Tag: Mindfulness

Checking-in with yourself

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RocksMany of us have been extremely busy during the last months and still are. While the days are slowly becoming longer and the sunlight warmer – at least here in the French speaking part of Switzerland – let me give you some ideas for your daily informal mindfulness practice (and even if you are not practicing every day, this will also be very helpful for you, I am sure).

  • First of all, please take a moment to settle in with yourself, take a deep breath and become aware of the air streaming in and out of your body. Try to feel your feet and how they feel on the ground, whether you are walking, standing or sitting. Move your toes and explore the sensations that you are having right now, in your feet. It might sound strange but it is actually an excellent exercise for grounding yourself and becoming more centred.
  • Secondly, become aware of the tensions in your body; how are your shoulders feeling? What about your neck and your back? Is there any particular sensation in one or the other part of your body? If so, try to stay with that sensation for a moment. Explore it in a non-judging way.
    • Is it possible to release the tension, intentionally?
    • Is it possible to breathe deeply into it?
    • Does the feeling change, soften or maybe even go away?

If you are at home, you could also observe yourself in the mirror, watching out for tensions that you are able to see in your face, your jaw in particular.

    • Are you clenching your teeth?
    • What happens when you smile at yourself, does the tension go away?
  • It would indeed be helpful, if you could try to ‘check-in’ with yourself every time you are encountering strong emotions (positive or negative).
    • What is happening in your body and where during these strong emotional moments?

Doing this on a regular basis will make you accustomed to your bodily reactions and will help you noticing what is happening even before your brain knows what’s going on. Try it for yourself, you will be surprised of what you’ll find out!

Have an excellent week,
Jenny

4 tips on how to remain serene and creative throughout the week

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Mindful LeadershipBefore you start the new week, let me give some tips on how to remain serene and creative even though you have to cope with a flood of incoming mails, various problems, family issues etc.:

  • When you wake up in the morning, smile to yourself; your mood will directly improve.
  • Every time you feel tight or stressed, remember to breathe. Even better: take a couple of deep breaths, walk a couple of steps and stretch; you will immediately feel better and tensions will loosen.
  • Take the habit of establishing some so-called ‘micro-practices’: a certain trigger makes you take a particular action reminding you of staying mindful and switching off the auto-pilot. Example: whenever you are stopping at a red light with your car, take a moment to check in with you body, to feel what is going on and to breathe a couple of times deeply. Or: whenever your phone rings, instead of responding immediately, take a moment for centering yourself and feeling your body.
  • Do something creative every day; be it arranging the kitchen table for dinner in the evening in a different way than usual, giving a creative input while being in a team meeting etc. You will see that the more you do that, the more ideas you will get!

Here’s wishing you an excellent week!

Jenny

Communication skills

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See on Scoop.it – Mindful Leadership & Intercultural Communication

Communication

Being able to communicate with others is one of the best life skills a person can develop. Someone who can effectively communicate thoughts, ideas, and feelings is better equipped for success.

Jenny Ebermann‘s insight:

Excellent post on communication, great read!

See on principlesofstrategy.com

No more resolutions

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It’s that time of the year again, people take resolutions that they never live up to (or at least rarely) and everything is supposed to be better, brighter in the New Year. The fact is though that YOU are the architect of your life and that self-awareness and being kind to yourself should be at the basis of whatever you strive for.

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Start with acknowledging how you feel and where this can be felt in your body, focus and sharpen your attention on all these small things going on at this very moment. Don’t judge, plan, think. Simply BE… You hold the key to happiness, you simply need to pay attention to how life unfolds every single second. Think about something that made you feel warm and loved. Stay with that feeling and see what it does inside of you. Smile to yourself and be present. Moment after moment. Happy New Year!

A few words you might want to reflect upon

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Sun light

As I truly had a re-energizing and stimulating weekend in my silent retreat in the mountains, let me share this quote with you, which I find very inspirational:

“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.” John Lennon (via goodreads.com)

Have a great week and thanks for reading!

Jenny

Challenging Myself: A Mindfulness Retreat

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Mountain viewTomorrow, I will be going on a three day silent retreat; it will be the first time that I will be staying a couple of days. So far, I have ‘only’ experienced one day at a time. The most intriguing thing for me is not the fact that there will be no speaking; nor is it the fact that I will be alone with myself, looking deeply into what lies beyond the conscious mind. No, it is that I will be sharing my room with somebody I don’t know and I won’t get to know as we don’t speak.

Usually I like company and as a student I have always enjoyed these moments of sharing a room or an apartment with people. This time though, it will be different as there will be no ‘getting to know each other’. It will simply be a matter of non-judging, and adapting an appreciative attitude towards the other person for a couple of days. Well, this might be part of the experience but it still sounds a little ‘frightening’ to me!

I am almost certain that I will encounter some reluctance to stay focused and it will be interesting to see how I will deal with these moments of ambiguity and uncertainty. I am sure though that the experience will make me grow and allow me to re-charge my batteries at the end of this year.

2013 has indeed been full of action and change. The road ahead is not yet 100% clear but the mist is starting to lift, like clouds hanging on the mountains and finally disappearing. I wonder what three days of silence will bring… definitely some rest and centeredness!

“The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it.” Thích Nhất Hạnh

Take-aways from D. Goleman’s presentation in Lausanne

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Balloons in Sky

Yesterday I had the chance to attend Daniel Goleman’s presentation at the IMD in Lausanne. The room was full and people were attentively listening to what was entitled: “How can Global Leaders focus for High Performance”. I had never seen Goleman live before and I must say that it was a very interesting and enriching conference!

Firstly, did you know for example that when somebody says something that hurts you or when you simply receive an email that annoys you, your full bodily reaction is activated (stress hormones being released, muscles ready to run etc.) exactly as if you were fleeing from a predator like in ancient times? The simple thought of a negative event can in fact already trigger that reaction…

Secondly, were you aware that there are three different kinds of empathy[1]?

  1. Cognitive Empathy (understanding the mental models of people)
  2. Emotional Empathy (coming from the mirror neurons, feeling physically what another person is feeling)
  3. Empathic Concern (you not only feel with the person and understand her/him but you are also inclined to help)

Thirdly, also interesting, were Goleman’s explanations around what differentiates a top leader from a “mainstream” one. Not astonishingly, three areas of focus[2] are needed:

  1. Inner Focus (understand, manage and lead yourself)
  2. Focus on other people (i.e. empathy, to be able to understand what other people are thinking, feeling, how to communicate with others etc.)
  3. Focus on other systems (the surrounding parameters, the forces that impact an organization)

Once all three are combined, leaders excel in their tasks and are also perceived by peers and employees to be thriving.

And finally, to my surprise, Goleman even brought a simple mindfulness exercise to the audience, who sat in silence for a while, listening to his voice giving the instructions. What an inspiring moment!

Mindfulness according to him is “fitness for the brain”, training attention and focus. The more it is done, the more the brain changes the way it operates and reacts to stimuli and the better one will also be able to “listen” to the info coming from the gut (the somatic markers).

Bringing mindfulness into the workplace using different formats and tools to deal with difference, furthering not only internal communications, innovation and creativity but also self-awareness and efficiency in teams is what I am focusing on as a consultant/coach/trainer. If you are interested in learning more, I would be very pleased to hear from you!

And to end with a really nice old eskimo proverb that my mindfulness teacher brought to my attention yesterday and that I found back here:

Yesterday is ashes; tomorrow is wood. Only today does the fire burn brightly

Have a great weekend,
Jenny

[1] Compare also with this article : http://www.danielgoleman.info/three-kinds-of-empathy-cognitive-emotional-compassionate/

[2] Compare also with D. Goleman’s post: http://blog.haygroup.com/the-three-kinds-of-focus-every-leader-needs/

Mindful Leadership and the influence of emotions on trust

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Emotion: happyIn preparation of D. Goleman’s presence and presentation in Lausanne at the IMD later this week, I was reading some very interesting articles/research about emotions and their influence on trust.

As more and more leadership publications and organizational excellence discussions talk about emotions and how important these are for successful self-management, people-management and organizational functioning and well-being (for the company as a whole as well as for the people in it), I find their influence on trust highly important. Trust is indeed necessary for effective teamwork, functioning partnerships, management, social life etc. It really is the main ‘ingredient’ for making things happen, able to reduce the complexity that we are confronted at all times so that we can be together, work together, deal together in business matters and other things. Once lost, it is very difficult to re-build trust in whatever context.

Thanks to research conducted in the field of psychology and neuroscience we now slowly begin to better understand and value how our ‘brains’[1] function and why it is so important to listen to both of them. The idea, that certain emotions can influence trust is hence extremely interesting.

So far, I only knew of research identifying links between affective states (moods and emotions) and unrelated judgments[2] and not how specific emotions influence subsequent judgments. “Unlike moods, emotional states are typically shorter in duration (…)”[3] and they are more complex than moods. In their research, Jennifer Dunn and Maurice Schweitzer, found out the following correlation:

“Happiness and gratitude—emotions with positive valence—increase trust, and anger—an emotion with negative valence—decreases trust. Specifically, (…) emotions characterized by other-person control (anger and gratitude) and weak control appraisals (happiness) influence trust significantly more than emotions characterized by personal control (pride and guilt) or situational control (sadness). (…) Emotions do not influence trust when individuals are aware of the source of their emotions or when individuals are very familiar with the trustee.”

Applied to leadership, these findings are of great importance. As we have seen in one of my previous posts, certain mental qualities or attitudes, “(…) provide a rich soil in which the seeds of mindfulness can flourish: [4]

  1. Patience
  2. ‘Letting Go’
  3. Non-Judging
  4. Trust
  5. Generosity

To summarize: Under certain conditions, emotions such as happiness and gratitude thus increase trust whereas a key attitude for being able to plant the ‘seeds’ of mindfulness is also trust. If you thought that mindful leadership is out of your reach, well here’s a place to start!

 

 


[2] See Joseph P. Forgas for example

[3] Jennifer R. Dunn and Maurice E. Schweitzer:  “Feeling and Believing: The Influence of Emotion on Trust”, page 737

[4] Jon Kabat-Zinn: “Wherever you go, there you are”, New York 1994, p. 3.