As leaders, most of us know the power of painting a compelling vision and creating goals that stretch and motivate clearly guiding people towards the company outcome that makes a difference.
Yet, perhaps like most leaders, you may have bypassed a crucial aspect of your strategic, purposeful and aspirational focus. This crucial aspect is your psychological and physiological states of influence that drives your future success and is based on what you believe and feel consciously and subconsciously about your current circumstances.
Your State of Being Creates Your Future
Your state of being when viewed psychologically, emotionally, and physiologically determines the scope of vision you’re able to create and the goals you believe are possible.
When you’re depleted, dysregulated, or disenchanted, you’ll naturally see fewer options, narrower pathways, and heavier obstacles. Yet, by contrast, when you’re energised, grounded, and thriving, you’ll see brighter possibilities and more creative routes forward.
Your inner state informs your future far more than your mindset thinks.
This isn’t soft science, it’s leadership biology. Becoming mindful and creating a natural state of thriving to achieve vision, strategic objective and goals is an essential shift of mindful leaders as they create thriving within their company.
Mindful Thriving Strengthens Us In These Six Ways
1.Clarity of Thinking and Decisions
Stress clouds judgement. Feeling well allows you to think more clearly, assess situations calmly and proactively as you tap into your inner wisdom of cognitive and embodied experience to create a growth-first solution A well-regulated nervous system sharpens your clarity.
Mindful leaders make better decisions because they access clear cognition and embodied insight. A clear mind helps you approach visioning and goal getting with full alignment and a clear mind.
2.Sustainable Energy and Resilience
Leadership is a marathon, not a sprint and demands sustainable high performance from you and your team, especially when markets and the environment are volatile.
Continually connecting to your inner wellbeing allows you and your team to lead with your whole being knowing you are maintaining your physical, emotional and mental energy and protecting your reserves you need.
3.Emotional Intelligence
When you’re thriving, empathy, regulation, and self-awareness rise naturally. Your overall wellbeing is closely linked to your emotional intelligence and nervous system regulation. These are not add-ons, instead they are the bedrock of leading well, building trust, caring for your team and enabling people to bring a higher, broader vision to fruition.
4.Freedom from Negativity Bias
Negativity can cloud your judgments putting you in a state where you lead a vision built on scarcity and lack. It will be overly cautious and reactive to changing market conditions and misaligned with your personal true potential (your North Star) and the true potential of your team and company.
Mindful, thriving leaders are less likely to be hijacked by negative emotions including inner fear, anxiety or frustration. Instead your natural state will become aligned optimism, growth enabled allowing creativity, innovation and openness.
5.Better Collaboration
Leadership isn’t just about being a figure head and setting goals, it’s also about leading from within which means looking after your own wellbeing whilst at work. Your habits and behaviours guide your team every moment of every day. Your team will mirror and match your habits so when you model mindful thriving you are silently inviting your team into a more constructive, inclusive, and engaged visioning process.
6.Stronger Commitment
Mental and physical wellbeing is deeply linked with intrinsic motivation of people. When you and your team are mindful and thriving mentally, emotionally and energetically with aligned values and goals you are more likely to pursue higher goals and far reaching visions with sustained enthusiasm and focused commitment.
As a leader, knowing how to create this energy from a regulated nervous system creates an anergy that is contagious and oozes and inspired inspires people around you from team members to suppliers and clients as well as the ripple effect to your family and communities.
How to Fuel Visioning & Goal Getting With Mindful Thriving
Being present, mindful and thriving is not a luxury, it is the new baseline for leadership.
It’s a renewable resource inside every human being. And it can be deliberately activated. Harvard’s Richard Boyatzis has shown we’re at our cognitive and emotional best when our systems are balanced, safe, and renewed. In that state, leaders are more innovative, more connected, and more open to ideas.
You don’t need to overhaul your life to access this, you simply need practices that recalibrate your nervous system and shift your state before visioning or goal-getting sessions. This is where science meets biology and psychology meets social spiritual pathways enabling business focused mindful leaders. This is an act of mindful, well-resourced leadership that enables us to reconned when we get off track and let’s be honest that happens to us all. Having the inner skills is the key to getting back on track quickly.
There are ancient and modern practices to help you tap in to your internal resources. And, as much as I love extended, deep practices we all need an in the moment toolkit so here are a few to experiment with as you engage in visioning and goal getting either on your own or with others.
Here are simple but potent ways to experiment:
- Take a balancing breath. Just 3 Deep Breaths (3DB) can regulate your system and bring you present. (I call them the fastest “profit reset” you’ll ever find.) Conscious breathwork helps regulate the nervous system, reduce stress and bring you to the present moment.
- Recall a moment of joy. It doesn’t need to be a milestone achievement, perhaps the beauty of a rose bush on a morning walk. If you’re working with your team sharing these stories creates moments of mutual inspiration. Notice the effects sharing these stories has on others and on your mind, body and energy level as you recalibrate your nervous system into a natural state of thriving.
- Move your body. Stretch, walk, or practise yoga. Movement helps release tension, refresh your energy and reconnects brain and body for clarity.
- Practise gratitude. Reflect on three things you’re grateful for. Large or small, relationships, achievements or simply the joy of sun’s warmth. Genuine gratitude helps people shift into a more expansive state which primes your mind and emotions for expansive, creative visioning.
- Engage with the arts. Listen to music or read a poem that you like. If you’re with your team, ask each person to offer a piece of inspiring music, perhaps create a playlist. Share a poem and ask why it’s important. My favourite is always holding a strategy or visioning session in nature where we’re surrounded by beauty.
- Share life experiences. When teams know each other’s stories, vision expands from individual ambition to shared purpose. Take time to reflect on the ups and downs of your life and the lessons you’ve learned along the way. And, if you’re working with a team create space and time for people to share and deeply listen to each others stories – my only caveat is no moaning!
Why This Matters Now
Visioning is not a tick-box leadership activity. It’s a powerful tool for systemic change. But the fuel behind it – your inner state – is often ignored.
Our life-force energy can create benefit or it can harm and we have the choice. I believe our life-force energy is more crucial today than it has been for many years. Rediscovering how to direct it for our benefit and for the benefit of our businesses, teams and wider world will shape our future success.
As we lead ourselves, teams, companies, families and communities through the chaotic unfolding of our world, remember you have the ability to tap into your full potential and create the better future you desire most.
Simply put:
When you consciously choose to lead from a thriving state, you not only elevate performance and profitability, you also infuse love, care, and sustainability into your organisation and into the wider world.
That’s leadership worth following. That’s vision worth committing to.
Contact me to discover more.
Love. Gail