Get Your Mind Right

Meditation for leadership & creativity

You often hear athletes talking about the game slowing down for them. They can process information faster, respond more decisively to events unfolding around them, and be more confident in the correctness of their decisions. It’s often an important milestone in the development of quarterbacks, the leaders of the offense on the football field. They’ve achieved a flow state where they can focus completely on the task at hand and be fully present in the moment. It’s a state business leaders are keen to achieve as well. They don’t rely as much on physical performance as athletes, but making clear and timely decisions is still a major part of the job. Often, it’s meditation that helps them do it.

Defeat the Ego

Ego is not all bad. In fact, ego and a profound self-belief often propels people to positions of leadership. But unrestrained ego can do more harm than good. It can make leaders think they’re infallible and above the team. As a result, they deflect blame and alienate those they aim to lead. It’s impossible to learn from your mistakes if you can’t admit you make them.

As legendary business management author Jim Collins observed in Level 5 Leadership, “boards of directors frequently operate under the false belief that a larger-than-life, egocentric leader is required to make a company great” but “in more than two-thirds of the comparison companies, we noted the presence of a gargantuan ego that contributed to the demise or continued mediocrity of the company.”

Meditation is an excellent way for leaders to rein in their egos and overcome them in crucial situations. By calming the mind with a combination of breath work and the removal of distractions, most notably electronic communications, leaders can still their thoughts. They can process information better. Without the distraction of emails and calls, they can fully absorb all the information they’ve taken in and form strategic, long-term thought patterns rather than just reacting to whatever stimulus is prodding them.

The list of leaders who credit meditation for some or all of their success is a long one, from Bill Gates to Russell Simmons to hedge fund titan Ray Dalio. Scott Shute, who was the VP of customer operations at LinkedIn, found meditation so transformative that he left his position to lead LinkedIn’s mindfulness programs and now works as a “conscious business activist.”

“I will apply mindfulness practices when I find myself anxious to make a decision or feel defensive about criticism. I will breathe and contemplate for a few minutes and something that was formerly frustrating becomes almost playful. I can pay attention to details and may see things I had not seen before,” he told Harvard Business Review.

Manage Relationships

With teammates, family members, and employees, forming meaningful relationships is important to accomplishing great things. Meditation can help leaders build the emotional intelligence necessary “to become more attuned to the needs and feelings of your team,” entrepreneur Josh Felber wrote in Forbes. This can improve cohesion within a team, with tangible results in the form of better communication.

Those improvements translate to enhanced productivity, Wharton research found. Even just a few minutes of meditation a day can make leaders and employees more helpful and productive, Wharton management professor Lindsey Cameron discovered.

“The key takeaways are that mindfulness works, and that you don’t have to invest in an intensive eight-week intervention to be able to get the benefits from that because we all know that workplace life is deeply relational,” she said.

Meditation lowers stress levels, which helps people make better decisions and treat each other with more empathy. They also have a heightened sense of self-awareness and think before reacting. This not only helps defuse tense moments, when a leader can act with calmness and clarity, it has long-term benefits as leaders observe and analyze what their employees are saying and doing rather than rushing to the defensive.

Leaders remember that while they play a specialized and prominent role, they’re still part of the team.

“Meditating brings you back to the fact that at the end of the day, you’re no different than anybody else,” Ford Motor Co. chairman Bill Ford told the New York Times.

Creative Spark

Perhaps even more beneficial than those other effects is the creativity that meditation allows. Freed from distractions and more capable of slowing down their thoughts, leaders who meditate can enter a different state of mind where they think more deeply about the challenges they face and come up with solutions that wouldn’t come to mind amid the chaos of the day.

“In a world awash in distraction, stress, and often, distress — all of which can affect creativity and wellbeing — mindfulness becomes a valuable consideration,” the authors of Mindfulness and creativity: Implications for thinking and learning wrote.

By fully processing all the information that comes flying at them, people can learn valuable lessons that otherwise might escape them as they lurch into the next day. Brain waves change and the fear center relaxes. Your thoughts change.

“Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful,” filmmaker and transcendental meditation enthusiast David Lynch said.

Meditation slows the game down, and that’s a winning formula.