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Audrey Tang

The Leader’s Guide to Mindfulness

How to Use Soft Skills to Get Hard Results

FT Publishing, 2018

15 min read

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Most people know just a little about mindfulness, yet business leaders recognize its career benefits.

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Most people know just a little about mindfulness, yet business leaders recognize its career impact and workplace benefits. As psychologist Audrey Tang reports, a Mindfulness Initiative study found that users said mindful practices made them feel positive, focused and resilient. Mindfulness can help you be more conscious of your prejudices, goals and values. It can also strengthen your leadership skills. Tang describes how mindfulness leads to better decision making: It helps you set priorities and distinguish between important information and mere noise. In considering the practical aspects of mindfulness, Tang discusses using mindful practices to support collaboration, resilience, creativity, “emotional agility” and confidence. Her comprehensive introduction to mindfulness shows readers how to use it, step by step. Tang encourages those who wish to deepen their leadership skills to add mindfulness to their methods.

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“Practical Mindfulness”

If you ask a group of people what they understand about mindfulness, about half of them will talk about meditation or breathing or, perhaps, yoga. The other half will say that it’s nonsense. They will disclaim interest in hearing anything more about it. Yet the business world has embraced the concept of mindfulness. Universities teach courses on mindfulness in business schools. Publications produce articles that refer to mindful practices in the halls of tech industry leaders such as Intel, Apple and Google. These articles highlight the gains mindfulness has brought to these companies.

Originating in Buddhism, mindfulness is, according to one definition, a “contemplation of one’s own experience, subsumed under the four objective domains of the body, feelings, states of mind and experiential phenomena.” In 2016, Cranfield, Birmingham and Aberystwyth Universities conducted a study for the Mindfulness Initiative. Participants reported that mindful practices made them feel positive, focused and resilient. It enhanced their insights into other people’s behavior.

Practicing mindfulness strengthens ...

About the Author

Chartered psychologist Audrey Tang founded CLICK Training and is the resident psychologist on the Chrissy B. Show, a British program devoted to mental health. Some of the research she cites is available at Mindful.org.

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