July Hiatus: Jack Ricchiuto's "Mindful Leadership"

While I'm on my July blogging hiatus, I'd thought I'd share with you a few posts from friends whose thought leadership I admire. Here's Jack Ricchiuto on "Mindful Leadership":

Mindful Leadership: The Key To High Engagement Organizations

It’s interesting that we have two kinds of leaders today. We have those who actively create cultures of engagement and those who actually engender disengagement.

What makes the difference? Is it their pedigrees or salaries, personality types or track records? Is it the obvious or a more subtle chemistry of factors?

We now have compelling evidence that our quality of attention is the key differentiating factor in how we learn, work and live. It is equally true for how people lead.

High engagement leaders are mindful leaders.

Mindful leaders live in the present. They pay attention to the uniqueness and possibilities of each moment. Clear that now is the only time they ever have, they exude a sense of presence that is contagiously engaging, buoyant and realistic.

The practice of presence gives them an agile sense of timing and an inspiring sense of perspective. They are flexible without being distracted and passionate without being myopic. They treat change as inevitable and vital.

Unmindful leaders live in the past and future. Their sense of timing is regularly off. They come across as somewhere between distracted and obsessed. As much inauthentic lip service they deliver otherwise, they treat change as the enemy to their illusion of power.

They stay untrustworthy with unspoken agendas and unrealistic in expectations because they don’t live in the present. Unmindful leaders squander an unproductive amount of time planning and reporting because these excuse them from accountability in the present.

Mindful leaders get measurably more done because they are continuously engaged in the present. Even their sense of planning and reporting has the character of presence.

The world of an unmindful leader is a world of drama and dogma. The world of a mindful leader is a world of discovery and difference.

Mindful leaders treat conversations as opportunity spaces for action. They are always making agreements, generating and testing options, initiating and completing things. Regardless of agenda, duration or location, their meetings have a palpable feel of accomplishment and engagement. They do not allow people to unmindfully postpone the possible in self-fulfilling excuses about the impossible.

Unmindful leaders see vision as the assumptive delegation of action into the future. They think they’re demonstrating leadership by treating conversations as spaces for endless discussing, defending and dictating. Their meetings result in more meetings. Communication around them remains consistently fractured, fictional and frustrating.

Mindful leaders ask great questions that move people from uncertainty to creativity and talk to action. Unmindful leaders see conversations as opportunities to convert others to the narcissism of assumptions.

Mindful leaders engage people’s strengths, passions and connections. Unmindful leaders are consistently uninterested in these because their priority is fixing people’s weaknesses, deficiencies and differences.

Mindful leaders are regularly seen engaging by walking around. Unmindful leaders don’t have to look up from their screens and meeting tables because they remain intrinsically uninterested in the present.

Mindful people have little tolerance for unmindful leaders because their unmindfulness creates a culture of disengagement.

Unmindful people prefer the disengagement of unmindful leaders because it entitles them to a lack of accountability they prefer. Their refusal to share authentic feedback enables their disengaging leaders to conspire in the illusion that their unmindful leadership is responsible for what people achieve in spite of it.

Fortunately, there is an emerging genre of leaders who doubt the value of the unmindful model. They have an intuition that, even though unmindful leadership is normative and incentivised, it doesn’t create an environment that brings out the best in people. They seek to become more mindful in their approach to leadership.

They have a sense that the engagement of mindful leadership has far more benefits and fewer costs than disengagement from unmindful leadership.

The good news is that becoming a more mindful leader is completely possible because everyone already has all requisite skills.

We now have solid evidence that mindful leaders outperform unmindful leaders on every dimension of performance, development and interaction. The key to high engagement organizations is mindful leadership.

Every organization, school and community needs to demand nothing less.

…

Jack Ricchiuto is a writer, engagement artisan and author of “Abundant Possibilities: The Power Of Presence In An Intentional Life” released this month. More: JackRicchiuto.com

Thrivancy: The Practice of Happiness

My apologies to those who have been looking for new posts from The Green Skeptic. I've been on a brief hiatus the past few weeks for the holidays and to sort out some personal issues. I'll be back at it soon.

Meanwhile, I want to share with you some words of wisdom from my good friend Jack Ricchiuto, whose new book, The Joy of Thriving is coming out on January 15th (to correspond with his 60th birthday). You can read more about Jack and his work at DesigningLife.com and @zenext and about the book at JoyofThriving.com:

Happiness: The New Face of Thrivancy

Jack Ricchiuto

In societies where success is measured in units of economic advantage, happiness is talked about more as pursuit rather than practice.

Even though the US has lost its world leader status in more categories than most faithful nationals are willing to admit, it still retains global dominance in how to make the symbols of happiness more significant than the experience itself.

Since the 1950s, personal wealth in the US has doubled and happiness has declined. People with over $125 million in net worth are barely happier than the norm. Americans making more than $10 million annually are not significantly happier than the average. In the US and globally, 75% of employees are unhappy in their work at annual costs of over $300 billion. In the meantime, the country launched by Puritans annually spends $1.2 trillion on things they don't need, yielding ephemeral satisfaction that wanes before the next cycle of the moon.

In the recent survey I conducted with 300 people from around the world, the happiest people report that happiness is about practice rather than purchase, doing rather than debt.

92% of the happiest people say that their happiness is about what they focus on in the present. 96% report that happiness is a choice and as a practice, it can be learned. All of the evidence from the neurosciences strongly agree.

Peer reviewed neuroscience research empirically demonstrates that individuals can be trained to be 25 percent happier through various training programs in six weeks. As much as marketers would like to have us believe, there is little empirical evidence that authentic happiness can be measured in square feet, per capita income or big boxes per square mile.

"We can make Gross National Happiness more inspiring and engaging than Gross Domestic Product."

All demographic variables combined, including age, sex, income, race, and education, are responsible for only 15 percent of the difference in happiness levels between individuals. From my research, happiness flows from the prime practices of appreciation, generosity, interest, lightness and easy.

Appreciation is a grateful and passionate heart. Generosity is sharing what brings mutual joy. Interest is discovering new people, spaces, and things. Lightness is a sense of aliveness. Easy is the grace of simple. At least one practice is possible in every moment of your life however it is.

Happy people savor the pleasure of moments. They do not limit life's simple pleasures by multitasking them into seconds rather than minutes. They are thankful and delighted in joyful vision of the future. In measuring abundance from a happiness perspective, they shift from net worth to net gratitude.

They freely offer and invite sharing what brings mutual joy without the strings of reciprocity. With a desire to liberate themselves from the clutter of anxiety in their relationships, they share more from generosity than reciprocity. Happy people know that generosity is not where we lose ourselves. It is where we find ourselves.

They love their questions for the wonder unpeeled. Each of us has a different tolerance and love of questions, mystery, and the unknown. The happiest people on the planet are ridiculously in love with their questions. They decide how interesting their life and world is.

They have a delicious sense of humor and play in the abundant space of serendipity. They love by the principle that life does not necessarily get better by taking everything, including ourselves, too seriously. Happiness becomes more accessible by making our smile the most worn item in our wardrobe.

They do whatever they can to turn difficult into easy and complicated into simple. They reclaim authorship over the way things are easy and difficult. It is clear to them that when we make things easier, we have more courage to take on what we call the impossible.

In the study I conducted, the number one source of happiness for the happiest people is by far the joy of discovering new people, places, and things. 67% of the happiest people believe you cannot become "too happy" and 80% report that if they did, it would lead to a greater life of being caring and passionate. As it turns out, happiness profoundly shapes the contours of our life and world.

In over 200 studies, author of "The How of Happiness," Sonja Lyubomirsky, and her research colleagues find that happiness leads to being more productive, generous, creative, courageous, realistic, passionate, resilient, and healthier. What other qualities do you want to have and have around you in your life, work, and world?

9/11 victims who practiced gratitude were the quickest to be resilient and return to optimism. Higher gratitude people are consistently more helpful toward others in their life, work, and communities.

University of Wisconsin-Madison neuroscience research shows that happiness practices restructure the brain in ways that elevate our set-points. Set-points are the normal levels of happiness we personally experience and do not change with any kind of welcome or unwelcome events.

Harvard studies tracking 4,700 people over twenty years find that happiness spreads across three degrees of connection in personal and social networks for up to a year. When we understand the power of networks and the contagious character of joy, it becomes clear that happiness is a personal, social, and political act.

Each additional happy connection in our life is worth an increase of 9% in happiness where a $10k raise would increase happiness by 2%. British researchers find that a single smile releases the same brain stimulation as 2,000 pieces of chocolate. University of California at San Diego study, researchers find that because of these dynamics, the increased happiness of a friend's friend is worth the happiness of a $5,000 raise.

All of this has important implications for how we think about happiness as practice in our life, relationships, workplaces, and communities.

Happiness has unique power beyond classic economic indicators. Now that we have the science to support the efficacy and possibility of happiness, we can have conversations about happy workplaces and happy communities. We can shift from average household income to average household happiness. We can make Gross National Happiness more inspiring and engaging than Gross Domestic Product.

The Joy of Thriving

No era since the beginning of recorded human history has been so poised for making happiness the prime indicator of our thrivancy. When happiness is finally understood as a practice, we start becoming more innovative in designing our personal and shared spaces for happiness as a design principle rather than naively expect it to be the byproduct of wishful thinking.

Happy communities have more civic celebrations than public hearings. Happy workspaces become vibrant cultures of talent engagement, discovery, and generosity.

The realization that happiness is not about things but about the practices of happiness, creates profound implications for the design of public policy, civic spaces, workplaces, social networks, technology. how we raise and engage the next generation, how we go about our well-being, and how we become a happier planet.

The promise is transformative. Happier people are better friends and lovers, leaders and peers, neighbors and citizens. When happiness becomes a choice, all kinds of new doors open up to our personal and collective thrivancy. --Jack Ricchiuto, author of The Joy of Thriving, reprinted by permission of the author.