Mindful Leadership

Most entrepreneurs know there is no such thing as work/life balance.   Work is an integral part of life, not separate from it.  So why do so many of us talk about feeling out of balance?    Answer: We prioritize work disproportionately over the non-work/rest of our life.  And we work in ways that are not sustainable.   We put bounds on almost every aspect of our life, except work.   We don’t bring our families to work, but we’ll be heads down in our email during our annual family reunion.  We don’t stop in the middle of a work project to…

2:00 am, pitch black but for the twinkling headlamps.  Crampons on my boots, ice axe in my hand, inexorably tethered to a team of four.  I’m scrambling up the aptly named, Disappointment Cleaver, despair creeping into my consciousness.  This is where I learned the meaning of Commitment.   Though I’d trained hard and felt great on the climb the day before, I was laboring mightily in the higher altitude.   While we charged passed other rope teams, I felt as if I was barely hanging on, I’d never been so completely spent.  (What made me think this was a good way…

Terry was a serial entrepreneur with all classic, foundational attributes of her station:  tenacious, risk tolerant, resilient.  She started a services company with a truly unique approach, and she was passionately committed to both the company and the sector it served. Yet, when her young company was repeatedly losing contracts and struggling to meet payroll, she was faced with the entrepreneur’s ultimate dilemma, whether to continue the business she’d fought hard to create or to throw in the towel.   The idiom “throw in the towel” is, of course, a boxing reference to when a fighter’s manager throws a towel…

My son’s nanny had been with us about a year when we sat down for her performance review.    Betty was smart, dedicated, and had great judgment.  Great judgment both in terms of her ability to make good decisions and in terms of her propensity to cast an opinion based upon her beliefs.  The former type of judgment was a strength.  The latter, not so much.   After providing Betty with a glowing evaluation, I told her that just one thing was still niggling at me.  I wasn’t sure how to approach it, or even whether saying it would be fruitful. …

What happens when our reality doesn’t meet our expectation? It happens all the time, right? Maybe even every day. We want “x” to happen and we get ”y”. We expect our company to land the big contract, the employee to deliver the proposal on time, to achieve some set measure of success and it just doesn’t happen. Then what? How do we typically act/react? And where does that get us? That which We Resist, Persists When results fall short of expectations, most of us experience disappointment, perhaps frustration and maybe even anger. We concentrate on the gap between what we…