Zen Leadership is rated 3 out of 5 in the category professional training & coaching. Read and write reviews about Zen Leadership. When you add awareness to your leadership role, a new quality is added: presence. And mindfulness is one of the best strategies for developing more presence. Mindfulness means a state of awareness here-and-now, and all mindfulness practices aims at strengthening this quality and ability of being present in the moment. Mindfulness has nothing to do with religious beliefs or rituals. It has to do with our level of awareness in our daily activities and actions. Mindfulness is a form of mind training. Ordinarily our attention is dominated by our thinking - we are caught up in the constant traffic of thoughts, in a state of absent mindedness. In Zen Leadership practices we learn to disidentify with this automatic thinking process, and become aware of the present moment through our senses. With this shift of attention from thinking to sensing, we get plugged into real life. We learn to break unhelpful and unhealthy behavioral patterns, and start acting from a more real place in our selves. Instead of reacting to people and circumstances in an automatic and often emotional way, we start responding more consciously an appropriately. This has an immediate positive effect on our relationships. Employees will experience a leader who is more attentive and focused, who listens actively, is more relaxed and is clear in his or her communication. Mindfulness has a proven effect on our ability to focus, listen and pay attention. In addition, research shows that mindfulness provides good health benefits, especially in relation to stress related conditions such as sleeping disorders, high blood pressure, and physical and mental restlessness.