Mindfulness used to mean a few minutes of breathing at the end of a yoga class and maybe the occasional attempt at meditation.
In the past, I didn’t have time for anything more. At least, I thought so. I was a budding entrepreneur, knee-deep in scaling BetterMe into something big. And it meant waking up to 200 unread Slack messages.
If a blog post told me back then that mindful practices—layered consistently over time—would become one of my core leadership tools, I probably would have laughed and opened another tab.
If you almost did the same, stay. Because what I’ve learned since then is how mindfulness helps you stay steady when things get messy and lead people without burning yourself out in the process.
WHAT MINDFULNESS ACTUALLY IS
Jon Kabat-Zinn, who first introduced mindfulness into mainstream Western medicine, defines it as “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.”
What you’re essentially doing is training your attention. And right now, attention may be one of the scarcest leadership resources we have.
2024 Gartner research shows that 75% of leaders feel overwhelmed by their responsibilities. More broadly, the APA’s 2024 Work in America survey reported that 67% of employees experienced burnout symptoms. And the trend isn’t reversing anytime soon. When your brain is overloaded and exhausted, your attention span naturally shrinks, your focus gets fragmented, and important things start slipping through the cracks.
Senior women tend to have it even worse. According to the 2025 Women in the Workplace report by McKinsey and Lean In, women experience burnout at rates about 10 percentage points higher than men in similar leadership roles.
THE BRAIN SCIENCE BEHIND OVERWHELMED LEADERSHIP
When you stay under pressure for too long, your brain triggers a stress response—cortisol spikes and blood flow is reduced to your prefrontal cortex. That is the part of your brain that handles strategic thinking, emotional regulation, and clear judgment.
This is useful when you’re running from a predator. It is considerably less useful when you’re deciding whether to restructure a team.
Mindfulness doesn’t eliminate pressure. You still have deadlines and unexpected problems. But it trains the gap between the stimulus and the response. The wider that space becomes, the more access you regain to perspective and long-term thinking. You then stop operating purely from stress and urgency but start listening better, noticing nuance, and responding more intentionally instead of reflexively. Over time, that creates a very different kind of leader.
HOW A MINDFUL APPROACH CHANGED MY LEADERSHIP
I know the statement “mindfulness makes you a better leader” can feel abstract to the point of being meaningless. Here’s what actually changed in the way I run my company and show up for my team, as mindfulness helped me strengthen four important skills.
1. Focused attention: I stopped making decisions at the speed of my anxiety. I’d often be halfway through “fixing” a problem before I’d even understood what had gone wrong. Developing a habit to pause before reacting improved the quality of my decisions.
2. Awareness: I got better at telling the difference between real and emotional urgency. Whenever things got messy, my instinct was to move faster, get more involved, and raise the pressure on everyone around me. Mindfulness helps you catch yourself before stress takes over the room.
3. Authenticity: I stopped “performing” and started modeling. I was telling my team that recovery mattered and sustainable pace was a priority. The same me would then consistently work after hours. Mindfulness cultivates self-awareness that brings to the surface the inconsistencies between what you say you value and what you actually do.4. Compassion: I got out of the way. Compassion shifts the mindset from “I need this person to execute exactly the way I would” to “This person is learning, growing, and capable in their own way.” The less I micromanaged, the stronger the team became.
HOW MINDFULNESS PRACTICES CAN DIFFER
For me, mindfulness started with learning to be present again. Things like starting the day without reading emails or going for a walk—and just walking.
Those small steps eventually expanded into deeper practices. Every morning, before anything else, I take a cold shower. Beyond the physical benefits, it’s a mental practice for me. Starting the day with something uncomfortable sets the tone for everything after it.
Meditation and mantra work take about 40 minutes of my daily routine. Another 10–15 minutes go to Pranayama breathing, which helps regulate my energy levels throughout the day. I also train regularly, and sport has become one of my most grounding practices.
Every year, I also spend time with my spiritual teacher to keep me grounded over the long term.
But the main thing I want you to take from this: Mindfulness isn’t a routine you copy from someone else. Your version will look different from mine because you need to find practices that help regulate your nervous system and bring your attention back to the present.
That can be:
- One minute of intentional breathing before your first meeting
- Going for a walk without your phone
- Journaling at the end of the day
- Exercising without headphones
- Eating lunch without a screen in front of you
- Five quiet minutes with your eyes closed
- Cooking while paying attention to what you’re doing
- Repeating a mantra or prayer when your mind starts spiraling
Five minutes of genuine presence will always do more for you than 30 minutes of reluctant practice.
DON’T BECOME YOUR OWN ORGANIZATION’S BOTTLENECK
The more reactive a leader is, the less room their team has to do their best work.
Mindfulness helps you manage that reactivity and channel your ambition and drive where they can have the greatest impact. And that shift changes you from a leader your team has to manage around into one they can actually rely on.
The work that makes everything else better is the work you do on yourself. It just doesn’t come with a quarterly metric. Yet.
Victoria Repa is CEO and founder of BetterMe.
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