The present
For a few years now, I have attempted to meditate every morning. I say attempt because it is one of the habits that I find hardest to nail down, often disrupted by a kid waking up earlier than planned, or being short on time to get out the door, or, let’s face it, copious use of the snooze button. But even when I take my seat and close my eyes, I often have the feeling that I’m not doing it quite right. Generous spirited meditation teachers out there may tell me that there is no ‘right’ way to meditate, but I suppose what I mean is, I’m not always feeling the benefits that I think it could bring.
I suspect the reason for this is that I find it incredibly challenging to switch off my brain. I’ll get to the end of my allotted meditation time and discover that I haven’t been detaching from my thoughts at all, but rather have made a shopping list, remembered three things I need to do at work that I now need to write down somewhere so I won’t forget them, and worried about the limited number of foods that my childrens’ diets consist of. I don’t come out feeling calmer, but rather with the desire to go and do a food shop.
I’ve become increasingly convinced that the ability to live in the present is one of the hardest but most valuable skills that anyone can develop. I say develop - perhaps the more accurate way to phrase it is: not to lose. Anyone that has been around a small child for any protracted period of time will know that part of the joy of these little creatures is that they live almost entirely in the present. When they’re excited about something, they’re SO excited. When something’s upsetting them, or they’ve hurt themselves, it is like the world has ended - but only briefly, and then they’re straight back into their next activity. That capacity for the future not to overshadow their present, and for their past to stay in the past is something I would love to achieve again.
In a leadership context, there’s an interesting balance to be struck - we cannot simply focus on only what is in the present, when our job is to look forwards and set a course for where the organisation is going and how we get there. Part of how we do this is to reflect on the past - where we’ve come from, what’s worked or not worked previously, what we’ve learned from what’s gone before. But certainly for me, it’s easy to spend too much time dwelling on both the recent past and the immediate future. If I consider that something has ‘gone wrong’ - I’ve made a bad decision, dealt with something in a way I wish I hadn’t, or, on an organisational level, things have broadly not gone to plan in one way or another - I am liable to spend more time than is useful either beating myself up or trying to work out what’s gone wrong and how I / we could have made different decisions that would have resulted in a different outcome. I’m also prone to spending a considerable amount of time thinking about, or, perhaps more accurately, worrying about, what’s coming up in the next few weeks or months - the route to hitting income targets by the end of the year, that challenging conversation that you need to have next week, whether or not your senior team / Board / a specific department are working well together and how you could help them if they’re not. These are all valid things to think about - the question is, how much real estate should they take up in your brain on any given day?
I believe one of the most important skills for any leader is the ability to ruthlessly prioritise. Often, when you join an organisation, you are presented with a number of different areas that need looking at and working on. I know that my small brain is incapable of focusing and interrogating any more than three of these areas at once - even that might be too many depending on the scale of the issues that you’re facing. The leaders I admire have the capacity to pick their focuses - crucially, not just the ones that are urgent, but the ones that are important for the long term - and don’t try to do everything at once. I think we can apply this approach on a more day to day level. I try to think of my brain as a bit like a phone battery - it starts the day fully charged having been plugged in all night, and it’s then got a certain amount of battery life to take it through to the end of the day. If I use a substantive amount of that battery life to catastrophise about something in the future that may or may not happen, I lose some of my capacity to focus on what needs doing today. In other words, there’s an opportunity cost to freaking out about what happened yesterday or what may or may not happen tomorrow.
Our identity (as leaders, and as people) is determined by what we do, not what we say or think. How we show up every day, how we deal with the people and the scenarios in front of us - this is our leadership style, our leadership persona. There are so many things that we cannot control - which funders choose to give us money, how many candidates do or don’t apply for a particular job, whether that partnership you’ve been dreaming of comes off or not - but what we can do is decide what we’ll do today. What we prioritise, how we show up for our teams, and the attitude and energy that we bring.
I might always be a bit rubbish at meditating - although I’m certainly going to keep trying. But I am going to start every day with a renewed focus on the present - perhaps thinking about how to survive a meeting filled afternoon without losing focus, or how I can block out distractions when I have a task that requires deep thinking and attention. I think and hope that this might make me a better leader and, by spending more time and energy on things that I can control, possibly a happier one too.