By Elizabeth Herman | Posted on : December 24, 2020
Johann Berlin, shares his mental health tips, including meditation, for executives to stay at the top of their game.
What can meditation do for your leadership abilities? Especially when you’re under pressure, you need a renewing practice. Johann Berlin is a leadership advisor to top executives. He describes a “dramatic uptick in executives wanting more center, calm, and presence.”
He spoke to Real Leaders magazine on The Role of Meditation in Becoming an Effective Leader. In this talk, he went over the reasons for this trend and the benefits of meditation. He also offered tips for overcoming stress and maintaining calm going forward.
You can watch the full interview in the following video and read about it below:
Why has meditation increased among CEOs and executives?
A major factor is wanting to feel and sense their customers and employees. There’s a desire to be more present. The world is entering what Johann calls the “intellectual capital side of the economy. Much of the future is becoming more adaptable and people-centered.”
In the past, leaders have been able to do a lot with few resources. But having plenty of resources can result in getting very little done. It’s not material wealth, but mental health, that makes the biggest difference.
As Johann reminds us, “Our most valuable asset is our own good mental health. Yoga offers deeper alignment and integration of these different aspects of ourselves.” The practices contain timeless wisdom for mental health support.
“People think of yoga as the postures. But yoga means union of mind, body, and breath. There’s the physical element as well as the spiritual alignment.” The programs offered incorporate spiritual elements. The practices are also very grounded in action and results.
How do you tell CEOs to manage workplace mental health?
Johann describes CEOs as close to enlightenment already. “I joke and say they’re fallen yogis, with good karma in life, charisma, and abilities.”
But he describes the culture of anxiety in business as anathema to true human nature. “In the mythology of grit as a cure-all, you can become anything you want. Hard work matters. But when you get to an executive level, often you explore a deeper dimension of life.”
A deeper dimension comes out when individuals face reality. They realize, “For leaders, you can’t share if you’re depressed or having a mental health problem. Mental wellness is a derivative benefit of yoga. You bounce less from the highs of addictive behavior to the lows of depression.”
How do you maintain that sense of calm and mindfulness going forward?
Here are some ways restorative techniques help with a mental health issue:
Restoring changes your state of mind. Immersive programs help you become less hyper-focused on small things. You expand. A sense of expansion brings contentment and happiness under any stressful circumstances.
The ability to center leads to a lot of innovation. It's important to have a clear mind and time to reflect to innovate and come up with new ideas. Johann talks with many Nobel Laureates. He asks when they crystallize their ideas. They have told him that flashes of insight often occur outside of the workplace.
With regular habituation, you get trait changes. SKY Breath Meditation leads you into deep meditation. A professor at the University of Oslo did regular, ongoing, consistent practice. It showed that it can change gene expression.
Harvard studies show that grey matter changes. A recently published study showed many benefits around stress, resilience, and other factors.
You need to invest in immersive experiences. Attending to a stressful moment doesn’t lead to that steady, even state. The care you show for yourself has to be ongoing and continuous. You want to make lasting changes in your approach to specific stress-causing events. So healing actions when you’re not stressed out are necessary.
You must habituate. You can mix the immersive experience and practice coaching. You build a habit and integrate it into your life. A regular meditation practice helps you develop routines to improve your mental health.
What are the direct benefits to productivity, mindfulness, and loyalty?
Johann prefers not to prescribe meditation to improve your company’s balance sheets. “If I give my employees meditation, they’re more productive and efficient. That’s very transactional. That says, ‘I’m not doing this because I’m interested in their mental health condition.’
In fact, the military has considered meditation as a replacement for sleep. Using it for efficiency or productivity isn’t ideal. The best approach for employers is to aid the U.S. mental health crisis. Finding centeredness, calm, and non-medicated tools should be the goal.”
According to Johann, productivity shouldn’t be the primary reason to meditate. But it’s still significant as a by-product of the practice. “We’ve done studies on productivity. An economist studied it from inside at one large, high-performing pharmaceutical company. They had $200,000 in yearly savings for a cohort of 30. They did a short, 2 day immersive and some regular practice sessions.
You could invest a lot in mindfulness. But if people walk into a toxic work environment every day, they only encounter acute, one-time instances of problems. On a continual basis, when a leader is kind and centered, a mirroring happens over time. In their direct reports and all the reports below them, they lift everyone.” Johann opts for lasting change rather than temporary quick fixes in the corporate cultural environment.
What tips do you have for overcoming stress?
Here are three tips that Johann offers:
1) Invest in mind hygiene. We flood our brains with impressions. Cleaning our own minds helps emotional health. We must rest from all the alerts that come across our social media.
Ways to decompress, workplace stress rituals, and routines for the mind are so important. You can start with the breath. It stays in the present moment. We can access it any time of day. We have content online and plenty of apps out there.
2) Maintain an authentic social connection. Not showing vulnerability can compound a lot of pressures and stresses. Modeling authentic relationships gives us that genuine social connection. That means dropping any unreal narrative of perfection.
Here’s a good example. Johann held an intervention for one of the big four consulting firms. After a process called Heart to Heart, he was so surprised at what happened.
The most senior pair of executives said, "I’ve known this person for 15 years. We’ve been working day and night together and never learned that we’d faced similar challenges." They were so moved when they actually had a moment to connect. Moments like these improve workplace relationships and boost morale.
3) Find intrinsic inspiration. So much of life and work centers around extrinsic motivations, like a job, title, or goals. But enthusiasm or inspiration can make life more vibrant.
Google actually did this with their employees. They took on projects that they were passionate about. Many of their biggest products came out of those projects. That intrinsic connection was the reason. Johann describes this example in detail in the video.
How does your technique build peace globally? Can you talk about the founder ?
One result of centeredness and deep listening is that many of the world’s challenges can drop away.
“He’s a peace leader and spiritual leader from India. He built a multi-cultural, multi-religious organization called the Art of Living Foundation. It works to create a stress-free, violence-free world. It has helped tens of millions deal with their own minds and traumas.”
Johann met his wife through her work in Haiti with hundreds of youth leaders. “The Haitian youth leaders found clarity and purpose. They built a community with a sense of belonging, extending out to others.”
In that way, Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar created a ripple effect of peace. He has centers for mental wellbeing in 150 countries. He negotiated the peace deal between the FARC rebels and the Columbian government.
The foundation also works in remote workers’ communities and in prisons. There’s a program for veterans, called “Project Welcome Home Troops.” There’s equity work to transform inner cities.
What are the next steps?
Johann recommends that you learn SKY Breath Meditation. “It’s authenticated and validated by modern science. A study came out of Yale. We teach one on one or in small groups for executives.”
Meditation can be one of those tools for improving leadership skills. To get started today, join Beyond Breath - a free online session with a live instructor. You'll experience guided breathwork and meditation. You'll also learn about SKY Breath Meditation. It has helped millions of people worldwide to reap the deeper benefits of yoga.
Elizabeth Herman is a long time meditator, a trained yoga teacher, and a PhD in English, with concentrations in Rhetoric and Composition, and Literature. She offers writing support to clients, teaches locally, and volunteers for a better world.
