Mindful Leadership Summit in Washington, DC

The Mindful Leadership Summit brings mindfulness practices into the working world, and it runs at the Washington Hilton (1919 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington, DC 20009). The schedule covers Friday, November 10, 2017, from 8:00 AM through Saturday, November 11, 2017, ending at 6:00 PM EST.

So what actually happens there? The summit gathers professionals who care about leading from a place of mindfulness and want to act with more compassion in their daily work. Two things tend to stand out for people who show up. First, the training itself is demanding: this is a serious introduction to mindfulness-based leadership, not a casual weekend of breathing exercises. Second, the room is welcoming. You end up surrounded by other people trying to figure out how mindfulness fits inside their own companies and teams.

Attendees walk away with a set of skills they can carry back to the office. You learn to sharpen executive attention through meditation. You practice compassion using self-awareness exercises that most people never encounter. And you work on folding all of it into the realities of a workday. The program offers a broad orientation to the whole field, though the people who commit fully to it often describe something closer to transformation.

The speaker list includes 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, with others added beyond that group.

There's a related thread worth picking up while you're in town: neurofeedback training in the DC area. People who finish a mindfulness-based leadership program sometimes want to push the practice further, into watching their own brainwave activity and learning to shift it. That's what neurofeedback does. A computer monitors brain activity and then feeds the information back to the person connected to the system, so they can see what their own brain is doing.

The data appears as raw measurements and as performance scores. Those scores tell you whether your brainwaves are landing inside a chosen target range, say a mindfulness state, a deep meditation state, or an alert state. Executive teams, managers, everyone in an organization, and private individuals can all use it to train their patterns over time. For many summit attendees, it reads like a natural next chapter.

Why go in the first place? The summit is built around the idea that a company's people are its most valuable resource. Building mindfulness-based leadership skills can strengthen a person from the inside: more awareness, more steadiness, a better sense of wellbeing. Those qualities matter when you're trying to push through a hard problem, stay present under pressure, or simply communicate well with the people you work with.

Registration also opens the door to collaboration. You meet others who think along similar lines, and some of those conversations turn into joint projects aimed at spreading mindfulness training through workplaces. If you've been living and working in Washington, DC, and you've wanted to bring this kind of training into your own organization, the summit may hand you exactly the tools you need to get a new initiative off the ground.

A word on Dr. Dan Siegel, one of the speakers. He arrives with years of mindfulness-based training and teaching behind him, several published books, and research-grounded material he shares with the wider leadership community. The summit team invited him in part because of his standing: he teaches at UCLA, he's a New York Times best-selling author, and he speaks across the country. His work covers mindfulness for individuals, for leaders, for parents, and well beyond.