Last week I wrote about the importance of confidence as a high-octane fuel for leadership. In fact, it’s a make or break attribute if you’re interested in becoming a senior leader of any organization. That fact is it’s also a problem. There are people who are so confident they are made leaders of powerful organizations or have loud public microphones that influence millions that are simply bad for the world. You can be devilishly immoral or colossally incompetent and still be hypnotically confident.

That brings trouble to us all. Many confident acting people are primarily driven by fear or by having something to prove.  When these are your ghostly drives it’s like living in a haunted house. Scary stuff happens. People whose confidence is driven by these low motives often seem insistent, arrogant and relentless. It’s important to recognize that large organizations are most often toxic to people’s positive well-being because these abrasive behaviors are very often rewarded, especially if they’re covered by a spray tan of charm and a bleached smile.

Today I’m going to present something far more important than practical confidence. 

That’s because practical confidence is only a behavioral skill. But due to my long life and an ample share of crushing life tests I have learned there is a confidence far more valuable than a confident personality. If you discover it, it will make you immune to the harmful effects of fear driven bosses. It is also the most powerful psychological vaccine in the universe. I call it your Invisible Light. It’s not primarily a quality of your personality. Rather it’s a quality of your core being. It only becomes visible when you realize you have nothing to prove. It comes in the flash of clarity that the point of life is not what you achieve but the quality of person you become.

Simply put… you uncover your invisible light when you move from self-awareness to soul-awareness.

I realize the word ‘soul’ raises red flags in some of you. But please relax your inner voice of skepticism and just listen for a bit. I’m going to tell you a very personal story about coming to soul awareness. It’s not a story about religion. Rather it’s a story of my experience with reality…but transcendent reality. And it’s the root of profound confidence.

It’s a story that begins with my lost decade.

It began on May 30^th 1990 as I was sitting in a chair in my parents’ bedroom watching my father die. I was very close to my father my entire life. He was a John Wayne figure. A cattle rancher with a college degree…maybe the smartest man who has ever fixed watering troughs.  He was passionate, loving and fearless. When I was 13 I actually saw him talk an angry, desperate man out of trying to kill him by offering him a job. I thought a lot about his example as I sat in vigil. In the instance my Dad past I felt his essence, his spirit, his soul leave the room. I didn’t imagine this. I experienced it. It was only the beginning.

The next nine years were brutal.

Everything that was important to me was stomped on.  My wife of 20 years announced that she didn’t love me but rather had fallen in love with a young business partner. I was betrayed by a lifelong friend in a new business venture. The list goes on. I will simply summarize by saying everything that was important to me and nearly every belief I valued was shattered.  For nine years I was virtually alone and continuously struggled like a drowning man desperate for air. It was in this state of prolonged misery that I came across a book written in 1934 titled “The Secret Path” by Paul Brunton. In it he captures the essence of thousands of years of seeking the ultimate truth. He gets at the root of our invisible light by eliminating all the things that we are NOT.

First, we are not who we ‘think’ we are.

It’s true…all of us have a self-concept… the story about ourselves that we tell ourselves.  This is the monologue of our inner voice that tells us how smart we are, how good-looking we are, what we ought to believe, what we ought to do, what we deserve, what excuses we can justify…and on and on. It is a full-blown novel. But it isn’t who we really are. It’s just our story.  I know this because when my story got shredded I was still breathing…but just barely. I had spent my life saying my prayers and eating my Wheaties…doing what I should whether I liked it or not. I expected life to be just and fair. I thought the universe worked like an honest bank. If I just kept investing by being responsible and trying to be good, nothing really bad would happen to me. That was the story I kept telling myself.

But that story was dead wrong. Brunton is brilliant at teaching you how to write a new story.

He uses a simple meditation that enables you to clearly understand that you are not your achievements, your appearance, your memories, your job, your opinions, your reputation, your stuff, your behavior, your IQ, your tribes, your tastes, your interests or anything else that is not your essential identity. In today’s world this is a radical idea.

Psychologists tell us that we are all ‘socially constructed.’  They maintain that our identity is formed by whom we identify with or disassociate from. They laugh at the idea that we have an individual essence. They insist that all we are is the story we have created about ourselves. Some brain scientists also maintain that our separate consciousness is an illusion. They claim our identity is simply an imaginary construction of our brain chemistry. But is it? That is after all the big question.

It you take away all experiences, achievements, and everything else that seems to make us individuals what’s left?

Soul awareness. Soul awareness is neither a logical assertion nor an emotional belief. It is a profound and direct experience of being. It is knowing beyond reason. It is sometimes called super–rational knowledge. It’s knowledge that arises from our whole being, not just from the limited tools of logic or just the hot blood of emotion.

How do you get to super-rational knowledge?

Simply turn off the noise of your busy mind and listen for something deeper. If you say “I am not my achievements, who am I?” Just listen.  If you say “If I am not my body, who am I?” Just listen. That’s what I did. I did it for months. If you quiet your mind and learn to pay inner attention you can have a super-rational experience of truth beyond doubt. Soul evident truths. You see your invisible light. You discover that the existence of your inner being needs no external proof. Without a doubt you exist. It is nothing less than your transcendent identity…what most people call your soul. As Einstein discovered, matter can be converted to pure energy and energy into matter. You can experience your eternal energy. Your indestructible essence. In the quiet of sustained silence it is simply there.

Knowing this makes you free.

Toward the end of my decade of dark nights I went up to the mountains. I was alone in a cabin and as the sun was setting I decided to spend a little quiet time and think about my father. I laid down on the floor, closed my eyes and tried to imagine how it might feel to have him loving me right then and there father to son. I felt empty, exhausted and hurting. Then my mind shifted. I envisioned him holding me as a tiny child and I could feel his sure, unrestrained love. Then something changed. My imagination receded and I began to sense his actual presence. It seemed like a physical presence, not just in my mind but right there in the room. He seemed to be hovering above me, mirroring my reclined position.

His presence was unmistakable, just like when he walked into a room when I was growing up. He had the same powerful energy he’d always had. I had not felt anything like that since his passing. I didn’t know that I could. My mind was empty of thoughts but flooded with love. Then he spoke to me. Not out loud, but in his voice, with his thoughts. He simply and powerfully affirmed that there was nothing wrong with me.  And there was nothing wrong with what I wanted for my life. He simply said, “Be who you are and do what you came for.” I realize that that sounds corny, like something you might hear on Oprah. If I were making this up I would try to be more clever.

But I’m not making this up. It wasn’t so much his words as his undeniable presence that he used as a spiritual blowtorch to evaporate my self-pity and doubt. Above all it made me feel that I was ‘enough.’ A few other things happened in the remaining moments of that experience but the last thing he said was “this is real.” To be as descriptive as I can be it wasn’t so much that he said it as he ‘intended’ it.

That night my suffering ended.

The challenges didn’t, but the way I took on those challenges completely changed. I had received a gift of profound confidence.

The bottom line for me is simply this…  There is more to life than what we see.

What most people think is important isn’t at least not in the way they think it is. So for me the point of life is to become the best person I choose to be. As far as the world goes, I have nothing to prove…nobody else’s expectations to meet. I know that my experience is not unique. Tens of thousands, maybe even millions of us have had super-rational experiences confirming that there is more to life than life. We have every reason to be profoundly confident.

Guilt is an ugly thing. We all know it. And we all try to avoid it at any price. But guilt is necessary to personal growth and leadership. We need to stop hiding from it and start accepting it. Our progress and unlimited learning have taken its toll on our planet. It’s time to face our guilt in order to transform it. Two stories this week made me choose guilt as my topic for today: The first was published on the daily mail in UK, and retweeted to me yesterday (dailymail.co.uk). A baby elephant was refusing to abandon the dead body of its mother, braving the cold and darkness of the night.

Fortunately it was rescued by the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, and welcomed into an elephant orphanage to find a new future. Still, looking at the amazingly humane posture of the animal, hugging its mother’s body with its trunk, I asked myself how many orphans, human and animal, have stood guard by a dead parent in human history. More importantly, how many paid such a high price for a reason other than life itself: pillage, conquest, enrichment of someone, glory of others?… the many questionable excuses we’ve used to kill for thousands of years.

One of my clients provided the second story. A rather successful entrepreneur, he’s become mortally demotivated in the past few months. A few discussions into the origins of his fatigue with what used to be very exciting business adventures led him to identify an acute and overwhelming feeling of guilt. Once he stopped forcing himself to work, allowing himself some time to rest and connect back into his body, he was able to put a name on this feeling which had always been there in his background. Like a noise that’s annoying you, but you don’t really notice until it stops. Rather coincidentally, a picture of a great grandfather became quite present in his mind. This distant relative had left Spain at fourteen to go find fortune in Mexico in the nineteenth century.

Having become a very wealthy man, he suddenly left everything to come back to Spain in his forties. The old, black and white picture haunting my client depicted his fortune-seeker ancestor standing with one foot on top of a dead man’s head. An indigenous man. While it may be easy to judge this scene from the safety and comfort of our twenty-first century lives in modern cities, it would be very unfair to do so without understanding the circumstances that drove my client’s relative to kill one or many men back then, back there.

My client is now in the process of accepting that what his great grandfather did must have had a profound impact later in life. The guilt of taking another person’s life for reasons other than survival may have pushed him to move back to Spain as an escape, or an effort to forget. [pullquote]The problem is, even if we do manage to forget on a conscious level, our bodies hold on to the feelings we have not expressed.[/pullquote] The problem is, even if we do manage to forget on a conscious level, our bodies hold on to the feelings we have not expressed. As we fool ourselves into “turning the page”, “moving on”, and hoping for a better future, our bodies obediently bury our emotions deep underneath, in that dark pool we call the unconscious.

What is buried rather than resolved, however, can come back to haunt us many decades later. And because our bodies are mammals who share feelings and emotions spontaneously before our conscious minds even get a whiff of what’s taking place, we can’t help but share such buried burdens with those who most love us and cherish us. Thus, younger generations can find themselves carrying an unspeakable level of guilt in what psychiatrist Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy named “invisible loyalty”.

There are many lines of thinking in family therapy developing this concept, but I’ll keep it very simple and intuitive. Unsolved wounds and affronts suffered in one generation are unconsciously passed on to the next generations to work on. Just as a baby elephant is ready to sacrifice his own wellbeing in the hopes of somehow reliving his dead mother, many human babies take on huge emotional loads from their parents in a loving effort to free them of the weight. It is pure mammal solidarity.

We see examples of it every day in Nature. Though we try not to see how it also drives us to make choices in life which ultimately sacrifice our own happiness in the hopes of somehow restoring our long lost parents’ and grandparents’ joy. As we get older we find ourselves repeating dumb patterns of failure, or exclusion, self-sabotage or self-imposed loneliness. All of which directly impact our companies as much as they impact our personal lives.

We also fool ourselves into thinking we won’t do it again. And so we set ourselves up for blind repetition by applying all our efforts to look away, forget, deny…making us leaders of trash. Resolving our patterns, however, is as simple as looking at them. My client has already noticed an improvement in his motivation because he has started to look at himself and accept the feelings of guilt that haunt him. He has begun to look into his family’s history to discover the patterns repeating down through generations, also spilling into his own life. As he continues to connect the dots of his own life choices with the decisions made by his ancestors, he slowly resolves the buried burdens his elders have unknowingly put away for later.

It would be difficult to find a family free of guilt in our current society. We’ve mixed and mingled so much by now that we’re all related to someone who killed, exploited or enslaved others for profit. Guilt is invisibly present in all those selfies going up on internet around the world. Whether we care to look for it or try to ignore it in the many millions of colored pixels we produce. Avoiding our inherited guilt pushes us to repeat patterns of abuse that trash our planet mercilessly.

But if we each stop a moment to do something other than take a selfie snapshot, we may become aware of the share of guilt we carry. We may connect it to what we know about our family. Finally, we may resolve it for once and for all. The guilty are stronger than the innocent because they know what it feels like to hurt another. The innocent may yet do many dumb things in life. The guilty will not. The guilty will try to do something to honor those they hurt in their blind innocence.

They will, in fact, live to honor their victims with love and proud commitment every day. This is how guilt transforms into love. Don’t forget. Don’t move on. Don’t look away. Find the patterns you are repeating and connect the dots of guilt in your past. Stay with your guilt. You will find yourself building truly wonderful business models in the future. Business models of inspired love for Nature and grateful respect for life in all its forms.

If every leader transforms his guilt into loving respect of life, we will finally give meaning and purpose to all those who died in the name of profit. Profit will at last be at the service of life.

 

Confidence is the engine of success. The advantages of confidence are eye-popping. Social research confirms that your personal confidence is a more accurate predictor of your success then competence.

The reason is simple. Confident people learn what they need to learn and do what they need to do to overcome failures and setbacks that are inevitable along any journey of human achievement. Confidence is a hot topic these days. One reason is that there is strong evidence there is a confidence gap between men and women. And that gap is holding women back from getting their fair share of opportunities for rapid advancement and senior leadership. But a lack of confidence is not just a woman thing.

So many times when I’m in a senior leadership meeting and a director or VP walks in to present a new opportunity or solve a big problem their confidence becomes a topic of discussion after they leave. In business speak ‘executive presence’ is the tag given to how confident a young leader appears. 

HR research reveals that a lack of executive presence is a promotion killer. 

And I have personally witnessed many good ideas not seriously considered because the presenter seemed a bit timid, insecure or unsure. Confidence not only powers success, it’s also emotionally magnetic. Studies show that confident people are listened to more carefully, inspire loyalty and are more widely admired. Yep… confidence matters.

Let’s Build Your Confidence…

What Really Matters…

Here’s the Key…

1. Confirmation Bias. This happens when somebody only presents evidence that confirms their bias. This is very common. It’s what got us into the war in Iraq.  Recently released records show that Dick Cheney insisted the CIA only provide evidence that supported the existence of WMDs.  Analysts who tried to present contrary evidence were reassigned. This doesn’t just happen in politics. Nearly all leaders fall prey to the temptation that reality conforms to their theories. If you find yourself needing to go against thinking-as-usual to achieve your goal it really helps to point out how considering your data and evidence requires an open mind, free of confirmation bias.
2. Attribution Error. It’s all too human to look for a single cause to any affect. A common attribution error is that employees are primarily motivated by money and the positive or negative judgment of their boss. It turns out human motivation is extremely complicated.  Low paid people doing repetitive work are often motivated to produce more by money. Highly paid experts are much more motivated intrinsically to solve interesting and worthwhile problems for their own sake. The point is, most things in life have multiple causes. Pointing this fact out in the pursuit of your goal will often neutralize dismissive critics.
3. Unexamined Assumptions. This is the mother of logical fallacies. Unexamined assumptions are often promoted in time-worn bromides. For instance, in an age of unexpected disruptive competition, ‘going back to the basics’ is a path to oblivion. Just ask a publisher in the newspaper industry. If you want to see the ocean about examined assumptions we swim in just ask yourself, “What would have to be true for______________( fill-in the blank) to be true?” What you will find is that most people are making decisions based on unexamined assumptions.

Tips for Building Your Confidence…

1. Ask others what they most admire about you. Those are your strengths. Rely on them in hard moments…nurture them.
2. Increase your energy by getting eight hours of sleep, moving throughout the day, and eating a healthy diet.
3. Dress and groom yourself in a way that reflects your self-respect.
4. Create a place at home that’s a refuge from stress. Go there daily, read, reflect and write in ways that feed your soul. This is the way you take control of your inner voice.
5. Engage in vigorous exercise. Strengthen your body…it will strengthen your confidence.
6. Focus daily on what you want for your career and your life. Act on opportunities that advance your self-agenda.  Progress builds confidence.
7. Deepen your friendships with people who genuinely love you and encourage you. Avoid critics and cynics and all mean people.
8. Empathize but don’t apologize for problems you did not cause. If you’re constantly saying your sorry people will think their problems are your fault.
9. Strive to be an expert. Be curious. Constantly learn. Share what you are learning. Assert your point of view. Be tolerant of conflict. Shake off mistakes. Be excited about who you are and what you can do.
10. Don’t apologize for your goals for the life you want… ever!

To summarize the scientific formula for building confidence is: Have goals you are willing to stick to.

Stand up for your point of view with evidence and logic and confront those who oppose you by naming their logical fallacies. (If that doesn’t get you anywhere find a new place to work. Working with fools is foolish.) Develop your confidence muscles by exercising the top 10 tips. Now that I’ve talked to you about practical confidence you’re ready to go a little deeper… profound confidence. That’s the confidence you can gain that no tragedy, loss or disappointment can take away. I will explain it next week. In the meantime, remember…

Everyone has a difference to make and what you do matters.

 

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Nearly every company I do consulting for these days have something in common… and it’s not good. It’s called Project Failure. Virtually everywhere I go important strategic projects are failing to be delivered on budget or on time. This is not a trivial problem. Failing to achieve vital goals puts companies’ at risk and demoralizes employees.

Whenever organizations suffer chronic failure it brings up questions.

Are the right people in charge? Are the people in charge listening to the right people? Maybe not. That’s because research from Zenger Folkman confirms that people who are most likely to understand the time, money and resources necessary to accomplishing goals are usually not the people in charge. In fact they’re most often members of a group whose voices go unheard… women managers. You heard me. We live in a complex world. Most of the important things that happen to us are beyond our control. Yet, our brains are wired to make things seem simple and in our control. This helps us keep our worries in embers rather than inflame our brains with the bonfire of uncertainty.

One thing psychological research is clear on is that human beings hate uncertainty. 

We hate it so much that the most common stupid thinking trick we play on ourselves is called confirmation bias. This means that we pay attention to and even seek out any evidence that confirms our current prejudices. Then we create mental models of cause and effect which deceives us into believing we know more than we do. Leaders who have a Hard Power mindset are the most susceptible to self-deception… or what I call acting like idiots. Here is why.

The Hard Power mindset focuses on control.

This makes a dictator model of leadership seem logical and attractive. This creates high decision-making efficiency and accountability. Hard Power political leaders can quickly become ruthless. People who don’t execute their wishes get executed. Today we see lots of politicians using Hard Power messages to stir people up. You know… when anything is happening that we don’t like, bomb the hell out of someone.

Many people find this is an attractive idea. It’s simple and we like simplicity. Hard Power language confirms a make-believe world where we can force people to do what we want them to do. That of course is the thinking of idiots. Unfortunately it’s not that different in business. Uncertainty is viewed as a weakness. Goals must be set. Big, hairy, audacious goals are especially favored because on the off chance they are achieved the leader is celebrated as a hero. My experience with Hard Power is leaders who are constantly setting “stretch” goals and driving their teams to “up their game” is that they mistakenly attribute success to all-out, relentless effort. This feeds into their confirmation bias.

It makes leadership seem very simple. Set goals, get in people’s faces, intimidate people through rewards and punishment and keep track of today’s score. Whatever… that’s not leadership. That’s dictatorship.

So let’s get to real leadership.

Leadership that accomplishes worthwhile goals. Goals that make the quality of human life better. My experience is that wise leadership sets meaningful goals based on a realistic use of the time, resources and talent needed to achieve those goals. Necessary time, resources and talent are chronically underestimated by Hard Power, goal-mad leaders. Here are some dos and don’ts for Hard Power leaders (who are usually men) and Soft Power leaders (who are often women).  These are the rules for people who are serious about success and are committed to the idea that better things happen when men and women leaders work together.

For men (or Hard Power women): Do:

Do what you mother taught you about being polite.  When you’re setting goals ask the women on your team (or women who are one or two levels deeper) what it would take for the organization to execute and successfully achieve your goals. Always remember, their brains are designed to think more holistically. They’re much more likely to see un-intended consequences, and the full scope of effort needed to be successful.  So…ask…listen…acknowledge. That’s it.  Ask for specific input. Listen with both ears. Then acknowledge the content of the message that is presented and ask more questions. That behavior creates engagement. Often what is said may seem like a wet blanket. Reframe the message.

Your bias for action may blind you to the risks and difficulties that stand in your way.

This is foolish. Before you start on any long car trip you need to have a full tank of gas and a clear understanding of the distance your car can go before you need another fill-up. Doesn’t matter how fast you drive if you run out of gas before you reach your destination.

Don’t:

Don’t dismiss the wisdom of women’s assessments of what it will take to succeed because your mental model of women is that they are overly cautious, “fraidy-cats.” When we were teenagers most of our mothers were telling us to slow down while our fathers may have been winking.  Our mothers were right…wearing seat belts and driving the speed limit is always a better choice if living a long life is a goal.

For women leaders (or Soft Power males): Do:

Do master the behavior of positive pro-activity. This is accomplished by framing you’re prudent wisdom in the context of the strategic objectives of the enterprise. Powerfully communicate your commitment to achieving relevant, strategic goals. Never use the phrase “yes…but…” Rather, restate the importance of a goal and your commitment to achieve it by considering all the critical details including the unstated and often unmeasurable roadblocks. These are the inconvenient truths that linear brains ignore. Most importantly, suggest solutions and progressive steps that should be taken to ensure success. Assert yourself calmly and drive for progress.

Don’t:

Don’t engage in hand-wringing, complaining or passive aggressive blaming. Don’t nag others about your concerns. All those behaviors play into female stereotypes that reduce your influence and confirm the prejudices of linear thinking Hard Power idiots. Let me be clear.  I have coached many male, Hard Power leaders who are exceptionally effective. The reason is they don’t act like idiots. They recognize their blind spots and biases and surround themselves with a diversity of strong leaders who are unafraid to express their opinions.

There is only one way to foster the candid expression of different viewpoints…it is to listen with an open mind. This is how great leaders vaccinate themselves from thinking viruses caused by a desire to succeed without understanding the sustained investments in time, processes, resources and talent necessary to do amazing things. To be vivid, most of the time leaders go to war or terrorists blow themselves up it is because of the blood-lust to impose their will. Their emotional vision of defeating their enemies leads them to ignore the risks of oversimplifying complexity.

I often think of the example of William Wallace, the hero of Braveheart. He made a great speech and then led his raw army into a gruesome slaughter. I am sure if he’d consulted the wives and mothers of his untrained warriors they would’ve proposed a long-term strategy designed to minimize casualties and maximize results. I just want to point out that women’s brains are wired for complexity. It is this wiring that makes Soft Power very powerful.

Wise leaders build executive teams that integrate Hard and Soft Power to help large groups of people, from corporations to nations, achieve sustained greatness.

Wisdom is very rare. Our world needs lots more of it… be wise.

Employee engagement is a constant struggle that seems to be getting worse. The New York Times described the problem, yet again, just last month in an opinion article on employee burnout. The article reports that Harvard Medical School psychiatrist and assistant clinical professor Srinivasan S. Pillay surveyed a random sample of 72 senior leaders and found that almost every one reported some signs of burnout. As workers worldwide are reporting that they “lack a fulfilling workplace,” companies have an opportunity to get a better return for their investment in human capital and drive growth.

As it turns out, employees are more satisfied and productive when four of their core needs are met: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. According to the Times article, the more effectively leaders support employees in meeting these needs, the more likely employees will be to engage, be loyal and satisfied, and exhibit positive energy, increased productivity, and less stress at work.

The answer is right in front of you. Or more specifically, within you. When you take a mindful approach to business—that is, when you engage in mindfulness meditation practices that develop your ability to remain attentive to the present moment—your performance at work improves. Mindfulness is a state of active, open attention to the present. It involves observing current experiences without judgment. Mindfulness allows you to more fully participate in the moment in which you find yourself. When you are in a mindful state, you are ready for anything. You respond rather than react. And you create more space in your mind for insight—where your best ideas come from.

Although mindfulness is a hot topic these days, it’s hardly new. Harvard Business School professor Bill George reports that the company he led as Chief (Medtronic) had a meditation room almost forty years ago, thanks to the vision of founder Earl Bakken. A major proponent of mindfulness meditation, George has been meditating himself since 1975. Two years ago we learned about the wildly successful Search Inside Yourself (S.I.Y.) mindfulness meditation course held at Google and taught by Chade-Meng Tan, Google’s 107th employee. Tan teaches emotional intelligence via a practical, real-world meditation that can be used anywhere. This practice encourages participants to be aware of feelings without acting on them as a way to more accurately understand one’s circumstances. Google clearly sees this investment as a valuable part of their growth strategy.

Jon Kabat-Zinn is responsible for much of the popularization of the secular practice of mindfulness through his mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) program initiated in 1979. MBSR is the most widely studied mindfulness practice, although some would point even farther back to the groundbreaking work of Norman Vincent Peale, who wrote The Power of Positive Thinking back in 1952. Since that time, clinical studies have documented the physical and mental health benefits of mindfulness in general, and MBSR in particular. Programs based on MBSR and similar models have been widely adapted in schools, prisons, hospitals, veterans’ centers, and other environments. As relates to business, mindfulness meditation practices have been found to increase productivity and creativity as well as reduce burnout and increase growth.

In short, more businesses need to support mindfulness practices by employees. I view it as an effective investment in human capital that consistently delivers great returns. Chiefs at every level stand to benefit from this simple, yet profound practice.

Rick Miller describes how Chief titles are widely used today for people with power, but don’t accurately reflect what it means to be a Real Chief. He asserts that Being Chief is about making a choice rather than gaining a title. Watch Rick speak here to learn how to unlock your power and be a Real Chief.