[1/2] Around the word: mindfulness - Mindfulness in the workplace: which techniques for which benefits?
In the first diptych of our new series ‘Around the word’, Peter Daly, EDHEC professor and a qualified mindfulness teacher, explains why and how mindfulness techniques can help managers and leaders in their daily work.
For many years now, Peter Daly, Professor at EDHEC Business School and a qualified mindfulness teacher, has been using these techniques to train managers and leaders in his modules. This involves using mindfulness meditation, mindful and compassionate listening and a plethora of other techniques to raise awareness of the importance of mindfulness in management and leadership.
In this article, Prof Daly outlines what mindfulness is, its benefits in the workplace as well as the attitudes you need to adopt to embrace mindfulness. He finishes this article by offering a recording (1) of a brief mindfulness meditation exercise that you can try to get yourself started on a mindful journey.
What is mindfulness?
Mindfulness involves quieting the mind and observing our flow of experience dispassionately to help us de-automize our habitual reactions to those experiences. Jon Kabat-Zinn has operationally defined mindfulness (2) as “the awareness that arises from paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally”. Mindfulness enables us to open up to new information and see beyond just one point of view.
Buddhist-inspired mindfulness was introduced by Jon Kabat-Zinn into Western psychology when working with medical patients suffering from chronic pain that were unresponsive to medication therapies. He used mindful meditation to help patients focus awareness and attention on experience without attachment to their experiences. This involves stilling the present thoughts and experiencing the full texture of the moment.
What are its benefits for managers and leaders?
Mindfulness can help us improve our decision-making, enhance emotional awareness and intelligence, reduce stress, boost creativity and increase resilience. It can also enhance social relations for those who have a lot of customer- or client-contact in the workplace. Mindfulness enables us to come out of automatic pilot.
However, if we live only on autopilot (a pressured, always-on, information-overloaded and constantly distracted, accelerated work life), then we miss out on lots of important moments. We need to take time for ourselves, and mindfulness means truly being ‘in the now’, not being stuck in the past or planning the future.
Mindfulness helps us to calm our minds, focus on ourselves, connect with our positive emotions, regulate how to react to situations, and balance our individual needs and those of others. Mindfulness boosts our mental capital, i.e. the cognitive and emotional resources that ensure resilience in the face of stress, and the flexibility of mind and learning skills to adapt to a fast-changing, complex and protean workplace.
How can we integrate mindfulness practice into our daily routine?
On a daily basis, you can engage with mindfulness either formally or informally.
Formal mindfulness involves taking a moment in our day to meditate. This may be done seated or lying down with your eyes closed. We focus on the present, on our breathing, physical sensations, emotions, feelings and thoughts. This may involve some specific mindfulness practice such as loving kindness, breathing exercise or visualization. You may want to use guided meditation practice, listening to the words of a mindfulness teacher, or do it yourself freestyle. Many people use mindfulness apps such as Calm, Headspace or Insight Time (3).
Informal mindfulness involves encouraging people to bring mindfulness into their daily lives such as becoming more present in relationships through mindful listening, going for a mindful walk in a park for example by taking everything in (the images and colours, the sounds, the feel of the breeze on your skin, and the smells and odours of nature) or mindfully eating your lunch – via enhanced awareness of the food on your plate, or it may be doing daily chores such as ironing, washing a cup or taking a shower. All these informal mindfulness practices engage with the five senses.
Before beginning, what are the attitudes one needs to embrace?
Jon Kabat Zinn’s outlined 7 attitudes of mindfulness that are important for mindfulness practice and he later added two more.
First, he asks that participants be Patient and allow things to unfold in their own time. We live in a fast-paced, accelerated society and mindfulness affords us the time to slow things down, and for this, we require patience.
Second, we need to be capable of Letting-go: a form of non-attachment where we do not hold onto our emotions, thoughts, feelings and experiences and hence, free ourselves.
Third, we must embrace Acceptance of things as they are in the present moment.
Fourth, we should engage in Non-judgement or the ability to impartially witness and observe our own experience in the present moment without judging, evaluating or categorizing our experience.
Fifth, we must Trust our experience as well as our thoughts, feelings, emotions and sensations and not look outside for any kind of external validation.
Sixth, we must have a Beginner’s mind, i.e. being open to the present with fresh eyes.
Seventh, we must try to be Non-striving, which means not being goal-oriented, fixated on an outcome and always striving for success.
Kabat Zinn later added two more attitudes, namely generosity, which implies being generous with yourself, with our time, our attention, listening and engaging with yourself and giving to yourself and others, and gratitude, which is learning how to be grateful for and noticing the small things in life, hence, creating positive emotions, which increases our subjective sense of well-being. In order to remember these attitudes, we can use the acronym "PLANT BN and 2Gs".
So how do I get started?
Before getting started, one must remember that mindfulness is an extremely personal practice, and one-size does not fit all.
Research (4) suggests that mindfulness is very helpful for those who have lots of social interaction in their daily jobs.
However, you must choose the right kind of mindfulness for you and it is considered more effective to strategically integrate mindfulness when you need it such as prior to a stressful presentation, when meeting with a difficult person, or for once-off major events.
Here, Peter Daly offers you a short mindfulness exercise (1) that comes from the UK College of Mindfulness Meditation handbook, which is being used with permission. So sit comfortably and listen to his voice…
Recording by Peter Daly on a mindfulness exercise (approx. 5 min)
References
(1) Recording available below
(2) Kabat-Zinn, J (2017, 11 January). Defining Mindfulness: What is mindfulness? The founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction explains. Available online from: https://www.mindful.org/jon-kabat-zinn-defining-mindfulness/
(3) CALM - https://www.calm.com
HEADSPACE - https://www.headspace.com
INSIGHT TIME - https://insighttimer.com
(4) Hafenbrack, A. C., Cameron, L. D., Spreitzer, G. M., Zhang, C., Noval, L. J., & Shaffakat, S. (2020). Helping people by being in the present: Mindfulness increases prosocial behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 159, 21-38 - https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2019-54288-001
Photo by Nubelson Fernandes via Unsplash
