Google leads the way – again

Google, Pepsico, Harvard Business School and others leading business organizations are teaching mindfulness to combat stress and enhance productivity and creativity.

Do you create moments of mindfulness, or is your mind on unconscious auto-response all day? A mindful moment is that instant that allows you to be absolutely and fully present in your most powerful, creative, knowledgeable and wise self. It is when you take your mind off auto-response and consciously gain control of your thoughts and emotions. The mindful moment is where mental magic happens. It’s your best stuff.

Benefits of mindfulness in business. You will be:

1. More creative
2. A better problem-solver
3. A wiser decisionmaker.

Mindfulness allows you to connect information from different parts of your mind that you can’t connect when stressed. When you are in a deep level of mindfulness during problem-solving, it’s like dropping into a space deep in your mind with an infinite number of possibilities.

Psycho-physiological benefits of mindfulness development include:

• Decreased stress, anxiety and worry
• Decreased emotional reactivity (better impulse control)
• Decreased chronic pain
• Improved immune system functions
• Increased focus
• Improved quality of sleep and working memory

According to Scientific American Mind (April 2013), mindfulness decreases the release of cortisol, often referred to as the stress hormone. Lower levels of cortisol are associated with feelings of relaxation, contentment and inner peace. Cortisol also blocks the most important part of your brain to use as a leader, the pre-frontal cortex, often called the "executive" brain.

Mindfulness also allows us to essentially be happier and healthier people. Time magazine supported this conclusion in a February  2014 cover story entitled, “The Mindful Revolution.” And here is an amazing 30-second video on the benefits of mindfulness on the news show 60 Minutes. It shows the change in brain waves when you create a Mindful moment. It happens in about one second!

Many of our highly respected leaders have been developing mindfulness for years, because being mindful is powerful. Harvard Business School teaches mindfulness; one of my Fearless team members, a former Buddhist monk, teaches mindfulness at Google and Pepsico.

Mindful Moments Can be Transcendent

When you have trained your mind so that you can consciously choose to have mindful moments (this can be accomplished fairly quickly with the right training), you create expanded possibilities and can make higher conscious choices and decisions from these possibilities. When you are being mindful, you can connect information from different parts of your mind that you can’t when stressed. Thus, it allows you to be more creative, a better problem-solver and better decision-maker, like the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who practiced mindful and other meditation forms for years. His years of meditation enabled him to use his mind to imagine and create disruptive technologies that others couldn’t begin to imagine.

When you are more mindful, you are more conscious; when you are more consciousness, you can have a consciousness-raising influence on everyone around you. Mindful moments are where mental magic happens.

Whether it’s how you lead yourself, your family, a team, an organization or a business, you can become a more mindful leader. I invite you to join the revolution and become more of a Fearless Leader. The third section of the book Fearless Leaders has easy techniques to help you become more mindful, and coaching  along with Fearless Mindful retreats (coming this summer) can further accelerate your learning.