The Morality of Meditation. MEDITATION is fast becoming a fashionable tool for improving your mind. With mounting scientific evidence that the practice can enhance creativity, memory and scores on standardized intelligence tests, interest in its practical benefits is growing. A number of “mindfulness” training programs, like that developed by the engineer Chade-Meng Tan at Google, and conferences like Wisdom 2.0 for business and tech leaders, promise attendees insight into how meditation can be used to augment individual performance, leadership and productivity. This is all well and good, but if you stop to think about it, there’s a bit of a disconnect between the (perfectly commendable) pursuit of these benefits and the purpose for which meditation was originally intended. Gaining competitive advantage on exams and increasing creativity in business weren’t of the utmost concern to Buddha and other early meditation teachers.
3 Ways Meditation Can Boost Your Career | Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute. 3 Ways Meditation Can Boost Your Career August 2, 2013 Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute Meditation carries many hidden benefits. People know that it’s great for relieving stress, building attention span and cultivating self-knowledge. Yet meditation also brings many other hidden benefits that can directly help improve your workplace performance. Meditation can help you grow personally and professionally #1: Reciprocated Warmth and Compassion Numerous studies have shown that meditation increases compassion.
It comes down to reciprocated warmth. In turn, others were more compassionate towards them as well. . #2: Identify and Eliminate Patterns Most of everyday life is a pattern. However, some patterns just aren’t useful. Most people never step outside their daily grind to take a bird’s eye view of their life, their habits and what’s unconsciously driving them. . #3: Unfreeze Your Brain On any given work day, there’s a “tug of war” going on in your brain. Mindful Leadership: Compassion, contemplation and meditation develop effective leaders. Originally Posted The European Financial Review The highly visible corporate leadership failures of recent years have deeply shaken public confidence in business leaders.
All too often these leaders have placed self-interest ahead of the well-being of their organizations. After the companies got in trouble, their leaders then refused to take responsibility for the harm caused to the people they served. The problems at British Petroleum, Hewlett-Packard, and failed Wall Street firms, along with the actions of dozens of leaders who failed in the post-Enron era, are glaring examples of these lapses in leadership. As a result, there has been a widespread loss of trust in business and political leaders in the past decade. “In the past two decades far too many leaders have been selected more for charisma than character, for style over substance, and for image rather than integrity.” Once lost, trust is very hard to regain. A new generation of authentic leaders Developing mindfulness Notes. This Is The New Favorite Pastime Of The Business Elite (Hint: It's Not Golf)
Until the very end of his life, Steve Jobs was an innovator. At the tech leader and Zen Buddhism practitioner's funeral in October 2011, friends and family received a meaningful parting gift: A wooden box containing a copy of Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramhansa Yogananda's spiritual memoir, a story of awakening and self-realization.
"That was the message: Actualize yourself," Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who attended the funeral, said recently at the 2013 TechCrunch Disrupt SF conference. "If you look back at the history of Steve and that early trip to India ... He had this incredible realization that his intuition was his greatest gift," Benioff said. More and more business leaders in the tech world and beyond are following Jobs' lead, tapping into their intuition through meditation, a practice that's been linked to lower stress levels and boosts in cognitive functioning, creativity, productivity and even empathy. Marc Benioff "Meditation is a major part of my life," Benioff said.
Amazon. Leadership And Compassion—Stephen M. Ross School of Business. Our work on how organizations foster compassion is based on interviews with employees in a variety of settings and studies that track how compassion responses unfold following traumatic events in employees' lives. We have found that leadership-at all levels within an organization-is critical for creating a context for meaning and a context for action that, taken together, foster organizational compassion. Here, we attempt to summarize the implications for leadership, which we hope will inspire ways of thinking that are helpful and useful. Starting Assumptions 1. The capacity to be compassionate and to express compassion is universal. 2. Institutions (work, family, religious, etc.) enable or disable this innate capacity to express compassion. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Providing a Context for Meaning People are struggling with trying to understand what is happening. Creating a Context for Compassionate Action a. B. Amazon. Matt Tenney: How Compassionate Leadership Results in a More Innovative Culture. Ironically, in the recipe for creating and sustaining a highly innovative culture, compassion might just be the most important ingredient. It's well known that as organizations continue to grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to attract and retain highly innovative people.
Most large organizations become increasingly bureaucratic as they grow, and nothing will drive away highly innovative people more quickly than lots of bureaucracy. As a result, most organizations gradually become less innovative over time. There are, of course, exceptions to this general trend. It is possible, even in large companies, to create a culture that attracts and retains highly innovative people and, perhaps more important, helps people who are not natural innovators to be more innovative as well. The key ingredient for creating and sustaining such a culture is being committed to serving and caring for our employees. The examples of how Google works to care for employees are almost legendary.
What Stops Leaders from Showing Compassion - Roger Schwarz. By Roger Schwarz | 8:00 AM August 29, 2013 Most good people want to act compassionately at work. And recent research suggests that compassion also creates positive outcomes in organizations: People who experience compassion feel more committed to the organization and feel more positive emotions at work; when people receive bad news that is delivered with compassion, they remain more supportive of the organization; and acting with compassion can increase your own satisfaction and mitigate your own stress at work. And yet even if you want to be compassionate with others at work, you may find it difficult. You may find yourself either judging others or making assumptions about what will happen if you are compassionate. This can be especially challenging for leaders.
As a leader, you get paid for your judgment. “Your suffering isn’t that serious.” “You contributed to your problem.” “You’re acting like a victim.” “If I’m compassionate, they will think I agree with them.” Norm Brodsky: Use Compassionate Leadership to Create a Positive Culture. Amazon. Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace) (9780062116925): Chade-Meng Tan.
Compassionate Leaders are Effective Leaders. We are pleased to present an excerpt from Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace), the new book from Google’s “Jolly Good Fellow” Chade-Meng Tan. Meng will talk about the book for the University of California, Berkeley Greater Good Science Center on September 18. Please join us! The best definition of compassion I know comes from the eminent Tibetan scholar Thupten Jinpa. Jinpa is also the longtime English translator for the Dalai Lama. He has a charmingly mellow and gentle voice, so the Dalai Lama mischievously makes gentle fun of it every now and then (“See, I have deep booming voice, but this guy, his voice so soft,” the Dalai Lama would say, and they would all laugh out loud).
Jinpa defines compassion as follows: “Compassion is a mental state endowed with a sense of concern for the suffering of others and aspiration to see that suffering relieved.” Specifically, he defines compassion as having three components: 6 Exercises To Strengthen Compassionate Leadership. Disney has been known for its litigious nature in the past, going so far as to change copyright law in order to keep Mickey Mouse out of public domain. That's why it's kind of weird that a movie filmed at Disney World, unapproved by the Mouse House, even exists at all.
After making a splash at Sundance this year, though, the intriguing Escape From Tomorrow appears to be heading for a theatrical release--and the first trailer is now online. First-time director Randy Moore shot the film at the Florida theme park, guerrilla-style, over a series of visits with his crew and an unknown cast. Details of the terms Moore worked out with Disney remain under wraps for now, but the controversial matter seems to be settled. The hallucinatory Escape From Tomorrow tells the tale of a father completely losing his shit over the course of a day at a certain tourism Mecca.