Janice Marturano on Finding the Space to Lead - Practical Advice for Mindful Leadership

Hello and welcome to the Better Life Better Business podcast, where we have conversations about how to live a better life and build a better business. Thank you for being here. I am your host Shawn Ellis, and today I am excited to share our special guest with you. Janice Martorano is the founder and director of the Institute for Mindful Leadership Before that, she was a vice president at General Mills, and she's the author of a brand new book titled Finding the Space to Lead, which we'll be talking about today. And it's on sale everywhere right now, so you can go get a copy. And as a matter of fact, Janice's publisher has graciously allowed for us to give away a few copies here, so read below for details on that. But Janice, welcome, and thank you so much for being here.

Oh, thanks, Shawn Ellis.

It's a pleasure to be here. I'm happy to, to to talk with you about mindful leadership.

Very good, very good. You know, my mindfulness journey started a couple of years ago, and I found out about you somewhere pretty early on along the way. I'm very intrigued by the intersection of mindfulness and business, which I know is right where you operate. And I have to give a shout out to our mutual friend Elmo Shade, who finally made the introduction. So I'm grateful for that, and again, just to to have this time with you today.

Great, looking forward to it.

Good, well today what I'm thinking, what I'd love to talk about, your book of course, but what is Finding the Space to Lead, and from there go into what you really talk about is leadership excellence. So maybe some of how mindful leadership leads to leadership excellence, and I'd love to give people some practical steps maybe to get started or what they can do to kind of bring this about in their own life. And business. Of course, you have great retreats to do that, but maybe some tips on how they could start today. So that's my thoughts for the game plan. Well, talk about your book and what is Finding the Space to Lead, and maybe in that is maybe your own journey. But let's start with that, the new book.

Okay. Well, thanks, Shawn Ellis. So Finding the Space to Lead, I like to start with what the title actually means and why I call this book Finding the Space to Lead. In the many years that I began working in teaching mindful leadership, first with my colleagues at General Mills, and then since 2008 to leaders from around the world, I often heard, and in fact had seen this myself for the decades where I was a leader in an organization, I saw this as, you know, the best leaders are these people with, they're well-trained, they have bright minds, they have good hearts, And they execute, and that's how they became leaders, and that's how they do their jobs well, but there was always this nagging sense that something wasn't quite right, there's something was missing, or they needed something else. And in many, many conversations over many years when I started to explore this, and of course I had felt this in my own life before I began this mindfulness training, I asked, well, if there was one thing that you could have, what is it that you'd need so that you could bring your best bring your best self, all of your capabilities, more of your creativity to this moment? And they never said, "Well, we need more budget, we need more resources." They never said any of that. They came back with some version of, "I just need some space. You know, I just need space." And that certainly, I think, rang true for me and in the hundreds and now thousands of people that have been trained in mindful leadership. Really what has happened to us in our culture today, in whatever capacity you are working, is that we're so overconnected, overscheduled, overbusy, that our minds are in a state of continuous partial attention. We're always distracted. We almost never can be fully in this moment. And as a result, we rarely bring our best selves because we go into a kind of autopilot.

Yeah, that phrase or label continuous partial attention, I mean, it's so true. And you know, in your book you tell the story, if I've got it here, of an executive. I think maybe his name was Jim, but he talks about, he says something like, you know, my day started like every other day, you know, lots of meetings, too many meetings, too many priorities, too many opportunities. I forget the exact quote, but I think I read that and I thought, well, That sounds like my day. I think that's the way we all feel like we live.

Yeah, yeah, it's true. And then on top of that, when some emergency enters our life or something, so we're busy juggling all of that, and then the unexpected comes. So it's hard enough to just juggle all of that, and then something unexpected comes in, and now we're totally lost. Now it all falls to the floor.

But even in just the day-to-day juggling, it starts to take a toll both on us physically and on us, our capacities mentally. And so learning how to, all during the day, take what I call a purposeful pause, which is a kind of mini training of the mind in mindfulness, is really a way for us to reset all day long. And it doesn't take any more time out of your day. So we can talk more about exactly how you might do that, maybe at the end, how we can start by taking some purposeful pauses.

Yeah, exactly. That's, that's what I was thinking, because I love that, that idea of a purposeful pause. And it is something, as you know, what I've I've found is there are these pauses that are already built into the day. It's just a matter of noticing them as opposed to flying right through them.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And Shawn Ellis, not only flying right through them, which you're right, we do that, or we get impatient with them. A perfect example is we need to walk from one meeting to another meeting.

Well, we can take that walk even if it takes a minute or two to go from this conference room to that office. And we can just walk and allow our attention to be on the act of walking, which actually begins to allow the mind and the body to take a kind of rest in that walking. Or we can get impatient and we can text along the way, or we can run down the hallway, or we can do all these other things that we kind of want, you know, the Star Trek's "Just beam me to the next," uh, I don't wanna walk there.

Right.

So yes, we miss things that could be wonderful chances for us to bring ourselves back to the present moment.

Yeah, and you know, we hear a lot about mindfulness. Some of our listeners and viewers, I'm sure mindfulness may be a new thing to them, and hopefully we can, you know, be a nice introduction here. But those that have heard of mindfulness, a lot of times we hear of it in relation to mindfulness-based stress reduction or the the stress reduction application. But I love that you write about mindfulness as basically the pursuit of leadership excellence, or finding this space as a path to leadership excellence. And you break it down into 4 capabilities. I can't remember exactly what you call them, but could you maybe talk about that a little bit?

Sure.

4 fundamentals of leadership excellence. So this is where the 2 threads in my life combine. I had been practicing with the mindful training and training to become an instructor, certified instructor of mindfulness training.

And at the same time, of course, I'd spent decades in leadership roles and in the development of leaders in my roles of vice president at General Mills and other officer-director roles I had before that. So I'd spent decades looking at sort of the many ways that we can help cultivate leadership excellence, not only in myself and my own journey, but in the many people I managed along the way and mentored. And so when I began to look at this intersection and see for myself the intersection of this training of the mind, it really was not for me about stress. It was about the ability to strengthen these fundamentals. So they are focus, clarity, creativity, and compassion. So although we can all think about characteristics or abilities that we would want our leaders to have, in my experience, those four are fundamental. And if you can cultivate your ability to focus, to stay on task, to actually deeply listen in a meeting, deeply listen to a conversation, as opposed to the constant distractibility of the mind, or clarity— that in today's world where everything is changing at the speed of an internet microsecond, we need to have our own ability to see clearly what's here. Not what we expected, not what we thought, not what we hoped, not what was here last month, but what's actually here. And to do that, we need to start learning about our own filters, our own reactivity, our own conditioning. And that's part of the training of mindful leadership. Creativity— you need spaciousness for innovation, just no two ways about it. And if you're running on autopilot No chance you find the innovative solution. And last but not least, compassion. So this is about self-compassion, compassion toward our colleagues, compassion to the bigger community. It's about remembering the big picture and not always attending to what screams the loudest, but attending to what's important, whether that's at work or in our own home lives.

Yeah, yeah, I love those. And you know, the clarity one, what I was thinking of when you said that I know for me personally, that's been one of the biggest benefits I've found with mindfulness. Of course, leading a small business and the ever-changing marketplace for business, but also at home. My wife, we live with chronic illness here and kind of never know what one day is going to hold, what the next moment is going to hold. And it's easy to get— you can either get swept away by the moment, it just kind of rocks your world because it didn't go the way you thought it would go.— or to, you know, to be able to really pause and, okay, this, you know, this moment is what it is, and trying to see clearly what is the, you know, the right thing right now, what is the appropriate response here.

Yeah, and that's a beautiful example, um, because our lives are not smooth.

No one's life is smooth, and everyone has their own stuff.

Yeah, exactly.

That happens, right? And it's actually— and I have found it just this extraordinary gift to be able to expand my repertoire of how I meet that stuff when it arises. So that's really what we're doing. It's not like that stuff is any less difficult or complex, but it's about, well, I can react to this, I can deny it, I can push it away, I can be angry about it, and/or I can see when that stuff arises and make a more conscious choice about bringing my best self to that moment. That's what we're talking about in the area of clarity.

Right, yeah, exactly. And I'm glad you said that because, yeah, it's not as if mindfulness makes everything, all the problems go away, all the challenges go away. It's, you know, being able to meet them more effectively. The compassion piece, I was really interested in that, and I read something, a blog, and I'm sure you have too, that the LinkedIn CEO wrote a year or two ago. He said that the principle of managing compassionately is one that he aspires to live more than any other. And, you know, he wrote about how important that is in his leadership and management. What do you find as you talk with leaders? What is the response to this idea of, you know, leading with compassion? Because I know as a, you know, having worked with, you know, with different managers and leaders, of course anybody wants to work in that environment where you're with somebody that you know they really care about you. But at the same time, it goes a little bit against the old-school thinking of, you know, kind of leave your problems at the door. I don't want to know what, what you've got going on in your personal life. You just show up and do your job. You've worked obviously with a lot of leaders in a lot of different organizations. What, what do you find talking with them about the compassion piece?

Yeah, it's a really nice question. First, to put compassion as, as We talk about it in Finding Space to Lead, and as we teach it at the Institute, compassion means understanding.

And when we actually make the effort to understand what's here— so it's not about sympathy or empathy, it's not about becoming somebody's psychologist or, you know, best friend— it—

but it is about an open-hearted understanding of what is here.

And that starts with what is here for me. And often what I found is that piece is actually the most difficult one for the really good leaders, the best leaders. It's easier to say, yeah, I really want to be open-hearted and understand what someone else is carrying. And if there's some way that I can offer an act of kindness or support or listening, then I do care about other people and I want to be able to to do that. But turning the lens to ourselves and really looking clearly at, well, what do I need here? And what's the suffering or what's the difficulty in my life? And is there an act of kindness I need to give to myself? Sometimes that's the harder thing to do, um, because first of all, you have to acknowledge that there are things that are difficult in your life and that there are steps you might be able to take that are different. So that— but without the self-compassion, it's almost impossible to be truly compassionate toward others. And the third part of compassion for me is compassion to our community. And that's where the leadership has the opportunity for the win-win-win, what I call the win-win-win. So good for the organization, good for the employees in the organization, and good for the community. And when we cultivate the ability to be a mindful leader by working on those 4 fundamentals, that's when we have our best chance of having the space to make the choices that lead to the win-win-win.

Yeah, yeah. And I'm glad you brought up the win-win-win because I was going to, uh, to mention that because I love that piece of it. Um, what, um, let's talk about some of the ways you can, you can move toward this because, uh, you know, we can talk about what, you know what the right thing is, what you should do, but then, of course, putting it into action. That's always the challenge, and thankfully mindfulness provides a path to that. And a big portion of your book, I know, is dedicated to meditations and reflections to kind of help train your mind, basically. Can you talk to that piece of it? And, okay, how do we— let's say, you know, okay, I want to get on board with that. How do we go about doing that?

Yes, perfect. Okay, so the training in mindful leadership has 3 pieces to it. One is meditation. Meditations. And because I know what it's like to be in the juggler of the 21st century role, whether you're leading a global organization or leading your household, leadership is something we all can aspire to. So I make these first part of the training, the meditations, very simple and very brief. They're 10 minutes, and the recommendation in Finding the Space to Lead is 10 minutes once or twice a day. And so everyone can find something in their lives that's less valuable than training your mind to actually be here for your life for 10 minutes once or twice a day. So that's my first pitch. The second part of the training is the Purposeful Pauses, and that's the mini training you can do all during the day with routine events like brushing your teeth or having a cup of coffee or walking down a hallway. And, uh, and then the third part are the reflections. And the reflections are really where you start to ask questions about what are the principles of your leadership, or what do I mean to me when I talk about excellence? What's my definition of excellence and leading with excellence, whether it's leading my own life or leading a global organization? I have to know what that means. How can I, how can I get there? If I don't know what it means to me. And so those 3 pieces—meditations, purposeful pause, reflection—the simplest thing for somebody to start right now, they're watching your video blog right now and they are looking for one thing to try right now, I would say feel your feet on the floor. You're sitting at your desk and you're watching this, or you're listening to it. Can you bring your attention to the sensations of the feet on the floor, feeling the weightiness of the legs, touch of the soles of the feet. If you can do that, see if you can maintain just a curiosity about that. Do you feel warm? Your feet feel warm or cool? Can you notice the touch of the socks or the shoes? Whatever's there for you to notice. And then when the mind drifts away, like back to your to-do list or looking at your text or you're hearing pings on your computer, bring it back. Notice when it wanders and bring it back. So you can feel your feet grounded to the floor, or you can feel the sensations of the breath in the body. When you do that, when you practice with a body sensation like that and aim and sustain your attention on the sensations, not changing them, not searching for them, but just being open and noticing them, you are bringing yourself to the present moment. Because the only place sensations can be felt is in the present. You can't feel that breath from 2 minutes ago. You can't feel the breath 2 minutes from now. If you can feel it in your body, you bring yourself here. And oftentimes when we find ourselves spinning out of control, it's because our minds, our emotions have taken us far away from right here. And so the first step is bring yourself back here. And now you have more access to more of your own capabilities. So a teeny tiny thing to experiment with. Then the other thing I would say is the reason I wrote the book, we all offer retreats and workshops through the Institute, have been doing it for many years. And, but the book allows people who aren't quite ready for signing up for that retreat or the workshop. And it is meant to allow you to start this journey in a very comprehensive way. So not only is there the book, but the book has a website, and on the website are those 10-minute meditations, guided. You can download them onto your computer, your iPhone, whatever you'd like. So it is meant to be a very comprehensive way of, let me just start it for myself. Let me see what this is like for a week or two. And see if I start getting more of the hang of it. And I hope it opens the doors for many more people. Yeah, great.

And yeah, and I'll link to the website here. Let me make sure it's findingthespacetolead.com, right?

Yes, that's right. And all the downloads are free.

Right, yeah, I was just checking that out myself. So yeah, great, great resources there. And you know, some people that maybe aren't familiar with mindfulness or maybe you hear the word meditation, like me, the first time I heard about it, I thought, "I don't meditate. That's new age. That's Buddhist." That's whatever it is. That word scared me. But then just what you led us through there, just that paying attention to your breath, feeling your feet on the floor, all of a sudden when I realized, "Wait, that's meditation?" I think that's one of the things that can kind of scare people off, but it's really— we're not talking about new age. You don't have to be a Buddhist or, you know, whatever it may be.

That's right. And I like to think about the training that we do in mindful leadership as training the mind. And we know we can train the body's innate capabilities, right?

If we, if we work out, we can make the body stronger, we can have more resiliency, we have better cardio functioning. And we now know from neuroscience and fMRIs, functional MRIs, that when you train the the mind in this way, you actually are physiologically changing the brain. And what we're really looking at here is, can we train the mind in a way that increases our focus and clarity and creativity and, and allows us to embody our compassion? So that's what we're after here. It's sort of the next evolution of, yes, we learned about training the body, and now we're learning about training the mind.

Yeah, it seems so obvious, but it's, it's so easily overlooked. You know, you talk about the ripple effect in your book, which, which I love. I think about that myself, actually. The logo for my This Moment Matters work is a drop of water and the ripple effect. I often think of that myself. And you can talk more about that. But just starting, just doing one of these little exercises, or maybe, maybe it's someone that, you know, you think 'Well, nobody else in my office practices this. What difference can I make?' Which your own story is a great example of that. But maybe talk about the ripple effect before we go and how one little thing can go beyond that one little thing.

So if we have a minute, I'll tell a story of— I love this story as an example of the ripple effect. So one of the students who was on retreat with me went back, and her first day back in the office, of course, because she'd been out of the office for 2 days as she went on the retreat. And she came back, and of course, like all of us, when you're out of the office for any time, your schedule is now crazy. And she was triple booked everywhere.

And so she looked at her calendar and she thought, oh, okay, it's gonna be one of those days. And she started to look for things that she could jettison or push off to another day. And one of the things on her calendar was a meeting with a mentee that had had a lot of performance issues. And this was sort of the last-ditch effort for this woman. And, and we'll just I'll just call her Mary for now. And so she thought about putting that meeting off, and then she thought, "Well, but this is so important to Mary because it's really her last chance to get her stuff together here." She, for a couple of months, had just fallen off the cliff in terms of performance, and nothing seemed to be making a difference. But they would meet weekly and agree on assignments, and then they'd come back and she'd talk about those assignments and they'd agree on the next. Weeks' assignments. So she says, you know, I better keep that. So she did. But she ran around all morning. Finally came time for that meeting with Mary, and she showed up at 1 o'clock, and she was rushing herself and came back to her desk and caught sort of— okay, Mary was already waiting, so she sort of breathlessly said, okay, Mary, great, so how did the assignments go this week? And Mary simply said, I didn't do them. And that's all she said. And there was like nothing else, just, "I didn't do them." And she had this air of something about her. So the woman, the mentor, said— she later described to me, "From the tip of my toes, I could feel the anger rising up in my body." Because here I was, overscheduled, overworked, exhausted. I made space in my calendar for her because it was so important, and she apparently didn't care. And she said, "So I could feel this. I actually could attend to my body and feel this anger rising in me." And then I felt it was the place for me to take that purposeful pause and feel my feet on the floor. I took and felt a few breaths in my body, and somehow I was starting to get this other sensation in the room, which was a sensation that something else is here, something else is wrong.

And so instead of all the chatter that was in my mind that I was about to say, don't you care about this? Don't you know that you're gonna lose your job? I put this— instead of Instead of all that chatter which was starting to build in my head, I simply said, "Are you okay?" And as soon as I said, "Are you okay?" Mary broke into tears and sobbed and sobbed. And as it turned out, for all these months, although people had asked her why she wasn't performing, no one had asked her, "Are you okay?" And that was the trigger that opened the door to a real horrible family situation that she was dealing with. And of course, the whole meeting could have been much different. The ripple effect of paying attention to her own body and that sensation she was getting that there's something else here. Yeah. Even with all the craziness that would have otherwise, she told me, pulled her away.

And she thought about how many other conversations went a bad way because she didn't have that ability to kind of just pause in that moment and hear what else is here in the room.

Yeah, that's it. It's a great story. And, you know, just one, one moment, you know, what is it, one, one thought you have, one, you know, something you say like that, one little action that you just— you never know what door that's gonna open and what the, what the ripple effect might be, right?

Yep. Yes. So I don't know, do we have time for one more?

Yeah, sure, sure.

One more business example of that, the ripple effect that goes to the win-win-win. So sometimes when leaders have that spaciousness, instead of picking a typical promotional event for a product where you just have to move more volume, you know, you have to increase sales, and so there are sort of standard ways you can do that with pricing and things like that. But when there's some spaciousness and there's more of a compassion toward the community as well, and for the employees themselves, for the team that you lead. I once saw a— well, I saw it actually a number of times now, but the first time I saw this was someone who said they had read and knew about the enormous problem of literacy among low-income communities in many of the major cities, of course, and that struck them and stuck with them. And so instead of doing the typical promotion, they took the extra mile and with their products gave away free children's books in Spanish. Uh, so when you bought this product at no extra cost to anyone, they got this book written in Spanish and they targeted the distribution to the communities that would benefit most from this product. And the letters that came in and the stories they heard, mostly from teachers who said this was the first book little whoever ever had, or it really made them feel so special to get this, this little thing. And so, you know, took a little extra effort, little extra cost, but really not more than doing another kind of promotion. But it allowed the spaciousness that particular leader had found the spaciousness to look for that win-win-win. So what's the ripple effect of doing that? Huge.

Yeah, yeah, I love it. And it's, you know, just as your book says, you have to find the space to, you know, to even make that decision to, to do that. Um, and again, your, your book obviously has some great exercises for that. Um, so before we go, of course, everyone watching and listening, by all means go buy this book. I'm reading it right now, it's, it's excellent. And, and then you've got the meditations and reflections on your website, Finding the Space to Lead. What if someone is interested in, in taking the next step and attending one of your courses or retreats? Can you talk a little bit about what you offer there before we go?

Sure. So the best place to see that is instituteformindfulleadership.org. We list all of our retreats and courses and workshops. We'll be teaching all over the country and in Canada and Australia this year. So we offer— two of our main things that we're offering is we always offer our 4-day intensive mindful leadership retreat. It's called Cultivating Leadership Presence Through Mindfulness. Our next one's coming up in early April, and it'll be in New York. We're also offering a 2-day retreat in a number of places, one exclusively for nonprofit leaders, which has the support of Eileen Fisher Foundation. So it's It's very, very affordable. And one in Minnesota, which is for employees at all levels. Those are 2 days, non-residential, so a 9 to 4 in Minnesota, and residential in Garrison Institute in New York for nonprofit leaders. So all the details are on the Institute's website. And one more that I will tell you we're going to announce in February, so early February, We will be doing our first online live course workshop for 4 weeks in February and the first week of March. And so it'll be a 90-minute class once a week and it'll be live. So we're looking forward to that. And that course will be Finding the Space to Lead. Okay, great.

So you don't even have to get on an airplane to attend that one.

No, right from your home.

Great. Well, you know, I just, I love the work you're doing. Like I said, the intersection between mindfulness and business. I know what effect it's had on my own life, so I love what you're doing. And if people go on your website too, you've got great research and case studies that show this really does make a difference in your own life, but also in your organization. Great. Well, thank you so much. Thank you, Janice. I wish you great success with this book and with everything you do. Hopefully we'll cross paths again. But thanks again for being here.

My pleasure, Shawn Ellis, and I hope to see you on retreat someday.

I hope so too.

Take care now. Thanks. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.