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About the author
Michael Bunting is the founder of the leadership consultancy WorkSmart Australia, a certified B Corp. He has trained and coached thousands of leaders, from CEOs to front-line leaders. WorkSmart consults to organisations ranging from global multinationals through to medium-sized businesses in the area of leadership, engagement, alignment, values and culture. He is the author of A Practical Guide to Mindful Meditation and co-authored Extraordinary Leadership in Australia & New Zealand with Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, the world's premier researchers and authors in the field of leadership. He also teaches Mindful Leadership for Sydney University's award-winning Global Executive MBA.
Michael regularly contributes articles for industry magazines including CEO Magazine, BRW, SmartCompany and Inside HR. He has also appeared on Sky Business News and several radio stations. He delivers large-scale keynote presentations at industry events, trade shows and company off-sites.
Michael has run a disciplined personal mindfulness practice for more than 23 years and has taught mindful leadership to businesses and government for more than 16 years. Michael holds two business degrees and a postgraduate diploma in mindfulness-based psychotherapy.
He lives with his family in Sydney, Australia.
Introduction
How mindfulness impacts leadership
One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.
When I started my personal transformation journey at the age of 22, fresh out of studying business at university, I had no idea what I was signing up for. I was starting what seemed like a cool process of gathering knowledge by taking evening classes in practical philosophy, depth psychology and mindfulness meditation. I thought this would somehow make me special.
What I did not realise at the time was how delightfully humbling the process would be – that it would bring me into direct, truthful contact with my confusion, my deep conditioning, my self-obsession, my painful insecurity, my need to feel validated by always being ‘right'… and so much more. Rather than making me special it exposed a wonderful ordinariness in me.
Now, as I look back on years of disciplined mindfulness practice, the inquiry processes, the failures and successes, the laughter and the tears, I see that mastery of oneself is more about removal than addition. It's about stripping off the masks and pretences that keep us feeling isolated. It's about letting go of beliefs and ideas that keep us locked in self-defeating habits. It's about dissolving the inner judge, surrendering the burden of a busy mind, and rediscovering the innate love and wisdom that have been with us all along. It's a mastery that clears the conditioned patterns that confine us.
And as we let go, we begin to connect with our deepest, truest selves. In a sense, we take Pinocchio's journey. We become real and authentic, and our artificial selves fade away. As the parts of us that we want to hide from ourselves and the world are revealed, we are empowered to fully embrace our whole selves. This is how we find authentic joy and meaning in our lives.
What is mindfulness?
I define mindfulness as maintaining an open hearted awareness of our thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations and environment in the present moment. It is paying attention in the present moment purposefully, warm-heartedly and non-judgementally. It is experiencing and accepting the present moment as it really is – not how we want it to be, think it should be or perceive it to be, but as it really is.
Kevin Pickhardt, the CEO of Pharos, a print management solutions company headquartered in New York, gave me his beautiful definition of mindfulness: ‘Being mindful is our ability to pay attention and respond to every situation in the healthiest way possible – to accept whatever happens and respond with kindness, compassion and understanding.'
Through meditation and other practices we become more aware of our habitual reactions, expand the gap between stimulus and response and make wiser choices. We learn to see the innermost motivations for our actions and become more honest with ourselves. We learn to be the observer of our thoughts, rather than identifying with them and getting caught up in the mental stories we create. In short, we become profoundly self-aware.
The extensive research I will share with you in this book shows that mindfulness is not a new age, intangible abstraction for lofty-minded seekers of spiritual enlightenment. It is a concrete discipline proven to provide real, measurable benefits for your behaviour, performance, health and happiness. It is a well-developed, thoroughly substantiated, evidence-based process for gaining clarity and accessing and developing your greatest potential. As my friend and colleague Charlotte Thaarup-Owen, founder of the Mindfulness Clinic, puts it, ‘Mindfulness practice enables us to gradually learn to use the mind just as a tool, rather than as a tool and an obstacle. Our past conditioning embedded in our mind often gets in our way and causes us to make poor decisions. Mindfulness trains the mind to become present so that we can greet every experience with wisdom and freshness and start responding instead of reacting.'
The integration of mindfulness and leadership
Within a few years of starting my journey with mindfulness I was fortunate to meet two wonderful mentors who taught me the connections between mindfulness and leadership. As mindfulness became my deepest passion, they invited me to teach and make a living from the work. This was at a time when very few organisations offered transformational leadership development programs, let alone mindfulness training. Back in the late nineties mindfulness was a radical idea, even stigmatised. I took a great risk when I left my own thriving paper merchant business and joined them in the trailblazing venture of teaching mindfulness and leadership to business and government.
But it worked, and far exceeded my expectations. The programs were radically successful. Before any research on mindfulness was available, people connected with the elegant common sense of mindfulness in a leadership and transformational context, and the results were usually life changing.
The key is the integration of mindfulness and leadership. Just being mindful is not enough. Even with serious mindfulness training we can still be poor leaders. But when mindfulness is fully integrated into leadership, exponential progress can be made. This book marries research-based mindfulness practices and leadership behaviours to provide a practical model for improving your leadership and your life. For me, that has been the greatest reward of this work – supporting leaders to truly transform themselves and their teams.
I don't think the leaders I've worked with had much idea what they were taking on when they said yes to authentic, mindful leadership and personal development. They did not realise that the familiar ground they were standing on would be shaken. We like the word transformation, but the process is a whole lot grittier than the advertising. As one of my favourite awareness teachers once put it, ‘Most of us are not prepared to sign up for transformation, we just want to become a caterpillar with wings. But that is not a butterfly.' The caterpillar does not survive the process of becoming a butterfly.
Transformation is the territory of true leadership. The process of reinvention calls for a spirit of adventure. A transformational leader is willing to stay young, a beginner, an adventurer inside and out. They are also ordinary people. The work of true transformation is just that: work. It takes no special talent or skill. But it does take an uncommon determination to face our fears, reactivity, avoidance patterns and insecurities and to keep going. It takes strength.
Developing as a leader is about cultivating our inner strength to stay true under fire, to ask questions we don't know the answer to, to stay balanced when our world is turning upside down, to stay kind and respectful when the heat of anger and frustration is coursing through our veins, to courageously hold ourselves and others accountable when we want to slip into avoidance and self-justification.