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Margaret Graziano
a book bubble about
Ignite Culture
Business & Investing
Author Insight
Staying in the Moment for Optimal Leadership
The working world is full of things that can take you out of the present moment. Things like multitasking, keeping your cell phone on, constantly checking your emails, and having many open windows on your computer are all things that distract you. Cognitive overload is the result of these distractions, leading you to experience an inability to focus and stay on track, bouts of agitation, and increased distress, culminating in decreases in productivity and strained work relationships. No matter the skill or competence level, when a human being has too many things to keep track of, it's difficult to focus and complete tasks. One of the most important things to do to get present is to remove yourself from the world of distraction. Attempt to implement some liberating constraints, such as turning your cellphone off during periods of focus, signing out of your email account and only logging in during scheduled email sessions, keeping only 1 or 2 windows open on your computer, and blocking out time to focus on specific tasks or projects. Another way to keep yourself on track and in a present state of mind is to know, understand, and experience what your ultimate purpose is and define what it looks like to operate in alignment with that purpose. When you do that, you give yourself the opportunity to tune in to what is important and how to work in service of that purpose.
Book Excerpt
Ignite Culture
Focus on full presence. As we witnessed in Donna’s story, many people live in a state of constant distraction. In fact, a major study at Harvard that looked at 2,250 subjects and a quarter-million data points concluded that people weren’t fully engaged in the task in front of them a whopping 47 percent of the time. More interestingly, mind-wandering was found to be an excellent predictor of people’s happiness. The more present a subject was—engaged in the task at hand—the happier they described themselves to researchers. The less present they were, the more unhappy. The modern world has made it more challenging to live fully in the present moment, and this has negatively impacted our well-being. In fact, another twenty-year Harvard study of six thousand men and women aged twenty-five to seventy-four found that “emotional vitality—a sense of enthusiasm, of hopefulness, of engagement in life, and the ability to face life’s stresses with emotional balance—appears to reduce the risk of coronary heart disease.” It’s part of a growing body of research showing a strong link between our thoughts and emotions and our physical and mental well-being. Forward-looking companies like Google have taken note of this correlation and adapted their organizational cultures to encourage creativity and well-being. In 2007, an engineer at Google named Chade-Meng Tan gathered a team of leading experts in mindfulness techniques, neuroscience, leadership, and emotional intelligence to develop an internal course called “Search Inside Yourself” (SIY). It was designed to help fellow Googlers “develop the skills of mindfulness, empathy, and overall emotional intelligence to create the conditions for individual and collective thriving.” The program was so successful that it has become the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute. Though now independent, the team still works with Google, as well as many other high-performance organizations, such as SAP, the United Nations, Procter & Gamble, and Salesforce, among others.
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