Bringing a virtual meeting with a new client to a close I asked, are there any remaining questions? A member of the team, silent and mainly looking down until then, slowly raised his head and said softly, “What I want to know is, how do we keep the faith?”
Pensive nods filled the Zoom room. Over the past year they’d gone through a merger, significantly downsized staff, seen a drop in funding and clients because of the pandemic, and found working from home very challenging. Nerves were frayed around the edges.
We’ve all discovered that remaining resilient during a pandemic is a challenge. Chats with co-workers, checking the common room for bagels, or stepping into team meetings encouraged new ideas, decreased anxiety, stimulated connections. But as months of working at home and shelter-in-place continue, our emotional and psychological wellbeing are affected. A general air of malaise sets in and it gets harder to deal with the pressure, manage stress, and face the isolation.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot. What helps us keep the faith that our families, our jobs, our companies, our planet will be alright? How do we stay strong, flexible, buoyant and productive and help each other do the same? Although a close relationship with spirit can be very important, I’m not speaking here about a spiritually based faith.
In times of disruptive change, when the world isn’t the way it was or the way we expected it to be, faith is finding the trust and confidence to keep going, feel our feelings without being in complaint mode, speak in a way that is reassuring and even encouraging. Generating an inner stability, we can act as faith-keepers in our organizations – grounded and steady while open and responsive.
Cultivating mindfulness through meditation has been found to set in place a calm internal atmosphere. Realistically optimistic we can stand for and believe our capacity to make it through, in ourselves, in our organizations, in our leadership.
Mindful awareness can be thought of as a way of relating to experience, moment by moment. Over time, practicing mindful meditation invites us to pause before reacting. We gain a wider view, calmly listen, remember what really matters, and develop an encouraging mind-heart connection. We end up feeling more resourceful. To learn more check out my colleague Marc Lesser’s upcoming Mindful Change-Makers Summit.
Why should leaders and organizations care about mindfulness? Research from Shapiro, Wang, and Peltason published in Cambridge University Press Mindfulness in Organizations: Foundations, Research, and Applications, explores why. “The thoughtful incorporation of mindfulness into a professional culture can evolve a work environment toward a richer and more creative state, where one's ‘work’ arises from a state of being rather than reactive doing.”
They found that mindfulness offers the potential to transform our internal and external environments in a way that nurtures growth, emotional intelligence, creativity, and innovation. It awakens the capacity to respond to life with an open mind and a wise heart.
The practice of mindfully setting the heart and mind creates personal benefits as Ruth King, author, meditation teacher and founder of the Mindful of Race Institute describes:
…Our disguises fade, and our aggression diminishes. Our mind becomes tranquil and more manageable, and we act more wisely toward others and ourselves. Not only does meditation decrease fear and worry, it also reduces our heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, oxygen consumption, perspiration, and muscle tension, and improves our immune system and neurotransmitter function.
She goes on to say, “We learn how to stay present without distortion or judgment and discover through our own discernment that the present moment is worth returning to and living fully. Meditation invites us to slow down so that we can experience ourselves clearly, lovingly, and wisely.”
Here are 3 more mindfulness practices that I’ve personally used and seen leaders employ to cultivate, sharpen, and develop a mindful state of consciousness —Gratitude, Breath, and Love.
1. GRATITUDE - Gratitude, as a practice, becomes a place to come from, an appreciative way of relating to experience that reduces unconscious reactions and increases resonance. When consciously grateful, whether for health, a sunny day, a hair cut, or a text from a friend we connect with heart and a sense of appreciation for what is working, what is in place, the foundation where we stand.
Without a personal practice of gratitude, it’s easy for leaders and their teams to lose faith, to become lost in problems, trapped in a deficit mindset of all that is wrong with the current situation, as dissatisfaction builds wave after wave of dissonance. Instead, when we practice appreciation, we search together for what’s good, life-giving, joyful.
The practice can be simple and is better when shared. Just before sleep, my husband Rick and I ask each other, “What are you grateful for today?” We are often surprised by the answers. This has become a practice, one of the ways we keep the faith, building our connection, our trust and confidence in each other, and in our lives.
2. BREATHE - Conscious leaders attend to breath as a way cultivate mindfulness. In a recent Inspiring Minds Series, from the Mind and Life Institute, Sharon Salzburg reminded us to breathe, simply breathe. “Settle back. Let the breath come to you. You’re breathing anyway. All you need to do is feel it. Settle back. Let the breath come to you. Rest.”
Practicing being aware of our breath and sensing where we feel the breath in our body can have subtle, nuanced effects. I see leaders make better choices when actively practicing mindful breathing and leveraging their use of a pause.
Following the breath is simple. We breathe. We bring our attention to the in breath and out breath and follow the sensations in our body, whether sitting at home, running a mountain trail, or walking through a city street. Or try Breathing, an app developed by Edwin Stern and Deepak Chopra to be reminded to bring heart rate, blood pressure and brainwave function into a coherent frequency.
Over time we begin to witness the miracle of our breath, the oxygen continuously generated on earth, the remarkable balance that has been just right for the existence of humans, and all life.
Mindful breathing is above all about showing up in this moment to inhabit our lives. Everything we do is enabled or undermined by how much we are in the here and now. Cultivating an awareness of our breath is a process of clearing out excess to reveal what is essential - a calm, creative alertness.
When we moved into our home thirty years ago, the garden was overgrown, a tangle of wild plum, black acacia and ivy. As we cleared out, pruned back, eliminated, and fertilized, a remarkable transformation occurred. Flowering quince, stately oaks, resilient pink amaryllis and white cala lilies reclaimed their natural shape and vigorously began to grow. So too, we can experience the freedom to grow as we mindfully return to breath.
3. LOVE - Leaders who consciously develop their ability to connect and act from love recognize that their hearts are a potent force for change in the process of transformation. We think of love as something that happens to us, sometimes for us and sometimes against us. Love is also a choice and when we close our eyes and meditate on love, we can open, listen, become curious, and experience the field of love that lies beyond particular situations or people. Sitting and sensing love we discover that love is not somewhere to go to or get to, but rather a place to come from.
Leaders who engage in these sustained practices begin to recognize love as an inner state that is wider and deeper than what is happening in this moment. Over time, instead of reacting with criticism or blame, they face challenging situations with equanimity, activating the voice of love, kindness and compassion to inform their efforts.
There’s so much more I’d like to say here, especially about the importance of love since maintaining a sense of community is as challenging as its ever been. If you’d like to take these practices deeper into your life, consider joining a community of like-minded leaders as we explore these 3 practices and more in our upcoming online program The Courage of the Heart.
Events in the world are happening faster and faster. Control is impossible to maintain. Both research and actual results in teams and organizations show that conscious leaders cultivating mindfulness provide a calm center, a container steady and resilient enough to ride the waves of continual uncertainties as we figure out together our wisest way through the next change.
Many of these resilient leaders are leaders we do not see behind the scenes adapting, innovating, radiating calm and a sense of faith when the rest of us are in turmoil.
Mindfulness returns us to a bedrock of trust, confidence and faith. When we take a few minutes every day to practice, we gratefully receive the grace and blessings that surround us, attend to the stillness at the center of the breath, and increase the transformative power of love.
As I write this our family dog, Stanley, comes into the room. Ears up, tail alert, he’s keeping the faith that eventually I will rise, and he will get his morning walk. He invites me to live in this present moment and reminds me that there is fun to be had.
Ready to walk out the door into the sweet territory of nature, I am aware of those leaders mindfully being of service to a vision of love, healing and health for our beloved planet.
How do we keep the faith? Together let’s attend to and cultivate the moments when faith happens, when we are picked up and carried as the first narcissus blooms, a new baby is born, and the sun breaks through the trees.