Mindfulness for Leaders – Improving performance and wellbeing (How to tune-up your business and personal effectiveness)

Introduction

We are all fully aware of the uncertainty, conflict and stress experienced over the past two years in particular following major changes in our lives related to events such as Brexit, the covid pandemic and hybrid workplace practices. There is now even more uncertainty, and indeed alarm, as hostilities break out in Europe with emerging economic, social, and humanistic implications.     

As leaders there is an emerging need to explore “different” personal processes and behaviours that can be adopted to help achieve enhanced performance in the workplace and for personal wellbeing. Mindfulness is one approach and although it has been long established it is now growing in popularity in helping leaders (and others) to be in as good a shape as possible to meet today’s challenges.

In this highly interactive and insightful workshop Martin Stepek will lead you through the practicalities of Mindfulness such that you can experience what works best for you in reducing negative stress, encouraging positive thinking, and increasing confidence to cope with continuous change.

What is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is a revolutionary set of practices based on paying attention to what is happening in the present moment. The practices can be as formal as meditation or as everyday as walking or drinking a cup of tea or coffee. Participants will learn that it is how you do it that makes all the difference.

The Benefits of Mindfulness

• Fundamentally, being “presence-based” enables leaders to be grounded and to respond flexibly and calmly to the emergence of rapidly changing situations and opportunities. The topic of benefits has been well researched as evidenced in the examples below
• Reduced stress and improved mood and outlook.  (Massachusetts General Hospital)
• More co-operation and compassion towards others (Harvard University).
• Increased resilience and control over pain (University of Utah)
• Reduced and better self-management of depression (Oxford University).
• Reduced cravings in smokers (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh).
• Decreased loneliness in elderly people (Carnegie Mellon University)
• Positive changes in personality (Massachusetts General Hospital)
• (Mindfulness can change which of our genes are switched on or off).

Participants are invited to discover how to create clear, focused and calm leadership.

Keynote Speaker – Martin Stepek Bio

Martin is highly respected as the CEO of the Family Business Association and as the founder of Ten for Zen.  His impressive career has spanned a diverse portfolio covering business, literature, politics, mental wellbeing, and Scottish-Polish relationships.

Martin graduated from Strathclyde in 1981 with a law degree, a post-graduate diploma in legal practice, and a blue with the Scottish University’s football team. From 1981 Martin was co-owner, and from 1987 to 2002 a director of the Scotland Top 500 business J. Stepek Ltd famous for their groundbreaking cult TV adverts with fellow retailers Glens, Hutchison and Robertsons.

Martin co-founded the Scottish Family Business Association in 2006 to bring global best practices for family businesses to Scotland. In 2011 he won the prestigious UK Family Business Ties lifetime award for services to family businesses.

As the founder of Ten for Zen he teaches and promotes mindfulness, a set of mental wellbeing and training practices approved by the NHS as a treatment inter alia for stress and anxiety, and a method by which emotional intelligence and compassion is cultivated. He has facilitated mindfulness sessions across the public, private and charity sectors and has developed online mindfulness products as a global commercial and a philanthropic service. See www.tenforzen.co.uk 

A published poet, his English-Polish bilingual volume on the death by starvation of his Polish grandmother “For There is Hope” was awarded the USA-Canada Pinnacle prize for best bilingual book by the North American Book Entrepreneurs in the Spring of 2013.

Martin was the Scottish Green Party’s leader in 2003-04 and took part in government coalition talks between the SNP and the Greens in 2007. He occasional writes a blog on political and social matters but is no longer actively involved in party politics.

Finally, Martin researches and promotes awareness of Polish-Scottish historical, heritage, artistic, tourist and commercial links and has a particular desire to see close relationships built between Scotland and his family’s place of origin, Podkarpacie in south-eastern Poland