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Summary Report 

This document captures key questions and insights that arose during a weekend deep dive retreat hosted by Mindful Leader and the Garrison Institute in August 2018. The participants were all internal champions of mindfulness within medium to large organizations (100+ employees). Our objective was to provide a forum where these peers could share best practices and lessons learned, bond, and find meaningful ways to support the continued growth of mindfulness in America.

Being an i…

By Wendy Quan, guest contributor 

Organizations struggle with constant change. Or, rather, it’s the employees who struggle with the relentless changes that disrupts their lives and mounts their stress. The problem is there is never enough change management resource to truly help our employees.

The responsibility of helping people through change, or ‘change management’ tends to fall upon leaders, change managers, project managers or human resources. However, generally whatever little time there…

By Schuyler Brown, guest contributor

One morning in 2015, I opened my Sunday New York Times to find a profile of Mark Bertolini, the CEO of healthcare giant Aetna, on the front page of the Business Section. The story was not a typical business story, but rather a vulnerable and personal portrait: the story of a corporate leader’s personal journey into meditation and his vision to bring the practice into his workplace.

Bertolini hired Andy Lee to do the real work of building a company culture w…

By Patricia Thompson, guest contributor

When I began my career as a management consultant, I was reluctant to be authentic. As a Black female who had just finished grad school, I was all too aware of potential negative stereotypes that others might have about me based on my age, gender, and race. As a result, I made it my mission to come across as pulled together, polished, and serious at all times.

To prevent any concerns about how knowledgeable I was, I led with my intelligence. At the same …

By Leah Weiss, guest contributor

Meetings are a way to arrive at solutions, voice opinions, share and receive team feedback. So why are roughly 59% of meetings a waste of time? Furthermore, meetings can cause companies to lose billions of dollars in revenue annually.

Why haven’t we yet found an antidote to mindless meetings? Maybe we’re not looking in the right place.

A Tip from Tibet 

The image of an ego-tripping narcissistic boss is fading fast. In its place is a leader who knows the impor…

By Schuyler Brown, guest contributor

Many of us are aware of the mindfulness revolution currently happening in corporate America, but perhaps less of us know about the interest in empathy that’s coming on its heels. Over the past few years, I’ve received requests to teach empathy at a social media giant, a large healthcare company, and a worldwide leader in hospitality. These companies have been early to the practice because their business models rely on interpersonal skills—building and keepin…

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

In recent years, mindfulness has made tremendous strides into mainstream society. People are practicing it individually and bringing it into their organizations. Through my work at Mindful Leader I have encountered, advised, and learned from countless champions of mindfulness at the workplace across the globe and at companies of every size and industry.

If you are interested in bringing mindfulness to your organization, th…

By Patricia Thompson, guest contributor

I recently coached a senior executive I’ll call Stephanie, who was grappling with a pretty common dilemma in the business world: her organization’s profits were nowhere near where they had been projected to be, and her impatient CEO wasn’t happy about it. She and her colleagues were feeling intense pressure to perform and feared that they would lose their jobs if they were unable to turn things around.

To cope with the situation, Stephanie decided to mir…