Founder and Chief Executive, Mindfulness Works

Michael Chaskalson is the founder and Chief Executive of Mindfulness Works. He coaches senior people and personally delivers much of their training.

The author of “The Mindful Workplace” (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), Michael is one of the world's foremost proponents of the use of mindfulness in workplace settings. He has a masters degree with distinction in the clinical applications of mindfulness and more than thirty-five years of personal practice of mindfulness and related disciplines. Michael has delivered mindfulness training to groups and senior individuals in a wide range of organisations around the world – banks and financial services organisations, professional services firms, media companies, construction companies, the NHS, the civil service and several leading business schools.

Michael also has an entrepreneurial background. In 1979 he founded a fair-trade company. Now known as Windhorse:evolution, the company has sales of £10 million and employs 200 people in the UK and elsewhere. Having given his shareholding to a charitable trust, Michael left the company in 1988 and devoted himself to investigating, teaching and studying mindfulness and related matters. He is an honorary lecturer at Bangor University, where he is a member of the Core Teaching Team at the Centre for Mindfulness Research and Practice in the School of Psychology. He is also on the faculty of the Executive Masters in Positive Leadership and Strategy at the IE Business School in Madrid.

Michael’s work is deeply informed by his own mindfulness practice and his knowledge of the contemporary research – including cutting-edge neuroscience research – into the use of mindfulness in a wide variety of contexts.