How to Remain Calm in our Tornado-World

Lean practitioners, especially Lean leaders, live in a frantic tornado-world of design-construction-distraction. In our best moments we remain calm. And our calmness keeps us clear-headed…or restores that clarity, once we push away the craziness for a moment.

Steve Jobs, for all his faults, was 30 years ahead of his time in his management approach. No not the high-pressure, yelling part. In his understanding that leaders find inspiration and calmness inside themselves.

As reported by Geoffrey James in Inc. Magazine, “What Jobs intuited, neuroscience has now confirmed: it’s not the carrot of greed that motivates great leaders. It’s their ability to find inspiration within themselves and then communicate that inspiration to others.”

“It wasn’t greed that caused individuals (and therefore mankind) to evolve; it was mindfulness. Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson quotes Jobs explaining this way of thinking:

If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there’s room to hear more subtle things–that’s when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before.”

I know this to be true. I’ve been practicing meditation for 35 years, and its effects are as described: intuition blossoms, you see and hear things more clearly, you can be “in the moment” more and you simply calm down and become the person you know you are inside. Others are drawn to that.

Read more of Geoffrey James here.