Finding the Space to Lead: A Practical Guide to Mindful Leadership

FINDING THE SPACE TO LEAD: A Practical Guide to Mindful Leadership

By Janice Marturano Publication date: March 13, 2014 ISBN 978-1-62040-247-4 £18.99; 208 pages

Publicity Contact: Sophia Blackwell Marketing and Publicity Manager +44 (0)20 7631 5831 Sophia.Blackwell@bloomsbury.com @sophiablackwell

BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING “At the World Economic Forum, I saw in person how Janice Marturano's Mindful Leadership training could make a real difference in the lives of corporate leaders from around the globe. Her powerful new book, Finding the Space to Lead, makes the principles of this training accessible to readers everywhere. Whether you're the leader of a corporation or a PTA, or you just find yourself overwhelmed by the pace of modern life, you will find both invaluable wisdom and practical advice in these pages.”

--Arianna Huffington, President and Editor-in-Chief, Huffington Post Media Group

FINDING THE SPACE TO LEAD: A Practical Guide to Mindful Leadership

by JANICE MARTURANO Janice Marturano knows a thing or two about the demands of work/life balance, and how easy it is to slip into auto-pilot mode. In 2000, Janice, a senior executive, was tackling a major acquisition in a multi-billion dollar deal, juggling an overwhelming workload, an active family life, and at the same time was experiencing personal grief with the death of her parents. Overworked and overextended, Marturano was mentally, physically and emotionally drained. Prodded by a friend to take some time off, she attended a meditation retreat. What she learned there would change the course of her career.

By incorporating mindfulness principles into her daily life, Marturano began to feel focused at work and fully present at home. Eventually she began sharing her mindfulness training with fellow executives, who rapidly saw its benefits and spread it through the company and beyond. She is now the Founder and Executive Director of the Institute for Mindful Leadership, and has brought her training to leaders from across the globe.

In this accessible guide, Marturano explains how to integrate the practice of mindfulness—meditation and selfawareness—with effective techniques of management and mentorship. “Whether the challenges are leading a company, a team, a class, or a family, Mindful Leadership training strengthens the mind’s ability to focus, see clearly, be creative and embody compassion so we can all lead, and live, with excellence,” says Marturano.

Years of neuroscience research have shown the efficacy of mindfulness training, and Marturano’s own surveys of executives have proved its practical value. FINDING THE SPACE TO LEAD is specifically geared to practicing mindful leadership in the workplace. This guide will help readers better manage calendars, meetings, to-do lists, strategic planning, and the interpersonal challenges of the workplace by offering specific exercises to face real-world situations in a mindful way. Whether the challenges are leading a company, a team, a class, or a family, through the Mindful Leadership facets: clarity, focus, creativity, and compassion, we can lead all our lives with excellence.

Janice L. Marturano Janice Marturano is the Founder and Executive Director of the Institute for Mindful Leadership, a non-profit organization dedicated to training and supporting leaders in the exploration of mindfulness and leadership excellence. She founded the Institute for Mindful Leadership in January, 2011, after ending her 15 year tenure as Vice President, Public Responsibility and Deputy General Counsel for General Mills.

Janice was a strategic leader within General Mills for nearly 15 years before leaving to dedicate herself full time to the Institute. While a corporate officer at General Mills, she co-developed the very first mindful leadership curriculum at the University of Massachusetts Medical School’s Center for Mindfulness where she served as a volunteer member of the Advisory Board. As a certified teacher of mindfulness and an experienced former officer of a Fortune 200 company, she has brought the intensive training of mindful leadership to leaders from all forms of organizations—corporate, nonprofit, academic, government, and military. In 2013, she was invited to share her understanding of the importance of mindful leadership at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Janice’s work has been featured on the BBC, Huffington Post Live, and in the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Saturday Evening Post, Forbes, Green Futures (UK), Success magazine, and the Los Angeles Times.

Advance Praise for Finding the Space to Lead “Janice Marturano is a widely-admired executive and a leader in a movement that is changing the shape of our world through mindfulness and emotional intelligence. With this insightful book, leaders of all shapes and sizes will not only become much more effective in every way, they will also become happier.”

-- Chade-Meng Tan, Google's Jolly Good Fellow and bestselling author of Search Inside Yourself

"Mindful Leadership has transformed my life. As a corporate change agent my ability to understand myself better and others is crucial to bring about skillful & sustainable improvements. In Finding the Space to Lead, Janice, the pioneer of Mindful Leadership, offers us the practices that have enriched my leadership competencies and opened the most meaningful workplace and life dimension."

–Andreas Metzen, Senior Vice President, DVB Bank SE

“I describe my first mindfulness retreat as life-changing and once again Janice has ‘WOW'ed’ me. Her clarity, encouragement and reminders to be gentle on ourselves as we learn to be mindful leaders are simply amazing. Finding the Space to Lead will benefit all who read and practice it.”

–Gale S. Pollock, Major General (Retired), CRNA, FACHE, FAAN

“Janice Marturano knows what leadership excellence is, and shows us how it can be cultivated. Much more than just a simple application of some mindfulness techniques, Finding the Space to Lead joins mind training exercises and sound business disciplines into practical, transformative leadership practices.”

--James Gimian, Publisher, Mindful and mindful.org

“Janice Marturano has been an inspiration to many of her friends at General Mills. Her new book, which explores the framework of mindful leadership, is an excellent read for anyone balancing the complexities of modern life and leadership.”

--Michael L. Davis, SVP, Human Resources, General Mills

“With leaders everywhere searching for ways to be mindful, Janice Marturano’s timely new book, Finding the Space to Lead, is the definitive guide to becoming a mindful leader. If you follow her practical advice and easy-to-adopt exercises, this book will change your life. You will not only become a better leader, you will have a more fulfilling life.”

–Bill George, Professor, Harvard Business School and former Chair and CEO of Medtronic

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“A must read for anyone in a leadership position. This is a riveting account of how mindfulness can transform leadership in organizations and improve individual well-being and organizational success. Sprinkled with compelling real-world examples, this book should be required reading for leaders of any organization.”

--Richard J. Davidson, Founder and Chair, Center for Investigating Healthy Minds, University of Wisconsin-Madison

"We live in a world where every single person is a leader in some capacity and everyone is trying to figure out how to deal with the increasing demands and complexities of life. Finding the Space to Lead gives us concrete strategies, from a high powered executive of a major American corporation, to increase our focus and creativity, as well as how to lead with compassion. In this practical and straightforward book, Janice Marturano shares her down to earth and common sense approach that can help moms and moguls alike. I highly recommend it.”

--Congressman Tim Ryan, Ohio, author of A Mindful Nation

“This book is a must read for business leaders who want to create a sustainable corporate environment grounded in shared communication and trust.”

–Matt Mumber, MD, author of Sustainable Wellness: An Integrative Approach to Transform Your Mind, Body and Spirit

“This book is both deeply moving and utterly inspiring. Whether you are already a leader, or preparing to lead, or perhaps you have had leadership ‘thrust upon you,’ reading this book and following its practices will become a lifeline, allowing you to discover a way to cultivate your deepest potential to lead with excellence and wisdom.”

–Professor Mark Williams, Professor of Clinical Psychology, University of Oxford

BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING

A Conversation with

Janice Marturano For those who are new to the mindful leadership training, or somewhat skeptical, how can this training enhance one's career? Enhance one’s life?

Just as we know that you can train innate capacities of our body to be stronger, more flexible and more resilient, we now know through decades of research that this training physiologically changes our mind, and enhances our ability to focus, see clearly, be creative, and embody compassion.

We can cultivate and strengthen our capacity to embody leadership presence. This capacity allows us to be responsive rather than reactive. It allows us to enhance our ability to step off the autopilot treadmill we are often living on, and make conscious choices about our life. This is a critical capacity we all need whether we are leading our own life, our family, a team, a department or a global organization.

Why do we need mindful leadership in today’s world?

As we consider the challenges leaders face today, it‘s relatively easy to see how dearly we need to cultivate mindful leadership. The environment we live and work in is constantly evolving. Time is now often measured in internet seconds. There are new and complex economic and resource constraints on our organizations. We are attached 24/7 to an array of technological wizardry that regularly generates anxietyproducing information overload and a sense of disconnection that can overwhelm and isolate us. The world is seemingly changing so rapidly that someone training for a career today may find the career path radically altered by the time they are ready to enter it. One paradigm after another is shifting. The volume of information at our disposal is not in fact leading to more certainty, but rather less, as we are faced with a dizzying array of choices. The number of voices and opinions that can be heard on any given issue is so dauntingly large that we often don’t know who or what to believe or follow.

It is also true, though, that these tumultuous times can be times of great opportunity and innovation as the world becomes smaller and we begin to see the potential to meet the complexities of the day in ways that are truly innovative, productive, and compassionate. It’s a time to take leadership and to bring all of our capabilities, including our capability to be fully present in this moment, to find the innovation, courage, integrity and compassion we need to make a difference in our world.

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My work life has become so overwhelming that my relationships are suffering. Will this book help?

Very often, the same distractions that keep us from being present in the workplace, interfere with our ability to feel connected to others in our personal lives. We may find that even if we intend to pay attention to our friend or our child, our mind soon becomes distracted with our own internal chatter, or we find ourselves wondering about what may have just arrived on our iPhone. When we train our minds to pay attention and begin to learn that we can redirect our attention to the present moment when we notice our mind has wandered, we quickly begin to notice the differences in our communications with others.

We notice more subtleties in the conversation and we are more able to deeply listen to ourselves and to speak from the heart. This kind of presence in a conversation is felt-by you and by others-and can become the basis for deepening a relationship.

My day is packed with back-to-back meetings and mile-long to-do lists. I don’t have time to train.

As you will see in the book, this training requires no special equipment and invites you to set aside only 10 minutes, twice per day. The effects are felt almost immediately and most people will quickly see that some of those meetings and ‘to dos’ start to change and lessen when they begin to see things more clearly and make some conscious choices about how they want to meet the moments of their lives.

Meditation seems a little New-Agey to me, and I wouldn’t know where to begin.

Finding the Space to Lead is a step by step approach from a senior legal executive at a Fortune 200 company. It was developed over a period of 4 years with the input of executives, and employees at all levels, to make it simple and applicable to the busy lives we all live. There is nothing New-Age about Mindful Leadership training. You begin with a guided 10 minute meditation (meditations are free and available at the Finding the Space to Lead website for readers of the book) and add simple applications from there. The applications, called Purposeful Pauses, do not take any time from your schedule because they are done during your day-at lunch, walking down the hall, looking at your calendar, etc. Simple and clear are hallmarks of bringing this training of the mind into your life.

FINDING THE SPACE TO LEAD: A Practical Guide to Mindful Leadership

By Janice Marturano Publication date: March 13, 2014 Hardcover 978-1-62040-247-4 £18.99 208 pages

Publicity contact: Sophia Blackwell Marketing and Publicity Manager Sophia.Blackwell@Bloomsbury.com +44(020 7631 5831

@JaniceMarturano www.FindingtheSpacetoLead.com www.bloomsbury.com