the reality of change and be radically inclusive).

Mindfulness practice itself originated within rich spiritual traditions that have developed and transformed over thousands of years. Historically, people tend to be drawn to mindfulness practice during times of rapid change, which are accompanied by high levels of stress, volatility, and uncertainty; times much like those we live in right now. In addition, over the centuries, mindfulness has been adapted and integrated to meet the most vibrant and pressing needs of society — not only influencing spiritual traditions but seeping into many facets of daily life and culture, including the arts, food, education, work, and beyond.

While it’s true that increasing self-awareness is a key aspect of mindfulness practice, the intent is more than awareness of one’s individual self. The intention is to cultivate a wider and more inclusive perspective, aspiring to loosen concern about oneself and to expand our narrow personal experience, so we adopt a more universal and less dualistic awareness. This is referred to in Zen as a shift from Small Mind to Big Mind.

Much of what we experience on a moment-to-moment basis is the world of Small Mind — of the personal self, of I, me, and mine. In fact, science now has a name for Small Mind — it’s called the default mode network. This is the part of the brain that is often worrying about the future or ruminating about the past, rather than being relaxed and alert to this moment, to seeing with greater clarity. From a psychological perspective, this is a lot like ego. Mindfulness practice includes learning from and appreciating Small Mind while cultivating Big Mind — the more open, curious, and accepting perspective or way of being. You might say that mindful leadership is about applying the experience of Big Mind, which is cultivated through meditation (but can be accessed anytime), to the concerns of Small Mind, or the pressures and joys of daily life and of working with others to accomplish time-sensitive goals.

After my year as head cook, I was asked to be director of Tassajara, and this further deepened and broadened my experience in mindful leadership. Tassajara, in addition to being a Zen monastery, has many of the challenges common to a small business. For one thing, Tassajara’s revenue provides crucial financial support for the San Francisco Zen Center. It is also, during the summer months, a retreat center — with workshops and overnight guests.

Then, after a year as Tassajara’s director, I decided to leave the monastery to earn a master’s degree at New York University’s Graduate Business School. I was eager (as well as terrified) to enter the business world and test what I was learning about integrating mindfulness, work, and leadership. By then, I felt I’d identified several noticeable benefits to this approach, which are as follows:

• Mindful leadership cultivates a richness of experience; ordinary, everyday work can feel heightened, meaningful, and at times extraordinary.

• It removes gaps between mindfulness practice, work practice, taking care of people, and achieving results.

• It considers learning from stress, challenges, difficulties, and problems to be an integral part of the process of growth and not something to be avoided.

• It helps us recognize and work with contradictions and competing priorities to cultivate flexibility and understanding.

• It helps us experience timelessness, effortlessness, and joy even in the midst of hard work and exceptional effort.

• It can be applied to any activity to cultivate both confidence and humility.

• It embraces individuality and unity — everyone has a particular role and yet all make one team, supported by and supporting one another, practicing together.

• It considers true success twofold — in the character and compassion of the people and in the quality and results of the work.

I’ve since found these benefits of mindfulness practice and mindful leadership to be enduring and universal; they are accessible and available in any situation and to anyone. You don’t need to spend time in a Zen monastery. You don’t need a business degree. All you need is to apply the approach of mindful leadership to whatever situation, challenge, organization, role, or work environment you are in.

Mindfulness is a way of being and of seeing that shifts our perspective. It is pragmatic — endlessly so, in my experience — since it helps us solve everyday problems in effective and efficient ways. It also develops our way of being, adding depth and richness to the experience of life itself. With mindfulness, every task is approached with both humility and confidence, with hope and with letting go of hope. Ultimately, mindfulness is mysterious, plunging into questions of consciousness, birth, death, and impermanence — while providing us with direct experience that, when we let go of our fears and habits, what arises is composure, a deep sense of love, and a profound sense of meaning and connectedness to life.

PAIN AND POSSIBILITY: THE EMPOWERMENT OF MINDFULNESS

Ever since graduating from New York University, I have been part of both worlds, the contemplative world and the business world — though, of course, now I consider these one world. A few years after graduating, I founded a publishing company, Brush Dance, which became a leader in creating and distributing environmentally friendly, inspirational greeting cards and calendars. (We were one of the first companies in the world to make products from recycled paper.) I ran Brush Dance for fifteen years, and then I founded ZBA Associates, a consulting company that trains leaders and employees in using mindfulness and emotional intelligence. One of my consulting clients was Google, which eventually led to my involvement in developing the Search Inside Yourself program.

I feel fortunate that my work focuses on helping individuals, teams, and companies become more conscious and aware, as well as helping them cultivate productivity, leadership, and well-being in their work. I’ve been doing this in one form or another for much of my life. Nevertheless, while mindfulness as a workplace skill has become more accepted, I’m still often asked: Why do executives and companies work with you? What motivates them to explore mindfulness?

I usually answer this question with two words: pain and possibility. It can be painful to step outside of our role and to be more in touch with our vulnerability, with the tenderness of our heart. Additionally, we usually sense when our values, aspirations, and work are not in alignment or when we are not living up to our full potential. For example, it hurts to become aware that we avoid conflict and difficulty, or we overreact in challenging situations, and thus tend to undermine our effectiveness and influence. On the other hand, we also recognize that we are capable of acting in better, more effective, and skillful ways. We see possibility and are inspired to realize that potential.

Simply recognizing a gap between how you are living, working, and leading and how you aspire to live, work, and lead can be profound and transformative. Equally inspiring is acting to narrow these gaps in effective, practical ways. Mindfulness helps us in both efforts. It helps us identify and bridge these gaps. In fact, I think just naming these gaps can be a great gift, to feel both pain and possibility: the pain of some portions of your life right now, and the possibility for greater awareness, satisfaction, ease, effectiveness, and connection. To me, recognizing, engaging with, and learning from pain and possibility, seeing the gaps that exist, is both a core mindfulness practice and an essential leadership practice. In my trainings and workshops, this is a framework I use for understanding and practicing mindful leadership, and it is a primary approach of this book.

That said, becoming aware or more conscious of the pains and possibilities of our experience, of what is actually happening — whether that’s in the world of work, community, family, relationships, or spirituality — is inconvenient and uncomfortable! It can be frightening and disruptive. This is why mindfulness, and mindful leadership, is more difficult than it may seem on the surface. Yet this is where our true power lies — our power to learn, change, and grow. This is where our ability to respond effectively, to connect deeply with others, to find solutions to problems, and to think and act creatively originates.

Signs of missed potential and opportunity are often easy to see if we dare to look. Are you avoiding facing reality or what is painful? Is your life out of alignment with your values and aspirations? Are you undermining your potential or giving away your power — that is, your ability to develop yourself, to see more clearly, and to influence others toward greater understanding, satisfaction, connection, and productivity? If so, how, or in what ways? I’ve posed this question — How do you give away your power? — to hundreds of people from many walks of life, and here are some of the answers I’ve received. Are any familiar to you?

• I say yes when I mean no.

• I rush from one thing to another to get to the “important” stuff and don’t appreciate what I am doing in the moment.

• I overthink decisions, and then overthink my overthinking.

• I feel helpless and hopeless in light of what’s happening in our world today.

• I get impatient and frustrated with myself and others over petty issues.

• I underestimate my abilities.

• I don’t make clear requests or ask for help — either because I feel like I need to do everything myself or I am afraid that others won’t respond to my needs.

• I avoid expressing strong emotions and often ignore my gut feelings regarding what I want or what I believe is right.

• I talk to fill space, fearing an uncomfortable silence.

• I check email, social media, or find other distractions when I feel the least bit sad or anxious.

• I am critical of myself for making mistakes or for making decisions that don’t turn out well.

• I don’t consistently take care of myself — I don’t get enough exercise, enough sleep, or enough healthy food.

• I avoid having deep conversations or discussing topics that make me feel vulnerable.

• I compare myself to others when it comes to appearance, money, and status.

• I sometimes feel like a failure, stuck in the gap between where I am now in my work and life and what I know in my heart is possible.

These are difficult, challenging problems for anyone, yet we sometimes feel them most acutely when we are in positions of leadership, when others depend on us and have high expectations of us. These statements often represent entrenched underlying patterns and habits. There are no quick fixes to resolve or transform them. However, just the act of naming how you give away your power can be very empowering! This is the power of awareness, the power of mindfulness practice.

MINDFUL LEADERSHIP BENEFITS THE “FULL CATASTROPHE”

In this book, I primarily address business and work life, but the truth is, the seven practices of mindful leadership can benefit all aspects of our lives. Of course, we are each of us in charge of our own lives. But more to the point, gaps we identify at work, whatever our job, often relate to gaps we experience at home, in relationships, as parents, and so on. Gaps of pain and possibility exist in every realm, and sometimes, when we recognize a gap in one area, it can open up a flood of recognition that goes far beyond our original focus.

I often begin mindfulness trainings by pairing up participants and having them address two questions: What do you love about your work, and what are your biggest challenges? Afterward, I ask the group what they discussed, and at a recent training, a woman in her midforties stood up and said, “I just changed jobs, and my commute each way is now more than an hour. I feel tremendous pressure at work to perform at a high level and to learn new skills. I work with teams globally and am constantly challenged by working in multiple time zones and an array of cultural differences. I’m expected to respond to emails and texts, regardless of what time it is. I have two young children who recently started school and need a good deal of attention, and I have a husband who also recently changed jobs.”

Because of her vulnerability, the clarity with which she spoke, and the familiarity of the challenges she faced, this woman had everyone’s attention. We could all feel and relate to her pain. And yet here she was, taking two days out of her already overscheduled life to explore mindfulness, emotional intelligence, and leadership. Clearly, she came to this training because she sensed the possibility that she was capable of working and living differently, and everyone else there did, too.

This woman was exploring mindful leadership in part because of her work and the almost exploding demands she was experiencing as a manager. But she clearly wanted to integrate mindfulness in all areas of her life. Her description reminded me of the book about mindfulness by Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living. The phrase comes from the novel Zorba the Greek. At one point, a young man asks Zorba if he is married, and he replies, “Yes, I’m married. I have a wife, children, house, everything; the full catastrophe.”

In our own ways, each of us has our own “full catastrophe.” Our work and life situations are much more complex than even Zorba could have imagined. That said, while we at times can feel stuck in our own personal “catastrophes,” we are often attached to them as well. I believe that the woman who spoke at the training wasn’t looking to change any part of her life. She didn’t want to let go of any of the activities that were so challenging and stressful. Instead, she wanted tools and practices, perhaps a different approach or way of being, that would improve her daily life, so she savored more and suffered less. She wanted to meet all her challenges more skillfully, whether at work, with her children, or with her husband. She wanted to close the gaps she felt.

First, I acknowledged her challenges and her pain and thanked her for her honesty and vulnerability. I also let her know that we’d be spending two days learning and practicing strategies for meeting pain and opening to possibility — the possibility of meeting and even at times savoring the challenges, as well as the possibility for finding calm and composure right in the midst of the storm. That is the promise of mindfulness: By shifting our awareness and patterns, we can learn to experience greater acceptance and at times awe and wonder right in the midst of the chaos and challenges of our lives.

MEDITATION MEANS LIVING WITH EYES WIDE OPEN

Stare. It is the way to educate our eye and more. Stare. Pry. Eavesdrop. Listen. Die knowing something. You are not here long.

— WALKER EVANS

When I first read this quote by photographer Walker Evans, I realized that my entire adult life I have practiced staring through meditation. I was introduced to Zen meditation when I was twenty-two years old, when I first arrived at the San Francisco Zen Center, and the experience changed my life. Meditation has been a fundamental practice for me ever since, and it is a core practice for mindful leaders.

While Evans doesn’t seem to be talking about meditation, he captures it perfectly. When meditating, we stare, pry, eavesdrop, listen. We become aware and pay attention, both inside and out, so that we educate ourselves and “know something” worthwhile and useful. Indeed, we often meditate to see and understand what is most important, acutely aware that we are not here long.

The premise of this book is that leadership also requires this kind of staring: engaging your full awareness; engaging body, mind, and heart; and aligning your deepest values and intentions with the deepest values and intentions of others.

Strangely enough, I’ve found that meditation and leadership have much in common. Both mean living with our eyes wide open. As a practice, meditation sounds deceptively simple: just stopping, sitting, bringing full awareness to body, mind, and heart; letting thoughts and emotions come and go; cultivating kindness and curiosity; touching life’s pains and disappointments, its joys and possibilities; cultivating an appreciation for being alive and for all of life, along with a radical sense of belonging and connection. Another way to describe meditation is the practice of being your true, authentic you by letting go of your ideas and identification with self.

Meditation helps us live with an appreciation of the power and preciousness of our human life. Meditation practice and all contemplative practices can be described as cultivating depth and sacredness in our everyday lives. This is what makes it mindful: Our practice helps us see what is going on, all our gaps, all our pains and possibilities, the full catastrophe.

Through meditation, as we stare, pry, listen, we learn to recognize, not only how to get things done, but how to get the most important things done with the least amount of resistance or unnecessary effort. We recognize what we can influence and what we can’t, and so act more effectively. We connect more deeply with others and become better listeners. At times, meditation means fiercely struggling for change, and at times it means practicing radical acceptance. Meditation teaches suppleness and adaptability, confidence and humility. Perhaps most important of all, meditation helps lighten our hearts, helps us let go of cynicism, and opens us to our profound lack of separation from ourselves, from other people, and all life — which are important qualities for leadership and for life.

AVOIDANCE IS NATURAL BUT SELF-DEFEATING

At times, staring and focusing can be painful, and we usually avoid what is painful; that’s a natural reaction. But this avoidance can keep us from achieving what is possible, since this requires naming and transforming what is painful. Avoidance is often one of the main obstacles to mindfulness, to mindful leadership, and to creating a supportive organizational culture.

We have to choose to stare, to open our eyes and wake up. When we don’t, and when avoidance becomes a habit, we stop wholeheartedly engaging with ourselves and with life. We become numb, fall asleep to what is, and stop seeing clearly. This is more than a leadership or workplace issue. It’s a universal human problem, one that’s almost inherent to who we are as evolved beings: We can’t see everything all the time, we naturally turn away from what causes pain, and we don’t like change. Avoidance can sometimes feel like self-preservation, but it’s actually self-defeating. Learning to look directly at what is, as much as possible, even when we don’t want to, is a powerful skill that challenges us, changes us, and transforms our lives.

For example, I think of myself as having been asleep through much of the early part of my life. I grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey and lived what I considered a fairly “normal” life. I got good grades, played sports — bowling, golf, football, and baseball. I watched many hours of television and worked during the summers, caddying on golf courses, stocking items in a lumberyard, and working in a local hospital laundry room. The food I ate was mostly packaged and canned.

This numbness, ignoring, or turning away from anything that was uncomfortable was in place as part of my birth — my mother was highly medicated as I was entering this world, so that she would experience the least amount of pain possible — and it continued at school, where we had regular nuclear bomb practice drills, duck and cover. It included my visits to the Veterans Administration Hospital, where my father received shock treatments for bipolar disorder, which I now suspect was post-traumatic stress disorder. My father fought on the front lines in France and Germany during World War II, but along with my feelings, aspirations, and doubts, this fell into the category of things no one talked about.

I didn’t know it growing up, but I was between worlds: between the world of feeling separate to emerging to a world of connection; from being asleep and unaware of my own pain and the pain around me to a world of intense feelings, tears, grief, celebration, and joy. From a world of ignoring the depths of the aspirations of my heart, pretending that everything was just fine, to a world of longing, struggling, and loving. Learning to love the “full catastrophe” of this crazy mixed-up world and the struggle of attempting to make sense of it all.

A similar narrative is at play today. We are between worlds and the need for mindfulness and mindful leadership has never been greater. I imagine that this is always true, but the stakes and intensity appear particularly profound at this juncture: Climate change, nuclear weapons, inequality, and terrorism are at the top of the list. Major changes in world economies, politics, health care, and our food and water systems are collapsing and being reborn at the same time. All are being catalyzed and transformed with this same power — the power of shifting from autopilot and denial to greater attention, awareness, and wakeful consciousness; the power of acknowledging our pain and the possibility of transforming this pain through staring, prying, not turning away.

We are beginning to wake up to what is and to what is possible. It’s not easy. This awareness — of love, of gaps, of the poignancy of passing time, of the fact that we are not here long — can crush my heart. At the same time, the very experience of life, the pain and possibility of this human life in its totality, exhilarates me. Appreciating your life — seeing, accepting, and enjoying your life to the fullest, including all of its pains and possibilities — is what this book and the seven practices are all about.

THE SEVEN PRACTICES OF MINDFUL LEADERSHIP

In 1995, Daniel Goleman’s groundbreaking book Emotional Intelligence was a catalyst that inspired businesses and executives to embrace the importance of emotional skills and competencies. Goleman’s work sparked a revolution in interest in emotional intelligence that was quickly adopted by corporations worldwide and used in leadership trainings.

It’s easy to understand why. Despite the fact that it is difficult to quantify or measure “emotional intelligence,” we know it is essential and we recognize it when we see it. There are five key areas or competencies that make up emotional intelligence, and there is a great deal of agreement about (and research confirming) the benefits we get when we cultivate these areas:

• SELF-AWARENESS: knowing our internal states, preferences, resources, and intuitions.

• SELF-MANAGEMENT: turning compulsion into choice; managing our impulses, resources, and intuitions.

• MOTIVATION: knowing what is important to us, aligning with our values, and knowing when we are not in alignment with our values; cultivating resilience.

• EMPATHY: awareness of the feelings of others; cultivating connection and trust.

• SOCIAL SKILLS: cultivating our communication skills, especially listening, engaging skillfully with conflict, and leading with compassion.

All this sounds excellent. It paints an attractive portrait of the ideal business leader, and many predicted that emotional intelligence training would lead to a revolution in the workplace, creating just the type of positive corporate culture Peter Drucker and other experts say we need. What’s interesting, however, is that despite the widespread adoption of emotional intelligence programs in the United States and globally, that revolution never came. Leadership, workplace environments, and employee well-being did not become transformed.

Ten years after publishing Emotional Intelligence, Goleman published a follow-up book, Working with Emotional Intelligence. In the chapter “The Billion-Dollar Mistake,” Goleman describes what went wrong. Companies attempted to train leaders in emotional intelligence like any other subject, primarily through lectures and reading. They taught the concepts, and yet very few of these trainings ever practiced or embodied the concepts. Emotional intelligence programs explained a lot and did very little. People did not practice the core underlying competencies they needed to learn in order to actually shift emotional intelligence — such as focusing one’s attention, exploring how individuals construct reality, and actively practicing selflessness and compassion. All these things are fundamental parts of mindfulness practice, but they were not included in emotional intelligence training at that time. Thus, without the component of practice, the revolution proved to be a failure.

THE POWER OF PRACTICE

I’ve always appreciated the corny joke about the out-of-town visitor to New York City who asks a stranger: “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” Without hesitating, the stranger responds, “Practice, practice, practice.”

When people ask me, “How can I bridge the gaps between where I am and where I want to be?” I’m always tempted to give the same answer: “Practice!” It’s humorous but true.

Practice has several meanings, depending on the context. As the joke implies, you can’t succeed at anything without practice, or learning the skills you need by exploring them over and over. Whether playing the piano or playing tennis, preparing for a performance or writing a report, you only improve through repetition. By doing. In this sense, practice is an intentional activity designed to increase learning, skill, and competency. In medicine or law, those who practice enough get to run their own practice, which refers to one’s professional work. In this sense, your “practice” represents your business or your professional role, which can involve a lifetime of study and work to achieve.

During the years I spent living (and practicing) at the San Francisco Zen Center, the word practice referred to a way of life — it referred to the practice of meditation as well as to the expression of our deepest and most primary intentions. The aspiration was to integrate meditation and mindfulness practice with our relationships, work, and day-to-day activities. In this sense, our “practice” was our perspective. Our practice sought to integrate all our actions with our values and intentions.

I decided to name the seven competencies in this book “practices” for all these reasons. They are meant to be practiced in order to build skills and support integration. And they describe an approach, a way of life, and an expression of our deepest intentions. Through practice in each of these seven areas, we can transform pain into possibility.

Practices are values and intentions expressed in action. Practices are like habits, since they build a muscle memory over time. But they are more than good habits. Practices express our intention to transform our life toward our highest aspirations, for realizing our full potential and for helping others.

THE SEVEN PRACTICES: MINDFULNESS IN ACTION

Mindfulness can be (and has been) characterized in many different ways. However, for the purpose of training mindful leaders, I’ve distilled seven mindfulness practices:

• Love the work

• Do the work

• Don’t be an expert

• Connect to your pain

• Connect to the pain of others

• Depend on others

• Keep making it simpler

These aren’t your typical mindfulness instructions. To me, mindfulness is so much deeper and wider — so much more profound, messy, and mysterious — than is usually portrayed. To me, the point of mindfulness isn’t to succeed at meditation, or to understand certain concepts, or to create inner peace by holding the busy world at bay. Rather, the point of mindfulness practice is to cultivate a more alive, responsive, effective, and warmhearted way of being within the world as it already exists and within the life you already live.

What makes mindfulness somewhat challenging to explain and understand is that it involves a certain amount of paradox. For instance, the renowned Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki once said, “You are perfect just as you are, and you can use a little improvement.” This is similar to the somewhat paradoxical goals of the woman I described earlier in the mindfulness training: She wanted her experience of everything to change (or improve) without changing (or letting go of) anything in her experience.

Thus, mindfulness practice sees and embraces two worlds at the same time: the universal and the relative, or Big Mind and Small Mind. On the one hand, the aim is radical acceptance of yourself and your experience. You are perfect as you are in the grand, universal scheme of things. Yet this is distinct from the relative world, and only here do you need some improvement. From the absolute perspective, you really are perfect, including your struggles, pains, desires, and aversions. Yet a core part of mindfulness practice is becoming familiar with your individual patterns and tendencies, your fears and dissatisfactions, and engaging with them to transform the everyday problems of life instead of ignoring them or pushing them away.

In this book, each of the seven practice chapters includes a variety of exercises, experiments, and activities to help you understand and realize the practices in your life. The seven practices also build upon one another, and I’ve grouped them into three categories, which I call “investigate, connect, and integrate.” The first four practices focus primarily on the inner work of self-exploration and self-awareness. The second two practices focus primarily on relationships: your relationships with other people, with your work, and with the greater world. And the seventh practice focuses on integrating all of the practices. Ultimately, all seven practices work together to help you realize what is most important in any given moment and then make the most effective decisions. Altogether, they constitute a guide or workbook for developing yourself as a mindfulness practitioner and a mindful leader.

Here is a brief description of what the seven practices are all about.

INVESTIGATE

• LOVE THE WORK: Start with inspiration, with what is most essential. Acknowledge and cultivate aspiration — your deepest, most heartfelt intentions.

• DO THE WORK: Have a regular meditation and mindfulness practice. Learn to respond appropriately at work and in all parts of your life.

• DON’T BE AN EXPERT: Let go of thinking you are right. Step in to greater wonder, openness, and vulnerability.

• CONNECT TO YOUR PAIN: Don’t avoid the pain that comes with being human. Transform pain into learning and opportunity.

CONNECT

• CONNECT TO THE PAIN OF OTHERS: Don’t avoid the pain of others. Embody a profound connection to all humanity and life.

• DEPEND ON OTHERS: Let go of a false sense of independence. Both empower others and be empowered by others to foster healthy group dynamics.

INTEGRATE

• KEEP MAKING IT SIMPLER: Let go of a mindset of scarcity. Cultivate awe and wonder. Integrate mindfulness practice and results.

THE ORIGIN OF THE SEVEN PRACTICES

I did not develop these seven practices on my own. They emerged out of the Search Inside Yourself (SIY) mindfulness-based leadership training program I helped develop at Google. This evolutionary process was integral to what these practices are and my approach to them, so I think it’s helpful to tell that story.

In 2006, as a leadership consultant, one of my core clients was Google, where I was coaching several engineers on leadership and team building in regular sessions at their headquarters in Mountain View, California. One day I received a phone call from Chade-Meng Tan asking if we could meet. A few people at Google had referred to me as someone with “ten thousand hours of meditation practice, an MBA degree, and many years of leadership experience.” Meng, as everyone calls him, was a Google engineer.

Meng is passionate about mindfulness and meditation, and he felt that the way to create a more peaceful world was to massively spread meditation. He decided to use the 20 percent of his variable work time (Google encourages employees to spend up to 20 percent of their time exploring projects outside of their core areas of responsibility) to create a mindfulness program and offer it at Google. Nothing like this existed at the time, and he invited me to be part of the team to develop the program.

At this point, he had gotten as far as settling upon the name: Search Inside Yourself, playing on the fact that Google’s primary business is as a search engine. In addition, Meng had consulted with Daniel Goleman, Jon Kabat-Zinn, and others and felt that this mindfulness program should be structured around emotional intelligence and have a strong science component. Encouraging and exciting data now links meditation practice with changes in the brain and more skillful responses to stress and emotional challenges.

Meng invited Zen teacher and poet Norman Fischer along with Mirabai Bush, who was running an organization called the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, to lead the first SIY program in 2007. I observed the way those two led the program and then provided one-on-one coaching sessions with each of the twenty-five participants. The next several iterations of SIY were co-led by Norman and me. The following year Meng and I co-led most of the trainings, along with Philippe Goldin, one of the world’s leading scientists studying brain science and the effects of mindfulness.

The program was well received and became extremely popular within Google. Employees throughout the company were curious about meditation and immediately felt the impact of having a regular practice. The science of meditation was new and convincing, and we used it as a central part of the teaching of mindfulness; this was important to the open-minded but still fact-based Google engineers. The program struck a nerve, addressing the demanding, fast-paced Google culture by connecting the dots between meditation, mindfulness, emotional intelligence, science, and leadership skills. And perhaps most importantly, we were able to create an open and trusting environment that led to building a more caring, learning community. Participants were eager to have real, vulnerable conversations with one another, to share pains and challenges as well as possibilities. The program’s reputation spread via word of mouth as program participants noticed they were becoming more skilled leaders and their overall well-being was noticeably improving. Several years later, pre- and post-self-report surveys confirmed these observations.

By 2009, waiting lists had grown, and as soon as a program was announced, it would fill up within minutes. In 2011, Meng and I decided it was time to offer Search Inside Yourself outside of Google, and the following year, Meng, Philippe, and I created the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute (SIYLI) as a 501c3 nonprofit organization. I was the CEO, Meng was board chair, and Philippe was the third board member.

By the end of 2012, the organization moved into its first offices in the Presidio in San Francisco. We had five full-time employees, were testing the program within a variety of organizations, and had just offered our first public program in down-town San Francisco. In 2013, in order to better meet the demand for mindfulness training within Google, we launched our first teacher training program for twelve Google employees.

An important aspect of teaching SIY includes teaching mindfulness and meditation. At an early meeting with these twelve teachers-in-training, we asked Norman Fischer to attend. As Meng spoke to the Google employees, I sat next to Norman, showed him the agenda, and pointed out that he was scheduled to speak next! Though he wasn’t aware of it, he was supposed to give a talk on what is most important in teaching mindfulness. Norman calmly began taking notes on a blank piece of paper.

The notes were a list of what Norman believed were seven core principles for teaching mindfulness, and he proceeded to speak on them extemporaneously. As I listened, I knew these practices represented a powerful approach and path to the art of mindful leadership, well beyond the training of new mindfulness teachers. Afterward, I posted these practices on everyone’s desk at SIYLI. I adopted them as guiding principles for establishing the type of work culture I wanted to create within the organization, for how I wanted to teach leadership, for how I wanted to show up as a leader, and for how I wanted to live my life.

I began to include these seven practices in talks I gave at Google and at mindfulness and leadership conferences around the world. In one of my early morning meditations, I envisioned these seven practices as a manual of mindful leadership, as something like what this book has become. As this image took shape in my mind, I phoned my friend Norman and asked for permission to use his teachings as the core of my next book.

Norman responded, “What teachings? I don’t remember what they are.” I read Norman the list of seven practices, and he said, “Oh, those are really good! I look forward to reading your book.”