CNBC reports that teachers around the USA are using meditation apps, like Calm and Headspace, in their classrooms to help students with anxiety and encourage focus. Calm has created free access for thousands of teachers in 140 countries. Headspace is working directly with 300 schools in the US to enable access to its app.

By Angelica LaVito | @angelicalavito

From the article:

• Teachers around the country are using meditation apps like Calm and Headspace to introduce mindfulness to their lesson plans.
• The Calm app launched Calm Schools for teachers in May of 2016
• Headspace works directly with 35 districts and around 300 schools in 15 states to offer their teachers access to the mindfulness app.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/30/teachers-are-using-calm-headspace-to-teach-mindfulness.html

In today’s world, we need mindful leadership more than ever, but there are still few scientific studies which directly support evidence of the impact of mindfulness training on leadership. Megan Reitz, an Associate Professor of Leadership and Dialogue at Ashridge Executive Education at Hult International Business School, and Michael Chaskalson, one of the pioneers of the application of mindfulness in leadership and in the workplace, examine the path of implementing mindfulness training in company leadership.

From Harvard Business Review :

Mindfulness is the height of fashion in leadership development circles. At a recent conference in the field, we saw a missionary-type fervor among some trainers who claimed that mindfulness could fix every ill in the organizational world. It’s easy to succumb to enthusiastic hyperbole; one HR director we spoke to was characteristically delighted to be introducing a two-hour workshop to her board of directors to help them become more resilient, more focused, and more open to challenge.

But hopes like these are justified more by wishing than by any reliable evidence. There is in fact very little data in relation to the impact of mindfulness training on leadership development. Despite plenty of anecdotal support from leaders who have tried mindfulness, the current enthusiasm for it derives mainly from research conducted in clinical contexts that don’t much resemble modern organizations.

From the perspective of leadership development, there are three urgent questions that need to be answered if the enthusiasm (and the usefulness of mindfulness in a leadership context) isn’t to dissipate.

We need to know:

• Does mindfulness training actually “develop” leadership?
• If it does, how does it do so? What are the mechanisms that make it effective?
• And how do we design interventions that actually work?

As we explained in our previous article, to begin to answer these questions we designed a Mindful Leader program involving fortnightly workshops, three of which were face to face and one of which was a shorter virtual meeting. In all, the research studied 57 senior business leaders in two cohorts. Participants learned why mindfulness might be relevant to their leadership practice, how to practice it, and how to apply their learning to their individual leadership challenges.

Read the full article here

The first Monasterra retreat “Leaders on the Path”, led by Anne-Valerie Rocourt and Romain Cristofini, took place the 7th-9th of April in France.

Stéphane Leluc of Kalapa Academy has been selected by Orange to introduce mindfulness-based programs to their corporation in France. Other recent or upcoming interventions include mindfulness introduction programs at BNP Paribas and Bayard Press.

Juliet Adams’ latest book, Mindful Leadership For Dummies, will be released next week, on the 27th of June — pre-order here.

Enrique Escauriaza has joined The Potential Project, bringing the PP programs to Spain!

Podcast with Dan Huston, who speaks about his university class and text book Communicating Mindfully: Mindfulness-Based Communication and Emotional Intelligence. From Present Moment Mindfulness.

Listen here :

Episode 062 :: Dan Huston :: Communicating Mindfully: Mindfulness-Based Communication and Emotional Intelligence : Present Moment Mindfulness

“In your meditation practice, you may have noticed how much internal dialogue is happening, moment by moment, distracting you from just being present with your experience. That’s our default mode, thinking and perhaps doing, rather than being. Our practice helps us to see and experience a little more directly what’s going on in our external and internal environment. Now consider the situation when we’re communicating with someone else. We may still have that narrative locomotive, fueled by the fire of emotions, memories, habit patterns of behavior and speech, and so does the other person. Communication is tremendously complex! What would it be like if our mindfulness practice helped raise our awareness of that complexity, and gave us a little space to respond, rather than react, in communications?”