Tag: Kristin Neff

Developing Compassionate Leadership through Mindfulness


The concept of “Compassionate Leadership” has its foundations in the global mindfulness movement.  One example of this foundation is the book by Amanda Sinclair, Leading Mindfully.  She has a chapter on Bringing Love and Compassion into Leadership in this very readable and eminently practical book.  In this chapter she draws on the example of Paul Roos, who coached Sydney Swans to their first AFL premiership.   

The emergence of compassionate leadership

LinkedIn published an article in 2014 on the benefits of compassionate leadership and the traits of compassionate leaders.  In 2017, Forbes produced an article on Compassionate Leadership: A Mindful Call to Lead from Both the Head and the Heart which tracks why compassionate leadership has evolved to its prominence today.  The article recognises the seminal work of Google in developing mindful leadership through The Search Inside Yourself Program which is now available world-wide through the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute.  The program was initially conducted over seven weeks in Google and is now offered globally as a two-day mindful leadership course covering mindfulness, emotional intelligence, neuroscience, and compassion.

The currency of the compassionate leadership approach has been reinforced by Forbes.  In January 2020, Forbes published an article, How to be a more compassionate leader (and why it’s so important), which provides some practical steps to develop compassionate leadership including compassionate listening and helping to make other people’s lives better.   

Developing compassionate leadership through mindfulness

In October 2020, Forbes published another article which recommends mindfulness practice as a way to develop Compassionate Leadership.  The author, Laurel Donnellan, drew on the work of Darrell Jones, General Manager of Chill.  Darrell recommends three basic elements – focus on inner transformation, value quality of mindfulness practice (however brief) over quantity (and the related “shoulds”) and find refuge in your practice whatever form it takes (e.g. meditation, Tai Chi, mindful reading or prayer) in challenging times, especially in times of grief.  Darrell also suggests that we focus on “togethering” – putting our connectedness before our separateness.  One way to do this is to consciously practise “compassionate listening” to those who have a different perspective or cultural background, seeking to create conversations that are inclusive.

During the Radical Compassion Challenge, both Jon Kabat-Zinn and Tara Brach reinforced the need for mindful listening to personal stories as a stimulus to compassionate action and highlighted mindfulness practice as a way to remove the blockages (such as fear of failure or unrealistic assumptions) to taking kindness-inspired action.

Chade-Meng Tan, author of Search Inside Yourself and founder of the Google program of the same name, stressed the role of mindfulness in developing personal insight, compassionate action, and the capacity to inspire others.  His personal vision is to contribute to world peace through the development of compassionate leadership globally and he views mindfulness as the pathway to achieve this goal. 

Many mindfulness practitioners and researchers see self-compassion, developed through mindfulness, as a source of insight and motivation for compassionate leadership.  Tara Brach, for instance, argues that mindfulness can help us to overcome negative self-evaluation, sensitize us to the needs and hurt of others and free us up for compassionate action.  Pema Chödrön maintains that “compassionate abiding” in our own pain and suffering as a form of mindful self-compassion builds resilience and acts as a doorway to compassion for others.  Kristin Neff, author of The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook, maintains that self-compassion is not self-pity or self-indulgence but helps us to understand our connectedness to others through sharing the human condition of pain and suffering. 

Reflection

Mindfulness helps us overcome self-absorption, our sense of separateness, negative self-narratives and resentment and, in the process enables us to see more clearly our connectedness, identify our capacity to helps others and to find the courage and creativity to put our compassionate ideas into action.   As we grow in mindfulness through meditation, reflection, and mindfulness practices, we build our capacity for compassionate leadership that not only enables us to take compassionate action but also inspires others to do likewise.

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Image by Joshua Choate from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Self-Compassion in Times of Uncertainty and the Coronavirus

There are many people offering ways to manage anxiety and fear in these times of uncertainty brought on by the global Coronavirus.  Psychologist Rick Hanson, for example,  provides multiple online mindfulness resources including the Wise Brain Bulletin.  In the latest issue (Volume 14.2), Kristin Neff and Chris Germer offer 10 self-compassion practices for self-management during this time of the pandemic.  Self-compassion is about being compassionate towards ourselves despite our mistakes, deficiencies and perceived weaknesses.  It takes time and effort to build self-compassion, particularly if we are used to negative self-talk, berating ourselves for our mistakes or constantly comparing ourselves to others (and coming up short in our own estimation).

Elsewhere, Kristin provides a video explanation of the concept of self-compassion, discusses the three components of self-compassion and offers exercises on how to develop each of these.  She also offers a range of guided meditations and exercises on the website for the  Center for Mindful Self-Compassion.   Kristin and Chris are co-developers of the Mindful Self-Compassion (MSP) Program designed for those who want to explore more fully the richness of this mindfulness approach.  They are very well qualified to teach mindfulness and compassion (for ourselves and others).

Additional Approaches to developing self-compassion

There are multiple resources and exercises available to help you build self-compassion.  Some that are very accessible and easy to use are:

  • Compassionate body scan: a 20-minute progressive body scan that focuses attention on different parts of the body and treats each part of the body with kind awareness and tension release.  The guided body scan is offered in separate audio recordings by both Kristin and Chris.
  • Mood tracking: an essential element in building the self-awareness necessary for developing self-compassion and improved mental health.  There are many mood tracker apps that help you identify your triggers and enable you to gain control over your emotional responses.  Steve Scott provides a review of the 14 best mood tracker apps available today.  These apps provide a ready means of tracking stimuli and your responses in terms of moods/feelings.

Reflection

Self-compassion is the antidote to negative self-evaluation, just as gratitude and savouring what we have reduces competitive comparison and envy.  As we grow in mindfulness and self-compassion through meditation, mindfulness practices/exercises and reflection on the triggers that precipitate our strong emotional responses, we can progressively develop self-intimacy and the self-regulation necessary to identify our negative triggers and control our responses.

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Image by Stephen Cruickshank from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Self-Compassion for Healthy Eating

Marsha Hudnall, President and Co-owner of Green Mountain at Fox Run (a whole-body wellness retreat), offers an interesting perspective on how to develop healthy eating – whether that involves avoiding overeating, under-eating or eating foods that we know cause inflammation through allergy or intolerance.  Marsha in her article on this topic suggests that self-compassion is the missing factor in enabling us to persist with healthy eating. 

Often when we stray from the ideal approach to healthy eating that meets our specific needs, we berate ourselves for our failure to stick to the right path.  Marsha has been a pioneer in the field of non-diet and alternative approaches to healthy eating through her writing, teaching and her work as a board member of the Center for Mindful Eating.   She explains her personal experience and perspective on mindful eating in a Mindful Dietician podcast.  Marsha offers advice too for people who are on dietary restrictions as a result of a health condition – available in a paid webinar titled, When the Doctor Says No.

Self-Compassion for healthy eating

Self-compassion has been the life pursuit of Kristin Neff who stresses the importance of self-kindness to overcome negative thinking in the face of set-backs or temporary defeats.  Kristin reinforces the need to recognise that we share a common humanity and part of our life experience is larger than ourselves (we are not the only one encountering life challenges).  She stresses the role of mindfulness in dealing with thoughts and feelings that damage our self-image and using mindful approaches to grow self-awareness and self-regulation.

In her podcast interview mentioned above, Marsha identifies two key barriers to effective self-compassion – the social and personal obsession with body image (and related materialistic values) and the relentless pursuit of perfectionism.  In relation to perfectionism, she argues that we need to acknowledge that we cannot be perfect – we will make mistakes and poor choices.  This acceptance opens the way to new learning, new habits and thoughtful responses to life crises.  This fundamental realisation was a real breakthrough for tennis player Ash Barty who became Number 1 in the world in 2019.

Mindfulness and mindful eating

Marsha stated that her introduction to mindful eating occurred when Jon Kabat-Zinn visited the Green Mountain retreat center.  She came to understand that mindfulness was essentially about awareness and understanding of the influences shaping our responses and the potentiality of making different choices – choosing between a range of options rather than being locked into a single way of doing things, e.g. mindful eating instead of dieting.  Marsha alluded to the perspective of her mother-in-law, Thelma (Founder of Green Mountain), who talked about “the plank of choice” versus the “diet tightrope”. 

Marsha broadens our perspective on mindful eating when she offers suggestions in her article on ways to bring self-compassion to the process of eating:

  • Give up a fixed way of thinking – what Marsha calls “black and white thinking”.  She suggests, for example, that pizza should not always be branded as bad for you – it may be the best choice when celebrating an achievement with friends. You can be mindful of others, the occasion and the flexibility you have on that occasion – rather than adopting a fixed position that leads to subsequent dissatisfaction for not having “participated” fully in the celebration. In her podcast interview, Marsha argues that we need to adopt a “middle-ground” instead of pursuing unattainable perfection.
  • Become aware of your negative self-talk when eating – Marsha suggests that you write down these thoughts, and also have prepared responses that you can adopt when the debilitating self-critique starts up.
  • Practice giving yourself kind responses – do this whenever a negative thought enters your mind during the day.  The more you do it, the easier it gets and it quickly becomes a default way of thinking – just as awareness practice while waiting can replace the default mode of grabbing your mobile phone to fill the gap.

Drawing on her own personal experience and awareness of research findings, Marsha maintains that mindfulness can help us to contribute more positively and successfully to our own family, work and professional arena.  She observed that as you practice mindfulness, you become more aware of the subtleties of being mindful and its impacts in every arena of your life.  Marsha noted, too, that exploring neuroscience and an understanding of the brain, better equips us to deal with our daily challenges.

Reflection

As we grow in mindfulness, we can become more aware of the thoughts and feelings that drive us to unhealthy eating and related practices and build the resilience to achieve self-regulation in our eating habits.  Mindful eating involves more than just eating slowly, it also extends to identifying and managing our negative self-talk that can occur while we are eating and other times throughout the day.

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Image by John Hain from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

A Guided Meditation on Self-Compassion

Diana Winston provides a guided meditation on self-compassion as part of the weekly offerings of meditation podcasts from the Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC), UCLA.   These weekly podcasts are also available via the UCLA Mindful App.  

Diana explains that the tendency to be self-critical – to disown parts of ourselves that we don’t like – is universal, not the province of a single age group, gender or ethnic group.  We can hear our own voice telling us that we are “stupid” “undeserving”, “inconsiderate” or some other self-demeaning term.  These inner voices focus on our flaws and not our essential goodness or kindness.

In line with the research and philosophy of Kristin Neff, Diana encourages us through self-compassion meditation to accept ourselves as we are with all our warts and flaws and to recognise that in common with the rest of humanity we make mistakes, make poor decisions and say or do things that we later regret.

A guided self-compassion meditation

In her introduction to a guided meditation on self-compassion, Diana leads us through a basic process for becoming grounded – adopting a comfortable position, taking a couple of deep breaths and engaging in a body scan to release points of tension to enable us to become focused on the task at hand. Diana then takes us through three basic steps of a self-compassion meditation:

  • 1. Mindful awareness of our negative “voices” – getting in touch with the self-criticism in our heads and being able to accept ourselves as we are, with all our faults, failings and mistakes.  This does not mean engaging with the voices but noticing what they are saying and accepting that we are not perfect.
  • 2. Recognising that flaws are an integral part of our shared humanity – acknowledging that this is part of the human condition.  No one is perfect and everyone makes mistakes – we have this in common with the rest of humanity.  We can then offer self-forgiveness and kindness to ourselves.
  • 3. Extending kindness to others – when we recognise that we share a flawed existence with the rest of humanity, we are better able to offer kindness towards others.  We can start by expressing gratitude to the people we admire and acknowledging how they enrich our lives. We can then extend this kindness to wishing them and others safety, health, happiness and the ease of wellness.

As we grow in mindfulness through awareness of our negative voices and our inherent flaws, we can learn to accept ourselves as we are, acknowledge our shared humanity and extend self-compassion to ourselves and kindness to others.

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Image by Ioannis Ioannidis from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Advanced Training for Mindfulness Trainers

In a previous post, I discussed resources for mindfulness trainers – free resources through Sounds True and a paid online training course, The Power of Awareness, by Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach.  In this post, I will discuss an advanced course that takes training for mindfulness trainers to another level.

The Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program

This is  a teacher program over two years conducted by Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach supported by global leaders in mindfulness.  One of the prerequisites for this certification program is completion of the 7 week, online Power of Awareness Course.

The Mindfulness Certification Program for teachers of mindfulness incorporates a range of activities designed to build your capacity to teach practices in awareness and compassion, while simultaneously building your own practice in these areas.

The content of the course is provided mainly by online audio and video training supplemented by two, three-day weekend events with Jack, Tara, guest teachers and fellow international participants in Washington.  Where participants are unable to attend the in-person sessions, live streaming is available at the time of each session and the sessions will be available in downloadable video format.

The core audio and video training is augmented by additional presentations by Tara, Jack and globally recognised, guest mindfulness teachers such as Deepak Chopra, Dan Siegel, Eckhart Tolle, Kristin Neff (self-compassion) and Anne Cushman (integration of meditation and yoga).  Participants in the certified teacher training program will also have access to the latest research findings on the benefits of mindfulness and specific forms of meditation.

Mentoring in the mindfulness teacher training program is led by Pat Coffey, assisted by highly trained mentors from the Awareness Training Institute.  Mindfulness practice will be developed through individual and group mentoring, online training sessions, practice groups with peers, a “self-designed practicum” and home practice of meditation exercises provided in audio format through the program.

Skill development will cover not only a wide range of meditation practices and applications (such as managing pain and suffering, dealing with trauma, handling relationship problems and conflict) but also specific skills to give presentations, mentor individuals and facilitate group sessions with mindfulness learners.

Certification will be provided in the form of a Certificate of Completion jointly authorised by The Awareness Training Institute and the Greater Good Science Center (GGSC) at the University of California, Berkeley.

As we grow in mindfulness, we will experience a desire to share our learning with others to help them also realise the benefits of mindfulness and meditation.  In teaching, we can enrich our own learning and practice.  The Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program is designed to give us the credentials and confidence to engage in mindfulness training.

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Image source: courtesy of brenkee on Pixabay

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Mindful Self-Compassion

Compassion is an integral element of mindfulness and emotional intelligence.

It involves being concerned for the pain and suffering of others, having the desire to reduce that suffering and taking action, at whatever level, to redress the suffering of others.   Taking action is a key aspect that differentiates compassion from empathy.

Self-compassion, then, is exercising compassion towards ourselves – ultimately, it means doing things to reduce our own self-initiated pain and suffering.

As we mentioned in a previous post, our minds tend automatically towards negative thoughts.  We are critical of ourselves, dwell on failures, feel embarrassed when we make a mistake and carry shame with us to our own detriment and that of others.

Diana Austin, in her doctoral study of midwives in New Zealand, found, for instance, that the sense of shame and self-blame impacted severely the ability of midwives to recover from the trauma of critical incidents.  Her study resulted in an e-book tool designed to promote self care and kindness towards self in the event of a health professional experiencing a critical event.

The Critical Incidents E-Book contains stories, information and practical advice for health professionals and their managers when mistakes happen and things go wrong.  In the final analysis, the e-book is a journey into self-compassion for those experiencing the depths of self-blame, shame and questioning of their own competence and ability to support others professionally.

Kristin Neff, one of the founders of the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion, identified three components of self-compassion:

  • physical warmth
  • gentle touch
  • soothing vocalization

In her video describing these three components, Kristin suggests a number of self-compassion practices that draw on these components.  For example, she recommends self-hugging and a simple exercise involving placing your hands over your chest while communicating care and tenderness towards yourself.

More detail on these self-compassion exercises can be found in the video below where Kristin Neff describes exactly how to do them:

As you grow in mindfulness you become more aware of self-criticism and the ways in which you blame yourself, and you gain the presence of mind to counter these self-initiated attacks on your self-esteem and sense of self-worth.  Mindful self-compassion exercises build mindfulness and develop self-care and kindness.  The more we are kind to ourselves, the more sensitive we become to the needs of others.

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Image source: Courtesy of johnhain  on Pixabay