Meditation and mindfulness are becoming popular day by day for many good results. Medical science has proven that Meditation and Mindfulness can help people to enhance their well-being.
Giant companies like Google, Linkedin, Apple, Nike, and Yahoo promote meditation and mindfulness practices for their employees.
There are many other famous companies that spend huge money on their employees to promote mindfulness because they understand the value and importance of these practices.
From this, you can predict the usefulness of Meditation and how it promotes good qualities and personality in a person.
What Meditation Can Do With Your Leadership?
Meditation or Mindfulness helps leaders to improve their emotional health, self-awareness, creativity, self-control, concentration, decision making, confidence, and five personality traits. Having these qualities in a leader, he or she works in a harmony with others and presents a great example of leadership.
In this article, we will discuss in detail that how meditation and mindfulness help leaders to grow the required qualities for good leadership. Along with this, I will share some scientific studies to support the claim.
Before we go further, you should know the qualities of a good leader or good leadership. A leader should possess a positive attitude, harmony with others, confidence, resilience, emotional intelligence, and communication skills. If Meditation could develop these characters, then it can be beneficial for leaders. So let’s find it out.
How Meditation And Mindfulness Help Leaders To Do Better Leadership
Regular practice of Meditation or Mindfulness can help a person to be a better leader and socialist. It helps to:
1) Enhance emotional health:
Mindfulness and Loving-kindness Meditation cultivate positive emotions in a person. With good emotions in the heart, A leader connects more deeply with the followers. As a result, a deep and healthy relationship could be developed between leader and followers, which accelerates the organization’s growth.
Emotions such as love, kindness, gratitude, and compassion work as stimuli for the mind and may derive many benefits for leaders.
We know that good relationships rely on exchanging positive feelings and thoughts. The same is true for leadership also. People like to work under a leadership that is based on the exchange of positivity, humanity, love, and affection.
One study suggests that people who practiced Mindfulness or loving-kindness meditation for 9 weeks experienced an increased level of positive emotions and well-being. So, a regular practice of Meditation or Mindfulness helps us to accumulate positive emotions day by day (1*).
2) Promote integrity:
As you know, Meditation and Mindfulness increase positive emotions in a person. When you are filled with positive emotions, you may work in harmony and build deep relations with others. So, the quality of integrity will naturally be formed in the leader, and then it transmits to followers.
You give respect and work in unity with others, and they do the same in return. Thus, strong moral principles are built in a company which leads to exponential growth.
3) Control stress and anxiety:
Many scientific studies suggest Mindfulness reduces mental stress and anxiety level.
If you are a leader or entrepreneur, you very well know that stress, anxiety, and depression decrease your efficiency, confidence, and productivity, and it can damage your relationships too. So it’s essential for leaders to own control over these negative factors.
Also, Mindfulness increases self-awareness which helps you to understand the cause of stress and provide better solutions.
With Mindfulness, you become more aware of what you are doing and what is happening around you, which gives mental clarity in difficult situations.
One research concluded that the transcendental meditation technique helps to reduce anxiety symptoms in high anxious patients. It was concluded that TM treatment is more effective than usual treatment or alternative treatment for anxiety disorder (2*).
4) Reduce negative thinking:
A negative thought is the root of every chaos. Stress, anxiety, or depression start from one negative thought and get bigger with contemplation.
Mindfulness breaks the cycle of negative thinking before it gets bigger. It gives you better control over your thinking process and constructively redirects the negative thought if it comes to mind.
So Mindfulness gives certain control to leaders over their negative thoughts and emotions.
In one interesting experiment, participants were asked to view the positive and negative images turn by turn. So at the end, results proved that participants who practiced Meditation or Mindful while watching negative images experienced fewer negative thoughts compared to the control group with no meditation practice. However, there was no difference in thoughts while seeing positive images (3*)
That means Mindfulness may attenuate thoughts that emphasize negativity but not those that emphasize positivity.
Related Post: Meditation Help With Negative Thoughts
5) Increase concentration and lengthen attention span:
As a leader, it’s important to have the ability to concentrate more on a particular subject. This quality will help you to solve problems and work on a project with efficacy.
Meditation is a practice to cultivate concentration for an extended period. So with time, your ability to focus will naturally increase.
In this world of technology, everyone is ready to grab our attention. And our minds become like a monkey who constantly change directions without our knowing. You may have experienced this when you open your phone to search for something on the internet, but in a fraction of a second, you get distracted by notifications and start checking out Instagram or FB feeds; then suddenly you realize, oh, I had to search something in google.
So to overcome these types of distractions, leaders should practice Mindfulness or Meditation to enhance their concentration level with a longer attention span.
The difference between an ordinary person and the great person lies in their degree of concentration. – Swami Vivekananda
One study found that regular brief meditation session improves attention in Novices. In this experiment, participants did mindfulness meditation for 10 minutes daily, and they experienced better attention faculty while completing the allotted tasks (4*).
6) Increase mental clarity:
Mindfulness increases self-awareness which gives you insights of what is happening in your mind and allows you to tackle thoughts, emotions, and situations around you.
With the increased awareness, you can direct your energies to find solutions, boost your productivity, make better decisions, and create something innovative.
Meditation provides mental clarity in negative situations and increases the perception of leaders to manage negative circumstances.
7) Good decision making:
Leaders have to make decisions very often. The future of the organization always relies on leaders’ decisions. So, the leader needs to have mental stability and good perception in order to make the right decision.
As discussed above, Meditation provides mental clarity and a focused mind, which leads to good decision-making power in leaders.
Meditation cultivates good qualities in practitioners, so the leader who regularly practices Meditation becomes a good person and leads him or her to make decisions alliance with the goodness of everyone.
8) Improve communication:
Meditation improves the basic five personality traits: openness, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism.
With the regular practice of Meditation, leaders can cultivate more openness of talkativeness, acceptance of new ideas, positive value exchange, helpfulness nature, and integrity with others.
Also Read: How Meditation Influences Your Personality?
9) Increase confidence:
Confidence requires a positive mindset, When you are full of positive energy, your confidence soar.
Mindfulness gives you choices of what to choose, negative or positive. Obviously, leaders will choose to have positive thoughts and good feelings, which develops a positive mindset in them, and with a positive mindset, leaders stay high in confidence.
10) Boost creativity:
One study suggests that Mindfulness may promote creativity and creative problem-solving skills.
Creative leaders always stand one step ahead in their industries. They manage and guide others with their creative ideology. They bring new ideas of innovation and help the company to grow.
11) Bringing self-control:
There are many stressful situations that come when leaders have to tame their emotional state. Otherwise, rage or misbehavior may damage the relationship between leader and followers. So, it’s necessary for leaders to own self-control over their anger.
Mindfulness gives leaders better control over their negative sphere and poor emotional state. For example, with mindfulness practice, a leader may control anger and easily direct his or her attention from blaming others to find solutions of problems.
12) Improve sleep:
Nearly half of the population in the US are suffering from insomnia (sleep disorder); how awful this is!
When you haven’t taken sufficient rest, you feel low in energy, and everything seems unpleasant. As a leader, when you are struggling with sleep problems, it’s difficult to manage a team, attend meetings, and work on a project.
Some scientific studies suggest that Meditation helps redirect your wild racing thoughts, which often leads to insomnia at night. Also, it takes you to a calm, relaxed, and tension-free state of mind where you can easily fall asleep.
One research found that people who practiced Meditation regularly stay asleep longer and had improved insomnia severity (5*).
If you practice Mindfulness and Meditation regularly, these 12 qualities may grow in you, which make you a better person and a better leader. Once you practice Meditation, these virtues will gradually rise in your leadership, and may your followers are benefited from these.
Also Read: How Consistent Meditation Benefit A Person?
You may be amazed that Meditation and Mindfulness can be beneficial in these many ways. But the list doesn’t end here; there are many other aspects of life, such as personal development, relationship, health, spirituality, and overall well-being, where Meditation could bring positive changes in you.
But we will not go deep into these topics, otherwise, it will take a long time.
Remember, what are the benefits of Meditation described here for leadership ask for regular practice of Meditation or Mindfulness. Daily practice for 10-15 minutes or more is necessary to bring these advantages.
Like learning any new skill takes time and effort, the same applies here. You have to put consistent efforts to become good at it. You will face challenges in the beginning but never settle and keep practicing.
How to practice Meditation and Mindfulness to be a better leader?
This is the most important question to develop leadership skills, so pay close attention till the end.
Related Post: 9 Ways To Cultivate Mindfulness
You can practice any meditation with which you are most comfortable. Here, I have listed different meditation techniques from which you choose anyone.
- Guided Meditation: In this, you have to follow meditation instructions from an instructor in the form of recorded video or audio.
- Mantra meditation: In this, you have to recite or utter a mantra (sacred word, phrase, or god name) and have to rest attention on it.
- Japa meditation: It’s the same as mantra practice, but you have to use mala while repeating a mantra.
- Mindfulness meditation: In this, you pay attention to your breath, thoughts, emotions, or body sensations. Also, you can try to cultivate awareness of what you are doing and what is happening around you.
- Object-focused Meditation: In this, you have to concentrate on a physical or virtual object for an extended period of time. Gazing at candle flame is a popular object-focused meditation practice.
- Loving-kindness Meditation: it’s the practice of transmitting positive emotions such as love, kindness, compassion, and gratitude to your acquaintances, deity, or enemies.
You can practice any one of these meditation techniques and invite good changes in your leadership.
Steps to practice Meditation:
- Find a quiet place where you can be peaceful and relaxed
- Sit in a cross-legged posture or sit on the chair, place your palm on your knee and keep your spine comfortably erect
- Set a timer of 10-15 minutes or more
- Slowly take 5-6 deep breaths
- Now practice your favorite meditation technique. It could be repeating the mantras, focusing on an object or breathing, spreading positive emotions, or following guided meditation instructions
For the rest of the day, you can practice Mindfulness by being aware of your thoughts, emotions, or body sensations and be conscious about what you are doing and what is happening around you.
Also Read: Mindful Communication Exercises, Tips, And Benefits
This way, you should practice Meditation daily and develop the habit of Meditation in your life. If you do this with a consistency very soon, you may find positive changes in your personality and leadership.
Resources:
- Positive Emotion Correlates of Meditation Practice: A Comparison of Mindfulness Meditation and Loving-kindness Meditation
- Effects of the transcendental meditation technique on trait anxiety: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials
- Does mindfulness attenuate thoughts emphasizing negativity, but not positivity?
- Brief Mindfulness Meditation Improves Attention in Novices: Evidence From ERPs and Moderation by Neuroticism
- A Randomized Controlled Trial of Mindfulness Meditation for Chronic Insomnia
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