Sometimes just a simple reminder can help us commit ourselves again to what’s most important.
Quotes can often serve as the perfect form of encouragement.
The list of mindful leadership quotes below will serve to inspire you and may even lead to new insights into yourself and your practice of mindful leadership.
Included are over 50 mindful leadership quotes from a variety of thought leaders in the mindful leadership space.
Thus, if you like, you could have one quote available to start each work week, giving you a subtle nudge to help you be leader you aspire to be.
Enjoy!
Our Current List of Mindful Leadership Quotes
“It seems to me it would do us all good to act from our heart more often. We’ll be surprised how small acts of attention and kindness can release the energy, enthusiasm, and imagination bottled up in our [over-stressed] minds and bodies.”
- Tim Ryan, congressman for the state of Ohio, author of A Mindful Nation: How a Simple Practice Can Help Us Reduce Stress, Improve Performance, and Recapture the American Spirit
“Our journey to develop the qualities of mindful leadership calls us to be present in this moment, to be ‘still in the midst of activity’. Or, more accurately in today’s world, in the midst of the chaos that often typifies our lives. As we begin to cultivate a practice to develop the qualities of mindful leadership, we begin to recognize the folly of believing that if we could just move faster, we would eventually catch up.”
- Janice Marturano, founder of the Institute for Mindful Leadership and author of Finding the Space to Lead: A Practical Guide to Mindful Leadership
“An anxious mind is an unproductive mind that doesn’t inspire the best in others. A top priority for mindful leaders is cultivating peace of mind.”
- Matt Tenney, author of The Mindfulness Edge: How to Rewire Your Brain for Leadership and Personal Excellence Without Adding to Your Schedule
“For mindful leaders, cultivating such organizational health requires first and foremost a mastery of organizational conduct—a fluency in nine basic competencies: Eliminate toxicity. Appreciate health. Build trust. Send clear messages. Embrace resistance. Understand blindness. Accept invitations. Heal wounds. Be realistic.”
- Michael Carroll, author of The Mindful Leader: Ten Principles for Bringing Out the Best in Ourselves and Others
“Mindful leadership entails being aware of one’s internal compass. It enables a leader to respond to a situation as it arises, to respond to the reality of constant changes from a place of deep calm and focus, and to have the presence of mind to face the reality of any situation.”
- Maria Gonzalez, author of Mindful Leadership: The 9 Ways to Self-Awareness, Transforming Yourself, and Inspiring Others
“A simple mantra for inspiring, effective, mindful leadership: Cultivate peace of mind and go about doing good.”
- Matt Tenney, author of The Mindfulness Edge: How to Rewire Your Brain for Leadership and Personal Excellence Without Adding to Your Schedule
“The reality is that there is no solution to work’s inherent chaos and messiness. Work by its very nature will always be uncertain. The good news is that work’s messiness and uncertainty need not be distressing. They may, in fact, be just what we are looking for.”
- Michael Carroll, author of The Mindful Leader: Ten Principles for Bringing Out the Best in Ourselves and Others
“The kind of perspective that brings focus and clarity comes from space. And while we may not always have a choice about clearing our calendars, we can make the choice to clear our minds of the habitual momentum that blocks creativity and compassion.”
- Janice Marturano, founder of the Institute for Mindful Leadership and author of Finding the Space to Lead: A Practical Guide to Mindful Leadership
“The more we are able to create space between stimulus and reaction, the more control we will have over our emotional lives.”
- Chade-Meng Tan, author of Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness
“The primary job of a leader is to serve, empower, and inspire greatness in others.”
- Matt Tenney, author of The Mindfulness Edge: How to Rewire Your Brain for Leadership and Personal Excellence Without Adding to Your Schedule
“Mindful leadership aims to develop self-aware and compassionate leaders…”
- Bill George, professor of Management Practice, and a Henry B. Arthur Fellow of Ethics, at Harvard Business School, former chairman and CEO of Medtronic, and author of True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership
“To think in terms of either pessimism or optimism oversimplifies the truth. The problem is to see reality as it is.”
- Thích Nhất Hạnh, author of The Miracle of Mindfulness
“A simple habit that will dramatically improve your business acumen and leadership skills is to be aware of your thinking and emotional state whenever you can remember to. Simply pause and look back at your own mind and body instead of always looking out.”
- Matt Tenney, author of The Mindfulness Edge: How to Rewire Your Brain for Leadership and Personal Excellence Without Adding to Your Schedule
“The little things? The little moments? They aren’t little.”
- Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction, author of Wherever You Go, There You Are
“The reality that everything is constantly changing provokes and tickles our attention because we never really know what’s going to happen next. We are awake at work precisely because everything is in question.”
- Michael Carroll, author of The Mindful Leader: Ten Principles for Bringing Out the Best in Ourselves and Others
“Effective change management depends on our comfort levels with change. Being comfortable with change can be trained by simply taking time every day to be still and notice what’s changing in our minds and bodies. In fact, this practice often results in an ability to thrive during times of change.”
- Matt Tenney, author of The Mindfulness Edge: How to Rewire Your Brain for Leadership and Personal Excellence Without Adding to Your Schedule
“When mindfulness is fully integrated into leadership, exponential progress can be made.”
- Michael Bunting, author of The Mindful Leader: 7 Practices for Transforming Your Leadership, Your Organisation and Your Life
“Mindful leadership keeps you cool and energetic in any situation, so that you can make the best possible decisions.”
- Amit Ray, corporate mindfulness teacher
“To take your team culture to the next level, consider making the personal and professional development of team members a higher priority than quarterly profits. Counter intuitively, this shift tends to result in dramatically improved numbers over the long term.”
- Matt Tenney, author of The Mindfulness Edge: How to Rewire Your Brain for Leadership and Personal Excellence Without Adding to Your Schedule
“When we get too caught up in the busyness of the world, we lose connection with one another – and ourselves.”
- Jack Kornfield, author of A Path With Heart
“Leadership excellence demands that you invest the time to cultivate resiliency and presence. It requires that you explore the principles that make you who you are, and that guide the leadership choices you will make.”
- Janice Marturano, founder of the Institute for Mindful Leadership and author of Finding the Space to Lead: A Practical Guide to Mindful Leadership
“The present moment is actually perfect just the way it is. It is our thinking that creates problems. Mindful leadership allows us to be free from the prison of our thinking.”
- Matt Tenney, author of The Mindfulness Edge: How to Rewire Your Brain for Leadership and Personal Excellence Without Adding to Your Schedule
“Mindful individuals have this trust in themselves at a deep level. They have dug beyond the shifting sands of thought and feelings and struck bedrock.”
- Robbie Steinhouse, author of Mindful Business Leadership
“Mindful leadership will help the new generation of authentic leaders to restore trust in their leadership and to build sustainable organizations known for their harmony. Its ultimate goal is to create a more harmonious and peaceful world for all to live in.”
- Bill George, professor of Management Practice, and a Henry B. Arthur Fellow of Ethics, at Harvard Business School, former chairman and CEO of Medtronic, and author of True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership
“The ability to innovate is directly related to our ability to be free from our conditioning and see things with the mind of a beginner. The practice of mindful leadership is, fundamentally, the practice of being a beginner.”
- Matt Tenney, author of The Mindfulness Edge: How to Rewire Your Brain for Leadership and Personal Excellence Without Adding to Your Schedule
“Mindful leadership ensures that teams and organizations have a broad awareness of what they are doing. And for that they must learn to switch between action and reflection. Mindfulness enables that by strengthening physical and mental resilience, increasing presences of mind to see what is really happening and taking responsibility for it.”
- Wibo Koole, author of Mindful Leadership: Effective Tools to Help You Focus and Succeed
“If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there’s room to hear more subtle things—that’s when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before. It’s a discipline; you have to practice it.”
- Chade-Meng Tan, author of Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness
“When a mindful leader is walking, she knows she is walking. When she is thinking, she knows she is thinking. This doesn’t sound so special. However, the ability to do this on demand, consistently, and during demanding situations is the difference between average and extraordinary performance.”
- Matt Tenney, author of The Mindfulness Edge: How to Rewire Your Brain for Leadership and Personal Excellence Without Adding to Your Schedule
“Mindfulness is about finding ways to slow down and pay attention to the present moment-which improves performance and reduces stress. It’s about having the time and space to attend to what’s right in front of us, even though many other forces are trying to keep us stuck in the past or inviting us to fantasize or worry about the future. It’s about a natural quality each of us possesses, and which we can further develop in just a few minutes a day.”
- Tim Ryan, congressman for the state of Ohio, author of A Mindful Nation: How a Simple Practice Can Help Us Reduce Stress, Improve Performance, and Recapture the American Spirit
“A mindful leader is clear in his or her communication, and those he or she leads know that decisions are made from a place of awareness, integrity, and courage.”
- Maria Gonzalez, author of Mindful Leadership: The 9 Ways to Self-Awareness, Transforming Yourself, and Inspiring Others
“It is clearly important to read and add knowledge to be an effective manager and leader. Even more important is the mind we show up with every day. The practice of mindful leadership optimizes the mind for true greatness.”
- Matt Tenney, author of The Mindfulness Edge: How to Rewire Your Brain for Leadership and Personal Excellence Without Adding to Your Schedule
“To be awake at work is to engage each circumstance now, on its own vivid, fluid, and uncertain terms.”
- Michael Carroll, author of The Mindful Leader: Ten Principles for Bringing Out the Best in Ourselves and Others
“The feeling that any task is a nuisance will soon disappear if it is done in mindfulness.”
- Thích Nhất Hạnh, author of The Miracle of Mindfulness
“The impact of our leadership – and indeed the quality of our lives – ultimately comes down to the answer to one question: How well do you love? In other words, How well do you understand and work to meet the legitimate needs of your team members and other stakeholders?”
- Matt Tenney, author of The Mindfulness Edge: How to Rewire Your Brain for Leadership and Personal Excellence Without Adding to Your Schedule
“There is no work-life balance. We have one life. What’s most important is that you be awake for it.”
- Janice Marturano, founder of the Institute for Mindful Leadership and author of Finding the Space to Lead: A Practical Guide to Mindful Leadership
“Mindfulness enables leaders to be fully present, aware of themselves and their impact on other people, and sensitive to their reactions to stressful situations.”
- Bill George, professor of Management Practice, and a Henry B. Arthur Fellow of Ethics, at Harvard Business School, former chairman and CEO of Medtronic, and author of True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership
“Self-awareness is the most important leadership skill we can develop. It is essential for knowing strengths and weaknesses, for extraordinary business acumen, and for high levels of emotional intelligence.”
- Matt Tenney, author of The Mindfulness Edge: How to Rewire Your Brain for Leadership and Personal Excellence Without Adding to Your Schedule
“When we get too caught up in the busyness of the world, we lose connection with one another – and ourselves.”
- Jack Kornfield, author of A Path With Heart
“A leader must first open – step beyond the boundaries of what is familiar and routine and directly touch the very people and environment he or she intends to inspire. Leading others requires that we first open to the world around us.”
- Michael Carroll, author of The Mindful Leader: Ten Principles for Bringing Out the Best in Ourselves and Others
“Mindful leaders know how to repeat success patterns and overcome failure patterns.”
- Amit Ray, corporate mindfulness teacher
“An unintended conversation with a team member should not be viewed as an obstacle to ‘getting back to work.’ That conversation is the most important work of a leader! By being fully present, mindful leaders take these opportunities to ask questions, learn more about a team member, build trust, and learn about ways to improve the business that only that person might see.”
- Matt Tenney, author of The Mindfulness Edge: How to Rewire Your Brain for Leadership and Personal Excellence Without Adding to Your Schedule
“A beautiful way to practice mindfulness, which is almost guaranteed to improve your social life, is to apply mindfulness toward others for the benefit of others. The idea is very simple—give your full moment-to-moment attention to another person with a nonjudgmental mind, and every time your attention wanders away, just gently bring it back.”
- Chade-Meng Tan, author of Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness
“The essence of bravery is being without self-deception.”
- Pema Chödrön, author of The Wisdom of No Escape
“Sometimes, inaction can be much more effective than action. Taking just a moment to pause and become objectively aware of our thoughts and emotions can dramatically improve the decision we make.”
- Matt Tenney, author of The Mindfulness Edge: How to Rewire Your Brain for Leadership and Personal Excellence Without Adding to Your Schedule
“Don’t believe everything you think. Thoughts are just that – thoughts.”
- Allan Lokos, author of Patience: The Art of Peaceful Living
“When we try to influence our world without first appreciating it, we end up in a lighthouse on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean ‘not seeing things as they are’ but as the way we want them to be…”
- Michael Carroll, author of The Mindful Leader: Ten Principles for Bringing Out the Best in Ourselves and Others
“Extraordinary leadership presence essentially comes down to two elements, fearlessness and love. When fear doesn’t control us, we inspire confidence in team members. When we love team members well, they go above and beyond the call of duty not because they have to, but because they want to.”
- Matt Tenney, author of The Mindfulness Edge: How to Rewire Your Brain for Leadership and Personal Excellence Without Adding to Your Schedule
“Authentic leaders are genuine in their intentions and understand the purpose of their leadership is serving their customers, employees and investors, not their self-interest.”
- Bill George, professor of Management Practice, and a Henry B. Arthur Fellow of Ethics, at Harvard Business School, former chairman and CEO of Medtronic, and author of True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership
“If you want to be successful, I highly recommend learning to be happy first. It is possible to become successful without first learning to be happy, but I strongly recommend against it, because if you are unhappy before you are successful, you are likely to be even more unhappy after.”
- Chade-Meng Tan, author of Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness
“Looking closely, you’ll likely find a tight correlation between the engagement of your team members and your ability to give them your full attention and listen wholeheartedly. During your next conversation, can you drop everything and give the other person your full attention?”
- Matt Tenney, author of The Mindfulness Edge: How to Rewire Your Brain for Leadership and Personal Excellence Without Adding to Your Schedule
“Work is a mess” encourages us to first recognize that we can never have a completely neat relationship with our livelihood. Treating work’s messiness as if it were a mistake or liability only creates further unnecessary distress and resentment. By developing the attitude that work is a mess, we can learn to relax and be curious about the surprises and interruptions. By engaging the messiness of work directly—appreciating both the advantages and disadvantages—we become fully equipped to engage such events in all their variations.”
- Michael Carroll, author of The Mindful Leader: Ten Principles for Bringing Out the Best in Ourselves and Others
“In the context of the work environment, emotional intelligence enables three important skill sets: stellar work performance, outstanding leadership, and the ability to create the conditions for happiness.”
- Chade-Meng Tan, author of Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness
“Setting a goal and pursuing it without attachment to the outcome is essential for being a highly-effective leader.”
- Matt Tenney, author of The Mindfulness Edge: How to Rewire Your Brain for Leadership and Personal Excellence Without Adding to Your Schedule
“Typically, business treats groundlessness or uncertainty as a liability or inconvenience, a temporary mirage on our way to perfect and lasting control. It’s as if work perfectly executed would eliminate uncertainty, guaranteeing success with no surprises, no mistakes, no risks misjudged. To be awake at work is to take exactly the opposite viewpoint. Rather than being a liability to be eliminated, groundlessness is acknowledged as the foundation or essential nature of all that we experience—the basic and unavoidable fact of life.”
- Michael Carroll, author of The Mindful Leader: Ten Principles for Bringing Out the Best in Ourselves and Others
“Mindfulness is a state of being fully present, aware of oneself and other people, and sensitive to one’s reactions to stressful situations. Leaders who are mindful tend to be more effective in understanding and relating to others, and motivating them toward shared goals. Hence, they become more effective in leadership roles.”
- Bill George, professor of Management Practice, and a Henry B. Arthur Fellow of Ethics, at Harvard Business School, former chairman and CEO of Medtronic, and author of True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership
“How we drink coffee and walk to the bathroom has an impact on the mind and how we lead. Please don’t overlook these moments.”
- Matt Tenney, author of The Mindfulness Edge: How to Rewire Your Brain for Leadership and Personal Excellence Without Adding to Your Schedule
“Authentic leaders never let their organizations lose sight of a shared sense of purpose and common values.”
- Bill George, professor of Management Practice, and a Henry B. Arthur Fellow of Ethics, at Harvard Business School, former chairman and CEO of Medtronic, and author of True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership
“For mindful leaders, cultivating such organizational health requires first and foremost a mastery of organizational conduct—a fluency in nine basic competencies: Eliminate toxicity. Appreciate health. Build trust. Send clear messages. Embrace resistance. Understand blindness. Accept invitations. Heal wounds. Be realistic.”
- Michael Carroll, author of The Mindful Leader: Ten Principles for Bringing Out the Best in Ourselves and Others
“To be most productive, we should do less, not more. Doing less helps us be clearer on what’s important and do those things well.”
- Matt Tenney, author of The Mindfulness Edge: How to Rewire Your Brain for Leadership and Personal Excellence Without Adding to Your Schedule
Do you have a favorite mindful leadership quote that we didn’t include here?
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