Are You Mindful?

In Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, Maria Konnikova explains how neurologist Marcus Raichle learned, after decades of examining the brain, that our minds are wired to wander. Whenever our thoughts are suspended between specific, discrete, goal-directed activities, the brain reverts to a so-called baseline, ‘resting’ state—but don’t let the word fool you, because the brain isn’t at rest at all.1 What this implies for business leaders is: they need to focus on the present moment, the only one we can really live in, to be truly effective.

- Vishal Gupta

Leadership can be defined as the process of influencing an individual or a group of individuals to achieve a common goal. In order to be effective as a leader, one has to be able to get work done by being able to understand her people, their feelings, desires, and then work towards aligning those with the work she has in mind for them. Command and order are the last resort for an effective leader. The big challenge for any leader thus is in understanding what drives her people’s feelings and behavior. She needs to be able to hear the unheard and take corrective actions proactively. One of the qualities that enable great leaders to lead their people well is ‘mindfulness’.

Imagine you have had a busy and exhausting day at office. You had asked your colleague to get a particular work done in the morning. As you enter the office, after a long and difficult meeting in the evening, you see a file kept on your table and the work not done. You feel overwhelmed and angry. You think your colleague is making an excuse and is not helping you at work. You react by shouting at her and doing work in anger. The next round of emotions and thoughts are more likely to be even more negative. The downward spiral continues.

The above-mentioned sequence of events can be well understood using the ‘automatic cycle of behavior’ (refer Exhibit 01 below)