Russell 00.00
Hi, and welcome back to Resilience Unravelled. I'm delighted to be joined by my next guest because as much as anything else, it's nice to hear an English accent for a change. It's been a while and I'm joined today by Andrew MacNeil. And good afternoon, Andrew. How are you?
Andrew:Hi, I'm good, Russell. Thank you very much. Thanks for inviting me on.
Russell:It's an absolute pleasure. Well, as you’re English, I don't have to have a long conversation about the weather across the ponds. But where in the UK are you today?
Andrew:I'm actually on the south coast. I can wave to France from here and it's glorious sunshine. So, feeling very fortunate this morning.
Russell:That's good. Well, it's good to hear. I'm in the northeast, of course, where it's very close to our signature month. When I first moved here, I was told there was June and winter, so we're nearly out of it. We're nearly going to hit double figures. So, there you go. Well, it's a joy to talk to you. So, Andrew, tell us a little bit about what it is that you do.
Andrew:So, I am a leadership consultant and try to help individuals and teams thrive under pressure. In essence, my role or my work is really around trying to identify how can teams both look after their well-being and improve their performance. I believe passionately that both are completely linked. We can't perform well if we're not well. And so, my role and the work that I do is really around looking at tools and techniques to help teams collaborate, to help them look after themselves and each other, and to enjoy what they're doing in an increasingly high-pressure environment. We find, again, teams and leaders. The group that I probably work most closely with are under immense pressure, either individually or collectively, and they are often really struggling. So, what I try to do is help bring along some tools and some ideas which can help them in that work.
Russell:Okay. I'm guessing one of the tools you talk about most is mindfulness, so perhaps we can talk a bit about that.
Andrew:Sure. So, a little bit then around I discovered mindfulness might be useful, so I approach mindfulness as a complete sceptic. I think that's important for my personal experience. So, about 2012, I was in a fairly high-pressure leadership role, and I found that I wasn't coping very well. I was under immense sort of personal stress, and I wasn't really present with my family, I wasn't present at work, I wasn't having a great time, either physically or mentally. So, I had to find something which was going to help me navigate this seemingly impossible wall of stress and pressure. And I reached out to a dear friend of mine who happened to be a Buddhist priest. He wasn't when I knew him at school, but he became one during the course of his life and I often joked with him that everybody should have a Buddhist priest as a mate.
Andrew:And I said, do you have any ideas? And perhaps unsurprisingly, he suggested mindfulness. And I have to say, when he said it, my heart sank because I had seen his sort of pathway, his life pathway, and I totally respected it, but it really wasn't for me and it's still not. But when he suggested mindfulness, I thought, it's just not my bag. It's not really what? Anyway, I didn't have a lot of choice. I'd run out of options, and I was pretty desperate. So, I went on this two-day weekend retreat and in this retreat centre and during the course of these two days, something clicked that if it were my thoughts that were overwhelming me, perhaps having relationship to my thoughts might help. So, I started practicing mindfulness and I found that it absolutely did help. I was able to start to enjoy work again, be present with my family.
Andrew:I found myself very rapidly really back in the flow and really thriving. So much so. And I always say that this doesn't guarantee a promotion, but within about three months I was offered a promotion and I had a bigger job. The only reason I mentioned that is because I then had a bigger job with more stress and was thriving in that role. And the thing which had fundamentally changed was this practice of mindfulness thing. But to be honest with you, Russell, I told nobody about it because weird, and I thought everybody else would think it was weird and I thought it genuinely would impact on my leadership promotion prospects because everybody would think he's doing.
Russell:Something a bit odd.
Andrew:And eventually I went to a program called the Major Project Leaders Academy, which is a sort of master's for project leaders, and in that I had no intention of telling anybody that I was practicing mindfulness, but it kind of slipped out in evening conversations, people were talking about leadership stress and they're saying, how do you cope? And people are saying, Exercise, and stuff like that. And I mentioned the M word and I kind of expected them to pick up their dinner trays and move to the next table, but bless them, they didn't. And a lot of them were so interested because they were after other ideas that they wanted to know more about it. So that gave me the confidence to think, hang on, can this be brought into a leadership context to a work context in a pragmatic, practical way, which can really help leaders navigate those high intensity situations?
Russell:So at a practical level then, because people, I mean, people come in here and talk about mindfulness all the time and it's great. And we have it from the spiritual side through to the very practical side. Now, since you're at the practical side. So, at a practical side, what is mindfulness and how do we begin to actually do it? Because at its heart, it's very simple, isn't it?
Andrew:Yeah, I think that's right. And it's something which probably most people do without even noticing it in a fairly unstructured way. So, mindfulness can be defined, perhaps, and John Cabot Zinn described it, I'm going to misquote him now, but it's something along the lines of non-judgmental, present moment awareness. And I love that description because it's so compact, there's so much in there. But in essence, what we're doing is we're noticing what's actually happening now and we're noticing it, and we're also noticing when perhaps we want it to be different, but rather than just running to something being different, we're just noticing what it is now. And we can do that very simply. And a way that sometimes I illustrated is the last time that anybody listening to this was on a holiday. And it's the end of the evening. And they were just staring out of the balcony or the veranda, and they were just noticing the sunset.
Andrew:And they weren't even thinking about the day that's just gone by, and they weren't thinking about the evening ahead. They were just noticing the scent in the air, the colours in the sky. In that moment we're present, we're just noticing what's happening. So, we will all have had mindful moments, I suspect. I don't know, I don't know everyone, but my suspicion is and so we can choose to create that. It's our capacity to build this intentional placement of attention. Somebody brilliantly once said that to choose where we place our attention in the attention economy is an act of rebellion. I love that.
Russell:That is a good phrase.
Andrew:Yeah. Not mine, I hate. But we can train ourselves to choose to place our attention where we want to. So on a very practical level, if we're going into a meeting, which is high intensity, or we're about to do a presentation, if we choose to bring our attention just to the contact points of our feet on the floor, or if we're sitting down the contact points with the chair and then broaden our attention out to the wide room, that is a moment of mindfulness because we're choosing to place our attention there. And obviously that's just the very beginning and we can build it out and it's a life's work and I will never finish that work and I will continue to learn. But that, in essence, is what we're doing. We're choosing where we place our attention.
Russell:Yes, it is simple. And then people will say, of course it's the life's work and blah, blah. So, what is the life's work bit?
Andrew:So there's another lovely quote, which is that mindfulness is easy. It's remembering to be mindful that's difficult. And I think that's the challenge, firstly, and there are some mindfulness practitioners who would take a different view, but my experience has been that by practicing what might be described as formal practice, so sitting for 1020 minutes a day. And by sitting, I mean practicing a mindfulness exercise or the wrong word but experiencing mindfulness for ten or 20 minutes at the start of the day or at the end of the day whenever works for you. It's kind of like going to the gym in that I don't go to the gym. Well, I don't go to the gym, to be honest with you, Russell, but I wouldn't go to the gym in order to become brilliant at leg presses or brilliant at press ups per se. What I would go to the gym to do is be able to Betty move a wheelbarrow.
Andrew:And in the same way, my practice enables me at moments of high intensity to just be able to choose where I place my attention and navigate. I can sense that fear response. I can notice in myself what's happening, and I can choose to place my attention somewhere else. So it's kind of by practicing and practicing, we can build this capacity to place our attention. And that is definitely a life's work because my attention, even during this podcast, has been flitting about all over the place because I'm a human and that's what brains do.
Russell:Yeah, and just as well that they do because of course, one of the things they're doing is protecting us and such like and using other forms of sensory information. There's two ways of looking at this. We can start the individual or start the organisational level. And I know you've written a book about organisational mindfulness, so should we start there at the big picture and then work in so how does an organ I'm assuming an organisation becomes mindful by having mindful people, but maybe I'm wrong there.
Andrew:Well, I think an organisation becomes mindful by, yes, definitely having mindful people, but also being open to having a conversation about mindfulness and about how you can bring it into the daily routine. So, it's a cultural thing, really. It's that idea of culture eating strategy for breakfast, having the culture right and being able to have an open conversation about something like mindfulness, I think is absolutely key. And I think for me, the reason or where my book came from was trying to explain mindfulness to a very cynical audience. So again, I think there's a perception that mindfulness is just about well-being. It is definitely, in my experience, has had huge advantages in well-being, but it also has, again in my experience, really clear benefits in terms of performance. So in the book, there is a model which has four boxes and it has a box which says Mindful of the vision.
Andrew:And the reason why it says that is when we're in the weeds, when we're delivering something under intense pressure, remembering why we're doing it. And that may be just to build market share. It may be to support a particular group in society. It may be, for any number of reasons, but whatever the vision of the organization or the vision of the program is, if we lose sight of it, we can lose sense of purpose, we can also be doing the wrong things. Next box is mindful of delivery. And by that, I mean any leader. Well, every leader that I've ever spoken to has had the experience of having too many things to do in a day. So how can we choose to bring our attention to which of the things are going to actually achieve that vision? So being selective and bringing our attention to delivery, so effectively delivering the third box is mindful of our team.
Andrew:So recognising and noticing and bringing our attention to who's struggling, who's underperforming but who might be really struggling at the moment. I think we all learned a lot about that during COVID and identifying in 2D versions where people are signalling that they're really not in a great place and then mindful of ourselves. And this is the oxygen mask principle, which most people, I think, will be aware of. When you're on a plane, people say, put the oxygen mask on yourself before you try and help anybody else. Instinctively we might think, no, I'm going to try and reach out and help that person. No, you're not, you're going to pass out. So put your oxygen mask on. So, it's being mindful of ourselves and knowing enough about ourselves and how to have toolkit ready to help us. So, the reason I describe that model is because the intention of the book is to frame mindfulness in a way that can help organisations support its people and deliver its objectives.
Andrew:Within that, there's a whole load of stuff about how you implement cultural change and how do you do that specifically for mindfulness. So, yes, mindful people, but mindful culture as well.
Russell:And that's interesting because mindfulness by implication, and feel free to correct me here, is the pausing, the stopping, the noticing, the identifying. But of course, what you do next is actually the critical bit. So, you can be very mindful but very poor at implementation. There’re two sides of the what and how always with these things, isn't there? But I'm assuming what you'll say is that if you're noticing more correctly, the chance of getting the implementation thing right is going to be improved because actually you're noticing the right things.
Andrew:Well, I think well, I have often experienced organisations being shocking at noticing and very active in doing things. Whether they're the right things or not is a whole different model of worms.
Russell:But it's all the same things. That's the point, isn't it?
Andrew:Yeah, and just being very busy, I'm not entirely convinced that the busyness is actually very helpful. There's lots to do, there's always lots to do, but is it the right stuff? And I think if we took a bit more time to notice what we're doing so an example which is sometimes used is a program board or a business board, an executive board, something like that. You could describe that as a practice in shared mindfulness. If you look at a program board, what are you trying to do? You're trying to bring your attention to something, the information being put in front of you. You're trying to come to a decision, non-judgmentally, ideally, and you're trying to be present for the purposes of having an effective meeting. What actually happens in most of my experience is people are on their phones. People are actually, even if they're not on their phones, they're thinking about the last email or the next meeting.
Andrew:They bring a whole load of judgment about the materials that they're receiving. And they're not even present in the meeting really. They might be physically there, but they're not present. So how many of the top table meetings which people have, are actual people even there? So, the capacity to notice, oh, my attention has gone off. Oh, I'm worried about the next meeting. Oh, I actually have views about all this, but they're not founded in anything. The fact that we might foster that capability of non-judgment, of clear attention, could be a game changer in some very senior settings.
Russell:And that's fascinating because you've highlighted me something there that's interesting, because the word judgment is key here, because judgment implies the process of judging, which in other words, is to have made a decision and to have ruled one way or another. But what we have to be able to bring to meetings is analytical skills to be able to understand the situation that's going on. So, I can see why you would mark judgment down. But lots of leaders believe they're there for judgment. They're there for making a decision. A decision. A decision implies judgment. But actually, for me, I think that judgment is a mixed-up process. So, I like the way you're pulling it apart because we still need to analyse even in that present moment, analysis is part of what we'll do. But if we've judged, we're using that confirmation bias rather than that sense of actually looking at the information in front of us and thinking actually, what does that truly mean?
Andrew:So I think it's that bringing judgment, which is already made before you've had the information in front of you, which is the problem. Absolutely. Decisions, that's what leaders you could argue that's what leaders are for. And that is, in my experience, certainly part of what leaders are for, making the decisions, coming to a conclusion, but doing so in a fully informed way, again, in my experience, is more likely to have the desired outcome or a favourable outcome.
Russell:And of course, it's a brain pattern, it's a brain bias to have decided what you want and find the evidence that support that view. And I suppose you're going to tell me that mindfulness is that thing where you notice yourself doing that and you pause that process.
Andrew:Well, we can learn yes, in essence, I think we can learn a lot more about our own biases. And I've also done work with EDI programs to try to if unconscious bias specifically is the problem, then being more awake might help us with that. So absolutely, if we know more about how our minds work and we take some more time to actually notice what's going on with our minds, then we can choose what feels right and what feels unhelpful.
Russell:And the beauty of what we're talking about is that actually it works brilliantly in a smaller organisation as well, because often people talk about massive organisations, but it can be a small restaurant with four people and you can actually be much more mindful about the service you're giving and the quality of the food you're producing. And actually, it's much more within the control of a smaller group, actually. Whereas actually, some of these Pangalactic organisations, they're all perfect. So, you don't need to worry about that so much. You can hear the irony dripping, I've hoped from my voice, but I don't know if it's irony or sarcasm. Who knows?
Andrew:Yeah, I absolutely hear you and I think you're right. I think it's something which is within it needs to be done wisely, it needs to be done thoughtfully in terms of bringing mindfulness into a culture. One of the things which I mentioned in the book is if we get to a place where mindful is so pervading that it's the norm, then we need to be sensitive that some people won't want to take part in it.
Russell:It's a very interesting point. Yeah. Sorry to cut across here. I think we just had a glitch. It's one of the things I was thinking about, just as you were talking about that, because I wonder if actually human fallibility and the foibles of leadership allows us to actually be less mindful because it's useful as well. Because actually you can argue that AI is the most mindful process of all because it's the least judgmental and it's the most based on objective data. I mean, no data is objective on the internet. We know what I mean. So, I just wonder if mindfulness is forcing us closer to being replaced by an AI system, whereas actually being a bit more emotional, bit more irrational can also be useful as well. But the point is to choose to be one or the other situationally.
Andrew:So without going down an AI rabbit hole, and I'm no expert on AI, but my understanding is one of the biggest problems is that it's programmed by humans. Therefore, the fact that it may be unbiased is open to challenge and indeed subjective. But that aside, yeah, it's all about choice. It's all about choice. It's about being able to choose to respond rather than to react. An expression which is used all the time by mindfulness teachers. And I think if we're able to notice when we are being driven by our habitual reactions and our unconscious biases, or being aware of biases and choose to do something else or to choose at all is a step in the right direction. And I think that's absolutely critical. It's at the core of this. I think a lot of what we do is so instinctive. I often talk about the Amygdala Hijack and how we're crossing a road, we see a bus, we stop.
Andrew:We don't think, oh, there's a bus. I must stop. My legs, I will stop. It just happens. And if you translate that to every fear response in every difficult meeting you've ever been in with any client who's given you a hard time, what do you think is going on in the body? There's a huge amount of fear response. So, when that's translated in the impact into our cognitive abilities, what we're saying is or what I'm saying is, if we notice that we are subject to these things, if we notice our habitual reactions, then we can choose more to do about it. That's not to say that the instinctive reaction of get out the way of the bus isn't a good thing. I'm not suggesting we should pause and meditate and then get hit by the bus. What I'm saying is that in a business setting, we have the same fear response that we always have.
Andrew:And being aware of that, bringing that into our equation, bringing that into our capacity to choose, that's the key.
Russell:Yeah. Well, hard to disagree with that, I'm afraid. So, I think let's let people engage with your content. So where can they find the book? Where can they find out more about you?
Andrew:So the book is available on Amazon. It's called Organisational Mindfulness. How to guide and just to leap.
Russell:In there for a second. For our American friends, it's Organisational spelled with an S, just so we're clear.
Andrew:It is, but for our American friends, it is, I believe, in the search with the Z as well. I tried to help. I tried to help. But yes, thank you. Very good spot. So that's the name of the book. And also, I work through Lxleaders, which is Lxleaders.com. That is LX followed by leaders. All one word. And we provide a whole range of services for teams, individuals around mindfulness training, coaching teamwork, and particularly building the kind of skills which I've just described specifically to try to help people thrive in high stress environments, both to perform, but also to stay well and enjoy that intensity as well as navigate it brilliant.
Russell:Well, thank you for spending time with us today. I really enjoyed that. I often judge the quality of my podcast guests by how many notes I wrote. And so, you probably discovered that you probably saw me writing notes. So that's a really good sign. So, thank you. I enjoyed it. I'm sure the guests do, too. So have a look at that book on Amazon and Lxleaders. Was it co UK? Just remind me.
Andrew:Think it's com, right?
Russell:I think it is as well. Just making sure that's there we'll link to it in the show notes. Anyway, Andrew, thanks for spending time with us today. I've really enjoyed it. It's been great.
Andrew:Thanks Russell. It's been great to see you.
Russell:You take care.