Blog

Creating a New Myth For Business - The Healing Organization

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By Raj Sisodia and Michael Gelb, guest contributor 

The dominant narrative about business remains focused narrowly on generating as much profit and growth as possible. This is done by generating as much revenue as possible, which means selling as many products as possible to as many people as possible at as high a price as you can get away with, whether people benefit from these products or not. Since profit equals revenue minus cost, traditional businesses also look to minimize costs. They do …

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Reflections from 2019 Garrison & Mindful Leader Un-Retreat

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By Michael Doyle 

Our careers provide us the opportunity to contribute to society, help us support ourselves and our families, and give us a sense of purpose of fulfillment. But for a great many people, the gap between this ideal scenario and their day-to-day seems to only get wider, as their working lives become more and more stressful and frustrating.

The benefits of bringing mindfulness into the workplace are well-documented, and yet it can be challenging to win over reluctant colleagues an…

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Is Meditation Selfish? Ask John & George

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By Mo Edjlali 

I've recently have had a great many questions spurred on by some of the critics of what is happening with Mindfulness. My conversations with folks like Professor Ron Purser, Professor Candy Brown, Assistant Professor Jaime Kucinskas, Professor David Forbes, and independent scholar Glenn Wallis have me thirsty for more intellectual debate. When it comes to mindfulness & meditation where can we find good debate and discussion? Have we created a tone that welcomes dialogue or that s…

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How to Motivate Yourself with Kindness

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In this session, Dr. Kristin Neff illustrates the importance of self-compassion, from the individual, to business context, to use with military veterans. She explains the difference between motivation by self-compassion and self-esteem. Self-compassion is a caring, open, and learning stance towards oneself with a mindset of growth and resilience. There are several components of self-compassion and Dr. Neff provides research to debunk popular myths about self-compassion. Self-compassion can be …

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10 Reasons to Integrate Mindfulness Practice with Your Work

BL00 - 10 Reasons to Integrate Mindfulness Practice with Your Work

By Marc Lesser, guest contributor

Company Time is a series of one-day and weekend retreats that I have been co-leading at Zen Center’s Green Gulch Farm for the past 20 years. These retreats are for people interested in integrating mindfulness practice into their work, for those looking for ways to make their work more meaningful and more connected to their deepest values, and/or for those considering some kind of career or life change. 

In these retreats, our role as teachers is to ask questio…

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Mindfulness: Disrupting Oppression in the Workplace

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By Regina Smith, guest contributor

I am a black woman in my mid-forties and a senior executive at a small progressive predominantly white organization. I have approximately 10 direct reports, and I report to the president. Of the people who report to me, two are people of color (male-identified), and none of the other executives who report to the president are people of color.  Even at a liberal and progressively-minded spiritually-based organization, the air we breathe is still the air of domi…

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Mindfulness @SAP: The Journey, Tactics, & Strategies Behind One of the World's Most Successful Mindfulness at Work Programs

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In this session, Peter Bostelmann provides an overview to how the company SAP has successfully implemented a Global Mindfulness Practice inside their organization. Currently, there are 6,500+ SAP employees who have completed the 2 day ‘Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute’ mindfulness training program (since 2012), with a growing waitlist of 5,500+ employees excited to attend the training. He provides insights and guidelines for organizational initiatives to deliver mindfulness trainings,…

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Are You Living on Autopilot?: How Mindful Leadership Training Can Bring You Back to the Present

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By Janice Marturano, guest contributor

Is it September? What happened to the summer?

Stop for a minute. Do you ever feel this way? How could it already be September? It feels like it was just May.

Or do you ever look at the time and wonder, how could it be 6 pm? I’m exhausted, but I’m not sure what I accomplished today. My “to-do” list seems just as long, maybe longer, than it was this morning.

This certainly was often true for me. As a senior executive, my days were always filled with meeti…

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The 5 Abilities Mindful Leaders Cultivate

BL00 - Bringing Mindfulness into Your Leadership Practice

By James Van Auken, guest contributor

People constantly wrestle with themselves. An impulse, a habit, an expectation—juxtaposed by a limitation, governance, or imposed denial of desire—all create disorienting dilemmas that can drive behavior and diminish mental resources. And in this internal wrestling contest of impulse, desire, and habit on one team and moral reasoning, responsibility, and “doing the right thing” on the other, a cyclical battle pervades.

In our contemporary society, we are o…

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Burnout and the Mindfulness Backlash

BL00 - Burnout and the Mindfulness Backlash

By Mo Edjlali, Mindful Leader's President and Chief Community Organizer

A couple of years ago I was invited as a guest to attend a Corporate HR Executive event on Resilience in the workplace. As the event went along, sometime towards the middle of the day during a Q&A period one of the attendees stood up and asked a question of the panel that left an impression on me (I’m paraphrasing) 

“We are overworked, our employees are overworked, how can we keep increasing people’s workload and just of…

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