As a tech leader, the amount of pressure and information you are asked to absorb and manage can be overwhelming.
Many tech leaders experience an overload of new priorities, information, and deadlines. These reduce productivity and kick off a negative feedback loop:
Leadership performance drops, cognitive abilities exhaust, more energy needs to be invested, only to achieve fewer outcomes.
This happened to me about 10 years ago.
As a director of engineering at Yahoo! In Silicon Valley, I was known for my passion for tech, research, and innovation. I grew as a leader while managing various teams of up to 30 engineers. After some years of success, it became evident that my workload was just not sustainable, my mind wandered off, and my performance dropped. My mind was just unable to cope with the long-term pressure.
But I knew I was more than capable of it.
As I realized the profound impact of mindfulness, I got motivated to learn and study the mind. That's how I immersed myself really deep into mind-management practices.
However, as a scientist, I always had the feeling that mindfulness is somehow this “fluffy” thing.
How do I know that I meditate right?
How do I know I’m making progress in clearing my mind from limiting or negative thoughts and false beliefs?
How do I know that all these mindfulness activities are actually helpful in evolving to become a better leader and the best version of myself?
I could not answer those. And so, my scientific mind kept nagging and introducing doubts.
Subjectively I felt much better, so I knew I was onto something good.
I also found proof of their effectiveness as I built the Zalando's Search, Personalization, and Research organization with up to 400 FTEs. Most importantly, it felt way less trouble than I had back then with a 30 people organization at Yahoo! The main driver for this had been the mind-management practices I implemented and refined over the years.
A few years ago, I had some “Aha” moments, and that was the starting point to a practice, which I now refer to as “Measurable Mindfulness.”
When playing with the MUSE meditation headband, a consumer device and wearable tech that allows you to monitor the quality of your meditation, I realized that this goes in a helpful directíon. Somehow you could see a score attached to your meditation and some other metrics.
It seemed, therefore, natural to think about key performance indicators (KPIs) for your mind.
As techies or business professionals engaged in an environment of constant pressure where hard work is the answer to productivity, we lose our natural ability of body awareness. We are numb when it comes to sensing what our body needs at the present moment, and we are detached from our intuition and true self.
Most importantly, we believe that this is the default state of mind, and there is nothing we can do.
We may try out meditation, as someone told us that this is helpful against stress.
But we realize we can’t even sit still for 2 minutes before our busy mind tells us: “This is a waste of time! Let’s use the time more productively.”
Our ego comes up with stories like, “mediation or all this mindfulness garbage is not for me. It is for those “Woohoo” and weak people who have failed to deliver.”
And this vicious cycle continues until we exhaust ourselves completely, physically, and mentally.Some end up in a burnout state, while others have to deal with the consequences of not listening to your body’s warning signals. They become sick.
Wouldn’t it be great to actually visualize your progress when it comes to mindfulness and your overall mindset?
As a top inventor in Silicon Valley, I knew I was onto something here. But I didn’t care about more patents. I needed to be still and let my creativity guide me to put everything together of what I had learned about evolving my state of mind in the past years.
The idea of “Measurable Mindfulness” was born!
Over the years, I have identified several crucial KPIs to guide me on how I could track and monitor my progress when it comes to evolving my mind.
At the core of everything, there is pure awareness, the quiet observer of everything. This is you, your "true self."
If you are fully connected to the present moment and can do this for one minute, you actually have completed a mindful minute. I realized that this is a foundational KPI for your mind.
Your level of present awareness (LPA) follows as it represents your mindful minutes accumulated over the course of your day. It is a percentage of how present you actually are.
Another important KPI is the number of average thoughts per minute (TPM). A busy “monkey” mind, an untrained mind, is typically associated with higher thought or excessive thought activity, while a calm and present mind has practically no thoughts at all.
Over the years, I discovered more “mind” KPIs, and the idea of measurable mindfulness was evolving nicely.
Mindfulness enables awareness, but there is more to do toward achieving a state of a high-performance mind.
What is a high-performance mind?
It is characterized by (but not limited to):
An increased level of self-awareness & reflection
Spending most of your time in flow on stuff that matters
Getting more done with less effort
Keeping your organization hyper-productive in complex and challenging environments
Superb mental flexibility to effortlessly switch between different states of mind
Staying calm and relaxed, anytime, anywhere, while being fully alert and focused
Enhanced cognitive abilities, processing speed, and throughput
Introducing Mind-Management
As my LPA grew things initially became worse. Now I could literally see all of this junk and garbage accumulated over decades in your mind.
Tools and methods are needed to do a “spring cleanup” of your mind and better support different aspects of evolving toward this state of a high-performance mind.
I put together a suite of these tools and methods, which I refer to as mind-management.
The idea of mind-management itself is not new and has been investigated for example in the field of neuroscience for quite some time.
However, how to put this together with a mindfulness practice using a systematic approach based on clear KPIs to evolve your mind - measurable mindfulness - is the result of this work.
After studying various aspects of mind-management, neuroscience, biohacking, epigenetics, mindfulness, as well as neurofeedback for over 10 years, I help tech leaders avoid failing in their careers because they have no science-driven strategy to manage their minds.
For this, I have developed a data-driven 12-week training program "Measurable Mindfulness: The Path toward a high-performance mind and your true Self" leveraging the latest science and technology to assist senior tech leaders in optimizing their mind and brain performance to thrive in high-pressure environments.
But is this it?
Is Measurable Mindfulness the “End Game”?
No, it is not.
It is a helpful phase during your personal and spiritual growth that works and delivers transformational results. I have observed this while working with many tech leaders in the past years. Don't just believe my words and do review their testimonials on my LinkedIn profile.
Measurable mindfulness gets you unstuck from your own stories, limiting thoughts, reactive patterns, and your ego’s tricks to keep you in this state of limitation, narrowness, and misery.
How?
By showing you objective numbers of different aspects of your mind, like holding a mirror in front of you, which is hard to ignore (even by a strong ego).
In my experience, as your LPA grows, you will become less dependent on these numbers. Gradually as your connection to your intuition strengthens and your body awareness increases, you will realize your path to your true self.
Your actual purpose, vision, and mission unfold.
You will be able to answer the question, “Why am I here?”
You will eventually be able to answer the question, “Who am I?”
Your true self basically gradually reveals itself under thick layers of excessive thoughts, and measurable mindfulness peels them off, one by one, like an onion.
Once you arrive at this state, measurable mindfulness is no longer needed.
But is an effective “crutch” to get you there …
Yours,
Reiner
Cultivate Presence to upgrade your Mind & Body
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“There is no better moment to increase your level of present awareness than NOW” - Reiner Kraft
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Definitely an interesting idea to make the progress in mindfulness measurable.
What I am currently not fully convinced of is how to actually measure this.
It's one thing to have a KPI, but if we don't measure it, it's not worth a lot.
How would you actually go about collecting this data?