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In a course on How to be the Chief Kindness Officer in Volatile Times, Leah Weiss, PhD, teaches compassion as a critical leadership skill. At its core, compassionate leadership respects others’ dignity, acknowledges the pain in the room, and values people.

The benefits? It builds resilience, deals with stress, and prevents burnout. And, of course, the opposite is also true: environments that don’t share these values can be a recipe for creating burnout. On a related episode of the Ten Percent Happier podcast, Weiss explains:

Going all the way back to the prison experiments from Zimbardo… the upshot was you take normal people and you put them in a sick environment, and they behave in kind.

…we have the capacity for wisdom, and compassion and all these great things, and I also know that we live in a time where we are spending the bulk of our waking hours in dysfunctional, dehumanizing institutions. It’s why the World Health Organization just declared burnout a diagnosis.

…I was getting called into doing a lot of work in organizations. And I was really excited about it, because it was at the moment of the mindful revolution… While I’m so happy that people are turning to these tools – and I do believe they help us access the best versions of ourselves, I also don’t want to let ourselves and our organizations – and beyond, and our communities – off the hook for calling out dysfunction.

To help us evaluate our alignment with the work we do or where we do it, Weiss recommends mindfulness meditation and other tools, including remembering our purpose:

“There’s two ways to go about getting more purpose, if you look at the research. One is what I describe in my book as top-down, so using our kind of rational self-reflective capacities like asking oneself that kind of question – what’s my purpose, how am I living it.

The other is bottom-up – that appeals to our embodied, emotional experience. Knowing what we’re passionate about, knowing what our core values are, when we’re acting out of alignment with them by the way we experience what’s known in the research as moral injury.

…If you’re one of the many people who doesn’t come into this world or have a big epiphany along the way, ‘my purpose is x,’ taking the path of trying to get clarity on core values – what matters most to me. Looking into our own narrative, looking back at our lives, the choices we’ve made that feel demonstrative of who we are and who we want to be is a good way.

What do you love doing, who are you, what do you want to be remembered for at the end of your life? Getting your core values clear, and then understanding that’s the ‘from-below’ – how do those show up in my life and where are they in conflict. When we are in conflict with them, there’s a huge amount of emotional frustration and stress and physical impact.

So I think values is the place – that’s the thread to pull on – if you’re not sure what your capital P, Purpose in life is. Look back at your narrative, look at your environments that you feel most alive in, most like yourself… This is where it comes together with mindfulness, your ability to have meta-awareness, or be aware of what you’re experiencing while you’re going through your life. The better you are at that, the more able you are able to see quickly when out of alignment with your values.”

Leah Weiss, PhD is a researcher and professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business on compassionate and mindful leadership. She co-founded The Compassion Institute and directs Compassion Education and Scholarship at HopeLab, a research-based nonprofit focused on resilience. Her most recent book is How We Work: Live Your Purpose, Reclaim Your Sanity, and Embrace the Daily Grind.

Curated by The Circle’s creative director & editor Lara Herscovitch (Cohort 10). To reach Lara directly: thecircle@clpnewhaven.org or Lara@LaraHerscovitch.com

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