Your Guide to More Mindful Leadership in 6 Simple Steps

Outside of the workplace, mindfulness is a topic that saturates mainstream media, lifestyle blogs, and how we organize our personal lives. However, once we enter the professional realm, we can see that mindfulness hasn’t quite made its mark as a necessary part of effective leadership and teamwork.

Becoming a more mindful leader can help keep your employees engaged, inspired, and motivated to develop their professional skills. Being mindful is not an inherent trait, but rather, can be learned through developing leadership techniques through the cultivation of emotional intelligence (EI).

Implement the following six steps for mindful leadership to help your team and organization thrive:

1. Check-In With Your Team

Your team and employees want to be understood, so make a regular “check-in” a part of your daily routine. These chats don’t necessarily need to revolve around professional performance. Rather, take the time to ask employees how they’re feeling, how their day is going, or other similar questions that allow for healthier professional relationships.

2. Tackle Professional Stress

Stress is a constant for many leaders, but this doesn’t have to be the case. By practicing mindfulness techniques like meditation and taking personal time to focus on your mental health and wellbeing, you can tackle professional stress while encouraging employees to be mindful of their mental wellbeing too.

3. Communicate Effectively and Efficiently

As a modern leader, communication is key. However, with the abundance of messaging platforms and methods of communication, keeping up with correspondence can become overwhelming.

Prioritize your wellbeing with mindful communication tactics, like limiting how often you check your email and streamlining your organization’s communication processes for increased clarity. Clarity is key in business communications to ensure that both leaders and employees are operating on the same page.

4. Be Honest and Authentic With Colleagues and Employees

Honesty is policy as a mindful leader. It may be tempting to create a facade of unshakable confidence, but this will only increase your stress levels and limit positive interactions with colleagues and team members.

When you’re honest and open with others with feedback, questions, and mentoring, you are not only creating better professional relationships, but you’ll be setting the bar for a more trusting and honest work environment that everyone can enjoy.

5. Develop a Positive Outlook

A positive outlook is an essential facet of mindful leadership. When a leader is equipped with a positive outlook, they can begin to identify how their actions correspond with specific outcomes and change their approach to cultivate positive interactions and experiences.

Key Step Media does a fantastic job outlining how leaders can begin changing their outlook with certain practices, including:

• Taking time to reflect on previous expectations or attitudes related to past experiences
• Observe how you react both physically and mentally when anticipating certain events
• Attempt to refine how your beliefs and expectations influence your experiences

When you understand how you feel about certain anticipated experiences and events, you can take time to cultivate a more positive outlook by thinking about what could go right, rather than what could go wrong.

6. Invest in EI Development Coaching

As we mentioned earlier, EI coaching can help leaders become more mindful of their own actions, and those of their team members. A study by the Harvard Business Review found that mindfulness training can improve three key characteristics that mark a successful leader, which are the ability to lead in difficult situations, the capacity for collaboration, and resilience.

At EI Advantage, we’re dedicated to helping leaders and their teams alike become more mindful and enhance their professional potential. You care about your employees, and investing in EI coaching can help them reach their professional goals. For more information about our executive coaching and team coaching services, get in touch today on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter.