Mindfulness meditation practice and developmental coaching are two tools that have proven effective in cultivating self-awareness and self-knowledge. When combined, they complement and augment each other in growing the client’s capacity to see and deal more effectively with complexity. The synergy thus created accelerates the development of emotional intelligence, which is the ability to accurately perceive, utilize, reason about, and manage one’s feelings and emotions. Mindfulness meditation offers a lens on our patterns; through practicing it we learn to create the space to choose our responses to situations rather than reacting habitually. Developmental coaching prompts us to recognize, by increasingly taking self as object, how we may be perpetuating habitual patterns that do not serve us well, and helps us open to larger perspectives and possibilities.
When we pay attention to how we inhabit the world, to the inner tendencies and forces that shape our experience, we are like fish finally recognizing water. Mind is our medium, the lens through which everything we experience is filtered. Our mindset is the interpretive process by which we make sense of that experience, and a fixed mindset, characterized by the inability to take self as object, is a major obstacle in developing as a leader because it causes us to interpret the world in habitual ways. One goal of vertical learning is to shift from fixed mindset to growth mindset, expanding one’s perspective and capacity for dealing with complexity and being open to new challenges.
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