Leadership Challenge #5 - Hitting a strategic pause by being more mindful
Happy Saturday,
Welcome back to my weekly leadership of the future newsletter. Every week, we do a challenge to boost your remote leadership skills.
The latest challenges so far:
This week’s challenge is about mindfulness: how to hit pause, keep silence, and retain focus in any leadership situation.
As usual, you'll receive the context (why it's important) and five actionable steps (how to do it) that you can implement at your own pace, DIY-style. Expect to invest about 3-4 hours in total. Let's get started.
Why does mindfulness matter, and how can it help leaders today?
Personally, I’ve been doing meditation for years now. Don’t panic. It's nothing fancy, nothing woo-woo, just simply sitting in silence for 10-15 minutes and breathing.
In my 20s, I learned philosophy for a brief period. I’m sure I wasn’t the first to conclude that all religions are the same in terms of practice. Getting closer to a state of mind (god, happiness, enlightenment, etc.) through self-reflection with some form of meditation. Prayers, chants, mantras, and practices vary, but they all have the same goal: hitting a strategic pause of silence.
These practices are now part of modern psychology and are all called mindfulness or something similar. A regular “prayer” is on our Apple Watch; it has an app called Breathe. It’s that common.
Yet, I don’t see many leaders practice this. Sure, everyone is fully on with fitness, self-nutrition, and health tracking. But most people still think that hitting a strategic pause of silence is a waste of time.
I hope this week’s challenge can change that for some of you.
Why is it needed?
There are pretty obvious benefits:
Reduced stress
Improved creativity
Better decision-making
Deeper connections with others
All that just sitting still in silence for a few minutes every day.
But I can give you a bit more tangible reason to do it. I’m sure you’ve been in this before or seen others doing it. I’ve seen it many times while working with CEOs and founders.
Shiny object syndrome. You try to solve unnecessary problems with the new tools popping up. Ends up in tool abundance and chaotic operations. Solving a problem is not a matter of tools but focus.
Hasted decisions. You think that a decision has to be made on the go immediately. Ends up in bad decisions. Good decisions happen when we have enough information AND time to decide.
Burn out. Creativity happens when we are inspired. We get inspired when we allow our minds to rest, digest, and consume the information we accumulate during our day. Burnout is not the lack of creativity but the lack of time to self-reflect.
So, being mindful simply means that you allow yourself to have time to think and keep strategic silence so you can focus to perform better.
In this week’s challenge, I’ll share 5 tactics on how to be mindful that worked for me, and I’m sure they work for you as well.
This time, the tactics are interchangeable and regular, which means you can do them on multiple days. All these practices should take more than an hour every day.
Tactic 1 - Detox morning
It’s hard to hit pause when the day is already full-on going. So, the best time to start to be more mindful is your morning.
Instead of doing the usual (wake up, check phone, within 5 minutes immediately respond to things…), hit pause early on.
Keep your phone in the living room, not in the bedroom.
Do your chores without checking your phone.
The hardest part: have breakfast, coffee, or whatever is your thing without checking your phone.
Only check your phone when you sit down to work and start your professional day.
Tactic 2 - Walk for clarity
I have a dog, so I am forced to take walks anyway. But I love these walks: I leave my phone at home and wander for 30-40 minutes.
Once the day has started, it’s hard to break the rhythm. A midday/afternoon walk is perfect for getting up and clearing the head.
I know we will always return to this, but leave all your tech gear at home during the walk. No, walking meetings are not productive or mindful.
Tactic 3 - Daily prime task
If you operate a startup or scaleup, things are all over the place. Focus is the hardest thing to retain, not just for leaders.
Practicing focus is simple: kill multitasking.
Now, as leaders, we do a million things at once, so stopping multitasking is a real challenge. But here’s a solution:
Nominate a single problem that you want to solve perfectly
Close all the 50 tabs in your browser, hide your phone, log out from all the chats
Dedicate 1 uninterrupted hour to solve the problem, ignore anything else
I’ve found that the best time to do it is before or after lunch, when the first meetings are done and we are not yet into the full afternoon.
Tactic 4 - “I’ll think about it!”
Most leaders find this phrase frightening—almost as scary as the “I don’t know” statement. But you need to practice it whenever you can.
First of all, a fact: almost all decisions can wait. Almost nothing is urgent or immediate. Anything can wait for 12-24 hours. Immediacy is an illusion of social media.
So, whenever you have a situation where they expect an answer from you, or you need to decide, instead of reacting on the spot, say: “I’ll think about it and get back to you!”
An unpredictable leader who makes fast decisions is just a child with no idea what is happening. By winning time back on your side, you build self-confidence, clarity, and predictability - also known as grown-up decision-making.
Tactic 5 - Sit and breathe
The last tactic is the actual meditation or mindfulness session, whatever you want to call it.
The best time to do it is before going to bed.
The easiest way is to sit down, close your eyes, put on some calm, relaxing music or sound, and inhale and exhale long. Do this for 15 minutes.
If you want to use guided meditation, use it. If you want to use a body scan (“and now relax your thumbs…”), do that. If you want to listen to a mantra, help yourself out. It doesn’t matter. What matters is this: sit, eyes closed, and do nothing but breathe for 15 minutes. You can do it longer, but the minimum is 15 minutes.
I can tell you what will happen already. People are not that different.
First 1-5 minutes: your mind will race on what happened today.
5-10 minutes in: “Why am I doing this? This is a waste of my time.”
10-15 minutes in: you finally give it in and relax.
I can’t overstate how important it is to focus on breathing. Long inhale and long exhale. That focus will keep you from thoughts like “I need to stop this” or anxious, nervous feelings.
One side benefit of doing this before bed is that you will sleep much better.
Now, being mindful helps you to focus. This entire leadership challenge series is all about enhancing your leadership presence online. What better enhancement do you need for your presence than more focus?
And you will need that focus because next week’s challenge is about thought leadership. We will get back to content creation but with a strategic twist. See you there!
If you have any questions, do let me know. I’m happy to help you.
Until next week,
Peter
