Jeff Goding is an executive educator, researcher, and advisor, and on the Board of Directors of the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center. He has spent 20 years helping executives of leading global enterprises optimize the performance of both their organizations and their own minds.

I spoke with Jeff about his upcoming presentation at the Buddhist Psychology Lecture Series January 12th and his personal and professional path to his current work.

Barbara:  Can you tell us something about your work and what you'll be presenting in January?

Jeff:  My background is perhaps a little different from most who present in this series. I am not a psychotherapist.  I am going to share how I utilize mindfulness and some psychotherapeutic principles together in my work with top managerial people in organizations, and what that looks like.

Barbara: What drew you to mindfulness and how did you get started integrating those principles in your work?

Jeff: I studied comparative religious philosophies as an undergraduate, years ago. I had even considered pursuing a contemplative life at the time. I was headed to the divinity school at Harvard but decided I needed a break. I realized that my stipend at the time was less than my living expenses and I wasn't sure how I was going to make that work.  I took a break for what I thought would be a semester, working at a technology oriented publishing company. I told my boss there about a wonderful trip I planned to take and he got so excited that he quit and went on the trip before me! I was asked to step into his position and stayed on there.

Barbara: So you never took your trip!
  

Jeff: I never went on the trip and never went back to pursuing the formal studies. I held a series of jobs in many different industries,  helping to run the quality systems and operations of organizations. I eventually became the CEO of an organization called Hammer & Company, which was the management research and education firm that invented the now mainstream re-engineering and business process management concepts. We researched and trained executives how to improve overall company performance by redesigning the way work and the people performing it were structured, managed, and measured across rather than just within the various departments. We found that the greatest struggle executives faced was in making the mindset shift required to successfully overcome organizational fragmentation. It wasn't that they didn't understand what was needed, it was just hard to change their mental habits.

Barbara: I can see where this is going regarding mindfulness...

Jeff:  After years of working 80-100 hours per week, I too found it very difficult to change my own mental and work habits. While struggling with this, I recalled that my previous Buddhism studies had mentioned something about overcoming habitual thinking, and so I reread all of my college textbooks, and began attending CIMC. I soon realized that although I had studied Mindfulness academically many year before, I hadn't really understood the practical applications.

Barbara: How long ago were your studies?

Jeff: 26 years ago, I studied Buddhism, started meditating but then abandoned it. In 2008 I began earnestly meditating and studying again. I took at least 1 course at CIMC every week, several at BCBS, and sat at least two, 7-10 day retreats every year for 5 years straight. During that period, I probably took everything CIMC offered, and much of what was offered at BCBS. I also went through CFM's MBSR course and Practicum, and attended workshops and dharma talks and read the works of a number of leading Mindfulness teachers, including Jon Kabat-Zinn, Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, John Peacock, and Jack Kornfield, among many others. After this intense reimmersion in Mindfulness practices, I began to more clearly see the parallels between how an organization improves its operational health by rethinking how it structures, measures, and manages it business processes and its people, and how individuals can improve their own mental health by leveraging mindfulness together with related "systems thinking" techniques to fundamentally uncover and rethink their own mental processes. For instance, the business process approach emphasizes the need to identify and manage internal organizational misalignments such as competing departmental agendas in much the same way Richard Schwartz emphasizes the need for individuals to recognize and manage competing parts. 

Barbara: Yes, I thought of the similarity to IFS while you described this. So how do you bring this to the people you work with?

Jeff: Well, for the past 17 years, I have been researching and teaching business leaders how to apply systems thinking to their organizational performance. Over the past six years, I have also been helping leaders apply this same kind of systems thinking and awareness to their own mental processes, as well.  I teach mindfulness principles and techniques, although I frame them in business terms such as awareness, resilience, and self-management training. I'll ask executives: "Is it increasingly challenging to aim and sustain your focus? Are you expending a lot of energy on non-value-adding mental activities? Are you getting the maximum return on your stress? Are you experiencing internal misaligments? How might you be competing with yourself? Do you feel you can bring your whole, authentic self to the office? How comfortable are you with ambiguity and uncertainty? How do you feel about not always being the smartest person in the room? I try to frame the discussions in terms and contexts that resonate with business people.  And I emphasize that while many of the Mindfulness practices we explore have a long history as spiritual practices, my approach is strictly secular.  I often position mindfulness meditation as a technique for among other things, creating the calm that leads to clarity. And that this clarity precedes insight. For executives struggling with intense schedules, constant pressure, an inability to sustain focus, and a sense of not being present in their own lives, the promise of greater calm, clarity, and insight is enticing. The conversation usually begins by focusing on how mindfulness can help them with their own quality of experience issues, but it often expands into a much larger discussion. As executives examine and better understand their own mental processes, their own triggers, how they relate to their inner experiences, how they impact others and how those others impact them, they naturally begin to explore larger questions concerning both their personal and their organization's mission and values, and possible misalignments.  Some executives even begin to fundamentally question and rethink the purpose of business, and how best balance that purpose with real systemic challenges such as stock market demands, quarterly reporting, and the like.

Barbara: So you're helping to increase social responsibility in businesses. Do you get push back from some of these companies?

Jeff: I don't lead with that but it seems that enhancing inner literacy tends to enhance our understanding of the world around us.  I've found that people who adopt mindfulness principles tend to develop a greater sense of agency, a sense that they can indeed do something about the problems in business,  even if only gradually.

Barbara: Are you writing about this?

Jeff: Not yet, but I want to.

Barbara: It sounds like it has potential for exponential growth and decreasing suffering on a wide scale.

Jeff: It does. While some companies wish to simply leverage mindfulness for employee stress relief, others really see that it is about a deeper inner literacy, and a few go so far as to hold themselves responsible for the pro-social, emotional, and meta-cognitive development of their employees.

Barbara: Wouldn't that be a lovely thing to have spread around!

Jeff: It would be. Interestingly enough, one of the companies with the most mature thinking in this area is one of the world's largest hedge funds. Not what you might expect.

Barbara: Well, you have your work cut out for you.  I find this very hopeful and interesting. Thank you so much for speaking with me. I look forward to your presentation.