Saint Anselm Workshop Links Mindfulness to Leadership Judgment

At Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire, the Mindful Leadership Workshop turned mindfulness into something managers could use the next workday: a way to notice what is happening, read new realities faster, and respond under pressure with better judgment. The April 15 session at the Savard Welcome Center was free and open to the public, with registration required and light refreshments offered, but its real appeal was practical. It treated mindfulness less as a wellness slogan than as a leadership tool for meetings, burnout, and organizational stress.

The workshop featured Annabel Beerel, whom Saint Anselm described as an executive leadership and ethics consultant and a former Distinguished Chair of Ethics at Southern New Hampshire University and former interim dean of religious life at Wellesley College. Her own professional profile matches that focus. Beerel’s seminars center on leadership, ethics and mindfulness, with topics that include leadership and new realities, self-awareness, decision-making strategies, managing change, emotional intelligence and the power of mindfulness. Her book profile adds that she has worked with multinationals, educational and nonprofit organizations, founded and led an international AI company, and served as president and CEO of the New England Women’s Leadership Institute.

Saint Anselm’s framing of the event gave mindfulness a clear working definition: the intentional directing of awareness to the present moment in a focused and sustained way without judgment. The college then linked that practice to leadership, arguing that leading well means noticing what is arising, identifying new realities and helping organizations adapt to them. That translation matters for supervisors, department heads and student leaders alike, because it gives a meditation concept a workplace vocabulary centered on attention management, change and accountability.

Research supports that link. A 2024 systematic review found that leadership development programs by themselves do not reliably build leaders’ core socioemotional skills, while self-leadership combined with mindfulness may help close that gap. A separate 2024 review identified attention, awareness and authenticity as the main qualities associated with mindful leadership. Workplace evidence maps also show that mindfulness interventions are increasingly used to support employee health, wellbeing and performance.

The workshop also fit neatly into Saint Anselm’s broader leadership culture. Its S.E.E.K. Anselmian Leadership Development Program says student leaders are taught to integrate what they have learned and collaborate across roles. Beerel had already appeared at the college in 2025 for a discussion of leadership in times of “radical uncertainty,” underscoring how central her work has become to the school’s leadership conversation.