Mindfulness at Work — How Quiet Leaders Build Presence Without Performing
Lindsey Cameron on the small moments that turn reactivity into presence — and why your work will never love you back.
You finish a day of back-to-back meetings and realize you spent the whole thing reacting.
Never quite present. Never quite yourself. Just running from call to call until, by mid-afternoon, you’re running on fumes.
For an introverted leader, that isn’t a scheduling problem.
It’s the gap.
The tiny space between stimulus and response — the one we consistently miss because the day never lets us stop long enough to find it.
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My guest this week is Lindsey Cameron. Management professor. Longtime meditator. A researcher whose work spans call centers, war zones, and the algorithm-driven gig economy.
She has spent more than twenty years building a contemplative practice — not as a life hack, but as the ground her leadership stands on.
And the thing I keep coming back to from our conversation is how small her tools are.
Three breaths before you answer a call.
Your hand on the doorknob before you walk into the room.
That’s it. That’s the practice.
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What she’s really describing is mindfulness at work as something you build one small gap at a time. Not a retreat. Not a course. A moment.
And then another moment.
Eventually those moments stop feeling like tools and start becoming the way you move through the day. She has a sign on her desk that says work is a form of worship.
I love that reframe. The goal isn’t to escape the meeting. It’s to bring the quality of mind you have in meditation into the meeting.
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The line from Lindsey that has stayed with me longest, though, is quieter than any of that.
Your work will not love you back.
Not all the time. Not in the ways you need it to.
Which means the version of you that shows up to lead has to be restored somewhere else. On purpose.
For Lindsey, that looks like small communities — a workout crew, a gardening crew, a meditation crew. Long walks with no input. Red lights in the house after sundown. And a rest group that meets on Zoom for two hours in the middle of the workday.
Two hours. In the middle of the workday. Resting.
Imagine what that would rewire in you.
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If you’ve been feeling depleted by leadership — if the calendar keeps winning and the presence keeps losing — this is the episode.
Listen to the full conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.
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