For more than 25 years, Mill Valley resident Jonathan Reynolds has shown a brilliant knack for translating the teachings of mindfulness to corporate America. In 2016, he launched Mindful Life, Mindful Work, a business that codified that work.
Now Reynolds is being honored by CEO Monthly magazine, naming Mindful Life, Mindful Work, Inc’s Reynolds 2024 CEO of the Year for the region of California in the category of ‘mindfulness and wellbeing’!
“As a company we’re grateful for this honor, as the efforts of all of our team members – those past and present; those in the public eye and those working behind the scenes – have contributed to Mindful Life, Mindful Work, Inc. being recognized as an important voice in the mindfulness and wellbeing space. Congratulations to the entire MLMW team!” Reynolds says.
Consider the journey that got Reynolds to this place. He grew up in Door County, Wisconsin, a peninsula between Green Bay and Lake Michigan that is “paradise for the thousands of people that visit in summer but mostly miserable” for the 28,000 or so who live there year-round and get to experience nearly nine months of winter each year.
Reynolds studied biology in college “because I didn’t know any better.” But like many young people in search of answers, he was drawn to yoga and meditation. “I needed to find better ways to live,” he says.
Reynolds took a trip to India, a “soul-searching adventure” that showed him that he wanted “mindfulness to be a cornerstone of my work.” He became a therapist for several years, only to realize that he “really wanted my sphere of influence to be greater than what it was,” he says.
That’s when mindfulness-oriented coaching came into play, as Reynolds began to draw on his psychology degree from John F. Kennedy University as well as an executive leadership certificate he earned from Cornell University. He built that solo practice to the point of launching Mindful Life, Mindful Work two years ago, bringing mindful meditation, a type of meditation that focuses the mind on the present moment, into Bay Area companies big and small. Whether he works with individuals or teams within companies, Reynolds seeks to identify “simple and practical ways to improve performance, efficiency, and workplace cultures by integrating mindfulness sensibilities,” he says.
His primary focus has been leadership coaching – helping leaders shift from a supervisor mindset to a coaching mindset. “How to get the highest performance out of your employees and yourself,” he says.
Over the years, Reynolds has worked with everyone from lower level employees who need help with “negotiating, leveraging and positioning” their way up the food chain to companies that reach to work with their entire “C-Suite” of executives.
“It’s all about people, pay and purpose – the culture, the money and the reason you get out bed in the morning,” he says.
Reynolds’ leap occurred around the time that mindfulness meditation became wildly popular and catapulted into a billion-dollar business, according to Fortune magazine.