Purpose: Mindful Leadership – An Exploration Of The Leadership Mindset: Purpose

By Noura Books

This exploration of the leadership mindset is a stand-alone part of the "Purpose" series.

Leadership requires a mindset of wisdom which brings order inspired by love. Without love and empathy, leadership becomes exploitative, abusive, or tyrannous. Sometimes, we find ourselves thrust in positions of leadership without the mental foundation to handle it. This can create a lot of pressure but can also provide opportunities to learn and grow through experience. Some of the main ideas we will explore here in relation to purpose are:

• Thoughts for meditation on leadership
• The challenges that occur when we find ourselves in leadership positions without the right mindset
• The mindset needed for leadership
• Taking leadership of our minds
• Leading with empathy

• Language: English
• Publisher: Noura Books
• Release date: Apr 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393520887

Noura Books

Noura is philosopher who writes on the topic of mindfulness. She is an artist and her tools are words she weaves into ideas. Her love for writing was inspired by her love for reading and her very active imagination. Her purpose in life is to empower people to break free from the chains of their circumstances and unlock their highest potential. She is convinced that all people have within themselves all the answers they seek if they look and inquire. Read more at nourabooks.com.

Book preview

Introduction

This text is part of the Purpose series but meant to stand on its own. We are exploring the leadership mindset in relation to Purpose.

Some of the main ideas we are exploring are:

Thoughts for meditation on leadership

The challenges that occur when we find ourselves in leadership positions without the right mindset

The mindset needed for leadership

Taking leadership of our minds

Leading with empathy

---

With best wishes,

Noura

www.nourabooks.com

http://www.nourabooks.com/books/

https://twitter.com/nourabooks1

Part I

Leadership As A Mindset Versus A Position

1

Meditation

There are two aspects of leadership: the mindset and the position. Positions of authority give us the power to make decisions that can significantly influence people’s lives. Such positions include, but are not limited to, the following relationships: parents and children, children taking care of their aging parents, doctors and patients, teachers and students, employers and employees, and so on. Leadership requires a mindset of wisdom, which brings order inspired by love. Without love and empathy, leadership becomes exploitative, abusive, or tyrannous.

Sometimes, we find ourselves thrust in positions of leadership without the mental foundation to handle it. This can create a lot of pressure but can also provide opportunities to learn and grow through experience. Being a professional is not just about having an advanced degree or having technical skills. It’s also about being able to use our skills objectively. It’s not just about what we do, but also how we do it. It’s about being able to get our personal issues or opinions out of the way so we can look at information objectively, and communicate it objectively. This requires self-awareness born out of the total understanding of ourselves.

The purpose of meditation is to build self-awareness by making the unconscious conscious so that we can be aware of how our state of mind affects our interpretation of what we see. If we’re not aware of our inner burdens, they could affect our decisions in ways we may not always recognize. The more responsibilities we have as leaders, the more important it is to have clarity because the consequences of making bad decisions are far reaching. If I am a janitor in an organization, and I forget to clean a desk today, it will probably not have a major impact on the organization. But if I am a CEO of a company and I make a bad business decision, the entire organization could go out of business, and a lot of people could lose their jobs.

2

What is Meditation?

Meditation is the art of living with what is, without condemnation, judgments, fragmentation, or covering it up with ideals. When we see directly without the screen of our judgments, we don’t compare or fragment. We can then understand totally because we give our total attention. We see the whole picture, and we see directly without any distortion or illusions. There’s no conflict in our perception because we don’t have any images or judgments that we compare against what we’re seeing. Meditation is the art of living without illusions or distortions, so the mind is free of the conflict that arises between the image (illusion) and reality (fact).

Meditation is about moving away from a dualistic way of looking at life to seeing the whole flow of it, and not to fragment and say one part is right or wrong in comparison to another. We look at life as one process that connects everything through relationships. When we look at