Why Mindfulness Is More Than A Productivity Hack

In this episode, Amy Edelstein unpacks why mindfulness goes beyond technique and how wonder is a key ingredient that develops authentic leadership in young people and adults. Mindfulness as only an add-on falls short of what it can be and how awe, gratitude, and presence foster the qualities of autonomy and leadership that are becoming more and more important. She encourages reflection on the wonder of human capacities, at a time when there is much attention on the capabilities of synthetic intelligence. 

In this session, Amy will

• contrast typical executive coaching models with the Inner Strength model of cultivating inner strength for outer stability 
• reframes mindful awareness as reverence for our capabilities, not only as a productivity tool
• explores gratitude for how evolution has unfolded, leading to the beauty and diversity of life on earth, and see that as a foundation for empathy and courage
• shows how intuitive leadership does not need to be sloppy, it can be  informed, integrated and multi-faceted discernment
• invites educators to point students to wonder and to see mindfulness in terms of what it can reveal rather than as a tool to address only deficits

Chapters

• 0:00 Framing Conscious Leadership
• 2:00 The Limits Of Mindfulness-As-Technique
• 5:00 Awe, Sentience, And Human Uniqueness
• 9:00 Gratitude As A Leadership Ground
• 12:00 Intuitive Leadership, Not Sloppy Instinct
• 16:00 Mirror Neurons And Sympathetic Joy
• 19:00 Youth Leadership Through Presence
• 23:00 Trust, Discernment, And Culture
• 27:00 Balancing AI Tools With Human Reverence

Transcript

Amy: 0:09

Welcome to the Conscious Classroom Podcast, where we're exploring tools and perspectives that support educators and anyone who works with teams to create more conscious, supportive, and enriching learning environments. I'm your host, Amy Edelstein, and I'll be sharing transformative insights and easy-to-implement classroom supports that are all drawn from mindful awareness and systems thinking. The themes we'll discuss are designed to improve your own joy and fulfillment in your work and increase your impact on the world we share. Let's get on with this next episode. Welcome to the Conscious Classroom. I'm your host, Amy Edelstein. Today I want to talk about leadership development. I've been thinking about this a lot as many of my advisors to the organization operate in the field of executive coaching and executive leadership. And some of the organizations that we're partnering with and working with strategically are also involved in leadership development. And I find that while we're tracking much of the same territory, autonomy, collaboration, strategic thinking, and resource management, relationship management. The approach from the executive leadership point of view, even those that incorporate mindfulness, is really quite different at a subtle level than the approach of inner strength and the way that we develop our young people and the adults who work with them, whether they're teachers, counselors, administrators, or simply the adults in the circles of these young people's lives. When mindfulness is sprinkled on to leadership development, when it becomes only a technique that you chart and map and count, it squeezes out the mysterious nature of how that shift in awareness allows us to see not only ourselves and the world, but all of life differently. When we're counting mindful reps, as one book that somebody recommended to me recently encouraged, we're reducing the contemplation on the mystery of human sentience, of human awareness, of human consciousness to a muscular reaction that we can repeat regularly throughout the day. The mindset then becomes one of acquisition of moments of mindfulness, which promotes a sense of materialism, of grasping, of greed, of competitiveness, of measurement. And the very purpose of mindfulness is to help us get out of that habitual way of seeing the world as divided up into little slices of reality. When we divide up reality into little slices, we almost always feel on edge, behind, insecure, wondering when, wondering when the shoe is going to drop. We're holding those in our awareness. We're simply refusing to see them. They're not pieces to be added together, they're not separate ingredients that make the cake of human life or life itself. And I feel that while all of these leadership models do authentically help people work with other human beings better, create psychologically safe spaces, help deliver messages and requests directly, help manage expectations, help employees know what's expected of them, help teachers know how they're supposed to deal and report, help understand the values and the culture. And they're really useful. However, the foundational level of human well-being, that sense that we are okay with our human life, our embodiment, our presence on earth this time around, is not really touched by simply getting a little bit better at this or that. One might stumble into that, but the leadership cultivation isn't really developing that per se. The way we work with students is to emphasize their human agency, their human capacities and sentience, and the value of being itself, being present, existence. And lately, especially with the adulation and extraordinary praise heaped on AI's capacities, I like to really counter that with ten steps back. And to see that the fact that we're human beings and conscious and walking on two legs and have vision, have hearing, have sight is extraordinary. It's not just an amalgamation of probabilities. We see, we sense, we feel with our skin, we hear, we smell, we touch, we love. How did that come about on an evolutionary scale? What would have happened if 13.8 billion years ago when the gases were congealing, it was just a few degrees warmer or cooler. We never would have emerged on this planet. Life wouldn't have emerged from that primordial soup. It's extraordinary that life has emerged and that human beings are conscious and that we have the delicate sensory nature that we do. Being alive and being conscious is an extraordinary thing. So when we invite our young people to explore their awareness, they're exploring it not to be able to get somewhere else or do something else better. They're exploring it as this foundational, awe-inspiring capacity that no one really knows how or why it came to be. But it did come to be, and that is amazing. When we connect with that profound level of wonder and allow ourselves authentically to drop back from everything we know and all of our to-do lists and get in touch with the miracle of life on earth. We drop into a part of ourselves that is flooded with gratitude simply for being. And when we're flooded with gratitude simply for our presence on earth, we immediately feel a sense of empathy, of gentleness and delicacy, a recognition that it's all so precarious and wonderful, and our actions really matter. And that it seems that life is continuing to evolve, and things are changing and growing and emerging in new ways, and we can connect. And when we do that, our qualities of leadership come to the fore. Of course, there are plenty of skills to learn, whether it's in strategic planning or resource allocation or human resource and managing different people or groups or classrooms or school communities. They're great skills to learn. When we learn those skills with this openness at the core of our being in our hearts and minds, then we allow an intuitive leadership to emerge. Intuitive does not mean uninformed, sloppy, random, arbitrary. Intuitive means that we're honing all of our capacities to know. Through our mindful awareness, we're taking in all of these different sensory inputs and information. We're allowing ourselves to recognize that we know in different ways. We feel, it's almost like we feel with our skin. We withdraw when we feel a threat on a subtle level. We lean forward when we feel someone in need of care. We rejoice when we see somebody else's happiness. Mirror neurons will rejoice. Now we may follow those mirror neurons with envy or self-discouragement or competitiveness, but our mirror neurons will register that happiness. And if we allow ourselves to experience that sympathetic joy, we awaken in a conscious way to the fact that this is a zero, this is a non-zero sum game, as Robert Wright described. That when someone rises up for positive and authentic reasons, and we rejoice in that, we experience the upliftment. Those are the qualities of an authentic leader. So the inner strength youth leadership program is really not different than our regular mindful awareness program. However, we invite the students to express and demonstrate that in different ways. We invite them to use not only their voice, but their empathetic awareness to support the whole class, to support the group that they're involved with, to lead a mindfulness practice. What they find is that the more true they are to their own awareness and sensitivity and perception, the better leaders they are. And as they grow into their roles in adulthood, those leadership qualities will continue to mature, and they'll be fortified by skills that are learned, how to project into the future, how to map resources and finances, how to know when a business is overstaffed or understaffed, how to manage burnout. They'll be able to make tough calls because caring hearts and open minds recognize that sometimes things are difficult to say, but they need to be said. And that's ultimately kinder in the long run because authenticity creates stability, it creates trust. So many people these days are talking about a crisis of trust. We experience mistrust in a classroom. Kids from different neighborhoods, different zip codes, different cultural backgrounds, different mother tongues, different socioeconomic brackets may start experiencing or responding with a lack of trust simply because they've been acculturated to do that. When we let them strengthen in their foundation of mindful awareness, they cultivate their skills of perception, discernment, critical thinking. And then they're able more effectively to make their own decisions about what's trustworthy and what's not. Who is trustworthy in this moment and who is not, and then to respond and act appropriately. And that as our culture is demonstrating less and less human authenticity, relying on simulated podcasts, relying on literature that was written by probability and large language models, relying on summaries of a life's work done in a few seconds by a probability scan. Therapy that comes in the form of a chatbot. While these are all useful shortcuts, and we certainly will see them in our day and age. I hope, and it's my strong recommendation to all educators, to combine that usage and the shortcuts and the help that our large language models and synthetic intelligence can give us with the increased wonder, respect, awe, and reverence for our human capacities, and then to demand more of our human activity in the world. So, human beings, we want us to walk this earth as noble beings, and we teach our young people to value their humanity and to pay attention to the mark that they're making in the world. What trace are they leaving behind them? Who would want to walk in their footsteps and why? The young people that I meet want to be examples. They respect the role models in their lives, they love the role models in their lives, and when they start speaking about them, you can hear their voice soften and their sense of natural care, appreciation, and protectiveness, even. As they say, my mom's my role model, my grandma's my role model, my aunt or uncle is my role model, my basketball coach is my role model because they care, they care for me. And when a student starts to express that, you feel all of those human qualities of nobility, of innate care, of moral action, of kindness. So as educators, let's look to that humanity as the pinnacle of human attainment, not the acquisition of wealth, power, instruments of violence, or synthetic intelligence. Let's take synthetic intelligence on its own terms, in its own right, without denigrating the extraordinary human experiment that produced sentience and consciousness. The practices of mindful awareness really open us up to wonder if we allow ourselves to work with them as more than a tool that's going to make us more efficient, more than a tool that's going to make us listen better in a meeting where we have to listen better, more than a tool that's going to make us more empathetic when we've been told that we are not listening enough, caring enough, present enough. Looking at mindful awareness, not as a fix-it tool. It's not like we take our car when it's broken down to the mechanic and have them tinker around so it runs perfectly. We want to approach our mindful awareness as an act of reverence in and of itself, as an act of wonder, because it opens a portal to our higher capacities of love and compassion and discrimination. It opens us to our higher capacities of wisdom. And it connects us with others across cultures, across generations who have stood for the nobility of humanity. Whether we're talking about the elders in a Peruvian tribe, or the medicine women in an Inuit village, or the executive in Palo Alto, who cares more about his quality of presence than he does about his stock value. Mindful awareness reminds us that the basics are our foundation for life. And when the basics are in order, we can experience and explore everything. And it will lead to great fulfillment and innovation and creativity. It will alleviate this plague of loneliness. It will fill that seemingly bottomless hole in the heart with that which is miraculous and connected and always present. So for all you educators who are working with mindful awareness, I invite you to pay attention to the language that you use to educate with the language of possibility and integrity and nobility of purpose rather than alleviating, correcting, healing, or fixing the presence or experience of lack. As educators of young people, we want to be trauma-informed, trauma sensitive while we teach. We don't always have to lead with that. And that goes back to the beginning when I was speaking about business coaching and business leadership and the difference with inner strengths approach of inner strength for outer stability. Accessing that aspect of our being that is always whole, our awareness, consciousness, which really doesn't expand or contract. It's present. And why it's present and why we know and why we're aware, we don't really know. And if we explore it closely, we feel its vast and miraculous nature. So let's allow that to be the context and container of all of the work we do in the classroom. Rather than mindfulness being the spice that we add to the soup of the main dish. I don't know if that metaphor worked, but you know what I mean. Let the infinite be infinite and contain everything else so that there's always room to look afresh from a different angle, to learn and discern and to care more. And in that, things will fall into place, and our leadership skills will develop. But when we try to squeeze the infinite into the finite, at a subtle level, we'll always feel ourselves with an impossible task. And that will erode our inherent leadership capacity. To invite you, as you do your practice today or tomorrow or the next day, as you sit in awareness, either alone with your peer group or with your students, allow yourself between you and you to reflect on infinity and see where it takes you. And as you see where it takes you, notice whether you're rising up taller, holding yourself with more presence and weight, and embodying those qualities of leadership that are a natural part of our human presence on earth. Thank you so much. Till next time. Thank you for listening to the Conscious Classroom. I'm your host, Amy Edelstein. Please check out the show notes on InnerStrengthFoundation.net for links and more information. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please share it with a friend and pass the love on. See you next time.