The Mindfulness Edge

How to Rewire Your Brain for Leadership and Personal Excellence Without Adding to Your Schedule

Matt Tenney, Tim Gard

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781119183242
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Liderazgo

The one habit that can improve almost every leadership skill

There is a simple practice that can improve nearly every component of leadership excellence and it doesn't require adding anything to your busy schedule. In The Mindfulness Edge, you'll discover how a subtle inner shift, called mindfulness, can transform things that you already do every day into opportunities to become a better leader. Author Matt Tenney has trained leaders around the world in the practice of mindfulness. In this book, he partners with neuroscientist Tim Gard, PhD, to offer step-by-step, practical guidance for quickly and seamlessly integrating mindfulness training into your daily life—rewiring your brain in ways that improve both the 'hard' and 'soft' skills of leadership.

In this book, you'll learn how mindfulness training helps you:

• Quickly improve business acumen and your impact on the bottom line
• Become more innovative and attract/retain innovative team members
• Develop the emotional intelligence essential for creating and sustaining a winning culture
• Realize the extraordinary leadership presence that inspires greatness in others

The authors make a compelling case for why mindfulness training may be the 'ultimate success habit.' In addition to helping you improve the most essential elements of highly effective leadership, mindfulness training can help you discover unconditional happiness and realize incredible meaning—professionally and personally.

Part 1

How Mindfulness Training Rewires the Brain for Leadership Excellence

1

The Shift that Changes Everything

In November of 1887, two scientists named Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley published a paper at a prestigious university known today as Case Western Reserve, in Cleveland, Ohio.¹ The paper caused quite a conundrum for physicists of the day.

Michelson and Morley hadn't intended to turn the world of physics upside down. They were simply trying to prove that the ether existed.

For many years, scientists believed that there must be some invisible sea, which they called the ether, through which every physical thing in the universe is moving. It was a very convenient theory. It provided the foundation for the then accepted laws of motion and provided a medium for the propagation of light (at the time, light was viewed by most scientists as only a wave-like phenomenon; it needed something to “wave” through).

The ether was an extremely important element of physical theories in the late 1800s. Most scientists agreed that the ether simply had to exist. There was one significant problem, though. No one had ever seen the ether, nor had anyone been able to measure it in any other way.

Michelson and Morley devised a rather simple experiment to determine whether the ether actually existed. They theorized that if there was an ether, and the earth was moving through it, there should be a sort of ether breeze, similar to what we feel when we put a hand outside of a car window while we're driving down the highway. For instance, the earth travels around the sun at nearly 67,000 miles per hour (mph), so that breeze alone would be fairly significant.

The ether breeze, they postulated, would create substantial resistance for a beam of light and cause the light to slow down. So Michelson and Morley set up an experiment to measure the speed of light traveling in the direction of the earth's motion, through the ether breeze, versus a beam of light not traveling against the ether breeze. The experiment showed quite conclusively that there was no difference in the speed of the two beams of light and therefore that the ether almost certainly did not exist.

Other scientists soon agreed with the findings, and similar experiments were conducted with similar results. Within a short time, there was quite a bit of consternation. It appeared that the beloved and necessary ether had been proved to be nothing but a figment of human imagination.

But the problems caused by the elimination of the ether as a possible component of the laws of motion and light propagation were quite minor compared with what else Michelson and Morley discovered in their experiment. As a side effect of their effort to disprove the ether, they also noticed that the speed of light was unchanged relative to the motion of the earth.

Soon, several other experiments produced similar results. It appeared that the relative motion of the observer did not affect the speed of light. This, of course, makes no sense. It defies the extremely well established and commonsense law of motion that states that velocity is relative to the motion of the observer.

For example, if you're in a parked car and a car going 20 mph passes by you, the relative velocity between the two cars is 20 mph. However, if you're in a car going 10 mph and a car going 20 mph in the same direction passes you, the relative velocity between the two cars is 10 mph. The other car pulls away at a rate of 10 mph relative to your car.

But if the speed of light were constant, it would mean that for some reason light wouldn't obey that law. If you were in a parked car and turned your headlights on, light would move away from you at 186,000 miles per second. If you and your car could somehow travel at a velocity of 100,000 miles per second in the same direction as a light beam, that beam of light would still move away from you at 186,000 miles per second.

Again, this defies common sense. In the example above, why doesn't the light have a relative velocity of 86,000 miles per second? Why would light be different from every other single thing we experience through our senses in this world?

These are likely the same questions the physicists of the day asked. The answer the scientists likely settled on at first was that something must have gone wrong in the Michelson-Morley experiment. Everything the experts of the day knew about the world, and how we operate in it, forced them to conclude that there was no way the speed of light could possibly be constant.

But one young physicist, who had been fascinated by light for years, took a different approach to the problem in the early 1900s. Although he was likely at least vaguely aware of the experiments showing that the speed of light is constant, his approach actually began in a very childlike manner when he imagined what things would be like if he were traveling on a beam of light. The result of his thought experiment was that one could never catch up to a light beam because that would result in seeing a stationary electromagnetic wave, which is not believed to be possible. Therefore, he concluded that the speed of light must be constant.

This young physicist later realized that if the speed of light were constant, there would be some very strange consequences. For instance, as a person approaches the speed of light, her mass increases, she becomes compressed in the direction of motion, and she actually ages more slowly relative to a person moving with less velocity. He realized that the speed of light doesn't change relative to time; time changes relative to the speed of light. All of these weird consequences were later proved through experiments to be true.

While everyone else was saying that the constancy of the speed of light is impossible because it totally defies common sense, our young physicist realized that both his thought experiments and other experiments suggested otherwise. He was open to the unlikely possibility that perhaps our world just might be so drastically different from how the conventional wisdom of the time suggested it was. He had to temporarily let go of much of what his training led him, and other physicists of the day, to believe. As Gary Zukav writes in the excellent book The Dancing Wu Li Masters, this pioneering physicist had to approach the issue of the constancy of the speed of light with the mind of a complete beginner.²

With this beginner's mind, the young physicist began to base all of his math on the idea that the constancy of the speed of light is not a theory; it is a fact. When he used C in his equations for the speed of light, he thought of it as being a constant. His most well-known equation is E = mc². The young physicist's name is Albert Einstein. Today, E = mc² is probably the most well-known equation in the world. His insights completely transformed our understanding of how the universe works and became the basis for some of the most useful physical theories in history, which later helped us build countless things we rely on every day.

Beginner's Mind

One of my favorite quotes is from a famous mindfulness teacher from Japan named Shunryu Suzuki. He said, “In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few.”³

Albert Einstein offers us a perfect example of this. When he was asked why he was so successful as a scientist, his humble response was: “The ordinary adult never gives a thought to space-time problems.…I, on the contrary, developed so slowly that I did not begin to wonder about space and time until I was an adult. I then delved more deeply into the problem than any other adult or child would have done.”⁴

When most scientists are children, and are asking the big questions that could change the world, they don't have the math or physics training that would allow them to translate their inquiries into something the world could use. And, by the time they reach the peak of their training, they have also fully developed into adults and have lost much of their sense of childlike wonder.

But Einstein never lost his childlike personality traits. He continued to ask naïve, childlike questions well into his adult...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for The Mindfulness Edge
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface: A Note on Best Enjoying This Book
• Introduction
• Part 1: How Mindfulness Training Rewires the Brain for Leadership Excellence
• Part 2: Developing the Ultimate Success Habit
• Afterword
• Appendix: Introduction to Neuroscience
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Index
• End User License Agreement