C-Suite Transcendence
Leaders turn to meditation in times of uncertainty and challenge.
Tammy Delaney-Plugowsky shows leaders how to connect with the body and the breath.
July 31, 2025
Tammy Delaney-Plugowsky was an executive in the public-health sector in Canada during the COVID-19 crisis. She was working long hours under pressure to meet exceptional demands, while also raising three kids. Sure, she was experiencing brain fog, and drinking and eating more than usual to take the edge off, but, for the most part, she thought she was coping. One day, her body physically shut down. What at first seemed to be disease turned out to be the effects of prolonged stress.
That moment of reckoning led Delaney-Plugowsky to begin engaging with meditation and breathwork. These practices allowed her to quiet her mind enough to connect with her body and a deeper truth: How she was operating was unsustainable—and unfulfilling. She ultimately pivoted to create Executive Exhale, a somatic-informed leadership-resilience company for those in health and service industries. “As leaders, we need to know how to pause,” Delaney-Plugowsky says. “We can’t lead others if we’re disconnected from ourselves.”
In the words of modern philosopher Bayo Akomolafe, “Times are urgent, we must slow down.”
Meditation at its core, experts say, is a way of pausing, stopping long enough to observe the subtleties of thought, emotion, and sensation that otherwise go unnoticed. Many of the world’s most influential leaders attribute their steadiness to a daily sitting practice. Ray Dalio, founder and CIO mentor of asset-management fund Bridgewater Associates, has said that the best advice he can give anyone is to meditate. This ancient practice reaches back thousands of years but has become particularly relevant today, as executives navigate immense uncertainty and rapidly shifting conditions, from tariffs to volatile global politics to AI.
An extensive body of research shows that meditation regulates emotions, improves focus, spurs creativity, and leads to better decision-making. A study from Harvard Medical School found that mindfulness rewires brain regions related to learning and working-memory capacity. An INSEAD and Wharton School collaboration found a 15-minute daily practice counteracts a tendency toward the sunk-cost fallacy, which many consider the most destructive and costly cognitive bias affecting organizations.
Matthias Birk teaches stilling the mind to the highest achievers.
While many executives may come to meditation for stress management or to improve performance, Matthias Birk, an instructor at Columbia Business School, global director of partner development at White & Case LLP, and Zen teacher, says they often find much more, as Delaney-Plugowsky’s story illustrates. “Meditation is a great source of tapping into intuition,” Birk says. He explains how, during periods of uncertainty, leaders can’t rely on what’s worked for them in the past. The circumstances can’t be controlled. “They have to be able to listen deeply and attune to what needs to be done now,” he says.
Birk, who with stints at Goldman Sachs and McKinsey & Company has spent his career guiding high achievers, points to what he sees as the defining traits of the greatest leaders throughout time, such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. “There is a strong connection between great leadership and the ability to self-transcend,” Birk says. These leaders, he explains, were able to move beyond personal desires and fears to a purpose that serves the greater good. “The true outliers, who were able to move society beyond what we thought was capable and lift people to new levels of consciousness, led from self-transcendence,” Birk says.
Photo Credits: Maria Teresa Tovar Romero, Michael H, Tim Robberts, Boonchai Wedmakawand, Nes, MoMo Productions/Getty Images
