How Mindfulness Improves Executive Coaching
The benefits of mindfulness meditation for business leaders are increasingly appreciated and confirmed by empirical research. Executives and high performing professionals increasingly use meditation to manage stress, maintain strategic focus, enhance cognitive performance, promote emotional intelligence, and improve interpersonal relationships. Meditation programs are increasingly offered in the workplace to promote these benefits. Potential risks of mindfulness programs can be avoided and advantages enhanced when workers engage voluntarily and proactively in the process.
However, mindfulness meditation is usually a freestanding offering in workplaces and not tied to the user’s specific leadership development challenges. Mindfulness meditation has not yet been rigorously integrated into leadership development programs and executive coaching. These kinds of development programs can help emerging leaders to identify — and overcome — their limiting beliefs, behavior patterns, and interpersonal difficulties. Such programs can help them to develop new skill sets including the capacity to think strategically and motivate others.
Similarly, executive coaching helps individual clients to develop essential skill sets to manage direct reports, communicate more effectively, develop sound strategic plans, and implement action plans for success. But since most executive coaches and leadership development specialists are not also specialists in applying mindfulness strategies, important opportunities may be missed. While executives may benefit from pursuing meditation as a freestanding stress-management strategy, their development as vibrant leaders could be bolstered by vigorously integrating the two approaches.
When executive coaches and mindfulness specialists collaborate closely, they can help clients to identify their core challenges and focus in-depth on addressing those challenges in a synergistic fashion. They can hold clients accountable to commitments they’ve made to both processes. The executive coach can engage the client in dialogue about how mindfulness strategies (such as controlled breathing and guided imagery) are working in the service of leadership development and executive functioning.
Meanwhile, the mindfulness specialist can help the client to develop individually tailored meditation techniques that support the executive leadership goals (such as maintaining a calm, steady presence in essential meetings in the C-suite or with colleagues across the organization). The two processes can powerfully reinforce each other and promote enhanced quality of life, work performance, and leadership capacity. But that is only the case if the executive coach and mindfulness specialist maintain a healthy dialogue with one another.
In my practice, I interweave mindfulness into my coaching interventions, so instead of needing two specialists, you have one, combining the two disciplines. Most of my clients come to me with an existing meditation or mindfulness practice - either active or dormant. Others don’t have any practice but are open to the idea - which is why they choose me as a coach instead of one of the many other outstanding coaches out there. .Every session starts with a mini-meditation, breathing exercise or mindfulness practice. On my retreats, workshops or even extended classes, clients have longer periods to achieve a relaxed state via controlled breathing and progressive muscle relaxation (temporarily suspending cognition), and then he or she can then work on the mindset changes that are the focus of the executive coaching. These mindset changes are more attainable when they are worked on in a state of meditative relaxation.
The benefits of a relaxed body state for executive coaching clients cannot be overestimated. Once client’s self-awareness expands to include their breathing and body state in general, he or she becomes more grounded, mentally focused, and capable of making significant changes. Deep breathing and somatic relaxation moderate his or her cognitive intensity, which empowered him or her to tolerate and transform stressful thoughts rather than being overwhelmed or detrimentally reactive to them. He or she thereby succeeded in achieving the executive coaching goals of transforming his self-perception from being riddled with problems to embracing wonderful new leadership challenges and opportunities for growth.
The synergy of executive coaching and mindfulness meditation is compelling. Meditation helps clients achieve a state of being in which they can think clearly about work-related stressors and goals. And when executives make positive mindset and behavior changes, they are better positioned to relax and achieve a meditative state — with all its inherent benefits. The two approaches continually deepen and bolster each other.
By carefully integrating executive coaching and mindfulness strategies in a single practice setting, we can help clients develop into more self-aware, grounded, emotionally intelligent, and effective leaders. Executive coaches, leadership trainers, and mindfulness specialists can form powerful partnerships in the service of an enhanced client experience. Rather than leaving to chance whether and how clients will engage in mindfulness meditation, executive coaches should consider partnering with highly qualified and trusted mindfulness colleagues. The process is more rewarding, and the outcome for clients is far superior, with this kind of coordinated approach.
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