Mindful Leadership & Executive Presence

MINDFUL LEADERSHIP & EXECUTIVE PRESENCE:

Vital Strategies for Mind Fitness, Change Resilience, Innovation, and Wisdom at Work

We were perhaps the first people to introduce the meme of “Mindful Leadership” into mainstream culture and organizations back in the 70s, and the success of our programs with leaders in business, medicine, military, government, and sports arenas has helped to open the way for the many programs that have followed.  Our unique approach to Mindful Leadership PLUS Mind Fitness – expands the scope of leadership development to include a wealth of potent methods that complement and explained the capacities of mindful leaders.  

We have recently been honored by invitation to offer a special briefing on mindfulness in the workplace for the All Parliamentary Round Table on Mindfulness at British Parliament, and to serve as advisors in Parliaments Mindful Nation UK Report.  We have also developed special programs on Mindful Leadership and Wisdom at Work for key leaders in the Prime Minister’s Office of Dubai.  After the success of Google’s Search Inside Yourself Program, we were asked to develop the follow-on program for Google which they called Google’s Mindfulness and Meditation Laboratory. This program reached and inspired Googlers in 24 Google offices around the globe and served to inspired the company wide adoption of mindfulness practices.  Through a recent collaboration with our colleagues at MindLab in the UK we are now including a profound set of new Mindfulness apps as part of our Mindful Leadership Programs.

Demonstrating the profoundly practical value of Mindful Leadership and Executive Presence in the workplace, our pioneering work in the field of mindful leadership, mind-fitness training, and resilience has helped inspire a growing wave of interest in applying this work in a wide range of industries and arenas.

Our unique approach to the practice of Mindful Leadership has four primary elements:

Our work of introducing the practices of “Mindfulness” and “Presence” to leaders and teams in the workplace began well before the widespread popularization of mindfulness through the inspiring work of Jon Kabat-Zinn and others involved in the field of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction.  Over the years, our programs in Mindful Leadership have inspired thousands of seasoned and emerging leaders in hundreds of organizations around the globe including:  Google, NASA, NOAA, World Bank, Hewlett Packard, Intel, Microsoft, Boeing, Hyperion, Intuit, Sun MicroSystems, Qualcomm, M.D. Anderson Cancer Research Center, Kaiser Permanente Medical Centers, International Center for Organization Design, Institute for Health and Productivity Management, AT&T Bell Labs, HP Labs, MIT, Stanford Research Institute, U.S. Army Special Forces, U.S. Air Force, West Point Military Academy, Decurion, St. Francis Hospice, Snohomish School District, Richardson School District, Pratt-Whitney Rocketdyne, Philips Medical Systems, University of Minnesota Medical School, University of Washington Medical School Faculty and Nursing School Faculty, Indian Institute of Management, and Mahidol University (Thailand).

Wisdom at Work’s unique Mindful Leadership programs include a broader spectrum of profoundly practical Mind-Fitness skills than most mindfulness programs and are custom designed to meet the unique needs of each of our clients.

Examples of Our Mindful Leadership Programs:

• After the success of Google’s Search Inside Yourself program, we were invited by Google to develop the “Mindfulness Laboratory” to teach software engineers and technology leaders skills to increase their capacity to bring greater innovation, creativity, focus, change resilience and personal sustainability, mindfulness, and wisdom at work.  This pioneering program was made available to Googlers at 24 Google locations around the globe and has been offered in various formats since 2010.  Learn more about the Leveys’ Mindfulness at Google program.
• Mindful Leadership and Wisdom at Work programs for the Prime Minister’s Office of Dubai and sessions on “The Future of Leadership” at the World Government Summit in Dubai.
• Special presentation to the Catalan Parliament on The Vital Role of Mindfulness for Community and Social Resilience and Wellness.
• Presentation on our Jedi Warrior Program for US Special Forces at British Parliament’s special hearing on The Vital Role of Mindfulness for Military and Blue-Light Emergency Services.
• Extensive programs integrating Mindfulness, Life-Balance, Wellness, Compassion, and Wisdom at Work for HERE Medical Services over nearly 4 years in UK (which provides services to nearly 5 million people in UK.)
• 5 Day Mindfulness Intensive Retreat for MindLab in the UK.
• Keynote address on history of the Mindfulness Movement to the Wisdom and Compassion at Work Conference in Madrid.
• During the years we served as primary consultants to the largest division within Hewlett Packard, mindfulness became one of the five guiding values for that division.  This work spread to dozens of divisions and global work groups throughout Hewlett Packard.
• At Intel, our Mindful Leadership work was framed as “Attention Leadership” and gave rise to a wave of programs designed to help every leader throughout Intel become more effective, innovative, and resilient in the midst of change.
• In our work directing the Ultimate Warrior Training Program for the U.S. Army Special Forces, mindfulness was the core element that led to our teams succeeding on missions that no other Special Ops troops had been able to accomplish.  One of our teams was selected as the most outstanding team in the NATO Games that year. This training program involved an intensive 30 day Mindfulness retreat (The Encampment) along with six months of intensive mind-fitness training. Military leaders described Jedi as, “The most exquisite orchestration of human technology we have ever seen.” Advisors Michael Murphy and George Leonard called Jedi, “the most advanced leadership development program to be offered in modern times.”
• The unique and transformative Urban Mindfulness in the Workplace retreats that we offer have demonstrated the potentials for seamlessly integrating mindful presence and mastery of attention into every activity and interaction of participants’ lives, work, and relationships.   We recently offered a 5 day Mindfulness in the Workplace retreat at corporate headquarters for a health care provider in the Europe who serves nearly a million people in their region.
• As directors of clinical programs at Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound and Children’s Medical Center in Seattle, and staff trainings for medical leaders from dozens of leading medical centers our work has emphasized the practice of mindfulness for mastering stress, reducing pain, improving attention, developing clear presence, improving the quality of communications, clarity, depth of thinking, the capacity to access intuition, and improve the quality of work.  Mindfulness is also a core element of our training of medical students, physicians, nurses and other health caring professionals at the International Center of Mindfulness, Meditation, and MindBody Medicine.
• Our work with peak performers in sports (Olympic Gold Medalist and world-class record holders) has emphasized Mindfulness as a key discipline for streaming the qualities of presence and self mastery that are most essential to personal sustainability and success.
• Each of our books, Mindfulness, Meditation, and Mind Fitness; Living in Balance: A Mindful Guide for Thriving in a Complex World; Focus! The Mastery of Mindfulness and Attention; Wisdom at Work; Luminous Mind: Meditation & Mind Fitness; Quality of Mind; The Fine Arts of Relaxation, Concentration, and Meditation: Ancient Skills for Modern Minds; and The Focused Mindstate audio program, offer detailed instruction regarding how to integrate practices of mindfulness into every domain of life-work. Our published works are available in ten languages.
• We were recently lecturing and leading retreats in New Zealand related to mindfulness in healthcare, medicine, and education.  Here are links for a couple of podcasts with us exploring these themes:  Mindfulness in Medicine  and Reflections on Mindfulness in Today’s Complex World 

Wisdom at Work’s transformational Mindful Leadership programs have inspired people of widely diverse backgrounds, educations, culture, languages, and beliefs, and can be scaled to deliver value to individual leaders and dynamic working teams as well as to whole communities and organizations who take mindfulness as a core success factor in their work together.

Our extensive expertise and enduring success in making a wide array of mindfulness practices and teachings relevant and accessible to corporate and organizational audiences distinguishes our work from many others working in this field who have far less personal and professional experience.  Thus, our unique approach to introducing mindfulness into workplaces as a vital organizational “operating system” has a much wider and deeper impact than merely teaching mindfulness as an “app” that is used by some but not widely understood or integrated into enhancing the quality of every aspect and encounter of life-work within an organization. Our work is inspired by Einstein’s insight that solutions to the complex challenges in our lives and times will not be found at the same levels of thinking or consciousness that created them, and that substantially new levels of consciousness and capability are essential if humanity is to survive and thrive.

Endorsements:

“Joel and Michelle Levey have skillfully woven together contemporary insights into the value and need for mind-fitness and meditation practices with a large number of evocative suggestions for practice.  Joel and Michelle clearly have a great deal of experience teaching a wide range of different settings and this is reflected in the precision and vividness of their instructions.  There is strength in the simplicity of their explanation of the value of these practices and their clear instructions for how to practice.” 

— Jon Kabat-Zinn, a pioneer in bringing Mindfulness Based training into mainstream business and medicine regarding the Leveys’ teachings.

“The Leveys’ work and writings offer a skillful blend of time proven antidotes to the stress of modern life.”
— Dan Goleman, Ph.D., author, Social Intelligence, Emotional Intelligence, and Focus

“You are presently engaged in work that has great prospects for bringing the inner-transformational sciences to people who may not under ordinary circumstances come into contact with these teachings.” 

— The Dalai Lama, an advisor on a number of the Leveys projects

“You have been so inspirational in the field of mindfulness teaching over so many decades.” 

— Chris Ruane, MP, British Parliament

The work of Joel and Michelle Levey has long been a luminous thread in the fabric of the Great Turning.  They embody in many ways this epochal transition to a life-sustaining society.” 

— Joanna Macy, Deep Ecologist, Activist, Scholar, another of our mentors also encouraged our work saying:

From the Blog…