Speaker 1: Welcome to Mindful Leadership Transforming Lives with your hosts saying,
Speaker 1: this is where leadership meets purpose, presence, and passion. In
Speaker 1: today's fast paced, high pressure world, we face a leadership crisis.
Speaker 1: Too often, teams are led by managers who lack empathy, clarity,
Speaker 1: and vision, leaving individuals uninspired, disconnected, and underwealue. But it
Speaker 1: doesn't have to be this way. Great leadership isn't born.
Speaker 1: It's bill the endgame. Empower your leadership, inspire the world.
Speaker 1: Every week, join me, your host saying, as we tackle
Speaker 1: the gaps in leadership and life coaching head on learning
Speaker 1: how mindfulness, emotional intelligence, and compassion can redefine success. This
Speaker 1: isn't just another podcast. It's a mission to fill the
Speaker 1: void left by in effective leadership. And it's not just
Speaker 1: about leadership in business. Life Coaching for leaders and new
Speaker 1: executives is at heart of this journey. Ready to rise
Speaker 1: above the noise and lead with clarity, purpose, and impact.
Speaker 1: Join a global movement dedicated to reshaping the future of leadership,
Speaker 1: one mindful moment at a night, Let's begin.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to another episode of Mindful Leadership podcast on
Speaker 2: the Transformssion Network. The podcast where it turns stress into strategy,
Speaker 2: overthinking into clarity, and overwhelm into momentum. I'm your host, Singh,
Speaker 2: the leadership coach who has watched a lot of busy,
Speaker 2: talented people charged through their ear without once stopping to
Speaker 2: ask whether they were charging in the right direction. Let's begin.
Speaker 2: I want to start with a story about a man
Speaker 2: I'll call him David. Devin was forty six, our senior
Speaker 2: partner at a professional services firm. Two kids, one dog,
Speaker 2: a marriage that he loves and does not pay enough
Speaker 2: attention to, and a job that he is, in his
Speaker 2: own honest words, crushing and being crushed by in roughly
Speaker 2: equal measures. He came to me spring because his annual
Speaker 2: review had gone well, bonus up battle affirmed, future was bright,
Speaker 2: and he had walked out of the meeting feeling, in
Speaker 2: his own words, like I had just been congress related
Speaker 2: for running faster on a treadmill that nobody actually owns.
Speaker 2: He actually said this, saying on paper, I am doing
Speaker 2: everything right, and inside I cannot tell whether I'm growing
Speaker 2: or just getting older inside the same routines. I don't
Speaker 2: know how to tell the difference anymore. I've thought about
Speaker 2: that line a lot. I do not know how to
Speaker 2: tell the difference between growing and getting older, and let
Speaker 2: it said, because that is in fact what happens to
Speaker 2: most of us. We confuse motion with growth, We confuse
Speaker 2: more of the same with becoming more. And the only thing,
Speaker 2: the only thing that lets us tell the difference is
Speaker 2: one thing most known us of us. Make time for reflection,
Speaker 2: not journaling for its own sake, not staring out of
Speaker 2: the window. Not the vague spiritual idea of, you know,
Speaker 2: taking time for yourself that gets scribbled at bottom of
Speaker 2: a tootl list and never crossed off. I'm talking about
Speaker 2: real reflection, structured, honest, the kind that produces an answer
Speaker 2: you can act on by Tuesday. That is what I
Speaker 2: want to give you this week, outside the usual set
Speaker 2: frames work sequence, as a stand alone bonus episode, because
Speaker 2: reflection diver deserves its own room. It is not a
Speaker 2: substep of any other practice. It is a practice underneath
Speaker 2: every practice without reflection, with every other framework I have
Speaker 2: taught on this podcast eventually drifts so here the framework,
Speaker 2: and I'll tell you upfront the word is the metaphor.
Speaker 2: The word is mirror. Hold up the mirror, mindful, inquiring, recognizing, reframing, owning,
Speaker 2: and realizing our mirror does not flatter you. A mirror
Speaker 2: does not argue with you. A mirror does not, for
Speaker 2: what matter, do anything for you. It only shows you
Speaker 2: what is actually there, and then it stays there patiently
Speaker 2: while you decide what to do about it. Now, that
Speaker 2: is what reflection at its best is, And the six
Speaker 2: letters in mirror are the six moves that turn act
Speaker 2: of looking at yourself into act of growing from what
Speaker 2: you see. So let's walk through it right first. The
Speaker 2: difference between rumination and reflection is where we get it wrong.
Speaker 2: I have to draw a line, and it is a
Speaker 2: line a lot of high function people get wrong. Rumination
Speaker 2: is what happens when you replay the same painful saying
Speaker 2: in your head at two in the morning, hoping that
Speaker 2: this time, somehow you'll think your way out of it.
Speaker 2: The reflection is what happens when you sit with a
Speaker 2: real question in daylight and let the answer rise. The
Speaker 2: two looks similar from the outside, both involving thinking, both
Speaker 2: involving looking inward. Both, if you describe them to a
Speaker 2: friend or a coffee sound like I've been thinking a
Speaker 2: lot about myself lately. The difference is now. Rumination is
Speaker 2: a loop. Reflection is a spiral. Rumination ends where it started.
Speaker 2: Reflection ends one floor higher than where it began. Most
Speaker 2: people who tell me they reflect a lot are when
Speaker 2: I look closely at the practice, actually ruminating. They are
Speaker 2: not generating new insights. Then they are replaying old footage
Speaker 2: with a higher volume. And the more they do it,
Speaker 2: the worst the feeling, which is the cleanest possible signal
Speaker 2: that practice is not in fact working. My friends, the
Speaker 2: mirror method is in part a way to know which
Speaker 2: one you are doing. If you finish a session of
Speaker 2: reflection feeling lighter, clearer, and one inch closer to a decision,
Speaker 2: you reflect it. Now. If you finish feeling heavier, more confused,
Speaker 2: and one inch further from a decision, you reminute it.
Speaker 2: The letters are how you stay on the right side
Speaker 2: of that line, So let me walk you through. The
Speaker 2: first one is the letter aim for mindful pause, and
Speaker 2: it is the move that, when skipped, makes every other
Speaker 2: movie possible. You cannot reflect at speed of your inbox.
Speaker 2: You cannot reflect with eleven open taps in your head.
Speaker 2: You cannot reflect with three slack channels blinking. The first
Speaker 2: act of reflection is not thinking, It is stopping. And
Speaker 2: the most people skip this step because stopping in our
Speaker 2: culture feels like falling behind. It feels like the people
Speaker 2: who are stopping are pulling ahead. So we do not stop.
Speaker 2: We try to reflect while running, and we get the
Speaker 2: cognitive equivalent of taking a photograph while sprinting. Well, the
Speaker 2: image is blurry, and the bloody image is the one
Speaker 2: we made decisions from. And as I've always thought, a
Speaker 2: mindful pause is the deliberate creation, deliberate indulging creation, a
Speaker 2: small window in which the engine is off, not of
Speaker 2: your body, the engine of your reactivity, the voice that
Speaker 2: wants to do something before it has finished seeing something.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about Aisha. She was the chief of staff
Speaker 2: at a fast going fintech brilliant, tireless. She came to
Speaker 2: a session of ours one day visibly framed. She had
Speaker 2: been reflecting on a hard week, she told me. I
Speaker 2: asked her where she had done the reflecting. She said,
Speaker 2: in the car on the way here between the two calls.
Speaker 2: It is not reflection, what is the debris we carry?
Speaker 2: I asked her just to do one thing before our
Speaker 2: next session, set for ten minutes in the chair with
Speaker 2: no device, no notebook, no music, no agenda, no meditating,
Speaker 2: not problem solving, just sitting in the chair until the
Speaker 2: chair felt like a chair and not a holding pen.
Speaker 2: Between the meetings, she came back two weeks later and
Speaker 2: told me it was one of the hardest ten minutes
Speaker 2: of a professional life, and also that somewhere around minute
Speaker 2: seven she had become aware of a feeling she had
Speaker 2: been carrying for three months and had not previously named
Speaker 2: a specific, locatable, nameable feeling, which turned out to be
Speaker 2: the entry point for the most important conversation she had
Speaker 2: with her CEO that year. The practice or the mindful
Speaker 2: pauses this once this week, sit for ten minutes with nothing,
Speaker 2: no notebook, no agenda, not to think, not to fix,
Speaker 2: just to be in that chair until the chair stops
Speaker 2: being the holding pen. My friend's mindful pause because you
Speaker 2: cannot clearly see in water that they're still moving. The
Speaker 2: second letter I is to inquire honestly, and this is
Speaker 2: the letter that decides whether the next forty minutes are
Speaker 2: going to be reflection or a theater. Now, most people,
Speaker 2: when they sit down to reflect, ask themselves comfortable questions.
Speaker 2: Am I working hard enough? Of course you are I'm
Speaker 2: a good person. Of course you are. Did I dosage?
Speaker 2: You always do your best by definition in the moment
Speaker 2: you are in. These questions sound a reflection. They are
Speaker 2: in fact self soothing. They prodressed up in reflecting clothes.
Speaker 2: You finish them feeling reassured. And reassured is exactly the
Speaker 2: wrong feeling for growth. Two. Inquire, honestly, is to ask
Speaker 2: yourself the questions you have been quietly avoiding, the one
Speaker 2: that if you sat across from a trusted mentor and
Speaker 2: they asked it, you would flinch. Questions like what am
Speaker 2: I tolerating right now that I know some way inside
Speaker 2: I should not be tolerating. Where am I performing competence
Speaker 2: to hide a real uncertainty? Who's approval? Am I still
Speaker 2: chasing that I do not actually respect? What conversation have
Speaker 2: I been postponing because I am of afraid of what
Speaker 2: is on the other side of it? A founder I
Speaker 2: coached sat down one Saturday morning to do some reflection.
Speaker 2: He spent ninety minutes journaling. He came to the session
Speaker 2: the following Monday very pleased with himself. He had filed
Speaker 2: fourteen pages. I read that, and I told him Marcus
Speaker 2: as gently as I could, that you had written fourteen
Speaker 2: pages of self defense, beautifully argued, internally, consistent, completely useless.
Speaker 2: Not one of the sentence has asked himself a question
Speaker 2: he did not already know the comforting answer to. So
Speaker 2: I asked him three questions that, Saraday, what is one
Speaker 2: thing about your leadership this quarter that if your team
Speaker 2: described it to me honestly, would actually sting who on
Speaker 2: your team you have been quietly resenting and not addressing?
Speaker 2: What are you afraid would happen if we told your
Speaker 2: co founder the show about how you felt about the
Speaker 2: last decision. He came back the following Monday. He came
Speaker 2: in looking like he had not slept, and he had
Speaker 2: a list of three actions, each one slightly terrifying each
Speaker 2: one when he actually did them in the weeks that followed,
Speaker 2: exactly was the right things? My friends? The cactus for
Speaker 2: inquiring is this, write down three questions about your current
Speaker 2: life that if a vice friend asked them across the table,
Speaker 2: you would flitch, then sit with them for fifteen minutes.
Speaker 2: Do not answer them quickly. The flinch is the signal
Speaker 2: you are in the writer rop inquire honestly because a
Speaker 2: mirror that flatters you is not a mirror, It is
Speaker 2: a poster. The third letter recognize the patterns, and this
Speaker 2: is the letter that turns reflection from a series of
Speaker 2: one of insights into an engine of real change. A
Speaker 2: single hard truth look at once will not change your life.
Speaker 2: A pattern seemed clearly the first time, because the pattern
Speaker 2: is the one thing you have been doing for years
Speaker 2: that until this moment, you have been treating as a
Speaker 2: series of unrelated events. That was a bad boss, that
Speaker 2: was a bad relationship, that was a bad team. And
Speaker 2: then some point, if you let the mirror stay up
Speaker 2: long enough, you see the small, embarrassing frame thing. Those
Speaker 2: three events had one variable in common, and friends, that
Speaker 2: variable is you, me as the one staring at the mirror.
Speaker 2: To recognize the patterns is to step back from single
Speaker 2: incident and ask where else does this show up? When
Speaker 2: have I felt this exactly before? What kind of situation
Speaker 2: seems to keep me finding me? Or more honestly, what
Speaker 2: kind of situation do I keep finding myself? In Renata,
Speaker 2: a very senior executive I worked with came to me
Speaker 2: convinced she had a bad luck with bosses problem three
Speaker 2: jobs in a row, three difficult relationships with the person
Speaker 2: above Quitt in an exercise where she wrote out in
Speaker 2: some detail each of the three relationships what had gone wrong,
Speaker 2: what had been said, what had not been said, and
Speaker 2: then she read the three pages out loud. Halfway through
Speaker 2: the third one, she stopped and she said, very quietly,
Speaker 2: they are not the same person, but I am the
Speaker 2: same person in all three rooms. And then she described
Speaker 2: with the precision I will never forget the specific way
Speaker 2: she had in all three jobs withheld a particular kind
Speaker 2: of feedback from the person above her out of a
Speaker 2: particular fear she had not previously named, and then watched
Speaker 2: the resentment build until the relationship was unsalvageable. That was
Speaker 2: not a bad luck with bosses problem. That was a pattern,
Speaker 2: and the moment she saw it as a pattern, she
Speaker 2: could do something about it, which she did in her
Speaker 2: next job, and that job, by her own report, the
Speaker 2: best professional relationship of her career. So the practice in
Speaker 2: this right, take the most painful or persistent issue in
Speaker 2: your current life, at your work, at your home, and
Speaker 2: your friendship in your society. Write down two or three
Speaker 2: previous times in your life when you felt the same
Speaker 2: kind of pain. Then look for the variable that is
Speaker 2: common across all of them. The variable almost always is
Speaker 2: not other person. It is the thing you do when
Speaker 2: you are in that situation, recognize the patterns, because the
Speaker 2: same thing playing out a third time is no longer
Speaker 2: a coincidence. It is the map. The fourth letter, reframe
Speaker 2: the story. And this is the letter that takes painful
Speaker 2: pattern turns and make it usable. Our pattern sine clearly
Speaker 2: is not yet growth. It is just unflattering photographs. What
Speaker 2: turns the photograph into growth is the story you decide
Speaker 2: to tell yourself about the photograph. And here is the
Speaker 2: thing most people do not realize. You are already telling
Speaker 2: yourself a story about every pattern in your life. There
Speaker 2: is say you did not pick up the story consciously.
Speaker 2: It was given to you by your family, by your industry,
Speaker 2: by your whole teacher, by some moment in your past
Speaker 2: that wrote a sentence in to your head you have
Speaker 2: been quoting ever since. Now. To reframe the story is
Speaker 2: to notice the sentence you have been quoting, and to
Speaker 2: ask whether it is true, Ask whether it is useful,
Speaker 2: and whether on closer inspection, it is even yours. I
Speaker 2: give example of David. For twenty years he told him
Speaker 2: to the story that he was not a creative person.
Speaker 2: That sentence had been said to him exactly once by
Speaker 2: a high school teacher in two thousand and three, and
Speaker 2: he had been quoting it unexamined ever since. He had
Speaker 2: shaped with jobs he applied for, which projects he volunteered for,
Speaker 2: which conversations he stayed quite in. He had built an
Speaker 2: entire career around a sentence that by one tired adult.
Speaker 2: On one back Tuesday, twenty three years earlier, we did
Speaker 2: one exercise. I asked him to write down the three
Speaker 2: pieces of work he had ever felt most proud of
Speaker 2: in his career. Here now. He wrote them down. Then
Speaker 2: I asked him, simply, were any of these creative? He
Speaker 2: looked at the page. All three were creator. He sat
Speaker 2: there for a long time. Then he said, with a
Speaker 2: small laugh, and had something else underneath. I think I
Speaker 2: have been operating an incorrect data for twenty three years now.
Speaker 2: My friend's that refrain. I'm not a non creative person.
Speaker 2: I'm a creative person who was told once that I wasn't,
Speaker 2: and I believe it longer than I should have changed.
Speaker 2: What he applied for, what he volunteered for, what he
Speaker 2: believed about himself in the meeting, and within a year
Speaker 2: he had taken up the most creatively demanding project of
Speaker 2: his career. In his own words, he was writing a
Speaker 2: new sentence. Now, the practice to reframe is this. Take
Speaker 2: the pattern you identified in the previous steps. Okay, write
Speaker 2: down the sentence you have been telling yourself about it.
Speaker 2: Then ask three questions, is it true, is it useful?
Speaker 2: And is it my or did somebody hand it to me?
Speaker 2: Then write a new sentence in your own words that
Speaker 2: is closer to the truth as you see it. Now,
Speaker 2: reframe the story, reframe the thought. Because the pattern is
Speaker 2: the photograph, but the story is the caption, and you
Speaker 2: are allowed to retrite the caption. The next letter, oh
Speaker 2: own your part, and this is the letter where reflection
Speaker 2: stops being an internal exercise and starts becoming a moral
Speaker 2: You can pause, you can inquire, you can recognize the pattern,
Speaker 2: you can reframe the story. And if you stop there,
Speaker 2: you have done a lovely piece of internal work that will,
Speaker 2: by Friday evaporate because inside without ownership is just content.
Speaker 2: It feels good in the moment and it produces no change.
Speaker 2: To own your part is to take the insights and
Speaker 2: locate specifically, the piece of it that belongs to you,
Speaker 2: not the piece that belongs to your birth, not the
Speaker 2: piece that belongs to your parents, not the piece that
Speaker 2: belongs to the broken system. Those pieces are real, Those
Speaker 2: pieces matter. They are also almost always outside the territory
Speaker 2: you can actually act on. Your part is the part
Speaker 2: you can act on, and the practice of growth is
Speaker 2: practice of pulling that part, your part, out of the
Speaker 2: mess and naming it clearly. I coached you, Yulearanda. She
Speaker 2: had spent six months in difficult dynamic with peer. We
Speaker 2: did the pattern work, we did the reframe. She came
Speaker 2: to a session with a beautiful articulated understanding of dynamic,
Speaker 2: twenty minutes of careful explanation. I waited until she was done.
Speaker 2: Then I asked her, that is great, Lena, is this dynamic?
Speaker 2: What is part of what you belonged to? She looked
Speaker 2: at me with something close to annoyance and said, I
Speaker 2: just spent twenty minutes telling you. And I said, you
Speaker 2: spend twenty minutes telling me about him, about them. What
Speaker 2: is the part that belongs to you? And she finally said,
Speaker 2: I've been waiting for him to apologize first. As long
Speaker 2: as I'm waiting for him. I'm not actually a free
Speaker 2: person in this I'm a hostage to whether he ever
Speaker 2: does the thing he almost certainly never going to do. See,
Speaker 2: that was her part, not the whole dynamic. Her part,
Speaker 2: and the moment she named it, she could act on it.
Speaker 2: But she did, and within a week in a conversation
Speaker 2: that did not require him to apologize. First. The practice
Speaker 2: of owning your part is this, take the insight from
Speaker 2: the previous fol letters. Write down in one sentence the
Speaker 2: specific part of this situation that belongs to me, not
Speaker 2: the whole situation, the slice that is mine, the thing
Speaker 2: I am doing or not doing that is within my
Speaker 2: power to change. My friends, own you, because the territory
Speaker 2: you cannot change is not where growth happens. Growth happens
Speaker 2: in the territory you can. And then the sixth and
Speaker 2: the final letter realign what matters. And this is the
Speaker 2: letter that turns the whole exercise from contemplation into life.
Speaker 2: Reflection at its best, ends with a small concrete adjustment,
Speaker 2: not a fire planet, not a vision board, a small
Speaker 2: adjustment to the next meeting, a different sentence in a
Speaker 2: difficult conversation, a meeting you decline a meeting. You finally
Speaker 2: schedule a boundary. You draw a boundary, you let go
Speaker 2: off a practice, you start a habit, You stop something
Speaker 2: small specific soon that aligns the next seven days of
Speaker 2: your life with what the milature showed you. To realign
Speaker 2: with what matters is to transplate insights into one microact,
Speaker 2: just one. Because the temptation after a good reflection session
Speaker 2: is to try to change ten things at one, and
Speaker 2: ten things change at once, in practice is zero things
Speaker 2: change at all. The discipline is to pick one. So
Speaker 2: take a mindful pause, inquire honestly, recognize the patterns, reframe
Speaker 2: the story on your part, and realign with what matters. Now,
Speaker 2: there are three traps to flat one confusing reflection with renimination.
Speaker 2: Remember that pitfall two trying to do the work without
Speaker 2: the pause, and pitfall three ending without alignment. So there
Speaker 2: are three small all name things. One tonight or tomorrow morning.
Speaker 2: Sit in the chair for ten minutes with no device,
Speaker 2: no note book, no agender, not to think, not to fix,
Speaker 2: just to be with the chair. Notice what is there
Speaker 2: when the noise lies down. In this episode, I'm sitting
Speaker 2: with you, and you're noticing that the reason for your
Speaker 2: ear has felt like. A motion without growth is that
Speaker 2: you have not been entirely sure which direction growth was
Speaker 2: supposed to point. Now that is the exact place for
Speaker 2: which purpose factor assessment is built. A mirror is powerful,
Speaker 2: but mirror only shows you what is in front of it.
Speaker 2: It does not on its own tell you which way
Speaker 2: you are meant to walk. The direction of travel is
Speaker 2: what purpose factor assessment was built for. Mirror is not
Speaker 2: a beautiful idea. Six small moves, twenty minutes, one correct
Speaker 2: act on the other side, the kind of practice you
Speaker 2: can build into Sunday night, and if you do, will
Speaker 2: quietly change the shape of the next five years of
Speaker 2: your life. Hold up the mirror, see what is there,
Speaker 2: Do one small thing about it, then come back. The
Speaker 2: mirror is patient. I'll see you next week. You're listening
Speaker 2: to Saying on Mindful Leadership Transforming Lives on the Transformation Network.
Speaker 2: Have a blessing.
Speaker 1: Thank you for watching Mindful Leadership Transforming Lives with me.
Speaker 1: Your host is saying, we are honored to have you
Speaker 1: join us on this journey to explore the transformative power
Speaker 1: of mindfulness, emotional intelligence, and authentic leadership. Tune in every
Speaker 1: week on Transformation Talk Radio. Dot Com at Moon Pacific
Speaker 1: on Tuesdays, where we will continue to explore how mindful
Speaker 1: leadership can create a ripple effect of positive changes in
Speaker 1: your life and lives of those who influence.
Speaker 2: This show is.
Speaker 1: Dedicated to helping you lead with purpose, presence, and passion,
Speaker 1: whether you're navigating the complexities of business, building stronger connection
Speaker 1: with your team, or striving to make a meaningful impact
Speaker 1: in the world around you. For about the show, access
Speaker 1: additional resources, or live deepot visits saying powerupoach dot com.
Speaker 1: Remember leadership isn't just.
Speaker 2: About what you do, It's about who you are.
Speaker 1: Let's continue to transform lives together, one mindful moment at
Speaker 1: a time. See you next week.