From the Harvard Business Review

How Meditation Benefits CEOs

Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts

The Harvard Business Review reports that the popularity of meditation – one way to practice mindfulness, has grown among CEOs and senior executives. Why are business leaders embracing meditation? Because according to the Review article, meditation appears to benefit CEOs more than recreation or relaxation do alone. With meditation it is being used as a tool to build leadership skills and achieve business goals. “Most of our new clients … are not sold by mindfulness as a novelty.” says Johann Berlin who teaches mindfulness to leaders and corporate teams. “They want to see how these approaches … are truly beneficial to existing priorities like retention, talent advancement, innovation.” For example, one of Berlin’s clients, a Fortune 25 company, has integrated mindfulness techniques into its high potentials program with the goal of creating agile and flexible mindsets as a foundation for leadership.

The research on mindfulness suggests that meditation sharpens skills like attention, memory, and emotional intelligence. A number of executives observations in the article – about meditation in the workplace connected back to the findings of academic research.

Below are some of the discoveries highlighted in the article:

Meditation builds resilience. Multiple research studies have shown that meditation has the potential to decrease anxiety, thereby potentially boosting resilience and performance under stress.

Meditation boosts emotional intelligence. Brain-imaging research suggests that meditation can help strengthen your ability to regulate your emotions.

Meditation enhances creativity. Research on creativity suggests that we come up with our greatest insights and biggest breakthroughs when we are in a more meditative and relaxed state of mind.

Meditation improves your relationships. While stress narrows your perspective and that of your team, and reduces empathy, negatively impacting performance, meditation can help boost your mood and increase your sense of connection to others, even make you a more compassionate person.

Meditation helps you focus. Research has shown that our minds have a tendency to wander about 50% of the time. Add in work interruptions, text messages, IMs, phone calls, and emails, and it’s no surprise that employees have a hard time staying focused. But studies show that meditation training can help curb our tendency for distraction, strengthening our ability to stay focused and even boosting memory.

For the full story read the Harvard Business Review article written by Emma Seppälä, Ph.D., who is author of The Happiness Track, Co-Director of the Yale College Emotional Intelligence Project and Faculty Director of the Women’s Leadership Program at the Yale School of Management. She is also Science Director of Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education.