[Introduction]
In my past almost 7 years of working with clients from 35 countries across 5 continents, I’ve been emphasizing to them the attitudes they needed in working with their voices, attitudes as allowing, letting go, awareness, etc. I hadn’t known these were exactly the attitudes in mindfulness until I started studying more about mindfulness, so in this series, I’ll share with you on mindful leadership from the perspective of voice work with what I have observed from working with my clients.
[Part I]
In today’s workplace, most leaders are overwhelmed and live on autopilot. You check your emails the first thing in the morning and start to become slaved by other people’s priorities. There are countless deadlines and expectations to meet. You have no choice but work around the clock and make things happen fast. You try to move fast and multi-task. Your mind is in thinking mode all the time. And you wonder why you are still not productive enough.
“Productivity rests on focused human attention.” – Dr. Jeremy Hunter
Mindfulness has come to the business world. Mindfulness is paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgmentally. It’s achieved by regulating one’s attention. It’s reported that mindfulness can improve productivity, creativity and focus.
Mindfulness does not have to be practised in stillness. It can be practised in action.
Most people, including you, have ignored a tool you’ve been using since you were born, a tool that you use day in and day out, and a tool that can be incorporated into your daily work and life, your voice.
The process of developing your voice is a process of mindfulness practice. You can enhance your leadership quality through working on your voice.
In this series, you’ll learn the 3 mindful attitudes through voice work to help you become more focused and more creative and become a leader of vision, creativity and innovation.
First, let’s take a look at the one of three mindfulness attitudes / principles that can be cultivated in the process of developing your voice. Here, it’s to develop a full voice, that is, a voice projected with the full body. Only in developing a full voice, would you be able to experience the transformational power of your voice and experience the reflection of mindfulness in voice work.
1. Allowing
Many of my clients, when started the process of developing their full voice, expected to see instant results. There are also clients who would want to start with the last step, instead of the first step, in the process of developing a full voice.
Both approaching the voice work in a way that’s not only unrealistic, but also revealed to me how the society has destroyed our patience, shaken our belief about how things happen and undermined the fundamental and basic rules on how things happen.
We live in a society that focuses on end results, which led to the tendency of results driven and the lack of patience in the process. Many of my clients asked me, “How do I make it happen? I laughed, “Unfortunately, you can not make ‘developing your full voice’ happen.”
Developing your full voice is more of a process of planting a seed. In order to have the end result, that is to have the seed grow into a tree or some other vegetation, you are not going to have the end result by pulling out the seed and forcing it to grow. It’s against the basic rules of nature and the seed will end up dying.
What will help is that you water the seed, give it sunshine, pull out the weeds, and so on, to create an environment that’s conducive for the seed to grow. You will reap in a few months. Well, unless you want to reap it sooner with the leaves looking greener, you can add catalysts. We all know what kind of end results that’ll bring.
Such is true for developing your full voice. It’s not achieved instantly, but a progressive process. It is to create an environment in the body that’s relaxed and easy to have the breath flow in and out, and to generate resonance without trying hard or forcing the result. It is a process of allowing.
