Mindful Leadership Summit in Washington, DC

The Mindful Leadership Summit is built around bringing mindfulness into the daily rhythm of work. It runs at the Washington Hilton, 1919 Connecticut Ave NW, from the morning of Friday, November 10, 2017 through the evening of Saturday, November 11. Two full days, held in the District of Columbia, aimed at people who want to carry contemplative practice back into their organizations.

So what actually happens there? Part of it is meeting other professionals who care about mindfulness-based leadership and the idea of compassionate action at work. The other part is training. Expect something rigorous rather than soft: a demanding introduction to the discipline, set inside a room that stays welcoming to newcomers trying to figure out whether this fits their company.

The skills on offer are practical. Attendees work on sharpening executive attention through meditation, on building compassion by way of self-awareness exercises, and then on the harder question of how to fold any of it into an actual workplace. For some people the weekend will read as a solid overview and nothing more. For those who commit fully, the organizers suggest real change is on the table.

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, and Gina Laroche are among those presenting, with others alongside them.

There is also a thread here about neurofeedback, sometimes called neuro-training, which the summit opens up as a topic of conversation in the DC area. People who finish a mindfulness-based leadership program sometimes want to push the work further, past practice and into measurement: watching their own brainwave activity and learning to shift it.

Here is roughly how neurofeedback operates. A person is connected to a computer system that monitors brainwave activity, and the system feeds that information back to them in real time. The data shows up two ways, as raw measurements and as performance scores, both of which indicate whether the brain is producing patterns inside a chosen target range. Those ranges have names such as mindfulness states, deep meditation states, or alert states. For summit attendees curious about going beyond the cushion, local neurofeedback services line up closely with what the training covers.

The reasoning behind attending comes down to people. A company's workforce is the asset that matters most, and mindfulness-based leadership skills are a way to build interior strength, steadier awareness, and a sense of wellbeing in that workforce. Those qualities tend to help when someone needs to push through a hard problem, hold their presence under pressure, or communicate more clearly with colleagues. Registrants also get the chance to find like-minded people and start collaborative projects that spread this kind of training further. If you live and work in Washington, DC and have been wondering how to bring mindfulness programs into your own office, the weekend may hand you the specific tools to begin.

A word on Dr. Dan Siegel, who presents at the event. He arrives with years of mindfulness-based teaching behind him, several published books, and research-grounded material he shares with the wider mindfulness community. He teaches at UCLA, has written New York Times best sellers, and speaks nationally. His focus spans individuals, leaders, and parents, among others.