Season 1 | Episode 4

Getting Started with Mindfulness

Gagan Adlakha

Gagan Adlakha, a master coach explains "mindfulness is not mindlessness, it is not about having no thoughts - it is about making conscious decisions, each time."

Episode Transcript
  • INTRO (Gagan Adlakha):(00:00:03)

    If we are able to create a little gap between the stimulus which is hitting us and the responses that we are giving to those stimuli, we will be able to live a better life and have our life more in control, and in my opinion, that's what mindfulness is all about, the sacred gap between the stimulus and our responses to those stimuli.

  • (Poornima Pandey):(00:00:24)

    You are probably familiar with this concept of mindfulness, but does it intersect with being a better leader. I’m Poornima Pandey and on this episode of Leadercraft, we have with us the Indian Yoda of coaching, Gagan Adlakha. As a master coach, he works face-to-face with top executives. His deep focus is on developing leaders and creating a ripple effect that transforms teams, companies, and even industries, and one powerful and useful technique that he swears by is mindfulness. We caught up with him to understand the basics of this practice and how we can begin to unleash its power in our lives.

  • Poornima Pandey:(00:01:18)

    Thank you for being on Leadercraft. It's lovely to have you with us.

  • Gagan Adlakha:(00:01:23)

    Thanks Poornima. Thank you for having me on the show and…

  • Poornima Pandey:(00:01:28)

    I'm going to cut straight to the chase. There is just so much noise all around us by way of opinions, information, anxieties, and stress. While this is true for everyone, it's even more for so for leaders. Given the realities of today's 24x7 world and the feeling of being constantly switched on, how do we slow down and focus in order to make thoughtful decisions? You've been working on the answer, mindfulness, and that brings me to my first question for you. What is mindfulness?

  • Gagan Adlakha:(00:02:06)

    We seem to be, you know, living in what people call the attention economy, and I'm sure all of you heard of that, so on the one hand there is technology which is creating so many changes and on the other hand there is so much stimulus that is coming our way in terms of people wanting our attention that we are living in a state that we are constantly bombarded by demands on our time and attention, okay, and what this does is it makes us extremely busy like you rightly said. We are constantly, you know, running after one thing or the other. The to-do lists are so long and the kind of things that you want to do sort of never seem to get over and what impact this has on us is that there is, obviously on one level there's a low level of productivity because we're pulled in so many directions. There is burnout that happens. Also the quality of decisions go bad because we, you know, don't have time to think through many things, and you know, the requisite attention is not given to things at times, and all this leads to bad decisions and therefore bad results. So we are caught in this whole, you know, space where these things are not getting any better. Many people are trying different things, but mindfulness is one thing that I believe is certainly a solution which a lot of people find working for them, and I would strongly suggest people to explore it if they're caught up in that kind of a tizzy because what it does is mindfulness, answering your question after a long preamble, is the gap that you can create between the stimulus and the response. If we are able to create a little gap between the stimulus which is hitting us and the responses that we are giving to those stimuli, we will be able to live a better life and have our life more in control, and in my opinion, that's what mindfulness is all about, this sacred gap between the stimulus and our responses to those stimuli.

  • Poornima Pandey:(00:03:54)

    What an interesting definition, the gap between stimulus and response, and I can imagine that it might impact pretty much everyone, but why do you think it may be especially important for leaders?

  • Gagan Adlakha:(00:04:08)

    Sure. See what happens with responses, just taking the same construct a little further, and each of those actions or inactions will have a certain consequence. You know, whether I give time to a certain emergency or a certain request for time or I don’t or I, you know, spend this much time on my business and this much time on my people or I spend this much time on costumer facing and external world facing and this much time internal facing, etc., and at the end of it, I believe that we are nothing but a summation of the consequences of all our actions, okay? Let’s start with looking at our personal life. Today where I am and where you are is nothing but a summation of the consequences of all our actions. What did we study? Where did we work? Which city do we live in? Who did we get married? Did we have children? What kind of food do I eat? How much you exercise? Who do I spend time with? What books do I read, etc., etc., and all these are decisions that one makes based on the stimulus that we get, and based on the consequences of this is my current reality, is my current context, okay? Therefore, my life is actually largely, very, very largely, made up by my own actions or inactions based on those stimuli and the responses I gave to those. So therefore, if that is true for individual, that is also very true for a leader. At an individual level, because like an individual, even an organization is nothing but a summation of the consequences of all the actions taken. Which markets do we go in? What products do we sell? How much margins do we want? Who do we hire? What kind of people policies we have? Who do we tie up with? What products? What pricing? What vendors do we have? Everything put together creates a set of consequences, and all those set of consequences put together create our reality and where the organization is. Therefore, as an individual it is important for me to create my own reality, but for a leader it's even more important because they are creating the reality of their organization, and the decisions that a leader makes is going to lead them to the reality of, you know, of tomorrow; and therefore, if they start making better decisions today, the company will hopefully be in a better place tomorrow. That's why I think it's absolutely critical for leaders for themselves as individuals and for the roles that they have to have better responses to the stimulus that they get, and that's mindfulness.

  • Poornima Pandey:(00:06:34)

    It appears that, you know, becoming a mindful leader isn't easy. There's no 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and here you go. So to your mind what are some of the ways to develop and practice mindfulness?

  • Gagan Adlakha:(00:06:49)

    Certainly, mindfulness is not 1, 2, 3. It's actually not even a thing that you do. Eventually, it’s a state that you want to get into. It's a state of being able to take that pause before a stimulus and give a conscious response to what you're doing. So what you're doing is you're actually fighting your compulsivenesses. The ones you really should be making. The idea is to become aware that how is the stimulus hitting me. What is happening to me inside. Why am I responding with this compulsiveness, and is there a better way for me to respond, and to do this you will need practices so that you get into that state, you know, and there are a lot exercise and lots and lots of practices that people can pick up, and I am not going to go into too many of those because, you know, the net is full of them, you have apps for them, and there are enough people teaching you. So as long as any leader wants to learn how to build this muscle, there are enough and more material and content around on how to do that, but the idea would be, can I start taking better decisions? Can I start taking more conscious decisions? Can I be governed less by my compulsivenesses that my brain has?

  • Poornima Pandey:(00:07:58)

    I do know that the listeners would love to know at least a couple of practices that you see in your coaching practice or for yourself as being the most successful ones, maybe not the entire universe, but just your own personal experience of a couple of practices would be immensely useful?

  • Gagan Adlakha:(00:08:15)

    Sure. So I'll share some of them. So some of the most common and often used is breath watching. It’s just the ability to sit down for about 10 minutes, 15 minutes a day every morning ideally, and just sit and start watching your breath, and just keep seeing how it's going in and going out and not being worried about, you know, controlling it or trying to force it in any which way, just watching it. Just start ignoring your thoughts, being aware of the fact that a thought has arisen, but also just letting it go without getting attached to it, without fighting it, or without creating any thoughts. Just this small practice of doing this 15 minutes a day every morning and whenever else you get time, sometimes commuting, sometimes in a flight. It just helps this muscle of trying to slowly distancing yourself from your mind because the mind, the thoughts start putting you on a train of thoughts, okay, and then you're taken away God knows where. So therefore, if you were to use that analogy, this helps you get off the train and onto the platform and watch the train go by rather than being on the train, and that practice will slowly start building that ability to be able to not get just stuck and attached to a thought but being able to see it, see the compulsiveness that's coming, and be able to take a slightly better decision by not getting driven by just because a thought has arisen. So what it will do slowly is, just to repeat, to create that slight difference between you and your mind. So this breath watching helps do that. Another practice that helps do very similar thing is to be able to watch the thoughts coming and just tag them or label them. So just sit down for some time. Instead of watching your breath this time, just focus on your thoughts. Let the thought arise and put a label on it, and it could be any label, it could be, “oh, I'm here trying to problem solve,” “oh, I've gone into, you know, an imaginary argument right now,” “oh, I'm thinking about the past,” “oh, you know, I've gone into, you know, getting angry with this guy again.” You know, just not getting caught up with the thought, but trying to be a little away from the thought and being able to label it, okay. So this is called thought tagging or labeling, and again, a very, very commonly used practice to just create that slight distance. So these are the two practices that are very easy to do. I would also recommend if, you know, anybody has further interest, there are just innumerable number of things available on YouTube. There are fantastic apps available. I think a thing called Headspace is very common and very popular.

  • Poornima Pandey:(00:11:02)

    It also seems to me that this would have huge repercussions in the way we live our lives, not just at work, but you know, in all the parts of our lives. Do you see this kind of a ripple or a positive effect that mindfulness contributes across the board?

  • Gagan Adlakha:(00:11:19)

    Absolutely. You know, mindfulness has to do with helping creating a better person, a better leader, you know, it impacts all parts of your life. And believe me, I’ve worked with a lot of people and we see impact in obviously professional life, personal life, family, health, finances, you know, social awareness, spirituality, and so many other spaces, you know. Every space that an individual is expected to play a role, it can work because as an individual, you are upgrading yourself, and when you upgrade yourself, anything that you do has a chance of being done better, and that's why it's important for us to understand that we are constantly wanting our organizations to be upgraded, our organizations to be more adapted to the VUCA world, our organizations to be more able to respond to the stimulus that's happening. How can we do that if our leaders themselves are not upgraded to that level? If they don't have those capacities and capabilities?

  • Poornima Pandey:(00:12:12)

    There is a lot of hope you offer Gagan in, you know, the science and the art of mindfulness. You say it is possible to rewire yourself, and that's actually bringing a smile on my lips because that's perhaps, you know, some of the difficult challenges that people face. You're saying you can be friends with yourself, and you know, you can rewire the mind. So I just wanted to actually wrap up this lovely conversation with you to ask you that do you ever see roadblocks in this rewiring, and how do you become your best friend?

  • Gagan Adlakha:(00:12:45)

    The human personality as many of us know is, you know, often seen like an iceberg, okay, where only 10% of it is above the water and can be seen but 90% is below the water and not seen. So, you know, this 10% is dictated by this 90% below the waterline of the iceberg, and this stuff that is there is going to dictate what the 10% is and how we're going to act, which has its own consequences, etc., what we talked about, but this 90% is a lot of wiring, as you say Poornima, a lot of patterns, a lot of stories, experiences, beliefs, and constructs that we have, and half of the problem is solved by just understanding where they're coming from and understanding why and what happened. Mindfulness is making conscious decisions, and what it isn’t is, you know, sitting down and having no thoughts in your mind. That is mindlessness not mindfulness.

  • Poornima Pandey:(00:13:42)

    Any last words to our listeners?

  • Gagan Adlakha:(00:13:45)

    I would strongly suggest that please try it, okay. It takes effort, it takes time to do it, but please try it and be at it. You may not see results immediately, but hey, you're trying to do some fundamental change. I think you owe it to yourself to try and make a better version of yourself, and therefore, of the organization and the team that you're leading, and you owe at least yourself this much time and effort to be able to do it, but let me also tell you rigor and discipline is critical. It's not something that you can do once in a while or I’ll sit down and do. It's like, you know, going to the gym. You can’t say, I'll go to gym once a month and be a fit person, may not be possible. Discipline, rigor is key.

  • OUTRO (Poornima Pandey):

    Mindfulness is not mindlessness. It is not about having no thoughts. It is about making conscious decisions each and every time. If you want others to be happy, practice mindfulness. If you want to be happy, practice mindfulness, so said the Dalai Lama and now Gagan. Let’s all try giving mindfulness a shot, and if and when you do start we hope you will tell your friends about it and let the word spread. Tune into Leadercraft to listen in to more such interesting stories and practices. This is your host, Poornima Pandey, signing off.

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