Marc Lesser: Leadership is a True Mindfulness Practice

Free Your Inner Guru

CEO Marc Lesser is on a mission to make mindfulness an essential practice of leadership. Marc Lesser is a speaker, workshop leader, and executive coach. Marc is known for his engaging, experiential presentations that integrate mindfulness and emotional intelligence practices and training. He is the author of 4 books, including Seven Practices of a Mindful Leader: Lessons from Google and a Zen Monastery Kitchen, and CEO of ZBA Associates, an executive development and leadership consulting company. Marc helped develop the world-renowned Search Inside Yourself (SIY) leadership program within Google – a mindfulness-based emotional intelligence training for leaders which teaches the art of integrating mindfulness, emotional intelligence, and business savvy for creating great corporate cultures and a better world. He founded and was CEO of 3 companies, and has an MBA degree from New York University. Marc was a resident of the San Francisco Zen Center for 10 years, and director of Tassajara, Zen Mountain Center, the first Zen monastery in the western world. Memorable quotes: “Leadership is essentially about integrity. Integrating a vision, sense of urgency with heart, morals, sense of ethics.” “I identify myself as a social entrepreneur – business as a force for solving problems and doing things that matter. Whether I’m in Google or a large company, many people are identifying as a social entrepreneur.” “Part of my mission in life is to ground mindfulness. To show what I think the depth and breadth of it. On one hand to demystify it, and on the other to show the mystery.” “I’m more and more up front that so many people who want to have a meditation practice struggle with it. My response is try sitting with others. I don’t think that meditation was meant to be an individual sport. I think it was meant to be a group sport.” “We’ve become separate from nature, and therefore separate from ourselves.” I just thought I was going to be practicing meditation and then found myself working with other people and leading. I thought, “This is the real thing, this is the practice.” Mentioned in this episode Marc Lesser’s book – 7 Practices of a Mindful Leader: Lessons from Google and a Zen Monastery Kitchen Free Your Inner Guru Episode 49 with meditation teacher Mark Coleman Connect with Marc Lesser online: website Twitter – @marclesser Facebook Connect with Laura and #FYIGPodcast online: website Facebook Instagram Twitter Want more conscious conversations in your life? Support the podcast and join the Free Your Inner Guru® Leadership Community at patreon.com/freeyourinnerguru