Mindfulness is now entering into the lexicon of the business world more and more readily. As we learn more about mindfulness and its benefits, I've found we often think of it in terms of stress relief as well as increased focus. But mindfulness can also help develop a key skill that leaders need in order to be successful: emotional intelligence.
As a leadership trainer on soft skills — including emotional intelligence — and a certified teacher of a mindfulness program originally started by Google, the marriage of mindfulness and emotional intelligence makes perfect sense to me. Mindfulness is a key tool in understanding ourselves, our own thoughts and feelings and what is important to us. It can help you develop self-awareness, which is the first component of emotional intelligence and is the basis for developing all of the other emotional intelligence skills.
As you become more present, you can understand your emotional triggers, your strengths and weaknesses and your motivations in life. With that understanding, I believe you can then lead a more meaningful life focused on what is most important and fulfilling. In my experience, practicing mindfulness can also enable you to become more thoughtful and deliberate, rather than reactive in your interactions with others.
But in some ways — and just as importantly — mindfulness can help enhance your relationships, which is the key to success as people and in organizations. Simply put, emotional intelligence can help you become a more effective leader. Through my learnings in the mindfulness program and my experience as a leadership coach, I've seen how mindfulness supports developing better relationships. Below are three tools to help you get started:
1. Empathy
This is the ability to experience and understand what another feels while still being able to discern one’s own feelings. For leaders, empathy is a great tool for developing connections with others. Data and neuroscience now show that mindfulness develops self-awareness as well as empathy.
By understanding yourself better through practicing mindfulness, you can begin to understand other people's feelings as well, which helps you to empathize with them. One small way to begin practicing empathy can be in your next meeting or in a one-on-one session with a team member. Pay attention to their body language and facial expressions to help you better get to know them and understand how they're feeling. As you grow in your ability to connect with others through empathy, I've found your relationships deepen and your bonds grow stronger.
2. Difficult Conversations
When there is dissonance among people, disagreements can occur. Leaders have to deal with many difficult conversations, and it is through this skill that conflict can be worked through in relationships. Mindfulness is a tool that can help develop this capacity, especially in developing the ability to understand another person’s perspective so that you are not only reacting from your own point of view. Often in challenging conversations, we get stuck in our own perspective, which can heighten emotional reactions to the conflict.
With the practice of mindfulness, you can get out of that stuck place and also understand your impact on others. You can do this first by taking a pause and not reacting in a difficult conversation with anger or frustration.
Secondly, mindfulness keeps you more present in the conversation so that you are not overtaken by your emotions and can connect back to your prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that helps us make rational decisions, so you can have a more productive conversation.
Finally, with mindfulness, you can understand and empathize with the other person's point of view, which can lead to more win-win solutions taken from both people's perspective.
3. Compassion
Compassion is the ability to move into action and be of service after empathizing with another person’s emotions. For example, you might notice someone on your team is emotionally triggered in the workplace. Instead of being reactive in these types of situations, ask how you can best support them so they can begin moving out of the trigger. Also, discuss what caused the trigger and how to work on avoiding it in the future.
Another way you can lead with compassion is to focus on helping your employees when they are in distress from working on a task by offering your support, assistance and mentorship. You can then help develop their skills in that particular task for the future.
Mindfulness practices — such as dedicated meditation or mindful walking sessions or quick bursts of deep breathing — are key tools in developing emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is a bedrock of building good relationships and becoming a good leader. With these key benefits, isn’t mindfulness worth giving a try?
