Welcome to Courage to Advance, hosted by Kim Bohr and brought to you by SparkEffect, in partnership with The Empathy Edge.
Tune in to our subseries every 3rd Thursday, right here on The Empathy Edge! Or check us out at www.CourageToAdvancePodcast.com.
In today’s always-on business culture, how can leaders cut through digital noise to regain mental clarity? Kim Bohr sits down with Timothy Swords, a mindfulness-focused executive coach who blends Harvard MBA-level acumen with over 2,000 hours of mindfulness practice. Timothy reveals how simple grounding techniques transformed executives from being the “scary person in the room” to creating harmonious relationships.
This conversation explores why self-awareness might be more valuable than an MBA, how stress contagion undermines organizational performance, and why working beyond 50 hours delivers diminishing returns. Timothy shares practical “mindfulness hacks,” including a grounding technique for meetings, plus how 10 minutes of practice increases self-awareness by 35%.
Whether you’re struggling with digital overwhelm, managing stressed teams, or seeking authentic leadership approaches, discover how mindfulness becomes a competitive advantage. Learn why emotions last 30 seconds unless we feed them with thoughts.
To access the episode transcript, please scroll down below.
Key Takeaways:
- Mindfulness is “lucid awareness from paying attention on purpose in the present moment”
- A leader’s emotional state directly impacts team performance through stress contagion
- Working beyond 50 hours shows diminishing returns; 70-hour weeks produce no more than 55-hour weeks
- Simple grounding technique: Feel your feet on the floor during meetings to interrupt anxiety cycles
- Just 10 minutes daily mindfulness practice increases self-awareness by 35% in 6-8 weeks
- Authentic leadership starts with clarity on personal values aligned with organizational values
- Two types of self-compassion: tender (being kind) and fierce (setting healthy boundaries)
“An emotion on its own lasts like 30 seconds. But if you’re feeding it with thoughts, it goes on and on—it gets worse and worse. If you want to do anger management, you’ve got to stop that cycle, because you’re actually creating your own anger.” — Timothy Swords
About Timothy Swords: Timothy Swords blends corporate acumen with mindfulness training to guide senior leaders in integrating mindfulness into decision-making and leadership effectiveness. His experience includes CFO and strategic transformation roles at Fidelity Investments, MUFG Union Bank, and PwC. Timothy holds an MBA from Harvard University and is a certified mindfulness instructor with over 2,000 hours of practice, including training with renowned teachers Jack Kornfield, Jon Kabat-Zinn, and Sharon Salzberg.
About SparkEffect: SparkEffect partners with organizations to unlock the full potential of their greatest asset: their people. Through their tailored assessments and expert coaching at every level, SparkEffect helps organizations manage change, sustain growth, and chart a path to a brighter future.
Go to sparkeffect.com/edge now and download your complimentary Professional and Organizational Alignment Review today.
Connect with Timothy:
Website: MindfulLeadership-Coaching.com
Email: Timothy@MindfulLeadership-Coaching.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timothyswords
Free Resources: mindfulleadership-coaching.com/free-videos
Connect with Kim Bohr & SparkEffect:
SparkEffect: sparkeffect.com
Courage to Advance recording and resources:
sparkeffect.com/courage-to-advance-podcast
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/sparkeffect
LinkedIn for Kim: linkedin.com/in/kimbohr
Connect with Maria:
Learn more about Maria’s work and books: Red-Slice.com
Hire Maria to speak: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross
Take the LinkedIn Learning Course! Leading with Empathy
LinkedIn: Maria Ross
Instagram: @redslicemaria
Facebook: Red Slice
Threads: @redslicemaria
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome to the empathy edge podcast, the show that proves why cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. I’m your host, Maria Ross, I’m a speaker, author, mom, facilitator and empathy advocate. And here you’ll meet trailblazing leaders and executives, authors and experts who embrace empathy to achieve radical success. We discuss all facets of empathy, from trends and research to the future of work to how to heal societal divisions and collaborate more effectively. Our goal is to redefine success and prove that empathy isn’t just good for society. It’s great for business. Hi everyone. It’s Maria here, and you are in for a treat with my partner’s podcast today, Spark effects courage to advance today, Kim Bohr sits down with her guest mindfulness focused executive coach Timothy swords to talk about how leaders like you can cut through all the noise and regain mental clarity. And you will love that the secret sauce to this is self awareness, the first pillar in my five pillars of being both an empathetic and effective leader. This is the podcast you needed in our crazy, turbulent, noisy world right now. Take a listen.
Kim Bohr 01:29
What if I told you that the most successful leaders aren’t just smarter or more experienced, they’ve mastered something that has nothing to do with their MBA or industry expertise, while our competitors are drowning in digital overwhelm, making reactive decisions under pressure, are you watching their stress infect their entire organization? There’s a small group of executives who’ve discovered how to find clarity and chaos, and they’re not just surviving today’s volatile business environment, they are thriving in it. Today, we’re revealing the leadership intelligence that Harvard Business Review says can help you more than any MBA can. It’s the practice of mindful leadership. I am excited to be here today with Timothy swards. He brings a rare combination of C suite experience and deep mindfulness expertise to executive coaching as a former CFO and strategic transformation. Leader at Fidelity Investments and MUFG Union Bank at PwC, he understands the intense pressures that are facing leaders today with over 2000 hours of personal mindfulness practice and training under renowned teachers like Jack hornfield and Jon Kabat, Zinn Timothy, guides senior executives in integrating mindfulness into their decision making and leadership effectiveness. His Harvard MBA and certification as a professional mindfulness instructor uniquely positioned him to help leaders find clarity and resilience in today’s chaotic business environment. Timothy, welcome to courage to advance Podcast. I’m so excited. You’re here today.
Timothy Swords 03:01
So excited to be with you. Cam,
Kim Bohr 03:03
so before we dive into all the leadership challenges we’re seeing today, I’d love to hear about your journey and bringing forward the mindfulness focus of your coachee,
Timothy Swords 03:16
sure, there’s kind of two paths that come together at some point, right? I was a pretty ambitious kid, I guess, and studied accounting, worked for a CPA firm, was very fortunate in working for a little startup in my 20s, where I became essentially the Chief Operating Officer and CFO, though we didn’t call it that, because it was this tiny little company heap. So it was a lot of fast growth, and then I wrote about all the mistakes I made to get into Harvard Business School and got into management consulting and consulting, when I was working with leadership teams, they asked me to start coaching them, and I was like, I guess I could sort of do that. Don’t really know what that means. Went to school at night for two years at a Graduate School of Psychology, which I’d always wanted to do. Actually, I always had this interest in psychology and being a therapist, potentially, but I didn’t think I’d be satisfied as a therapist. I liked the coaching part more. And then I also worked in big firms like Fidelity Investments and Union Bank and doing strategy and so very kind of corporate traditional route, but at the same time, somewhat behind the scenes, I had started practicing very intensive meditation. Starting at college. I had done various things like Transcendental Meditation early on in college, and then got interested in Buddhist practice and being somewhat ambitious spiritually, but also because I could experience these bliss states of meditation, I sign up for a 10 day silent retreat when I was a senior at college, which was very intense and very difficult in some ways, because the first few days, you’ve gone from 100 miles an hour to zero, right? But after about three days, one can also experience these amazing bliss states, because the busyness of the mind and the thoughts is settled down then, yeah, there’s. Definitely Joy available through these practices as well. And then somehow people started to notice, like I would be asked in an interview, do you meditate or something? And I never talked about it, because when I talked about early in my career, they thought I was crazy. You’re going on a 10 day silent retreat. Who does that, you know. But then people started to notice that maybe I was a little more calm than the typical corporate person. So then you would ask, What do I do? I see you meditate. Then they started asking me to teach. I was teaching the Young Presidents Organization. And then within the bank, I set up a national program at uni bank. When I was there,
Kim Bohr 05:38
I love that. And was there an experience for yourself in particular where you talk about this as is this journey. But was there anything that where there was this more pronounced experience at some point in your life that you were called on this work for yourself?
Timothy Swords 05:54
And yeah, for many years, there was my meditation practice and my work, and then I think a few things happen. One is, I mean, I certainly noticed in my work that I was managing stress better. As a corporate consultant, you’re working on super intense projects, traveling all the time, you’re working 10, 1214, hours a day sometimes. So certainly the meditation practice helped with that, just keeping up with those challenges. But then there were a few things. I was on a coaching assignment where I was doing a lot of development plans for executives one after another, and as part of that, I was doing it with a colleague, and we were needing to find homework assignments for these executives with their new development plans. And one of them I came across was the Harvard Business Review article called The Making of a corporate athlete. And it’s still one of my favorite articles for my clients. And it talks about two main things. One is, well, a little context, they talk about a corporate athlete as working, you know, 5060, 7080, hours a week with no breaks, versus like an actual athlete who maybe is on the field once a week or twice a week, and the rest of the time is training and recovery time. And this article was written by a executive coach and an Olympic level trainer, and so they meant emphasize two things. One is recovery time and how important that is, and literally, every 90 to 120 minutes taking at least a five minute break. And then the other thing was these four capabilities that said you need to be a corporate athlete. One is a physical strength, emotional strength, mental strength and spiritual strength and spiritual they defined as purpose. And I thought, Oh, that makes a lot of sense. I’ve been an athlete, and certainly through the mindfulness, I got the emotional and mental part and some of the purpose part. At that point, I started to get more in touch with just how important purpose is and where that can come from, which in my studies, and what worked for me was on my values, like being super clear, what are my top three or five values, and how do I live from those each day and each moment, if I want to be a connected person, right? If that’s a big value for me, and say, I’m meeting a friend for a hike, is the hike like the point to get to the peak as quickly as possible, or is it to have a good connection with my colleague or my friend while we’re hiking and in the workplace? If I say being a kind person is important to me, if something comes up that’s challenging in a meeting, like, how do I maintain being kind? And then I started, as part of my teaching mindfulness in these corporate settings, I started to teach people how to do that, and now I start any coaching engagement with that, like, why are you here?
Kim Bohr 08:42
That’s such an important question. And I think it’s something that we don’t ask ourselves enough, and sometimes maybe the quick response is maybe more surface level and not as thoughtful, because of how much we’re moving through these busy days. I think I want to take this a little bit into something that you and I talked about prior, which is really this idea of, with so much of the uncertainty and so much of just the fast paced nature of our, at least our American business culture, there’s this sense of control. Where do we have control? Where do we have agency? And one of the things you and I had talked about that I would love for you to speak to a little bit more for our listeners, is we talked about, you use this term as, like mindfulness, as kind of this activity with agency, and I think explaining that a little bit more and how it differs from this casual understanding. I think you were mindful. We say we need to be mindful, and it’s just this very passing comment, and I feel like it doesn’t really carry the weight or understanding of what you’re speaking of. I’d love for you to just talk a little bit more about that.
Timothy Swords 09:44
Sure, yeah, maybe I’ll talk about what the definition of mindfulness is, yes, and then maybe talk about why it’s so helpful in terms of having agency. Actually, I would say mindfulness is a lucid awareness. Mm. That arises from paying attention on purpose, in the present moment and in an open and curious way. It’s not about stopping one’s thoughts or just accepting what’s ever going on one’s fate without agency, but if one’s paying attention at that level, we also tend to be in touch with your values, right? Am I actually acting from my values? In business, we talk about measurement and feedback loops, right? Performance management, we’re really kind of measuring our own mental activity, emotional, yeah. And then, just because, in meditation, your nervous system has calmed down more than the typical person might be you have more mental space so you’re able to respond more wisely. Well, let me talk about stress for a minute. Maybe when we encounter a stressful situation, right, our amygdala starts getting activated, and we cannot get into a fight or flight mode, yeah, which takes our prefrontal cortex, where our executive functioning happens offline, right? If you’re really stressed, you literally can’t have a logical thought. Many people have experienced this with their spouses, right? People the closest to us can trigger us the most, right? Yes. So when one practices meditation, you’re in an alpha state, which is this both relaxed and alert mode, which is actually more restful than sleep, and that’s we practice this regularly, then we just don’t get as upset as much when a stressful situation comes up, we still have the spaciousness to respond. That’s what
Kim Bohr 11:35
it brings to mind for me too, is there’s the instrument we use in a lot of our work with executives, is called the Harrison assessment. This is behavioral based assessment, and it very much identifies those behaviors, and we talk about these flip behaviors that happen when we’re under stress and unintended consequences. And what I really appreciate about what you’re sharing here is the ways of bringing in a real, deeper understanding of mindfulness in a way, to help you manage the sensation of those flips and the situations and the scenarios you have of how you might be able to a really useful tool to perhaps get ahead of it and also maybe smooth out some of that those behaviors in when we think about it, from that Harrison term, it’s because we favored a particular behavior over another that would more likely be complimentary to smooth it out, we have these imbalances, which all of us have in some degrees. We need to have these tools in ways that can help us work through them in because we can’t have the high level of favor of all these different behaviors and be perfect. And so I think what you’re saying is it just brings so much clarity to what leaders need to be incorporating into their toolkit. And I know that you’ve talked about C levels, that you’ve coached you, and I’ve talked about the work that we’ve done with many executive teams, and how this constant sense of always on is inescapable for many of them. One of the things we talked about, too was you and I had talked about, hey, what are some of the biggest challenges we’re seeing in the work that we’re individually doing? And we talked about things you and I both said, across industries, right the policy changes that are coming from just federal government right now are just very impactful for many throughout our country, looking at this constant digital noise that we’re all experiencing, this always on the one thing that really stood out to you was we were talking about the stress that contagion that exists where the stress where these tools and understanding aren’t in place, really do bleed over into teams and other aspects of the organization you started to talk about this a little bit earlier, the personal values conflict that many leaders have in trying to navigate with all of this going on. And so I think when you think about that list, what does stand out most profoundly to you? I think you had mentioned the values is that kind of where you feel like is the foundational aspect of where people should be beginning?
Timothy Swords 14:06
Well, yes, I think individuals should begin there. And if one wants to live an authentic life, be an authentic leader, I’m not sure to me, that’s the starting point, right? Yeah, are my personal values? How do they sync or not with the organizational values? I do think that’s where you start, for sure. And then what are the ways the strategies or tactics, if you will, that enable me to lead as an authentic leader in that sense. I mean, I think to me, those different areas be hard to say for me, like which is more than effective in, you know, business at large more than the other. But I think maybe what, what they have in common is is like an organizational stress contagion, right? Whichever particular thing it is like the policy changes or just the digital overwhelm, all comes down to this level of. Stress and how a leader or leaders or organization is dealing with the stress overloads, stress contagion.
Kim Bohr 15:07
Oh, completely. And what’s coming to mind is some of the work I’ve done in organizations as well. And one of the things that I think is so challenging and so critical for leaders to think about is whatever those stressors are. When you have each of your members of your executive team experiencing them and experiencing these imbalances that can happen that can cause these, you know, the flip behaviors or the reactions, that is a really dangerous situation for a leadership team in the organization, because that does filter down. It’s bad enough having one leader in that situation. It’s a terrible situation when your entire leadership team is experiencing that on an ongoing basis. It’s hard to imagine. How do you get your footing under you in those situations, to stabilize the group so that it can lead Right? Right? So I think one of the things that when we talk about kind of more of this digital overwhelm that we all in some fashion, you know, are navigating. I was talking with an executive recently that works with the team across multiple time zones, and one of the things I found really interesting is that this executive was finding it very challenging to set boundaries out of fear of disappointing others. Yeah, and that is very common for many leaders, given the reality that leaders today are bombarded with all of this information from all these different directions, whether it’s deadlines or data, whatever the case is, yeah, how do you find mindfulness helping executives cut through that noise and being able to regain some of that mental clarity and confidence in their decision Making?
Timothy Swords 16:39
Going back to that now, kind of ancient article on the corporate athlete, part of it is just like basic physical realities. There’s in some cultures in particular, there’s a lot of emphasis on working a lot of hours. But if you look to the research, like it’s done at Stanford, for example, like, after like, 50 hours, it’s pretty quickly, very bad return on investment of time, right? And very much so I think there was one by an economist there actually, who looked at this, and if you’re working 70 hours a week, you’re actually not getting anything done more than if you were doing 55 hours a week, because those extra 15 hours is just really ineffective, right? Yeah. And I know, personally, I experienced this in consulting, you’d be working very hard, almost to the last minute for a presentation, because there’s so much data, and you’re trying to figure out how to present it well and all that. And we’d find ourselves working kind of into the wee hours, and hey, we called it the witching hour. At a certain point you thought you were making progress, right? And you’d be stacks, and then you’d look at it the next morning. You go, oh, yeah, you Yeah, we should have stopped at 6pm not Yes, midnight, because those last six hours were just a joke. Yeah,
Kim Bohr 17:49
it’s interesting how that sheer will can push us through but yet not guarantee any better production. Right in that diminishing return is such a real thing.
Timothy Swords 17:59
I’d say there’s maybe three things, intentional awareness, which I talked about, the foundation of that, and maybe strategic prioritization, which kind of has a big overlap with more traditional like how to prioritize, and then what I call sustainable practices. So maybe I could talk about the first and the third, yes, intentional awareness and the sustainable practices a bit, say, but I’ll back up a little bit. So I studied in this tradition. I studied as a Buddhist lineage, if you will, going on for 1000s of years. And there’s three main practices, concentration, mindfulness, which I’ve talked about, and these heart practices, which are around cultivating kindness and compassion, joy and equanimity, like a calm mind, right? And the last one, I know, the heart. One can sound a little Woo, woo, but it’s used today, for example, in treating PTSD. It’s these are very powerful practices harnessing the power of the mind and the heart. So going back to the concentration practice, in any meditation practice, there’s concentrations involved. You’re bringing the attention in a focused way, back to your breath or on your thoughts, whatever it is. And within emotional intelligence, right? There’s four quadrants. The first is self awareness, and that has two components, according to Daniel Goldman, one is the self awareness piece itself, and the other is focus. Meditation practice is a great way of increasing focus, so that’s super helpful for an executive that improves his or her focus. And then the second thing from the mindfulness aspect is clarity, right? If you’re doing regular practice, you’re starting to see those Remember, I said you were paying attention to our thoughts this intentional way. And what mindfulness practice enables is to see those thoughts as like data points. They’re not my thoughts necessarily, just what the mind is doing. It’s creating thoughts, and some are going to be really useful. Some are just what conjured up today. And according to National Institutes of Health Study, something like 75 or 80% of our thoughts are negative because, you know, we survived at. A species, because we’re on the lookout for threats and respond quickly. Not so great for thriving in positive ways, but really good for surviving. And we can take these thoughts less personally. We don’t have to believe them, all right? So quick little sidebar for a second. So I was trained in how to teach secular mindfulness, right? And part of my training was done at San Quentin Prison here in the Bay Area. And if you think about who’s in a prison, this is a men’s prison, there are men that just believe their thought, I gotta rob this store to survive. I’ve gotta shoot this guy because you disrespected my girlfriend or whatever it was, right? And you know, we all have a little bit of this inner felon in us, of like, I just got to respond right now, yeah, by meditating, we’re seeing these thoughts, and it’s more of like a bit of a passing show. And the other thing that happens is actually very positive, which is we can sit in this mindful state, this lineage I’ve been involved in is called Insight meditations, because insights arise, but they’re not just on this left side of the brain. They’re actually come from this intuitive place. They’re tapping into our subconscious much more information than we would get by just trying to think logically so we can actually have breakthrough insights. And Steve Jobs talked about this. He was a Zen meditator and credit a lot of his great ideas with being in this more expansive kind of a state. So to kind of bring it back to your question, though, so I would say clarity is something that can be available to a mindful leader, because you’re not reacting so emotionally to things, and you’re kind of seeing thoughts in this broader perspective.
Kim Bohr 21:39
I was talking with somebody recently, and one of the things that we were discussing was this place that coming from a very defensive place, right, but not inherently being always holding a defensive posture. And one of the things we were talking about was with the busyness and the constant information inflows and on and all this that there’s this part of it is this reaction, because of exhaustion, because of feeling like I’m having to have a conversation that I felt like I’ve already had, or it’s fighting these little battles that feel like, why are we even talking about this? And I think so much of what you’re saying is one of those tools to help, you know, to bring that clarity. Part of what we were saying is it’s when we don’t have the space to just think, you know that I love that show on I think it’s one apple tv shrinking and the theme song that is just, I just want to be able to hear myself think again. I think that is such a powerful statement. It is something that has gone through my mind on days of realizing it’s usually those days when I have not been disciplined in my own meditative grounding. Yeah, one of the things you brought to my attention, which I thought was a great article, and I want to have you just speak to how you used it in helping some of the executives you worked with, was you mentioned this HBR article. I’ll make sure we also put it in the link along with some of the other resources you’ve mentioned. That it was called self awareness could help leaders more than an MBA can. I was really impressed when I went and read it. Just for our listeners, the CEO discusses finding himself more leading from his head than his heart, and this really certainly resonates with the work we also do at Spark effect, and know the work you’ve done with your clients around the power of bringing those two together, and so how have you seen that tension play out, maybe in some of the executives you’ve worked with, where they’re trying to navigate reconciling that those two have a place together. It doesn’t have to be separate.
Timothy Swords 23:37
Sure. Sure. No, I appreciate the question, because the third thing I had wanted to mention around the leadership practices and is actually compassion. So compassion is an interesting thing. If you’re doing sort of pure mindfulness practice, you kind of need to be compassionate to yourself, because you’re seeing these thoughts and emotions come up, and not every emotion your experience is so pleasant, right? Right? One can feel anger, one can feel anxiety, one can feel frustration, disappointment, when those are coming up like the challenge is to be open and curious, right? It’s hard to do that if you’re not having some compassion for yourself, right? So it’s part of the practice, inherently. And as I mentioned, there’s these other heart opening practices where you specifically do things to have compassion for yourself and others. I mean, that’s a big part of being a, what I call a mindful leader. Is when these situations come up that are difficult for you, like, give yourself a little break. Like, oh man, this is tough, and I’m not going to let it be a contagion, right? I’m going to take care of myself. If I’m about to drown, I’m going to dip my little water wings in the pool, right? This is pulling somebody else down with me, right? Right, yeah. So that’s one aspect of it. I would say,
Kim Bohr 25:04
Do you have an example of a leader you’ve worked with where you could describe for people,
Timothy Swords 25:09
sure. So imagine a very smart man had grown up in tough circumstances. So I would say this maybe self worth was a little challenge, but he went on to go to an Ivy League school on a scholarship, studied medicine, decided not to go into medicine, but went into finance. Super successful guy burnt through one marriage because he was traveling all the time. It’s married again. He now has two families. So a lot on his mind, it’s a CFO Life Sciences firm. Technically brilliant guy knows the field really well, right? But we do his 360 people are scared to talk to him. He’s literally the scary guy, because he’s very confident about his technical skills and where the company should go based on a financial perspective. We started working together, and I did this exercise with him on his values. We did that, and then I did this sort of repeating question exercise of, why do you want to be here working with me? And his answer was, harmonious relationships. Interesting, right? So he’s a softy inside. Wants to connect with people like we all do, right? I love that we started working on a couple of things, right? So it around emotional intelligence, right? About self awareness, self management and managing relationships better. From a self awareness perspective, we started doing these mindfulness practices, and he could see when he would because part of what was generating his behaviors that weren’t being received so well was he was anxious, and he would respond to his anxiousness by being too strong or not sharing that he was anxious, right? Not being vulnerable at all, which is art for a lot of men anyway. And then we also worked on these little hacks, if you will, that had a like, little mindful moments in the middle of everything. And so for him, one that was really useful was he’d be in like an executive committee meeting, and he would ordinarily feel anxious and then overcompensate by coming on too strong. So what worked for him was just feeling the sensations of his feet on the floor the start of this meeting, or in the middle of these meetings, and that would be enough for him to call in the formal practice, and you could relax, because so here’s one of the tricks of the trade, right? If you’re experiencing the sensations of your body, you’re not in your head. You’re not in the thoughts. And what happens with thoughts, or my cognitive behavioral perspective, is an emotion on its own, lasts like 30 seconds. But if you’re feeding it with the thoughts, it goes on and on. It gets worse and worse. So if you want to do anger management, you got to stop that cycle, because you’re just going to get angrier and angrier. If you keep feeding the thought, you’re actually creating your own anger, right? Yeah. So you get in the body and you’re like, oh, sensations of feet on the ground. That’s just on its own. It’s very relaxing, very much. So this totally worked for this guy. That’s amazing. Yeah, within a few months, people were saying, I can’t believe the change for this guy. I mean, that’s how powerful it works for him. I’m not saying it’s that powerful that quickly everybody. He’s a motivated student. Shall we say? What I love
Kim Bohr 28:23
about that story is that it’s the tips are subtle in that case, right? It was a subtle tip that, you know, I think when one of the things that I hope with our conversation, people take away is that there’s a varying degree of what it means in this mindful practice. There’s there’s so many places that people can start to get to a place for more discipline. It doesn’t mean that they have to suddenly, in the middle of a meeting, go into a meditative state. And I think there’s a misconception around what this is. And often, I’ve heard so many people just say, I can’t even begin to meditate. I just can’t. I just can’t for all these different reasons. And list goes on and on, and I think what I appreciate about wanting to have this conversation with you is that you have really tapped into people who would have maybe had that type of belief system and been able to show them that there are some things that can bring them into a more attentive space and have a real change for themselves and that they can actually perhaps, then that lays the seeds of wanting to go deeper into other ways. There are really powerful tools, as you’ve described.
Timothy Swords 29:30
Yeah, no, that’s right. No, I appreciate that. I like that term, like to tip, like, from flip to tip, maybe, yeah, but your question earlier was around these limiting beliefs, right? And so sometimes it’s just crucial to work with those, right? So I was working with a woman, kind of senior level, and she was stuck on the corporate ladder a bit, but she was also not taking great care of herself. So we spent a number of sessions just really diving into that. And then. And we started talking about why she was doing that, and she said, Well, for me to take off, I really need to have it planned so that can really make the most of it, but I have this whole list of things to do before I would do the things for myself. And basically, because we went through the list, it was like taking care of the house, taking care of stuff for the husband, taking care of stuff for the son. She had this belief that she couldn’t do anything for herself, including taking care of her health, seeing her friends and looking for a better job before she got this whole other list. Then, wow. I suspect she’s not the only woman who was in that situation, right? The way our culture, you take care of other people first. But it was so interesting. We had two sessions where that was really the main focus. The day after the second session, I got a text from her. I made plans with my friends. I reached out to two other companies that talked to me in the past about wanting me to work for them and I’m going on a hike. Powerful. Yeah, right. She sits probably 10 or 20 minutes each day in meditation. So, you know, she got to see these thoughts too at a little more granular level. Well, why am I not taking care of myself? You know? Yeah, these kind of things work together. I think
Kim Bohr 31:11
what’s interesting about that example is that we’re told put your oxygen mask on first before you help others. And so we intuitively like, yep, that’s the right thing. And yet, in daily practice of our professions, we don’t always inherently think about that we think about, and I don’t know if it is more biological women versus men or whatever the case is, but I will tell you that I do relate to that story of feeling and others I’m around on a regular basis that feel like, well, there’s so much dependent, or maybe it’s perception or belief of not wanting to let somebody down, that story just keeps getting reinforced in ourselves, and the idea of putting the oxygen mask on first is completely out the door for anything in the day to day world, right,
Timothy Swords 31:57
right? And your question was about this man who didn’t want to disappoint people, right? Which is why, yeah, let’s circle back to that, because clearly she didn’t want to disappoint people. Was inner person that was driving her to this.
Kim Bohr 32:09
Well, it’s so common I think in a lot of the work I do, too. I see this in our at least again, in our American culture, this idea of asserting ourselves to say what we need is really low, it’s frowned upon. It’s there’s some interesting dynamic there that we carry, and yet it doesn’t have to be in conflict with being a team player or being successful or contributing and stuff. And so I think that also that idea of this work life balance, what I think people are trying to really get at is being able to figure out, how can I have permission structure for that to be acceptable as well as be then be able to say and so this is what I need to fulfill that. And yet, there’s some conflict in that, depending on a certain type of organization and things. I think a younger generation, this Gen Z, that’s coming into our workforce today, has a different view of that, which maybe could help all of us in some fashion,
Timothy Swords 33:03
right? Right? Yeah, no, I think that’s likely. So now I’m glad you brought that up as I wanted to talk a little bit more about compassion. Actually, typically we think about compassion. Probably the dictionary definition is, when someone’s suffering, we want to help them, right? That’s compassion, typically is, which is fine, and I would say there’s, within the mindfulness tradition, there’s something called Mindful self compassion, which is well, scientifically researched and supported by evidence, which says how important that is, first of all, yeah, but defines two types of self compassion. So one is, what I think we’re traditionally think of is, oh, man, this is tough, and I’m going to be kind to myself, right? In whatever that looks like, giving myself a pat on the back, or taking care of myself, go to the gym or whatever we need, in the moment, being kind to ourselves, right? There’s also a fierce self compassion, which is like the mama bear, right? Which says, No, I’m not doing that. That’s not good for me. I need healthy boundaries, like this client I was talking about, she needed some healthier boundaries around taking on everything for the whole house and the whole household and her whole family, versus putting on that oxygen mask. Yeah, right. And it can look like defending oneself physically. I’m in a dangerous situation. I need to get out of here or defend myself. Those are also self compassion.
Kim Bohr 34:27
I like that. That’s an interesting reframe, too. We don’t think about that as a compassionate connection as well. Yeah, that’s really very insightful
Timothy Swords 34:37
or or encouragement. Like, yeah, go see you know, yeah, exactly, yeah. Go for it.
Kim Bohr 34:43
Absolutely. Change is constant. And one of the things that you have talked about the past is that it’s interesting to me that we can say that change is constant, and yet we could have this sense of, once this thing is done, I’ll be able to find time to. Be more mindful, or to meditate, or to go to on a vacation, whatever, right? And we hold these things in parallel which are completely at odds with one another. So for listeners who are by themselves in one of these challenging situations, you know, but haven’t either create a formal mindfulness practice or aren’t sure where to start, what would be your recommendation as just even a first
Timothy Swords 35:20
step, yeah, so, I mean, there’s so many resources now as first step. There’s all sorts of apps, for example, but honestly, I was teaching last night at a Harvard Club of San Francisco on clarity and community in times of chaos that’s around mindfulness and in your life and at work and so forth. And one of the participants who had done some meditation, but mostly on apps, and she said, you know, having you lead, this was so much more powerful, right? And she felt more accountable, actually, to pay attention. There’s something actually just energetically that happens where it’s easier to go deep and to get it. So I would say some kind of regular group meeting where you get instruction, and then, because you can’t learn it all in one session, and it also helps in a group to be accountable to actually practice. So when I started out all the research, I started because I was just interested. But then the US and Western science started to catch up, if you will, starting in those late 60s, early 70s, and in those days, the research was on people who were meditating probably at least 40 minutes a day and doing these long retreats and things. I thought, oh, that’s how long you need to meditate for anything to happen. But more research, more recent research, points out that, like 10 minutes a day can actually make a big difference for self awareness. I think in that article you mentioned our Business Review, they talk about like, 10 minutes a day, for six or eight weeks, your self awareness goes up 35% or something like that. I do think just starting to learn, ideally live, if not live online, if not on an app, there’s some great apps out there, super useful, and then just trying it every day, even if it’s not for a long time, can be super I called it like micro moments many times, right? I
Kim Bohr 37:10
like that micro moments many times. That’s very good. So the final question a bit of a combination, so you could answer it, how you choose, what’s your vision for how business leadership might evolve with more mindful executives. And is there any kind of final thoughts you want to make sure you impart on our listeners that we haven’t necessarily talked about or you want to emphasize
Timothy Swords 37:33
in my perfect future of leadership, mindfulness would be a core competency, right along with strategy and operations, marketing and all that, because I think that would build emotional resilience, emotional regulation, so that contagion wouldn’t even start as much as frequently, right? Greater empathy for oneself and others. You know, I actually think it’s very powerful to that people feel included in decision making and done a lot of work with leadership teams, and when they’re working as a group together on something, they’re all way more committed. And so it’s a lot less bumps in the road going forward and strategic clarity actually, like more clear decision makers, people would be more grounded.
Kim Bohr 38:20
I love that. It’s such a great you’ve really talked so much about the head and the heart coming together, and how the power that’s really a superpower when we really embrace both those things and recognize that they really should be aligned. And I think that’s something that we obviously why you and I are talking, we have that same belief. We have that belief with Spark effects. So I really, really thank you, Timothy, for your time, for your insight. I want to just remind our listeners, as we wrap up that we will have free resources relevant to our conversation today that you can download at courage to advance podcast.com which will take you to that spark effect podcast page. We’re also going to have some pieces of from Timothy, some of the demonstration of some of the mindfulness work that you’ll be able to access again. Timothy, thank you so much for sharing your journey and your insights with us. It’s been tremendous. I want to thank our empathy edge podcast listeners and the podcast sub series into everybody for tuning in to courage to advance where Transformative Leadership isn’t about having all the answers, but it’s about having the courage to find them. Timothy, thank you so much again for joining
Timothy Swords 39:34
us. Thanks for having
Maria Ross 39:38
me for more on how to achieve radical success through empathy. Visit the empathy edge.com there you can listen to past episodes, access show notes and free resources. Book me for a Keynote or workshop and sign up for our email list to get new episodes, insights, news and events. Please follow me on Instagram at Red slice. Maria, never forget. Empathy is your superpower. Use it to make your work and the world a better place. You.
