Mindful Leadership Summit in Washington, DC

The Mindful Leadership Summit comes to Washington, DC, built around bringing mindfulness practice into the working day. It runs at the Washington Hilton, 1919 Connecticut Ave NW, from 8:00 AM on Friday, November 10, 2017 through 6:00 PM on Saturday, November 11, 2017 (EST).

So what actually happens there? For one, it gathers professionals who care about mindfulness-based leadership and want to carry more compassionate action into their work. Attendees can expect two things in roughly equal measure: a demanding, no-fluff introduction to mindfulness-based leadership training, and an approachable setting for meeting others thinking about mindfulness inside their own organizations.

The skills on offer are meant to travel back with you. Sharpening executive attention through meditation. Building compassion by way of self-awareness exercises that are a little unusual. Figuring out how to fold all of it into the rhythm of a workplace. For most people the weekend works as a broad first pass at the field of mindfulness-based leadership, though those who really commit to the program may find it changes something deeper.

The speaker list is long. Dr. Dan Siegel, Peter Senge, Nancy Costikyan, Darnell McDonald, Raj Sisodia, Richard Strozzi-Heckler, Marvin Riley, Stephen Macadam, Caroline Welch, Chris Schmidt, Gina Laroche, and others besides.

The summit also opens a door to something related: neurofeedback, sometimes called neuro-training, in the DC area. People who finish the mindfulness-based leadership program through mindfulleader.org sometimes want to push the practice a step further, toward watching their own brainwave activity and learning to shift it. Neurofeedback makes that possible for executive teams, managers, everyone in an organization, and private individuals too.

The idea behind neurofeedback is fairly direct. A computer monitors your brainwave activity and then "feeds back" what it sees to you while you are hooked up to the system. That information shows up as raw measurements and as "performance scores" that tell you whether your brainwaves are landing inside a chosen target range, say a mindfulness state, a deep meditation state, or an alert state. For summit attendees curious about carrying their practice into measurable territory, learning more about neurofeedback services in DC is a natural next step.

Why go at all? The summit treats a company's people as its most valuable asset and aims to help them perform. Mindfulness-based leadership skills can build interior strength, steadier awareness, and a sense of wellbeing, and those qualities matter when you are pushing through a hard problem, trying to stay present, or working on how you communicate with the people around you.

Registrants also get the chance to meet people who think the way they do and to start collaborative projects that spread mindfulness-based training further into working life. If you live and work in Washington, DC, and you have wanted to bring mindfulness programs into your own workplace, this is where you might pick up the practical footing to launch something new.

A word on Dr. Dan Siegel, who speaks at the event. He arrives with years of mindfulness-based training and teaching behind him, several published books, and research-backed material that he shares with the wider mindfulness-based leadership community. The summit team invited him because he teaches at UCLA, writes New York Times best-sellers, and speaks widely across the country. His work covers mindfulness for individuals, for leaders, for parents, and well beyond.