Preventing Burnout Through Mindful Leadership

Pankaj Singh—”Sing”—is a visionary leader who’s spent over 20 years revolutionizing businesses and building high-performance teams. As a former C-suite executive, he’s driven double-digit growth, streamlined operations, and transformed organizations worldwide. But his real power comes from something unexpected: Mindfulness.

Raised in an affluent family in India, Sing mastered classical music by age 13 but was restless. At 14, he was sent to train under a lama, where he first discovered the profound impact of mindfulness. Fast forward to 2020, His passion for mindful leadership was ignited during a high-pressure ransomware crisis early in his career. Faced with the overwhelming stress of guiding his team through uncharted territory, he turned to mindfulness to anchor himself. That pivotal experience revealed the transformative power of presence, empathy, and emotional intelligence in leadership—and it inspired his life’s mission to share these tools with others.

Today, Sing is an advocate for redefining leadership in a fast-paced world. His signature frameworks, The Ascendancy Action™ System and Mindful Leadership Mastery Compass™, equip leaders to transcend stress, foster resilience, and cultivate authenticity. Whether inspiring audiences through keynote speeches, mentoring teams, or crafting leadership roadmaps, Sing’s vision is clear: to empower leaders to transform challenges into opportunities and lead with clarity, compassion, and purpose.

 

The Interview Transcript

Hugh Ballou:
Welcome to the Nonprofit Exchange. This is Hugh Ballou, your host for this episode, and I’ve got a fascinating guest today. So give us your name and a little bit about you. You’ve got a passion for this work. So talk about your work. Now, our title today is a big deal. It’s about preventing burnout through mindful leadership. And I happen to know burnout is a major problem with non-profit leaders. So come on, tell us about yourself.

Pankaj Singh:
Nice to meet you, and it is a pleasure to be on your show. I’ve heard a lot. I go by Singh, and it’s easy for everyone. Singh, singhleadership.com, Singh everywhere. I worked in corporate America for about 23 years. And right in midst of COVID 2020 October, I faced as a chief technology officer of an organization, I faced a ransomware attack. We came out of that full blown ransomware attack during COVID in less than 30 hours. But what I realized after that was there are certain things, practices that I have been following without naming it mindful. And it goes back to when I was 14 years old, because of my health situation, I had an opportunity to get mindful practice training from a Lama. And I have always used that in my own life. And the teams that I have built in 23 years in corporate America, I never used the word mindful, except that I was using a lot of different micro practices. It was after that instant in 2020, October, that I decided to actually create a practice, a framework, a program that can help a lot of people across industry with burnout. During COVID, it just happened that there were a lot of people going through uncertainties and I was able to work through with them, which also allowed me to build out the whole program with that. So today, I work with leaders, teams that are drained, that are burning out, and help them to come out of autopilot by very simple, mindful micro exercises that takes less than 16, 18, 20 seconds to connect, to break your autopilot and connect with your prefrontal cortex, which is your logic part of the brain. In this last two years, three years, I have published two books. One is called Ascendancy Action System, and the purpose was I’ve just published all the frameworks out there if somebody wants to use it. And then the second one is a compass, the seven relationship that every individual need to have in their life personally or professionally to move forward. And the third part of the program, which is a big part of the program, is connecting people with their true inner purpose for themselves individually and for their teams through a inner compass journey program that we have.

Hugh Ballou:
Wow. Now, we’re talking to non-profit leaders, and as you know, there are quite a few of those in America. And some people say that burnout is at a crisis level. It’s hard for entrepreneurs to run a business. you take all that difficulty and you magnify all the rules and the fact that we work with volunteers. And mostly nonprofits are underfunded and we don’t have a lot of leadership. So it makes it one of the most difficult places to work. So it’s no wonder people are leaving. So am I right? And to talk about the burnout, what sets up this burnout? And is it a major deal with nonprofit leaders?

Pankaj Singh:
Burnout is a major deal. Burnout is real. Burnout is major deal. So there are two aspects to understand why burnout happens and why it’s very difficult to break that cycle without getting a proper help. So first of all, especially on a nonprofit organization, the leaders will get this better that the purpose is something, the best of what we have to give others, to help them move, right? That’s what the whole not-for-profit organizations are doing most of the time. But in return, there should be fulfillment. The fulfillment is in three Gs, gratitude that people thank you that you held them, grace that you see your effort reaping benefit, and third, your own financial growth. And burnout happens when you are constantly pouring out of your jug, and gratitude, grace, or your own growth is not coming through back to you. That causes, starts causing burnout. The first step of burnout is self-doubt. and you have self-doubt for 20 seconds, and then you have another thought, and then another thought, and next thing you know, you have given the control of your life to amygdala, which is fight-and-flight mode of the brain. Now, from a neuroscience standpoint, what happens is the moment your amygdala gets triggered, your brain seizes all the resources so that it is ready to fight. So, biologically what’s happening is your body is not getting, your organs are not getting all the nutrients because the brain is thinking it’s a fight and flight, we have to reserve resources. Now, as that cycle continues through the day, all your organs that should be getting the right amount of air, right amount of nutrition, blood circulation, all those things, that’s not happening. starts manifesting in problems with your body, shoulder pain, toughness around your jaw, irritation, all those things. So essentially, when we talk about burnout, there are two aspects of it, like I said. One is the notion, the second is manifestation on your body. So the moment you have those manifestation of tightness in your jaw or shoulder or something different that happens to every person, just stop, pause there, and think about what is your body telling you, right? Stress is not a problem. All these signals that body is doing is data that people need to learn how to use it to change it, to transform it. Those feelings that you’re having, those manifestation of those problems on your body is your brain’s way of saying, dude, I’m going to take over this thing. Either you pause and take over or else I’m going to take over.

Hugh Ballou:
Well, that’s a shift into an emotional state. Psychiatrist Murray Bowen, who created Family Systems, talks about anxiety, but he also talks about staying in our thinking brain and not in our emotional. Now, our emotions form our thinking, but you’re calling us to a different way, being conscious of what’s going on. So some of the causes of burnout, you talk about overwhelm and shifting of focus. So sometimes we have too few resources and we do feel overwhelmed. How do we deal with that? And then sometimes we feel all alone.

Pankaj Singh:
Awesome, so three questions that everybody should always have ready in their mind. So it is whether you’re sitting alone, I help high school kids to get off of the digital addiction that they are scrolling all day long on something, right? Or otherwise people who are trying to figure out and in that thought process that they cannot break it, three simple question that you can start with. Take a deep breath and ask yourself, what is the outcome? that you want out of this moment. Whether it is a meeting, whether you’re writing something, whether you and I are having a conversation, or you’re just sitting dull or watching and scrolling, binge-watching Netflix, whatever it is, any activity you start, start with that question, what is the outcome I want out of this? The moment you ask that question, what you’re doing is you are engaging your prefrontal cortex, your logic brain, and giving an intention to what is going to happen. The moment you do that, Even if it is, OK, I’m scrolling. You gave a name to an activity, so the brain is going to accept that as normal, not as firefight. So that’s the first question, that you name something. The second is, because now you have the intention, the second question becomes, if you were not here, who was the best person to be doing this work? Now that is called intentional delegation, intentional prioritization. And then the third question is, if you are not here, what else you could be doing that will be more valuable than this? So that’s reframing intentionally in less than 30 seconds.

Hugh Ballou:
Amazing. So it really doesn’t take, um, active Congress or a whole lot of time to change, change your posture on this. So, um, you talk about, um, in anxiety and stress are kind of in the same ballpark for me. So you talk about turning stress into strategic clarity. How does that work with within it? We think we’re in a high pressure environment, but maybe we create that ourselves.

Pankaj Singh:
Right, so just understand what’s happening from a neuroscience standpoint, right? There are incidents that’s happening or thought process. First of all, the brain is never empty, right? When people talk about becoming focused, they think I have to stop brain from thinking. No, you cannot stop brain. If the neurons in the brain don’t fire, there’s a bigger problem than stress, right? So it’s better that the neurons keep firing in the brain. The question is, A thought that comes to us, if it is not controlled, if it is not named, if it is not framed in a context that you can use it, it will always overwhelm you. Why? Because the moment, I give example to people, right? I mean, my kid was two years old, we bought him a software and we named it Bob. Mr. Bob is still in our conversation today. Every time we have that word, Mr. Bob, everybody smiles because we remember the smiling kid, two year old that we had at that time, right? that is what happens with the name that you put in if you reframe a particular context or a conversation to say this is not frustration this is a fear from a lot of people get say that it is frustration you dig in down it is fear of unknown that they label as frustration Because once you know and expand your emotional vocabulary to say what I am coining as frustration is really fear of not knowing the result of this activity I’m going to do. Now that’s a different conversation for the brain to have than to think of frustration. Think of anxiety. Think of depression. So having that Extended vocabulary to be able to explain and for this what we have what we have you now is we have a chat GPT that’s live and people can use it as a conversational mechanism for improving their vocabulary emotional vocabulary. The role of. training your attention. It’s as simple as that, training your attention on a certain number of times in a day. And I give your listeners a phenomenal tool. It’s called STOP, S-T-O-P, right? So anytime, next time you see a stop sign or a stop signal, or you stop doing something, just remember S-T-O-P. S stands for stop and take three deep breath. T is to think about The last thought that came in your brain. Always observe. Observe how that is manifesting in your body. What sensation you’re having in your body? What smell you’re feeling? What sound you’re hearing? Write quickly and put a name to it. So in mindful practice, this is called naming your emotions. The more name you can give to things, the more your brain does not rush into fight and flight. And the more you can work on allowing brain to not go into fight and flight, the more resources the brain releases for your body to consume. and the more healthier your organs are. The good news on that is we have an assessment now. It takes 25 minutes for anyone, 17 and above. We have not tested with students below 17. In 25 minutes, it tells you four different parts of your life and which archetype you belong in that. But the bigger thing is it identifies what frustrates you and what fulfills you. So we take a note of that. It tells you your blind spots, how you want to be led, how you need others. But the main thing is once you understand and you have a list of what frustrates you and fulfills you, then we start working with individuals to say, every day, make it a point that first of all, you start documenting, start reflecting what frustrated you, what fulfilled you. The goal is in next two to three weeks, let’s identify two to three activities, simple activities that is frustrating you and how you can stop getting engaged in those. And for leaders, it is maybe delegating a task to someone, right? Maybe restructuring, reorganizing your calendar so that you’re not always back to back to back to back and you have some breathing space. Similarly, with what fulfills you, how can we identify at least one activity daily that is fulfilling to you? Because every time you do something that is fulfilling, you are actually working with your beliefs and values and you get that much more adrenaline in your body to drive with passion.

Hugh Ballou:
So we get into these situations. Sometimes there’s myths that we tell ourselves, or there’s myths that are connected with the kind of industry that we work in, especially with the nonprofit leaders. What are some of the myths that paralyze us or put us into this situation?

Pankaj Singh:
The first one is overcommitment. and undervaluing what we provide. That is most common that I see. The second is, I can never not give. And what I mean by that is, if you’re always giving out, if you’re always pouring out of your jug, and there’s nothing that’s filling your jug, there’s only so much you can pour out. Helping others, looking after well-being of others is important, but at the same time, we have to look internally and make sure that this organization, this individual, this team that is always driving to give others actually receives from universe, right? I give a good example of cyclical, the cycles that we have in the universe, right? And one of the things that we have done as a humanity, not one individual person, as a humanity, we have broken that cyclicality. Right? What I mean by that is people are, evening is supposed to be for resting and rejuvenating. So next day morning, when sun comes out, you’re ready to run and do the thing. The brain is designed in a way that after sunset, the chemicals excretes in your brain that allows you to sleep. And then before sunrise, the chemical changes that allows you to wake up fresh. A lot of people in today’s day and age are in front of a blue light all the way to 10, 12, 1 p.m. or right before they close their eyes. Till you have the blue light in front of your eyes, your brain is thinking it’s still sun. Blue light is equivalent to sun. The chemicals that are supposed to be there, the metabolism to be able to allow the brain to sleep, it does not start till two hours after you shut your eyes. But then you have put your alarm in the morning to wake up because you don’t want to miss a meeting. You suddenly break the cycle of the brain, you wake up, your brain is not ready to drive you. So again, you’re starting the day with an autopilot. The same thing extends with Teams. especially with limited resources. How do we understand, learn and understand the cycles of our business on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly basis? And how we can ensure that our teams are structured to do maximum work in the morning cycle of the business and least work at the evening and night cycles of the business. I give this example all the time, especially it’s easy to understand that for accounting and finance folks, their evenings are typically mid of the month, right? And their mornings are typically end of the month or beginning of the month. Just to give you an example of what I mean by that, right? So middle of the month, how do you ensure that your team has enough rest? At least they get to enjoy and they get to engage in things that is not draining 24-7 so that they can then come back in the cycle and do that. Go ahead.

Hugh Ballou:
So you mentioned this picture before. I can imagine a pitcher of tea and we’ll pour everybody a glass of tea and then there’s nothing left for us. So self-care is not being selfish. That’s right. And how are we going to care? Like you get on their airplane, they give you the speech and they put on your mask first.

Pankaj Singh:
Mask first, yeah.

Hugh Ballou:
So we can’t serve others if we don’t care for ourselves. That’s a big problem in the non-profit community because we think We’re driven by sharing and supporting and helping others, and we forget about ourselves. So you’ve talked about mindfulness a little bit. That’s a big part of what you’re doing. So what role does mindfulness play in leaders making better decisions?

Pankaj Singh:
Awesome. So let’s clarify what mindfulness is before I give you how to do it and what to do. For anyone who’s listening to this, mindfulness, when I say mindfulness, it does not mean to twist your body in 200 different ways. It does not mean that you need to have a Zen office. It does not mean that you have to go to retreat. Mindfulness just means your mind is always full. The brain never stops. Neurons are always firing. Can you hold your breath and tune into that intelligence? Can you become present and stay present to be able to tune into all the information that your brain is collecting and you become an observer? You become an observer to be able to observe all the information and intellectual thing your brain is collecting and generating so you can use that. That’s what mindfulness means. It means to be present in the conversation. It means to be intentional in the conversation. It means to have very clear values that help you guide those decisions moving forward. There’s another podcast that I’m getting started to start here and conscious data, we use that a lot. There is nothing that we do in today’s world that is not information or data, right? The question becomes, are you making decisions that are convenient for you? Or are you making decisions that is intentional? The previous statement that you said about selfish, I challenge, especially leaders in non-for-profit segment, that think about this way. If you are the one providing the services and solutions to people who need it, is it not selfish that you are not taking care of yourself and killing that resource who can be the best partner for the community? Right? So self-care is selfish. Self-care is not selfish.

Hugh Ballou:
Whoa. So we’re going to look at your website for a minute for people to know more about you. And so it is, I want you to tell people what they’re going to find. It’s singhleadership.com. Now, some people are listening on a podcast, so they can’t see it. So describe it for those people as well.

Pankaj Singh:
Singleadership.com has got four simple sections. On the top, if you will see, homepage and work with me is a similar thing, similar story. There are three different types of engagement that I have. I work with people individually, I work with teams, and then I work with groups that is not necessarily part of a team. I know that becomes a little By the way, the pop-up that comes up, that’s made to help with rapid intervention. Since I have added that pop-on, this one, since I’ve added this one on the side, I am blessed and honored that I have saved at least 15 suicides. These are people who cannot call someone, and they cannot wait two weeks to get on my calendar. They can hit here, and this has a special link to my calendar on my phone directly that I can get on them with them immediately. So being able to just be present, and there’s no fee for this. I just want to be present to help you talk and guide you in a way that otherwise is not available for you. The podcast section is where I go live every Tuesday at noon Pacific. This is Mindful Leadership Transforming Lives podcast. Today will be the 28th episode of it. And everything that I share with people, it’s all out in the podcast also. I give them to every podcast is a new tool. That’s just like I shared with you the stop. The speaking engagement is where I do a lot of keynote speech and workshops with companies. That’s that. And I’ll let you get there. So that’s the speaking section. Yes. And then the last will be work with me. That’s where it talks about three different ways. One is leadership training. The second one is team training. And the third one is cohort training.

Hugh Ballou:
Lots of good stuff there. If people are worried about not getting down all the stuff that you’ve, a lot of good stuff, there’s a full transcript. If they go to thenonprivateexchange.org, there’s a full transcript with all these soundbites, which are really helpful. pieces of information that can help us reframe. So remember, there’s a link on his website if you need him. So as we’re ending up this really helpful interview, what’s one small practice somebody listening could start today to shift from feeling overwhelmed to being focused?

Pankaj Singh:
Do a three-part pause. Do a three-part pause. The first one is name it. So label your actual emotions and how it is manifesting on your body. Name it. Frame it. Ask if this is urgent, important, or just noise. Because once you have the name, you can frame to say, is it urgent and important, or it is just a noise that you have to work through? And then claim it. Choose one intentional act right there, no matter how small it is. no matter how small it is psychologically the way brain works is if you say something if you write something and no matter how small a body gesture that you do brain latches on it so most of the training most of the workshops that we do it’s all neuroscience back

Hugh Ballou:
This is so helpful. There is hope. So Singh, I like that, being a musical conductor for 40 years. Singh, you’ve given us some inspiration and some wisdom today. Thank you for being my guest on the Nonprofit Exchange.

Pankaj Singh:
Thank you.