 Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Ah, lunch didn't put everyone to sleep just yet. My name is David Gallus. I am going to talk about mindfulness meditation in the workplace. And I'm going to put it in the context, hopefully, of how we can use mindfulness and meditation to create better present moments for ourselves, for our organizations, and how that can translate to a better future. But before I talk about mindfulness, I'm going to invite everyone in the room to practice a bit of mindfulness. So if you're comfortable with it, put down your cell phones, find a position that's comfortable but dignified, see if you can get your spine upright but your muscles relaxed. And if you're comfortable with it, close your eyes and just feel the sensations of your own breath. Notice what it feels like to breathe. Where do you sense it? The air passing in and out of your nostrils, your diaphragm rising and falling. And now your mind may have wandered already. And when it does, simply notice where it's gone, acknowledge that your mind has wandered, and bring your attention back to the breath. And we'll just stay here for a little bit longer. And when you're ready, you can open your eyes. At Goldman Sachs, they are training their investment bankers, their traders, to use mindfulness and meditation to become less stressed, just to slow down their busy workdays. At Facebook, the engineers at the social networking company are training in compassion meditation, trying to use mindfulness and compassion to make the algorithms that power this social network foster more humane interactions between their 1.3 billion daily users. At General Mills, the big food company in Minnesota, there is a meditation room in every single building on the corporate campus. And it's not just the business world at this point. In healthcare and medicine, for decades now, doctors and nurses have been employing mindfulness to good effect. Not just to help their patients, though that's part of the work too, but to make them more resilient caregivers. To get through those long 12-hour shifts with compassion and being there, present, in the present moment, with their patients. Even the military in the United States is training soldiers and Marines in mindfulness, not to make them more effective snipers or killers, but to make them more compassionate and resilient people, more compassionate and resilient husbands and wives when they come home from their tours of duty. It's showing up in sports with stars like Russell Wilson of the Seattle Seahawks practicing mindfulness meditation right along weight training. It's coming to the legal profession, to schools. And I was at the World Economic Forum last year in Davos, Switzerland and I was astonished. I went there to cover the business world for the New York Times. And what I found was that every morning started with an hour of mindfulness meditation right there in the Alps. I wrote a story about it for the Times amid the chattering of the global elite, a silent interlude. And I can assure you it was the only time in Davos people ever stopped talking. There's even a magazine, Mindful Magazine. And I don't know if you can get the magazine itself here, but the resources here are at Mindful.org. And it's a wonderful resource that you can access from anywhere in the world with practical tips about how to bring mindfulness and meditation into your own lives and into your organizations. So what is mindfulness? Well, again, I'm going to talk about mindfulness today as a way to come back to the present moment, to make these present moments more filled with compassion, less filled with stress, and using that as a way to make more effective, more resilient organizations going forward. But let's define mindfulness. What is it that we're actually talking about? A common definition is that mindfulness is paying attention in a particular way on purpose in the present moment and non-judgmentally. Now, that sounds like quite a mouthful, but it's actually quite simple. It's about being right here, right now, in the present moment, with equanimity, without using so many value judgments, without reacting constantly and saying, this is good and this is bad. I'm enjoying this, I'm not enjoying that, but actually just trying to be non-judgmental in the present moment. And the man who defined mindfulness in this very accessible context is a guy named John Cabot-Zinn. John Cabot-Zinn was a molecular biologist studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This is 30 years ago now. And on the side, he was a meditator. He was a spiritual seeker. He was going on meditation retreats, totally separate from his work studying it at MIT. One day on retreat, he had a critical insight. He realized that mindfulness and meditation were effective means of stress reduction. It was reducing his own suffering, his own anxiety. And he had this critical insight. If that's what mindfulness can do, if he can use mindfulness to reduce his own stress and his own suffering, why not bring it to the place where people are suffering the most, to a hospital? So he opened up the Center for Mindfulness in the basement of the University of Massachusetts Worcester Hospital. This is kind of a far out place, and this is the late 70s, but he opens a Center for Mindfulness and he goes to the doctors and he says, bring me the patients who you're giving the drugs to who are still in pain. Bring to me the people for whom the conventional treatments just aren't working, and we'll see what we can do. And so they start doing that. They start bringing people who are on a lot of medications because they're suffering from chronic illnesses, and he develops a course called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, an eight-week course in training the mind, giving these people back the power of controlling their own reactions, giving them back control of their own thoughts. And here's what happened. The pain didn't go away. People were still in pain if they were suffering from an illness or an injury, but they were no longer allowing that pain to control them. They were no longer letting that physical pain dominate their entire world view, and thus was really born the beginning of a secular mindfulness revolution that we're now many decades into. Mindfulness-based stress reduction has now been taught to hundreds of thousands of people around the world, and it forms the foundation for much of the research into mindfulness that continues to this day. So John talked about cultivating moment-to-moment awareness, paying attention to the physical sensations, and also known as meditation. These two words get used interchangeably, but I'd like to suggest to you that meditation is the actual practice that can help us cultivate this state of mindfulness. So once again, to do this, and this is what John was teaching people in Worcester, Massachusetts, 30-some odd years ago, and I'm going to ask you all to do it again just for a few minutes right now. Take a position again, upright, comfortable. Notice the sensations of your breath, and when your mind begins to wander, bring it back to those physical sensations. We'll practice just for a few brief moments here, 30 or so more seconds, and when you're ready, open your eyes. It's important to keep practicing. It's easy to talk about mindfulness. Actually, practicing is not always so easy. It goes against the velocity of our daily lives. We're so used to working frenetically, constantly moving, constantly getting on to the next thing. It's so rare that we actually stop and be present right here, right now, in the present moment. And yet mindfulness is an innate human quality. It is not culturally specific. It is not particular to one tradition, one religion. It's something everyone in this room just had a brief taste of and something that is compatible with all sorts of belief systems. Indeed, we've seen mindful leaders in the past, and I know these are people that you all have thought about. People like Dr. Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, all of these people may not have used the word mindfulness, but at their best, when they were sitting there with their congregants, with their disciples, they were being mindful. They were 100% in the present moment. And yet I don't want to hide the ball here. Mindfulness meditation, this mindfulness revolution that we're seeing, is indeed inspired by the practices of especially Southeast Asian Buddhism. As Buddhism spread from India throughout the region, the Southeast Asian tradition distilled it into vipassana meditation, or insight meditation. And the practices therein contained lay out this very straightforward roadmap, paying attention to the sensations of the body, noticing the emotions, noticing our thoughts, and coming back, training the mind to notice them, but then return to the present moment, and using that as the first step to greater enlightenment. But what's happening today is not about enlightenment. Mindfulness today is a purely secular pursuit. It's showing up in white collar companies around the U.S. and across the world. And that is a demonstration, really, of the power of the mind. The only reason people are doing it is because it works. And I'd like to tell you the story of one man who really made it work. This is Mark Bertolini. He is now the CEO of Etna, one of the biggest healthcare companies in the United States. And about a decade ago, Mark was an up-and-comer at Etna. He was a hard-charging executive, type A personality, never stopped working, burned the candle on both ends. And as he was rising through the ranks at Etna, he was on vacation, a rare vacation, but he was downhill skiing, and he suffered a really terrible accident. He flew off a cliff, banged into a tree. The nerve endings in his left arm were actually separated from his spinal cord. He had multiple internal injuries. They medivacked him in a helicopter to the nearest hospital, and a priest administered last rites. They didn't believe he was going to survive. He did. They did several surgeries over the next few days. And as he began to heal, he needed to lean on medications. He took Vicodin. He took fentanyl. He took oxycontin. He was doped up on some pretty serious drugs. And the pain was so severe that he stuck with those. He continued to take these for weeks and then months, and then a year had passed, and he was still kind of in this fog. He wasn't able to get a step back. People encouraged him to take early retirement. But he was determined. He wanted to get back to work. So he started practicing unconventional therapies. He started with craniosacral massage therapy. He then started practicing yoga. And his yoga eventually led him to mindfulness meditation. And then something remarkable happened, he told me. Mark said at that moment, he started realizing that he could experience his pain without letting it define him. He could notice the physical sensations that, yeah, his arm still hurts. As I sit there with him, even today when I see him, he grimaces. He's in constant pain. And yet he's not allowing that pain to take over his life. He's not allowing that pain to stop him from being a good chief executive, a good husband, a good father. Around the time of the financial crisis, he was back at work. He ascended to become CEO of Aetna. And he went to his chief medical officer, a very straight-nosed scientist named Lonnie Reisman, and he said, Lonnie, I've got an idea. Mindfulness meditation helped me get back from my injury. We're a healthcare company, after all. Why don't we offer it just to our employees? Maybe eventually to some of our customers. But let's just start with offering it to our employees. Might it work? And this guy, Lonnie Reisman, chief scientific officer, he said, no way, no how. Wasn't going to have it. But Mark appealed to the clinician in Lonnie. He said, you're a scientist. You respect data. Why don't we measure it? So they partnered with Duke University Integrative Health and they ran a mindfulness intervention. They used mindfulness-based stress reduction, this program that John Kabat-Zinn had developed. And they gave it to several hundred employees in Connecticut and several hundred employees in California. After eight weeks, the results were in. And perhaps no surprise, people like getting to take an hour out of their work day to calm down and not listen to their boss. But more surprisingly, they took some biometric measurements. They measured things like heart rate variability, cortisol levels, common indicators of physical stress. And what they found was remarkable. In both cases, heart rate variability was much more stable. Cortisol levels had come way down. These people were verifiably less stressed. And so all their reports that they were having more harmonious interactions with their colleagues, that they were feeling more productive, that they were getting more done, suddenly it had some real credence to it. Mark then rolled it out now at this point. Nearly a third of Aetna's workforce of several tens of thousands of employees have taken one form of mindfulness or yoga training that they're offering. He then started working with providers to offer it as a health care benefit to the many organizations and companies that turned to Aetna for their health care plans. And after a full year of this, rolling the company program out, scaling it up, at the end of the fiscal year, Mark Bertolini was going over finances with his chief financial officer, and they noticed something surprising. Health care costs on a per-employee basis had come down 9% at Aetna. On a per-employee basis. So it's not that Mark had fired a bunch of people and lowered health care costs. Health care was costing less for each individual. And the only thing they had done differently was introduce these holistic wellness programs. At a company as big as Aetna, a 9% reduction in health care costs amounted to $7 million. Now I've asked Mark, I said, are you telling me that meditation saved you $7 million? And he's careful. He's a CEO of a public company. He says, I'm not going to go that far. I'm not going to draw a direct line from point A to point B. But think about it, David. If mindfulness and meditation and yoga can make my employees less stressed, if we know that stress and health are intertwined, that more stressed people have more health care problems. And if we know that when my employees are less stressed, they're more productive, they're at work more often, they're taking fewer sick days, they're going to the infirmary less, then yeah, absolutely. I do believe, he's told me, that mindfulness and meditation had a big role in this. Mark went one step further. After scaling it internally, offering it to his program, saving his company money, he had a personal realization. He said, I'm the CEO of this company. And there's one more thing I can really do. Aetna is a big, big company. Tens of thousands of employees, some of them very low wage workers. Income inequality is a big issue in the United States, roiling the political waters. And he said, as CEO, I can exhibit an act of compassion. I give my lowest paid workers a 30% raise. And he did it not because they were going to then become meditators. It wasn't some hidden agenda to further his mindfulness practice. Instead, it was the right thing to do, he said. And he came to this realization as a result of his own meditation practice. Aetna employees now practice mindfulness and meditation every day. They come up there to headquarters in Connecticut. And it's extraordinary, you walk in and every day at lunch, there's dozens, sometimes hundreds of people practicing. So again, Bertolini practiced himself, offered it to thousands of employees, saved millions in healthcare, gave employees a raise. A true mindful eater, if you will. Why am I the one up here talking about this, you might ask? If I may, I'd like to share with you my own story and my own challenges. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. I was a confused teenager. Then I was a confused college student. I'm still sort of a confused adult. And yet I was always asking life's big questions from an early age, but coming up very short on answers. I read mystical philosophy. I tried mind altering substances. And there were no answers. And then one day I was home. It was New Year's Eve. And I picked up a small volume from my mother's bookshelf on an introduction to Buddhism. I had never read Buddhism, but I knew I was going to in my studies at college the next year. And I started reading. Now it was New Year's Eve and I had invitations to go to parties. There were friends at a beach bonfire. There were friends at a bar or friends at a big house party. But I kept reading. I started reading these very clear, concise passages that meditation and mindfulness could help reduce our suffering. That desire and this constant wish to be stimulated could lead to suffering. And I didn't go out that night. I stayed up. I finished the book at about 2 or 3 a.m. I woke up the next morning, went for a walk on the beach. And I was still working with what I had read the night before. And so I opened the phone book. We still had phone books back then. This was before the web had really taken over. And I looked up meditation in the phone book. And lo and behold, there was a meditation center nearby. So I went and I started to sit. Later that day I connected with my friends at those parties. One of them had been punched in the face. Another still had his head in the toilet. And a third had watched his sister relapse and do cocaine again. I tell you that because at that moment, though I'm oversimplifying this basic equation that craving, that chasing stimulation can lead to real suffering. It was crystallized to me. It made some intuitive sense for me. And I resolved to continue and deepen my meditation practice. I started sitting in the Zen Buddhist tradition for about a year and a half. And then for my junior year of college I went here to Bodhgaya, India. I spent the better part of a year in India. Sitting with Zen masters. Sitting with this man, Anagurinka Munindraji. Not only did he look like Gandhi, but he was actually one of Gandhi's good friends. There's amazing pictures of them walking side by side around the Mahabodhi temple. And you can't tell who's who. There I am under the Bodhi tree as a young man. And here I am taking the Bodhisattva vows with Chokinima Rinpoche, a Tibetan teacher who I went on to study with. And it became a real part of my world view. Really a deep part of the way I learned to interact with people. Deep part of my intrinsic motivations. What I learned there. And so much so that I almost stayed. I thought, well this is pretty good. I don't know what I want to do with my life. Maybe I should stay and become a monk. I thought about it hard. And if I had stayed, I would probably look like Yogi Mike here. Yogi Mike stayed. He never came back. But I did. Of course I did come back. I went on to become a business journalist of all things. Writing for the Financial Times. Now at the New York Times. And in between my work as a business journalist, I would still go on silent meditation retreats. It was a private part of my life. It was something I didn't bring into the office. It informed my world view. It certainly helped me manage some of the inherent stresses of what can be a very tumultuous job. But for the most part, I was right here in the newsroom of the New York Times. Fast, tight deadlines. Sometimes screaming editors. And I was just kind of going through my work as a business journalist. And occasionally trying to keep up my meditation practice. Several years ago, though, I had gone off a good run of stories. I had interviewed Mark Zuckerberg in profile. I had an exclusive JL House interview with Bernie Madoff, the mastermind of the $65 billion Ponzi scheme. And I needed my next story. I was desperate, really. As a journalist, there's nothing worse than not having a good story to work on. And I'm sitting there looking for what comes next. And I see a brief headline. Associated Press Story or something. And it said that in Minnetonka, Minnesota, there were people meditating on the job. And the hair on my neck stood up. I said, if there's anyone who's got to tell a story about business in the workplace and mindfulness and meditation, I'm the guy. And so I got on a plane. And what I found was the first beginnings of this real movement to make mindfulness mainstream several years ago. The company, of course, was General Mills, the maker of Cheerios and Yo Play Yogurt and Haagen Daz Ice Cream. And on my way out to Minnesota, I thought, what do these people have to tell me about meditation? What am I going to learn from these people? And what am I going to find? Do they actually know what they're doing is what I see there even going to be recognizable? I didn't know. But I show up about this time. It was about 3.30 on a Tuesday afternoon. And I walk in in this big conference room about the main lobby of the corporate headquarters building. And this is what I see. It didn't look all that different from the Bodhi Tree. People were sitting in silence. Later they did basic yoga. Coming back to the present moment. And then I heard the woman leading this group start talking. Her name was Janice Martirano. She was deputy general counsel of General Mills at the time. And her story is illuminating. She had been the deputy general counsel for many years. Had been pushing through the merger with Pillsbury, a $10 billion deal that got tied up in Washington. In the midst of this year-long fight of her life on the professional front, she lost both her parents. This personal loss coupled with the professional stresses left her absolutely depleted. And she got back to work after this very intense period. And she could barely go on. Didn't have anything left in the tank. Finally, someone suggested why didn't she try mindfulness and meditation. She was a little reluctant at first. She was from the Midwest. But finally, upon persuading, she went out there and she went to retreat with none other than John Kabat-Zinn himself. She got there and he said okay, we're gonna meditate for an hour. And she almost got up and left. But she stayed and after five days, she didn't want to leave. She was ready to stay and continue meditating. It was such a relief. Such a respite from her work and everything she had been through. But she came back, got back to work and people noticed a change in her step. People noticed that she had more energy that she was more present in the room. That when other people got upset in meetings, she was remaining calm. She was remaining equanimous. And they said, well, what's changed? And she said, well, I've been meditating. And little by little, people said, well, I'd love to learn. And eventually, she had a quorum. She began teaching meditation to her colleagues at General Mills. And it got to the point where, by the time there are hundreds of the executives at General Mills are practicing mindfulness and meditation now. I wrote a story about it. The Mind Business for the FT Weekend Magazine. And this story went viral. More so even than the stories about Zuckerberg or Madoff. People wanted to know where could they learn more? What other companies were doing this? And how could they bring mindfulness and meditation to their own workplace? And I had none of the answers. So I endeavored to find out. I wrote this book, Mind for Work, How Meditation is Changing Business from the Inside Out. But to do it, I had to do my research. So I went on this journey into the contemplative heart of corporate America. I visited companies from Vermont to Southern California, from Seattle to Florida, and everywhere in between, finding anyone who was practicing mindfulness and meditation in the workplace. And it was extraordinary because what I found is that no two companies are doing it at Patagonia, it's imbued into the very culture because the founder himself was a Zen practitioner. Whereas at Google, it's a highly academic course in emotional intelligence and mindfulness. And yet at every one of these companies it's having a real impact. Why? Why are companies turning to this? Well, stress. There's a reason John Kabat-Zinn called it mindfulness-based stress reduction. Because we all suffer from stress. No matter what your job as a secretary, a CEO or anywhere in between, stress is common. It's fundamental to the human experience for better or worse. And it's something we all experience on the job. If mindfulness can help reduce stress, well, that's a good thing. And as we saw, mindfulness can help reduce some of these costs that are associated with stress. The World Health Organization suggests that stress and the illnesses associated with it are responsible for some $300 billion a year in productivity losses. Imagine if we started moving the needle there, just a little bit. At Green Mountain Coffee they started to move the needle. This is Bob Stiller, founder of Green Mountain Coffee and there he is meditating on some bags of coffee beans. And when I tell you what Bob did before he founded Green Mountain Coffee, you won't be so surprised that he's a meditator. Before founding Green Mountain Coffee he founded Easy Wider Rolling Paper Company. Yeah? He was a bit of a hippie. So, he's there. He starts meditating in the office. He gives it to his C-level employees. They all like it. They're having better interactions at the workplace. They're a little less stressed. But then Bob has his critical insight. He says that all these white-collar workers are less stressed. But what about my guys in the factory? Green Mountain Coffee has facilities all around the country where it employs thousands of people roasting coffee beans, packing boxes, driving trucks. Don't they need mindfulness and meditation as well? Well, of course they do. But he's not going to get them to sit with their legs crossed. They had to find a culturally appropriate way to do this. So, they worked with a yoga teacher and they developed mindful stretching. And so now every time Green Mountain employees come to work they start their shift with 10 minutes of mindful stretching coming back to the present moment becoming more aware of their bodies, more aware of their surroundings. And as a result, a year on, a year after they launched this program workplace injuries at Green Mountain Coffee facilities were down dramatically. We heard about it with the employees at Aetna but it's happening around the country. Mindfulness doesn't change only our bodies, our minds. It changes our bodies too, excuse me. There are studies that show after interventions of mindfulness-based stress reduction immune systems are functioning more effectively. When sufferers of the skin disease psoriasis were given mindfulness in addition to their conventional therapies, they healed some 33% faster than those who were taking just the conventional remedies. And again, Mark Bertolini taught us if we can have healthier employees we're going to see gains across the board. At ProMega, a medical device company in Madison, Wisconsin, that was the site of one of these studies about the immune system. It was the winter. A lot of the employees had the flu. Everyone was trying to get through their general end-of-year malaise and then they introduced mindfulness programs, meditation programs. In addition with kind of everyday common cold remedies, people started meditating. They started stretching. They started coming back to the present moment. And what they noticed, they were able to see the antibodies start boosting. Over the course of those eight weeks the employees who were meditating they got healthier. They healed faster than their counterparts who weren't meditating. More focused too. Think about what we did to start this session. We brought our attention back to the present moment. We noticed our mind wander and we controlled our attention and brought it back to the area of focus. Rather than letting our minds run away. And if you think about it, that's like going to the gym for the mind. It's reps at the gym. Every time we bring our attention back to the present moment, that's like one little lift of the weight at the gym. And there are studies that show this. A group of office workers in Seattle were given mindfulness meditation training. They were able to attend the BSR the classic eight week course. And what they found was that after this course they didn't do everything faster. They weren't somehow superhuman. But they were able to stay on task for a longer time. So instead of checking their email and then answering the phone and then updating their calendar and then surfing the web in three second intervals which is literally about as long as they stayed with it. They finished whatever it was they were doing and they moved on to the next task. And that's why you see people like Russell Okung the defensive lineman of the Seattle Seahawks practicing meditation too. When he's on the field he doesn't want to be distracted. Meditation he says is important as lifting weights. It's about quieting your mind. And we're now seeing mindfulness and meditation be taught in sports teams all around the country. From basketball to football to baseball as well. Now there is real scientific literature behind this. There's even a new term for the people who study the science of mindfulness and meditation. Contemplative neuroscientists. They're looking at how meditation changes the brain. And the rise of mindfulness has coincided with a real transformation and understanding of how our brains work. For many of the last decades there was conventional understanding now disproven that our brains somehow matured as we entered into adulthood and that's kind of where they stayed and then they generally atrophied as we got older. We now know that's not the case. Our brains are malleable. They're plastic. Neuroplasticity is the term. Which is to say they respond to stimulus in the brains of an accomplished human player. The parts of the brain associated with fine motor skills unsurprisingly perhaps now are more developed. And in the minds of meditators that's the case true. In the prefrontal cortex, evolutionarily this is the most recent part of the brain. The part of us that makes us human. It's responsible for our higher order thinking our reasoning. There's more gray matter in the minds of long-term meditators. And in the amygdala, an almond shaped region in the center of our brain which is responsible for our stress reactions. When we get in a fight when we get angry at someone we have these fight-or-flight reactions. That's the part of our brain that's releasing hormones making us tense making our breathing tight. In the minds of meditators the amygdala is less reactive. Now we've studied the brains of meditators. We can see that there you go this is your brain and this is your brain on meditation with more gray matter in the prefrontal cortex. And I had my own brain studied as part of my research and this is what they found. Mindfulness is no panacea and after 20 years of meditating there's still a lot of nonsense going around up there. And yet I think we're starting to understand that it can make a real difference. Not just in that moment that you're meditating, not just in the present moment, but as CEOs and leaders use their insights from their practice to make beneficial changes in their own organizations and in the world. A couple final thoughts. This is Eileen Fischer. You may recognize the name she has a very successful clothing brand in the United States and around the world and for many years she ran a very conventional company. She was a good person but she ran her company like you ran an apparel company. She bought quality products, quality sourcing, but conventional sources. She didn't give much thought to where that cotton was coming from, what chemicals were being used to diet, where the garments were actually getting put together. Some years ago though she began practicing yoga just trying to stay fit as she was entering later part of her life and that led her to mindfulness and meditation. She began practicing and she started having these series of insights. Much like Mark Bertolini realized as CEO he had the power to affect all sorts of people even as lowest paid workers lives, even if they weren't going to be the ones meditating. Eileen too realized that she had real influence here. She could use her insights, this new compassion she was developing and use it for beneficial changes. So she started reforming her supply chain, started using fewer toxic chemicals less unhealthy dyes better manufacturing facilities. And then she had this critical insight. She said well what about the literally thousands of women, mostly women, in China who actually sew my garments? What can I offer them? Well it wasn't going to be meditation. She had brought mindfulness and meditation to her own office in upstate New York at this point. White collar workers were enjoying it fine, but what about those women in China who were at the factories? She said instead of giving them meditation because culturally that just might not fly why don't we develop entrepreneurship skills. And so Eileen now runs a robust program and her goal she says is to give enough education enough training, enough entrepreneurship skills to these employees that so one day they won't just be making the clothes, but they'll be running the factories that make the clothes. And that for Eileen is what mindful leadership looked like. Finally I want to introduce you to my friend Tim Ryan and it's appropriate we talk about Tim on this day as America is going to the polls. Tim's a politician. He's a member of the US House of Representatives. He represents Ohio's 13th district, battleground state of Ohio you've been hearing a lot about. And for several years Tim was right in the thick of it in Washington DC. He's a Catholic from Ohio. He was a high school quarterback. This is not your average meditator. He had been on the hill for several years been re-elected several times and after his third re-election he was burnt out. He said he was so caught up in the partisanship so bombarded by requests by special interests he was barely listening to his own constituents anymore the very people he was supposed to be representing. So he went on a retreat again as it happens with John Kabat-Zinn. John's not the only person who teaches meditation but he's touched some very important lives along the way and they've gone on to do remarkable things. So he goes on a meditation retreat with John Kabat-Zinn comes back, continues to practice mindfulness meditation and for Tim what it did was allow him to listen again instead of when he was in conversation with his constituents already thinking of his preprogrammed response already thinking right past whatever it was they were saying Tim actually just listened and hearing those stories re-invigorated him. It gave him the inspiration he needed to get back to his work of being an effective representative. You actually slow down enough to pay attention to someone other than yourself. Meditation, mindfulness for Tim made him more sympathetic empathetic and compassionate and that's what mindful leadership looked like to Tim Ryan. Now since I began looking into this it has just exploded in popularity. Companies like Intel, Adobe and so many more are practicing mindfulness and meditation in the office. It's on the cover of Time Magazine big news programs in the United States and at the New York Times I'm now spearheading a big initiative to bring mindfulness training to our audience, to a global audience. So why are people bringing mindfulness to work? Well it's no panacea we know this but if individuals can be less stressed and more focused. If organizations can have healthier more productive employees and if leaders can be clearer, creative more compassionate I think we can all see the real value in bringing mindfulness to the workplace. Thank you very much.