Meditation can teach us a lot about leadership. But it’s not evident.

One of the many things the practice of meditation helps us with is familiarizing ourselves with our mind and how it works.

If you consider this from a leadership point of view, you’ll discover that a leader finds himself subject to many distractions. His team may be a source of never-ending questions just as much as he might find himself in a space of never-ending doubt or desire to know what to do. The context within which he is leading is another source of distraction as it impacts him, his team, and the work they are trying to do.

There always is something seeking a leader’s attention, and it always is accompanied by some form of anxiety. That is his attention is called for to make him attentive to a risk, and he will find himself seeking to give it to something that might help everyone feel soothed.

What the attention is grabbed by is the possibility that there is a problem and the impression that it is a problem that one might be able or need to solve.

It’s what the mind does with us.

Leaders learn to prioritize what they give their attention to and what problems can be addressed usefully.

Becoming familiar with how our mind works helps us see the patterns our mind is subject to. In those patterns, there is the possibility that most of the problems don’t need to be solved, they are only reminders of problems from the past. It’s our current way of prioritization that makes us believe that some of them need to be solved. It’s a prioritization that is encrypted in the story we tell ourselves.

Familiarizing ourselves with these existing patterns is a way to create some distance and see them from a new perspective. That is to see the repetition in an existing pattern.

It’s how we can become aware of how a quote usually attributed to Einstein may serve us too: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”