Mindfulness At Work Essentials For Dummies

Shamash Alidina, Juliet Adams

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780730319481
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

Manage stress and boost your productivity at work using mindfulness

Mindfulness at Work Essentials For Dummies explores the many benefits of utilising mindfulness techniques in the workplace, offering managers, HR professionals and businesspeople of all levels guidance on how mindfulness can help with the development of core business skills. You'll discover the key concepts of mindfulness and quickly grasp how its implementation in the workplace is a win-win for you, your team and your organisation as a whole.

Innovative companies like Google have made mindfulness in the workplace a hot topic—and for good reason. Mindfulness can be hugely beneficial on a personal level, as it has been proven to enhance one's effectiveness and ability to live in the present moment. These skills and techniques are equally valuable in the workplace, leading to improved working behaviour and better team building. With this handy guide, you'll discover all the tips and tricks to incorporate — and benefit from — mindfulness in the workplace.

• Provides an introduction to mindfulness and how it can help improve your working behaviour
• Offers useful tips on incorporating mindfulness into your working day
• Demonstrates how organisations can benefit from implementing mindful approaches to work

If you're a self-motivated and open-minded business professional looking to expand your knowledge base and effectiveness in the workplace, Mindfulness at Work Essentials For Dummies will help you implement the practice of mindfulness at work — and become a better leader, mentor or coach.

Chapter 1

Exploring Mindfulness in the Workplace

In This Chapter

Identifying what mindfulness is and is not

Retraining your brain

Introducing mindfulness into the workplace

I n tough economic times, many organisations are looking for new ways to deliver better products and services to customers while simultaneously reducing costs. Carrying on as normal isn’t an option. Organisations are looking for sustainable ways to be more innovative. Leaders must really engage staff, and everyone needs to become more resilient in the face of ongoing change. For these reasons, more and more organisations are offering staff training in mindfulness.

This chapter talks about what mindfulness is and why so many leading organisations are investing in it.

Becoming More Mindful at Work

In this section you discover what mindfulness is. More importantly, you also discover what mindfulness is not! You also find out why mindfulness has become so important in the modern-day workplace.

Clarifying what mindfulness is

Have you ever driven somewhere and arrived at your destination remembering nothing about your journey? Or grabbed a snack and noticed a few moments later that all you have left is an empty packet? Most people have! These are common examples of ‘mindlessness’, or ‘going on auto-pilot’.

Like many humans, you’re probably ‘not present’ for much of your own life. You may fail to notice the good things in your life or hear what your body is telling you. You probably also make your life harder than it needs to be by poisoning yourself with toxic self-criticism.

Mindfulness can help you to become more aware of your thoughts, feelings and sensations in a way that suspends judgement and self-criticism. Developing the ability to pay attention to and see clearly whatever is happening moment by moment does not eliminate life’s pressures, but it can help you respond to them in a more productive, calmer manner.

Learning and practising mindfulness can help you to recognise and step away from habitual, often unconscious emotional and physiological reactions to everyday events. Practising mindfulness allows you to be fully present in your life and work and improves your quality of life.

Mindfulness can help you to recognise, slow down or stop automatic and habitual reactions, and see situations with greater focus and clarity.

Mindfulness at work is all about developing awareness of thoughts, emotions and physiology and how they interact with one another. Mindfulness is also about being aware of your surroundings, helping you better understand the needs of those around you.

Mindfulness training is like going to the gym. In the same way as training a muscle, you can train your brain to direct your attention to where you want it to be. In simple terms, mindfulness is all about managing your mind.

Recognising what mindfulness isn’t

Misleading myths about mindfulness abound. Here are a few:

Myth 1: ‘I will need to visit a Buddhist centre, go on a retreat or travel to the Far East to learn mindfulness.’

Experienced mindfulness instructors are operating all over the world. Many teachers now teach mindfulness to groups of staff in the workplace. One-to-one mindfulness teaching can be delivered in the office, in hotel meeting rooms or even via the web. Some people do attend retreats after learning mindfulness if they want to deepen their knowledge, experience peace and quiet, or gain further tuition, but doing so isn’t essential.

Myth 2: ‘Practising mindfulness will conflict with my religious beliefs.’

Mindfulness isn’t a religion. For example, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) are entirely secular — as are most workplace programmes. No religious belief of any kind is necessary. Mindfulness can help you step back from your mental noise and tune in to your own innate wisdom. Mindfulness is practised by people of all faiths and by those with no spiritual beliefs.

Myth 3: ‘I’m too busy to sit and be quiet for any length of time.’

When you’re busy, the thought of sitting and ‘doing nothing’ may seem like the last thing you want to do. Just 15 minutes a day spent practising mindfulness can help you to become more productive and less distracted. Then you’ll be able to make the most of your busy day and get more done in less time. When you first start practising mindfulness, you’ll almost certainly experience mental distractions, but if you persevere you’ll find it easier to tune out distractions and to manage your mind. As time goes on, your ability to concentrate increases as does your sense of wellbeing and feeling of control over your life.

Myth 4: ‘Mindfulness and meditation are one and the same. Mindfulness is just a trendy new name.’

Fact: Mindfulness often involves specific meditation practices.
Fiction: All meditation is the same.

Many popular forms of meditation are all about relaxation — leaving your troubles behind and imagining yourself in a calm and tranquil ‘special place’ Mindfulness helps you to find out how to live with your life in the present moment rather than run away from it. Mindfulness is about approaching life and things that you find difficult and exploring them with openness, rather than avoiding them. Most people find that practising mindfulness does help them to relax, but that this relaxation is a welcome by-product, not the objective.

Training your attention: The power of focus

Are you one of the millions of workers who routinely put in long hours, often for little or no extra pay? In the current climate of cutbacks, job losses and ‘business efficiencies’, many people feel the need to work longer hours just to keep on top of their workload. However, research shows that working longer hours does not mean that you get more done. Actually, if you continue to work when past your peak, your performance slackens off and continues to do so as time goes on (see Chapter 4).

Discovering how to focus and concentrate better is the key to maintaining peak performance. Recognising when you’ve slipped past peak performance and then taking steps to bring yourself back to peak is also vital. Mindfulness comes in at this point. Over time, it helps you focus your attention to where you want it to be.

Applying mindful attitudes

Practising mindfulness involves more than just training your brain to focus. It also teaches you some alternative mindful attitudes to life’s challenges. You discover the links between your thoughts, emotions and physiology. You find out that what’s important isn’t what happens to you, but how you choose to respond. This statement may sound simple, but most people respond to situations based on their mental programming (past experiences and predictions of what will happen next). Practising mindfulness makes you more aware of how your thoughts, emotions and physiology impact on your responses to people and situations. This awareness then enables you to choose how to respond rather than reacting on auto-pilot. You may well find that you respond in a different manner.

By gaining a better understanding of your brain’s response to life events, you can use mindfulness techniques to reduce your fight-or-flight response and regain your body’s ‘rest and relaxation’ state. You will see things more clearly and get more done.

Mindfulness also brings you face to face with your inner bully — the voice in your head that says you’re not talented enough, not smart enough or not good enough. By learning to treat thoughts like these as ‘just mental processes and not facts’, the inner bully loses its grip on your life and you become free to reach your full potential.

These examples are just a few of the many ways that a mindful attitude can have a positive impact on your life and career prospects.

Finding Out Why Your Brain Needs Mindfulness

Recent advances in brain-scanning technology are helping us to understand why our brain needs mindfulness. In this section you discover powerful things about your brain — its evolution, its hidden rules, how thoughts shape your brain structure, and the basics of how your brain operates at work.

Discovering your brain’s hidden rules

Imagine yourself as one of your ancient ancestors — a cave dweller. In ancient times you had to make life-or-death decisions every day. You had to decide whether it was best to approach a reward (such as killing a deer for food) or avoid a threat (such as a fierce predator charging at you). If you failed to gain your reward, in this example a deer to eat, you’d probably live to hunt another day. But, if you failed to avoid the threat, you’d be dead, never to hunt again.

As a result of facing these daily dangers, your brain has evolved to minimise threat. Unfortunately, this has led to the brain spending much more time looking for potential risks and problems than seeking rewards and embracing new opportunities. This tendency is called ‘the human negativity bias’.

When your brain detects a potential threat, it floods your system with powerful hormones designed to help you evade mortal danger. The sudden flood of dozens of hormones into your body results in your heart rate speeding up, blood pressure increasing, pupils dilating and veins constricting to send more blood to major muscle groups to help you sprint away from danger. More oxygen is pumped into your lungs, and non-essential systems (such as digestion, the immune system, and routine body repair and maintenance) shut down to provide more energy for emergency functions. Your brain starts to have trouble focusing on small tasks because it’s trying to maintain focus on the big picture to anticipate and avoid further threat.

Threat or risk avoidance is controlled by the primitive areas of your brain, which operate quickly. This speed explains why, when you unexpectedly encounter a snake in the woods, your primitive brain decides on the best way to keep you safe from harm with no conscious thought and you jump out of the way long before your higher brain engages to find a rational solution.

This process is great from an evolutionary perspective, but can be bad news in modern-day life. Many people routinely overestimate the potential threat involved in everyday work such as a critical boss, a failed presentation or social humiliation. These modern-day ‘threats’ are treated by the brain in exactly the same way as your ancestor’s response to mortal danger. This fight-or-flight response was designed to be used for short periods of time. Unfortunately, when under pressure at work it can remain activated for long periods of time. This activation can lead to poor concentration, inability to focus, low immunity and even serious illness.

Mindfulness training helps you to recognise when you’re in this heightened state of arousal and be able to reduce or even switch off the fight-or-flight response. It also helps you develop the skill to trigger at will your ‘rest and relaxation’ response, bringing your body back to normal, allowing it to repair itself, and increasing both your sense of wellbeing and ability to focus on work.

Recognising that you are what you think

For many years it was thought that once you reached a certain age your brain became fixed. We now know that the adult brain retains impressive powers of neuroplasticity; that is, the ability to change its structure and function in response to experience. It was also believed that, if you damaged certain areas of the brain (as a result of a stroke or other brain injury), you’d no longer be capable of performing certain brain functions. We now know that in some cases the brain can re-wire itself and train a different area to undertake the functions that the damaged part previously carried out. The brain’s hard wiring (neural pathways) change constantly in response to thoughts and experiences.

Neuroplasticity offers amazing opportunities to reinvent yourself and change the way you do and think about things. Your unique brain wiring is a result of your thoughts and experiences in life. Blaming your genes or upbringing; saying ‘it’s not my fault, that’s how I was born’ is no longer a good excuse!

In order to take advantage of this knowledge, you need to develop awareness of your thoughts, and the impact that these thoughts have on your emotions and physiology. The problem is that, if you’re like most people, you’re probably rarely aware of the majority of your thoughts. Let’s face it; you’d be exhausted if you were. Mindfulness helps you to develop the ability to passively observe your thoughts as mental processes. In turn, this allows you to observe patterns of thought and decide whe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents at a Glance
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Exploring Mindfulness in the Workplace
• Chapter 2: Exploring the Benefits of Mindfulness in the Workplace
• Chapter 3: Applying Mindfulness in the Workplace
• Chapter 4: Boosting your Mental Resilience
• Chapter 5: Practising Mindfulness in the Digital Age
• Chapter 6: Using Mindfulness to Assist Different Business Functions
• Chapter 7: Integrating Mindfulness with Coaching
• Chapter 8: Commissioning Mindfulness Training in the Workplace
• Chapter 9: Thriving on the Challenges of Leadership
• Chapter 10: Leading People, Change and Strategy
• Chapter 11: Ten Ways to Mindfully Manage Work Pressures
• Index
• About the Authors
• Business & Investing
• More Dummies Products