Leaders can jump-start their career success by slowing down, allowing time for self-reflection, pumping up their curiosity and letting go of habits that no longer serve them. If you find yourself in constant motion, tap the brakes to reduce your speed and start reflecting on what you could do differently.

A current Google search for “reinvent yourself” yields over twelve million hits. Little wonder, since climate change, AI, and the shifting geopolitical order are about to turn the world we know upside down. To thrive in this environment, it is vital that we adapt and transform. Effective personal transformation is contingent on three factors: aspiration, awareness, and accountability.

Just as every professional athlete needs a coach to guide their training, so top leaders need a great executive coach. To support their clients effectively, such coaches are required to play a number of different roles.

The desire to pursue personal change is one I hear expressed frequently in my coaching work. The motivations for this are easy to understand. The world is changing faster than ever before, from technological innovations to pressing ecological issues and geopolitical shifts. Adaptation and evolution are unavoidable in order not to be left behind. But what is personal change, really? Can people really change? And if so, how?

With tectonic shifts in the business environment caused by digitalisation, sustainability challenges, the Covid-19 crisis, generational change and geopolitical upheavals, the CEO role has changed apace. To have any hope of surviving at the top, business leaders must be adaptable. Too bad, then, that this is a skill that many have lost – and however paradoxical it may sound, it is their own success that has been their undoing.

The simultaneity of the COVID-19 pandemic, environmental problems, digitalization, geopolitical tensions, and generational change poses major challenges for many companies. Now, top leaders must have the courage to hold back on the hasty development of strategies and instead devote all their energy to putting together the right teams first.

Mindfulness offers practices for dealing more effectively with stress, anxiety and fear that our minds generate as a response to the COVID-19 situation. By changing the way we look at our emotions, we can use this crisis to learn to become better, more resilient leaders.

Mindfulness training is an important building block towards New Work and cross-functional teamwork.

Companies increasingly are setting up agile, cross-functional teams to tackle complex problems that need to be solved through teamwork and collective intelligence. Are there ways that firms can nurture these abilities among employees? A ten-week mindfulness program can lead to a measurable increase in collective intelligence.