But exercise can be hard, not just for people who are new to it, but also for those who do it regularly. It takes effort and self-regulation. And that can be tiring, especially over the last year, when there was so much to be disciplined about. Sometimes, we just want to get on our walking route or do our program. Exercise becomes the escape from all the “musts” in life....
That’s what Daniel Goleman found in his book The New Leaders. Goleman quotes research that distinguishes the leadership of a number of highly successful US healthcare companies from the least successful ones (based on return on equity, share price over a 10-year period). He found that self-delusion was associated with poor performance, and self-awareness with company success: Tellingly, the CEOs from the poorest performing companies gave themselves the highest ratings on seven of the ten leadership abilities [outlined in the study]....
Science can’t explain the mystery of marriage—the actual experience of being in love. And yet, over the last 30 years, a growing body of evidence has helped shed some light on what works and what doesn’t in marriage. After reading much of the research and interviewing numerous researchers and marriage experts for our forthcoming book, here is our list of the top five research-based tips for optimizing marriage. 5 Practical Ways to Improve Your Marriage 1....
A Guided Meditation to Cultivate Presence and Awareness read more Chelsea Fuss October 18, 2021 Kelly Barron July 19, 2021 Kelly Barron July 14, 2021
In addition to assisting you in deepening your capacity to settle into the sense of presence and groundedness beneath thought, this practice can really be an important support for your work in the world with others. A Guided Practice to Deepen Your Capacity for Awareness Feel the position of your body as you consciously invite these moments of meditation. Bring intentionality and commitment to these moments of practice. Begin with a few very deep breaths, sensing into the sensations of breathing in and out....
The 3-Minute Breathing Space Unpacking the 3MBS So what exactly is going on in the 3MBS. At one level, if you’re in the middle of an automatic, or multitasking moment, there is a place that you can move your mind to that allows you to step out of these routines and the the demands they place on our attention. Simply sitting down and allowing your attention to move in these different ways can be quite beneficial throughout the day....
When you practice mindful self-inquiry, you bring kind awareness and acknowledgment to any stressed or anxious feelings in the body and mind and simply allow them to be. This means staying with those feelings without analyzing, suppressing, or encouraging them. Although this may seem scary in and of itself, realize that when you allow yourself to feel and acknowledge your worries, irritations, painful memories, and other difficult thoughts and emotions, this often helps them dissipate....
Fear is a powerful physiological response, orchestrated by a complex threat detection system in our brain, the amygdala being one player in that system. Our brain’s primary responses to fear are short-term: fight, flight, freeze and forget-it (okay maybe not always “forget-it.”) For some people a range of these emotions washed over them on election night, for many others they’ve been feeling these emotions acutely ever since. But here’s the thing, when the threat detection system in our brain is activated, and fear takes over, other areas of the brain aren’t as active, making it difficult for us to do our best thinking....
Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book, Wherever You Go There You Are was my introduction to mindfulness and it inspired me to learn more about what it is and further develop my practice. Did you take a class? If so, what sort of class did you take? I later took a class called Awakening Mindfulness at my local yoga studio and it helped deepen my understanding of mindfulness. How has mindfulness made a difference in your life?...
Mentally recall a meeting in which one of your colleagues was passionately promoting his point of view. Picture him leaning forward, his voice pitched in excitement, his skin flushed as he’s adamantly pressing on about his idea. Remember how you deciphered the signs of his intense commitment: voice, posture, pace, facial expression, and word choice. You observed these details and made some conclusions about his commitment, intent, and anxiety. Great leaders are great observers....
For most of us, until we stop, we don’t even realize that this person masquerading in our skin is not living the life we had imagined, or making decisions aligned with our deepest held beliefs and principles. Over time, life happens and if we are not awake, we can be missing out on the possibilities to live that imagined life. Are You On Autopilot? In small ways and over time, we get pulled along into the relentless need for greater, and more, and bigger, and better....
Listen to Episode 2: When We All Show Up Burned Out At Work Guided Meditations to Pair with this Episode of Burnout 1) A 12-Minute Meditation to Set the Tone for Your Leadership 2) A Focus Meditation to Foster Calm and Clarity 3) A 10-Minute Body Scan Meditation You Can Do at Your Desk 4) A 12-Minute Meditation to Reset for Tough Conversations read more Mindful Staff May 10, 2022...
The stress of caregiving is hard to bear. It leaves many of us heartbroken, overwhelmed, disoriented, and feeling inadequate. Even more sobering is the fact that this intense stress can spiral downward into burnout, marked by utter exhaustion, social isolation, despair—even hypertension, heart attacks, and death. “Jerry, if you don’t care for yourself,” my wife’s physician warned me, “you’ll likely die before Susan.” Caregivers seek ways to stay alive, and self-care is the usual recommendation....
But today’s scientists are not giving up so easily. Neuroscientists, psychologists, and others are probing as never before the mechanisms that underlie those “eureka!” moments of creativity. These range from the most momentous, like the moment when some unknown Paleolithic genius discovered how to light a fire, to the most routine, such as when your third-grader announces he needs a dinosaur costume for school tomorrow and you come up with a bedsheet-and-hanger T....
Now a new study out of the University of Miami finds that that meditation not only provides protection from a natural decline in attention during high-demand times, but that the more you practice, the greater that protection is. “That’s the biggest take-home for me: Practice is key,” says Amishi P. Jha, an associate professor of psychology and lead author of the study. “It’s not conceptual. It’s not like book-learning. [Mindfulness training] has to be embodied to get the most benefit....
A new study suggests that people who have mentally prepared for and thought about the upcoming workday—or “reattached” to work—have a better work experience, because they start the day off more in touch with their work goals. Researchers recruited 151 people from a diverse range of careers and emailed surveys to them each morning for one work week. People were considered to be more reattached to work when they agreed with statements like, “This morning, I gave some thought to the upcoming workday,” or “This morning, I thought about what I wanted to achieve at work today....
Dr. Adam Hampshire, who helped develop a variety of brain-training tests by the Medical Research Council at Cambridge University, argues that demonstrating improvement on tasks performed through these brain-training games does not provide a sufficient claim of a brain-training or brain-altering affect. The article continues: Most research that suggests brain-training works is fraught with difficulties: little has been peer-reviewed or conducted alongside control groups. Several companies use scans of brains “lighting up” to support claims that their programmes are effective, but these simply show a measure of the energy that the brain is using rather than providing any evidence that the brain is being altered in any long-term way....
His grandfather replies, I sometimes feel there are two wolves inside me, each of whom fights to tell me what to do. Whenever something angers me, one of the wolves is full of fire, and wants to attack and act nasty. The other is calmer, thinks clearly, and makes better choices. But they’re both always there. And the boy asks, But if they are always fighting, how do you know which wolf is going to win?...
