How Can I Maintain a Calm Perspective as a Leader?

The Ask an Executive series features Forbes Councils members’ insights into leadership and other business topics in a Q&A format.

Question: How can I maintain a calm perspective as a leader?
In a time when our global community is facing constant turbulence and an endless supply of bad news, how can I best adapt to work-life adjustments, manage everyone on my team, and still maintain my own mental health while facing unprecedented mental stressors?

Meet our Executive: Ken Kladouris, Partner and President, Platinum Wealth Group.
Forbes Business Council member Ken Kladouris is the president of Platinum Wealth Group. He is an esteemed wealth advisor who believes in living life by design. Charting his own course in the wealth management industry, Ken has assisted countless clients in creating financial abundance.

Answer: Cultivate a daily meditation practice.
As we look to a future that is riddled with uncertainty, cultivating an active daily practice to manage perspective is critical. Your perspective has great influence over your decisions, the teams you manage, and the overall health of the companies you represent. So the healthier your mind is, and the more thoughtfully your emotions are managed, the easier it is to navigate the unknown.

A clear perspective will also help you lead by example, so your team can embrace similar practices to elevate their mental and emotional state.

They often say the simplest of things are the hardest – this is what many people think of first when they think of meditation. However, daily meditation of just 20 minutes has been shown to provide mental clarity that lasts throughout the work day and compounds upon itself.

How to get started:

1. Choose a time every day that you will dedicate to meditation. If you can do your meditation right after waking up, that is ideal.
2. Find a calm, quiet place in your home where you will not be interrupted.
3. Make sure your phone is on silent. If you feel you need to set your timer, be sure that it the alert is a soft sound.
4. Sit in an easy, comfortable position, close your eyes, and simply breathe. Deepen each breath with every inhale. Let stress, anxiety, and fear go with every exhale.
5. Repeat this for 20 minutes, allowing your thoughts to come and go and your mind to settle. It will seem noisy in your mind at first, but over time your thoughts will seem more like a soft song and less like a rock concert rolling loudly around in your mind.

This practice, for many, has become paramount in having “successful” days. We all know challenging emails, calls, conversations, and more are par for the course for a leader. Having a calm state of mind and a balanced set of emotions will allow you to lead better, dream bigger, think outside the box, and model healthy behaviors for your team. Choose 20 minutes a day — just over 1% of your day — to create amplified results that have a profound ripple effect into a positive future.

Source: Forbes