Mindfulness without the Bells and Beads: Unlocking Exceptional Performance, Leadership, and Well-being for Working Professionals
Use mindfulness to unleash your potential—without the spiritual baggage.
Mindfulness Without the Bells and Beads: Unlocking Exceptional Performance, Leadership, and Wellbeing for Working Professionals strips away the bells, beads, and hyperbole associated with mindfulness, and explains how you can take your performance and leadership to the next level in just eight weeks, without adopting any spiritual or new age beliefs.
Author Clif Smith, a US Army veteran, former diplomat, and CIA-trained former intelligence officer, serves as EY’s Americas Mindfulness Leader and Global Mindfulness Network Leader and is internationally recognized for bringing mindfulness to tens of thousands of corporate and government leaders across the globe. In this book, Clif shares teachings and insights to help achieve the tangible benefits of practicing mindfulness as a fundamental part of our professional and personal lives. You’ll discover how to:
- Enhance mental focus, resilience, and decision-making under pressure
- Increase the impact of your communication and leadership
- Transcend limiting beliefs, fear, and other psychological barriers to success
- Connect, understand, and interact with others more effectively
- Effectively incorporate self-care into a high-performance life
- Demystify the practice of mindfulness to make it ideal for a corporate setting
Perfect for corporate leaders, managers, and executives, and any working professional in a high-pressure or high-performance environment, Mindfulness Without the Bells and Beads also belongs on the bookshelves of anyone who works in a stressful environment and wants to achieve a higher level of success and a better quality of life.
Table of contents
Dedication
Foreword by Tal Goldhamer
Introduction: A Staggered Start
PART I – My Journey with Mindfulness and an Introduction to the Fundamentals
Chapter 1: The Power of the Trained Mind
Chapter 2: Why Mindfulness Now
Chapter 3: (Some of) The Science of Mindfulness
Chapter 4: How do our Brains Work Outside a Brain Scanner?
Chapter 5: Finding the Signal in the Mindfulness Noise
Chapter 6: The Fundamentals of Cultivating Mindfulness
Chapter 7: Your Journey
PART II - Diving Deeper - An 8 Week Journey to Exceptional Performance, Leadership, and Wellbeing
Chapter 8: Introducing the Course
Chapter 9: Week 1 - No Trivial Moments – Moving from Autopilot to Aware
Chapter 10: Week 2 - The Mindset You Bring to Your Experience Matters
Chapter 11: Week 3 - Do You Have the Story or Does the Story Have You
Chapter 12: Week 4 - The Saber-Toothed Tiger of the Modern World: Everything
Chapter 13: Week 5 - Delving into the Difficult
Chapter 14: Week 6 - In the Same Boat
Chapter 15: Week 7 - Who Watches (Out for) You
Chapter 16: Week 8 - Maintaining Momentum
Chapter 17: A Final Word
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Appendix
Endnotes
Index