Mindful Leadership: Effective tools to help you focus and succeed

Feel like the world is passing you by as you rush through another workday? Like you never have enough energy to manage the team you’re supposed to be leading? Like you can't even accomplish yourself what you set out to achieve? What you need is focus. Focus is at the core of effective leadership, but cultivating it has become daunting in our age of globalization, fast technological change, and environmental challenges. As a leader, you need tools to navigate these unknown territories. One of the most effective tools is mindfulness: paying attention, openly and curiously, to what happens in the present moment. This book is full of insights and exercises that teach leaders and leaders-to-be how to practice mindfulness. It shows how mindfulness allows you to become more mentally and physically resilient, more easily able to switch between action and reflection, and better equipped at knowing when to focus on yourself or the world around you. But mindfulness-based leadership doesn’t stop there. By learning to focus, you learn to work with your team more effectively. Nurturing a mindful corporate culture helps you solve problems and build healthy strategies that will benefit you, your colleagues, and your organization.

Wibo Koole is both a management consultant and leadership expert, operating from his own business, Create2connect. He is one of the founders and directors of the Centre for Mindfulness in Amsterdam, where he teaches mindfulness programs for managers and for corporations.
His work focuses on strategy and innovation, change management and leadership development in a wide range of organizations, both corporate and social. He also has considerable experience in management himself, as campaign and strategy manager with the Dutch Consumer Association, as head of communications for Oxfam Novib and the mental health organization Emergis, and as general director of the Dutch Nature and Environment Foundation.
Wibo has inside knowledge of many economic sectors: telecommunications and internet technology, agro-production, health care, and banking and insurance; he has also worked with the government. He was also politically active as chairman of the PvdA (Dutch Labor Party) in Amsterdam. Recently he founded a platform that focuses on creating a sustainable financial sector.
He has been a mindfulness teacher since 2008. He regularly gives so-called Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction basic programs with open enrolment. In addition he developed one of the first mindfulness training programs for leaders (in 2009), in collaboration with his colleague and mindfulness trainer Rob Brandsma. Within the Center for Mindfulness, he leads the Mindfulness, management and leadership program.
Wibo Koole graduated with honors in political science at the University of Amsterdam, and took the Advanced Management Program at the Wharton Business School (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA). He also is a certified transformational coach. As management consultant he is closely connected to the Presencing Institute at MIT (Boston), that initiates and facilitates collective mindful leadership for complex transformation processes in organizations and society.