Meditation Meet-Up
"Performance and leadership outcomes improve when professionals and leaders train their minds via meditation to see and understand in new ways better attuned to today's complex and volatile world." Steve Presley, PhD
Why Meditation to Improve Leadership
Better Minds
Better Leaders
Better World
"Why Leaders Need Meditation More Than Ever"
(HBR, 2020)
Rick Hanson's List of Scientific Papers on Meditation
Prayer of the Children (Song) (Kurt Bestor, arr. Andrea Klouse)
VISION
Leaders and professionals with minds and hearts capable of meeting the challenges of a complex 21st-century world. Making the world a better place for all of us.
MISSION
Teach leaders and professionals targeted mind skills via meditation and mindfulness, and a state-of-the-art leadership framework so everyone contributes to leadership in some way. Show them how to integrate the two for better outcomes.
TESTIMONIALS
Dr. Presley, you present some amazing stuff! I'm still just a dabbler in the mindfulness work but oh how I can see its value. We all need to supercharge our minds to be more effective leaders and better people. In the short time, I've been following the guided meditations in the course, I've felt a sense of calm (which I kind of expected). What is amazing though, is the way I feel hyper-aware of things and an increased interest in the well-being of those around me. There was so much information that was new to me, I was fearful that I couldn't retain it without having to go through each section again (and again). However, the final section of the course did a great job of reviewing the details and putting everything in order.
Dirk, Retired Advertizing Executive
Dr. Presley is a joy to listen to. He masterfully shows how letting your innate humanity take centerstage while expressing your role as a leader, is really the best way to achieve lasting positive outcomes for your company or organization. As he so clearly explains, mindfulness and meditation will allow your innate abilities to come to the forefront without the mental and emotional distractions that get in the way. Dr. Presley, better than anyone I've come across, conveys these transformative principles in a way that is super easy to understand and absorb. I recommend his course to anyone in a leadership position or anyone else who sees themselves coming into a leadership role.
John, CEO of a Non-Profit
I found this to be a very well-rounded course. With the support of research findings, Dr . Steve gives you the tools to increase your metacognitive awareness through the 2x daily practice of meditation. Through this practice, I find myself more aware of when my mind wanders and also more aware of when I am not being objective. However, my absolute favorite part of the course is the connection between compassion and leadership. The Love & Kindness meditation is a great day to start the work day if, like me, you are someone who starts work irritable and closed off. I recommend this course for anyone trying to become a better leader or a more effective individual contributor.
Katie, Recruiter
What an enjoyable and practical course blending leadership development with mindfulness and meditation practice. I found the practical application of informal and formal meditation practices to be helpful in encouraging my personal re-exploration in this area. I appreciated Dr. Presley's real-world application of research-based practices that helped shine a light for my own reflection my leadership journey and challenged me to focus on key areas to continue to build. While I have previously participated in seminars focusing singly on mindfulness or leadership, I found this concise and practical course a thoughtful blend to move one's leadership development forward through disciplined daily practice. I believe this course offers takeaways that serve the entry-level and more seasoned leader.
Keegan, Executive Vice President
This course is extremely useful for leaders, those aspiring to leadership, and those of us who help to develop leaders. Further, it is just as useful in our home lives as it is at work. It updated my understanding of leadership to a model that is appropriate for the 21st century and provided highly usable tools for those of us trying to be effective in today's complex world. Even though I've been meditating for many years, taught leadership at the University level, and have coached executives for decades, I found in it much that is new and valuable. I am happy to recommend it without reservations.
Brenda Broz Eddy, Executive Coach, and Owner of Eddy Associates, a leadership development consulting firm.
This class has provided me with tools to be more in touch with what I am thinking and how I am reacting. I have a very busy mind and while it has served me well, I have learned that being able to rest and be present is also a much-needed skill and one that actually has to be learned. I found it beneficial both personally and professionally.
Barbara, Vice President/Adjunct Faculty Business Administration
Yes, I would absolutely recommend this course! The leadership aspects of the course helped me realize the type of leader I am and the type of leader I want to be. It also helped me to better understand my colleagues and other leaders in terms of what we are trying to accomplish together as a team. The mindfulness lessons and tools, like CPOC, were straightforward and useful in my day-to-day work. They allow me to catch myself in reactive situations or when my mind is wandering, so that I can be more present and in the moment.
Matt, Internal Communications Manager
This course was the perfect introduction to mindfulness practices. The skills build on each other each week and were easy to follow. As a newcomer to mindfulness, I felt like I had plenty to consider and explore each week but not so much that it was overwhelming. It was so beneficial to be able to learn about myself, my leadership, and how to unlock and increase my brain capacity.
Morgan, Program Coordinator, Leadership Inspirations
Leadership Powered by Mindfulness changed my life, immediately! By combining neuroscience findings with mindfulness and meditation practices, Steve and his team have prepared a course on how to become a superhero. Not only has my internal life changed for the better, but with these newly acquired powers, I was able to shift paradigms within my external life with others, for the better! This course is like creating a new healthy vegan dish with ingredients that you’ve had in your kitchen, the whole time. Cheers to the synergy that this course represents. I am excited to see the fruits
of its seeds!
Jason P.
It has really been awesome! I'm getting a degree in Library Science, and my brain loves making connections and linking everything that I am learning. This has been awesome for my classes and me. I feel like I can't stop talking about mindfulness, and compassion, and leadership, and I've been connecting them to everything I've been writing, especially my blog posts for my online classes. And on a personal level, I've been doing meditation for some time, but this is the first time I've had space to really explore what it is for me. … and it has really changed my experience with doing meditation. It is really worth trying to focus on doing because I didn't even realize how much extra tension I have been holding onto.
Helen, Librarian
It was a great experience and I appreciate being able to participate. One of the things that was really powerful for me was the integration of the leadership model, which is one of the things I was looking for. When you put that leadership definition up and show the connection of it with these tools, it really brought it together in a way I was hungry for. Thank you for that. The way you simplified leadership without losing any of the complexity and interesting descriptions of the leadership process was pretty amazing to me. I really liked that a lot. The breakout groups were really helpful because I would learn more about what some aspects of meditation were about. Being able to grab on to some of the tools you have given us and the guided meditations you provided us were super. I’d like to have even more of those! So, thank you. Great work!
Louise, PhD, Executive Coach
ABOUT
Upgrading Leaders founder, Stephen Presley, Ph.D., offers an uncommon approach to leader development. A foundational aspect of our approach is a dual-track focus on Meditation and Mindfulness Practices in the service of better Leadership Practices. Meditation and Mindfulness practices provide a sort of 'defragging" of the mind that leads to better clarity, self awareness, situational awareness, and outcomes.
Learning basic meditation practices is like going to the 'mental gym' to build new and expanded mind skills, essentially upgrading the human operating system, the mind. The end result is upgraded mind capabilities, better performance, and more effective performance and leadership.
We take a pragmatic approach to development, based on cause and effect. By improving just a few mental skills via meditation and mindfulness, leaders can potentially improve multiple skills that drive leadership. Research on mindfulness and meditation since the 1970s (over 7,000 studies to date) provides significant evidence of this claim. If you find this intriguing or are skeptical but curious, please see the Leadership powered by Mindfulness page, or contact Dr. Steve in Los Angeles, CA at stephen@upgradingleaders.com