Mindful Leadership and Wellbeing

Course content

Today’s leaders face relentless complexity, increasing polarization, and mounting pressure. Thriving in this environment demands more than technical expertise—it calls for leadership grounded in awareness, empathy, and personal balance. This course combines cutting-edge research in mindfulness, affective science, and behavioral decision-making to equip future leaders not just to survive, but to thrive.

Our minds often operate on autopilot, defaulting to habitual patterns of thought and emotion that shape our decisions and interactions without conscious awareness. Left unchecked mental habits and biases like overconfidence, confirmatory thinking, impulsivity, emotional avoidance, groupthink and a fixed-pie mindset can cloud judgment, strain relationships, and lead to reactive, ineffective leadership.

In this course, you will learn to identify and overcome cognitive traps that hinder decision-making, manage stress and emotions through mindfulness, cultivate deeper connections with compassionate curiosity, align your leadership with your core values, and foster resilience and well-being for yourself and your teams.

The course is structured around three key pillars of leadership:

1. Decision-Making: Challenge your decision autopilot by developing mindfulness skills to expand awareness, reduce cognitive biases, and make more flexible, effective decisions.
2. Leading Others: Navigate conflicts with confidence by overcoming your autopilot fight-flight-freeze response. Practice compassionate curiosity and mindful listening. Explore how group dynamics amplify biases and learn strategies to inspire motivation and gain buy-in.
3. Resilience and Well-Being: Reflect on your core values to align your actions with what truly matters. Discover tools to manage stress and foster well-being for yourself and your teams.

Objectives (and/or specific learning outcomes)

This course aims to help you:

Enhance decision-making by recognizing and addressing unconscious cognitive and emotional biases.
Develop mindfulness skills to regulate stress, emotions, and mental habits.
Build stronger, more meaningful relationships through compassionate and mindful communication.
Align leadership actions with personal values to lead with authenticity and purpose.
Cultivate resilience and emotional well-being to sustain long-term performance and wellness.

Prerequisites and Corequisites

Required and Corequired knowledge and skills

none

Teaching methods and learning activities

This course is profoundly experiential, designed to engage participants in transformative learning both inside and outside the classroom. In-class activities include dynamic role plays, team simulations, live experiments, case discussions, and guided meditation practices to cultivate mindfulness and self-awareness. Outside the classroom, you will engage in personal journaling, personal strengths assessments, and meditation practices to integrate these skills into daily life. The course also incorporates atypical, thought-provoking experiences that encourage deep reflection and invite you to apply mindfulness and leadership principles in unique, impactful ways.

References, bibliography, and recommended reading

Slides and supporting literature will be posted on UV in due time.

Course notes

Université virtuelle

Contribution to the teaching profile

For Master in Economics

LO 4.1 Travailler et communiquer efficacement au sein d'une équipe dans un environnement
international et multiculturel
LO 4.2 Faire preuve d’éthique professionnelle

For Master in Management Science

LO 1.2: Maîtriser et appliquer des concepts, cadres et théories clés en économie et en gestion
dans un contexte professionnel pour identifier une opportunité commerciale et créer
une solution innovante adaptée à celle-ci
LO 1.3: Aborder un problème commercial ou de gestion à travers différents cadres
disciplinaires (droit, communication, psychologie, etc.) et en tenant compte de facteurs
externes
LO 4.1 Travailler et communiquer efficacement au sein d'une équipe dans un environnement
international et multiculturel
LO 4.2 Faire preuve d’éthique professionnelle

Other information

Campus

Solbosch

Evaluation

Method(s) of evaluation

Personal work
written examination
Other

Personal work

written examination

Closed question with multiple choices (MCQ)
Open question with short answer

Other

Mark calculation method (including weighting of intermediary marks)

Participation (20%): Assessed through attendance and active involvement in class activities, including case and simulation preparation.
Personal Journal Completion (30%): Graded on submission and evidence of consistent effort (e.g., meeting entry frequency requirements), with the content remaining private.
Self-Awareness and Strength Test Completion (10%): Graded on timely and complete submission of assessments without evaluation of specific results.
Exam (40%): A closed-book exam focused on the theoretical concepts covered in class, testing foundational knowledge covered in class. Includes multiple choice questions and short open-ended questions.

Language(s) of evaluation

english