You Are Not Your Thoughts: Mindfulness, Leadership & Radical Acceptance | Dalida Turkovic | Fail With Me

But before that, since you traveled a lot and you have spoken with people in different culture and different walks of life, and I wanted to hear how did you perceive the concepts of mindfulness from all these different cultures? Why I am asking that is probably if you ask what is mindfulness to different people, you will possibly get different answers.

And I'm trying not to say that there is only one right answer.

I am trying to understand that how does this speak to you through different cultures since you have traveled extensively and worked in different geographies.

Thank you for that question.

I think that there may be different layers on how I could answer it, but I'll try to be as brief and as to the point as I can.

So while living in Asia, And the concept of mindfulness was very, very familiar, because there is a lot of presence of the Buddhist cult, Buddhism, and it comes, the roots of mindfulness are in Buddhism.

So while working in China, in a way, the obstacle was, are you bringing the religion in? And really wanting the secular aspect of that.

And soon I learned that actually mentioning the word mindfulness was not so important.

what people really want is to feel better.

And while bringing mindfulness to executives, it was more about, would you be interested to explore what it means to bring your mind into the present moment? And when introducing the practice, when the curiosity would come, what was that? What was this practice about? Then mentioning, well, there is a practice of mindfulness.

If you're curious to know more about it, here are the resources.

Eventually I opened the Beijing Mindfulness Center.

So then it became very obvious, right? The field of mindfulness is also going through stages.

It used to be like, what is this? How do we translate the word mindfulness as well? In every different country, the same question comes up.

How do you answer the word itself? And in many cultures, the word remains the same, mindfulness, just like in English.

So then the next phase, maybe from just before COVID-15 or so, people were more and more familiar with the concept of mindfulness and wanted to find out how can they feel better.

and manage stress.

And it became a skill to help individuals manage their own stress, manage their own view of the reality.

And in a way, I think that the secular field of mindfulness made a shift in the wrong direction.

But it's not that we learn from failing, right? So it's basically mindfulness was almost presented as a way to strengthen the individual.

You will be more resilient, you will have better leadership skills, you will be able to manage stress.

And then after maybe even some years of practicing, people were realizing something was off.

I was not really getting all of that because mindfulness is not a skill pill.

It's not something you learn and then you can do it.

It's not like a language.