BLOG
3 practices for simplifying your life
Harry Roberts was one of my teachers and mentors when I lived at the San Francisco Zen Center’s Green Gulch Farm. He was trained as a Yurok shaman and was incredibly knowledgeable about California native plants. He also taught me how to weld, and some important...
Talk: Love The Work
In this dharma talk at Green Gulch Farm, a branch of the San Francisco Zen Center, Marc Lesser discusses the practice of “Love the Work” – the first of the Seven Practices of a Mindful Leader. Drawing on his work as a “stealth Zen teacher” in the business world, he explores how this practice teaches us to truly enjoy life, to live our love, and to embrace the work of cultivating awareness and helping others.
Why You Don’t Need To Be an Expert
When we approach life with a beginner’s mind, we let go of being an expert. Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize–winning economist and psychology professor, describes people as having two distinct selves: the experiencing self and the remembering or narrative self. The...
Connect to Your Pain
Adapted from Practice #4, Connect to Your Pain, in Seven Practices of a Mindful Leader. When it comes to emotional pain, the strategy I adopted from a very early age was denial and compartmentalization. I grew up with a manic-depressive father, and the tension and...
What Leadership Stories Do you Tell?
One of my favorite exercises when coaching executives is to ask them to describe their work, or a particular project or key relationship, from 2 perspectives: the perspective of failure (what’s lacking, not going well, and/or failing) and, the perspective of success...
Taking the Backward Step that Turns Your Light Inward
Several years ago I co-led a one-day Search Inside Yourself program for Google’s doctors and health care providers. My co-teacher was a Google employee whom I had trained as a Search Inside Yourself teacher. After introducing the topics of mindfulness and emotional...