Business View Oceania

19 BUSINESS VIEW OCEANIA VOLUME 4, ISSUE 12 THE MINDFUL LEADER begin to live in integrity. Self-awareness is a recovery of integrity. And the practices of bodily awareness, emotional awareness, mind awareness- they all require mindfulness. To be mindful is to be steadily and continuously aware, or present. If you can’t be steadily and continuously present, you have no chance of self-awareness.” Michael’s latest book, ‘Vertical Growth: How Self-Awareness Transforms Leaders and Organisations’ (2022), was released earlier this year in conjunction with Carl Lemieux, Founder of Mindsmatter, and is a deep exploration of intrinsic motivation, accountability, and self-awareness. Vertical Growth’s Executive Book Summary states: “…most of the focus is on horizontal development, and little to no attention is given to vertical growth. We define horizontal development as gaining new skills and acquiring more knowledge to bring about a new competency. Vertical growth is much deeper and involves developing new mindsets, insights, and deliberate growth practices to shift our thinking and behaviour in a sustainable way. It is as much about unlearning existing habits as it is about developing new ones.” Vertical Growth also explores the idea that our relationship with difficult emotions is directly linked to our ability to develop positive patterns of behaviour. Michael explains further. “Teaching leaders how to work with difficult feelings is fundamental to self-awareness training. If you can’t work in a healthy way with difficult feelings, you will keep falling back into old patterns that bring you further out of integrity. Take anger, for example. Most people will attempt to ignore their anger or deflect it onto something else. The last thing they would ever consider is to simple feeling it in the body, feel the heat of it, let it flow. Be curious with it. But that’s actually the correct way to process anger in the most conscious, healthy way.” Vertical Growth’s Summary states: “Using developmental mindfulness, we can train the mind to stay present, curious, balanced, aware, and connected- not just when we feel good, but especially when we feel discomfort. As research shows, heightening our present-moment awareness increases our emotional distress tolerance, which in turn decreases our chances of reacting from habitual, conditioned responses to emotional discomfort.”