Mindfulness and Leadership

This is an excerpt from chapter 5 of my book THE NATURAL STRATEGIST: Cultivating a Mindset of Care and Connection.

Ellen Langer, renowned American psychologist and professor at Harvard University, emphasizes that mindfulness is a key factor in high performance in a variety of fields. In her research, Langer has found people who exhibit these mindful traits are often at the top of their fields. In business, for example, she found that Fortune 500 CEOs who were more mindful tended to have more successful companies (Langer 2014).

In the arts, musicians and artists who were more mindful were more creative and produced higher quality work. In sports, athletes who were more mindful tended to perform better and recover faster from injuries.

Mindfulness is a critical component of success in many areas of life. By being mindful, individuals are able to approach their work with greater focus and attention, which can lead to better performance and greater achievement.

A study Langer conducted with Arizona State University music professor Timothy Russell tested the practical effects of mindful music-making. As a profession, musicians play the same pieces of music over and over again. The constant repetition and familiarity leads to boredom. For this particular experiment, orchestra musicians were asked to play Brahms’s First Symphony twice, with different instructions (Langer, Russell, and Eisenkraft 2009).

The first time, the musicians were told to reproduce the best performance they had ever heard. Before the second time, they were instructed to play as well as they could, adding subtle new nuances to their performance.

After listening to recordings of both performances, listeners unaware of the experiment reported they heard a difference between the two performances and overwhelmingly preferred the mindful one. The musicians themselves also found the second performance more enjoyable, describing it as having more energy and a wider dynamic range.

This suggests performance can be improved without compromising discipline by being open to new nuances. Applying this principle in a business environment seems to suggest encouraging our employees to build on their individual strengths will lead to better performance as a whole (Langer 2014). Imagine the extraordinary results we could achieve if all our team members were fully present and mindful.

Mindfulness isn’t much harder than mindlessness.

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