The Mindful Workplace

Developing Resilient Individuals and Resonant Organizations with MBSR

Michael Chaskalson

• Éditeur: Wiley-Blackwell
• Année: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781119976912
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Psychology
• Sous-sujet: Industrial & Organizational Psychology

This book offers a practical and theoretical guide to the benefits of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) in the workplace, describing the latest neuroscience research into the effects of mindfulness training and detailing an eight-week mindfulness training course.

• Provides techniques which allow people in organizations to listen more attentively, communicate more clearly, manage stress and foster strong relationships
• Includes a complete eight-week mindfulness training course, specifically customized for workplace settings, along with further reading and training resources
• Written by a mindfulness expert and leading corporate trainer

1

What Is Mindfulness?

It’s hard to define exactly what we mean by mindfulness – it’s more like a rainbow than a single colour. Kabat-Zinn speaks of it as a way of paying attention: on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgementally^{1 (p. 4)} to whatever arises in the field of your experience, and that is a good starting point. Mindfulness is a way of paying attention ‘on purpose’. When you’re mindful, you know that you’re mindful. You’re aware of what you’re thinking, what you’re feeling and what you’re sensing in your body, and you know that you’re aware of these things. Much of the time we’re just not aware in that sense.

Take the case of James, who is driving to an important meeting for which he’s late. He’s feeling tense, hassled and not particularly mindful. A long line of cars has already built up as he approaches the traffic lights on a busy junction. Just as the line begins to close up at the red signal, another car races up from behind him, squeezes past at the last moment and takes James’s place in the queue. James is now precisely one car’s length further back from the lights than he would have been had that car not pushed in. In fact, he’s about 4.2 metres further back and, at an average urban speed of around 15 miles per hour (40.234 metres per second), that means he’ll be more or less one tenth of a second later for his meeting.

But it doesn’t feel like that to James. In that moment, from his perspective, it feels like a complete disaster. ‘Now I’m going to be really late. People are so rude, so pushy! Oh … !!!’ His shoulders tighten, his hands clench on the wheel and his mind begins to race. ‘What a mess! How could I be so late? They’ll never take me seriously. This is so unprofessional … I hate being late … What a pig – pushing in front like that … ’ His stomach starts to churn and he can feel heartburn coming on. His whole body starts to tighten up and he begins to sweat. What James is actually doing here is setting up the conditions for a not very successful meeting. He’s going to be in pretty poor shape when he walks into the meeting room a few minutes late (and one tenth of a second later than he would have been had that car not pushed in front).

Had James been paying mindful attention to his experience, had he been even a little mindful at any point in that unfolding scenario, things might have gone quite differently. He might, for example, have become aware of the way he was gripping the steering wheel. He might have found, for instance, that it was almost painful and that the tension spread from there up his arms and into his shoulders. Bringing some mindful attention to that, he could have deliberately loosened his grip on the wheel. His shoulders might then have softened and his stomach begun to settle. Taking a few deep breaths, he might have thought, ‘Ah well, one car in front – that won’t hurt too much. Now, how shall I best handle this? Will I apologize for being late or just carry on regardless?’

Or he might have become aware of how he was feeling. ‘Gosh I’m angry! Wow! My stomach’s really churning … like a washing machine! OK – let’s just chill a bit. A few deep breaths … ’ Or he might have become aware of his thoughts. ‘Oh yes … Here I go again. Catastrophizing. I’m a few minutes late and I write off the whole meeting … OK … Time for a few deep breaths … Now how am I going to handle this meeting? What would be my most effective opening … ?’ With some mindfulness training, James might have learned to bring a different quality of awareness to his thoughts, feelings or body sensations at times of distress. This capacity to know what we’re thinking, feeling or sensing as it is going on is what we might call the ‘metacognitive’ dimension of mindfulness.

Metacognition refers to our knowledge about our own cognitive processes or anything related to them.² In the context of mindfulness, metacognition extends into the domains of feelings and body-sensations as well. All of these – thoughts, feelings and body-sensations – are experienced in the mind, and metacognition is the mind aware that it is thinking, that it is feeling, that it is sensing. Any one of these metacognitive elements of mindfulness can enter our experience at any time and transform it. Had James become aware that he was feeling a pain in his hands and shoulders from gripping the wheel, or that he was angry, or that he was catastrophizing, he would have begun to have a choice around where things might go next. He would have been able to make wiser choices, and one of the purposes of mindfulness practice is to significantly increase the chance of that happening. Had James been in a position to deploy any one of the metacognitive skills as the car pushed in front of him at the traffic lights, his meeting would have been far more effective – and more profitable for his firm.

Another quality of mindful attention, according to Kabat-Zinn’s definition, is that it is rooted ‘in the present moment’. So often our attention is oriented towards the future or the past. Imagine the case of Emily, walking from the Tube station to her office on a sunny spring morning. She’s completely oblivious to the sensation of the first rays of early summer sun on her face. Nor does she catch the fresh fragrance of a shrub she passes that has just burst into flower. The sense of vitality and well-being that might have come from either of these experiences is lost to her. Instead she’s fixated on her to-do list for the next week. Not that she needs to be – she could recite it by heart. She’s been over it again and again and again ever since she woke up, but there she goes again, rehearsing the tasks ahead of her.

Emily thinks of herself as conscientious. She’s a good worker, focused on her job. But the way she’s needlessly and unproductively rehearsing her to-do list – checking its details maybe for the hundredth time that morning – keeps her from refreshing herself in simple ways. She’ll arrive at work in good time and get on with her tasks efficiently, but her performance won’t be quite as good as it might have been. Preoccupied with her to-do list, she’s lost some really useful opportunities to refresh herself and to broaden her mental and emotional horizons. But more than that. Preoccupied with her to-do list, or with her attention wandering into the past or future, Emily isn’t as present and wholehearted in her approach to her work as she thinks she is.

Sometimes her attention wanders into the past: ‘That meeting last week … If only I’d taken the chance to make that point, and if only Will hadn’t spoken in that way, and maybe it would have been better if I’d worn those other shoes … ’ Or it drifts into the future: ‘What will I make for dinner tonight? And should we book that holiday before prices rise again, and what will I wear tomorrow … ?’ And so Emily’s attention runs. She thinks she’s diligently getting on with her tasks but some of the time it’s as if she’s put her mind onto a kind of ‘automatic pilot’ and let it just run on as it does.

Maybe you’ve had the experience of driving 30 miles down the road and then suddenly coming to – ‘Oh gosh, we’re here already. How did I do that? I’ve been miles away … ’ You were thinking, or planning, or dreaming and you were simply driving on automatic pilot, performing quite complex tasks – changing gears, judging distances, braking, indicating – without any conscious awareness that you were doing them. It seems to work. And because it seems to work we put more and more of our lives onto automatic pilot.

When we were really young each moment was fresh and new and we were right there for each experience. But as we grow older it all starts to feel completely familiar and we begin to do more and more of it automatically and that seems to be OK. But is it? With our attention set on automatic pilot we miss things. Certainly, we miss the well-being elements that we might get from noticing the first blossoms of spring or the vibrant shades of the autumn leaves. But there are other things that we might miss as well. That particular tone in your child’s greeting in the morning that says he’s being bullied at school and somehow can’t talk about it right now. But you miss it, because you’re just doing family breakfast on automatic pilot. Or that flicker of expression on a colleague’s face that says that there’s something important going on at home that she really needs to talk about. Or that glance in a client’s eye that might have opened a whole new dimension to the negotiation.

On automatic pilot we miss things, and some of what we miss might have a significant impact on our performance at work. But more than that: at the deepest level, as Kabat-Zinn has pointed out,³ if life is just one moment of experience, followed by another moment of experience, followed by another moment of experience, and then another, and another … and then you’re dead, well, wouldn’t it be good to show up for some of those experiences? To show up for your life – while you still have it? To pay attention – in the present moment? The capacity to come out of automatic pilot a bit more often, to place your attention where you want it to be and to keep it there for longer is a known outcome of mindfulness training.⁴

One of the really intriguing studies on the relationship between mindfulness training and attentional effectiveness was carried out by Jha and Stanley with a group of US Marines.⁵ Their findings featured in Joint Force Quarterly, the advisory journal of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A group of 31 Marines about to be deployed to Iraq and undergoing ‘stress-inoculation’ training, which helps habituate them to the extreme mental rigours of combat, received an eight-week mindfulness course (a control group of 17 did not receive the course). Jha and Stanley then measured the protective influence of the mindfulness training on the Marines’ working memory. Her findings suggested that, just as daily physical exercise leads to physical fitness, engaging in mindfulness exercises on a regular basis improved the Marines’ ‘mind-fitness’ by extending their working memory under stress. That, she claims,⁶ safeguards them against distraction and emotional reactivity and lets them maintain a mental workspace that ensures quick and considered decisions and action plans. Besides offering some protection to combatants from post-traumatic stress and other anxiety disorders, the mindfulness training enhanced the clarity of thinking needed for soldiers fighting in challenging and ambiguous counter-insurgency zones.

For Jha, this study showed that mindfulness training might help anyone who must maintain peak performance in the face of extremely stressful circumstances: the emergency services, relief workers, trauma surgeons, professional and Olympic athletes and so on. But actually very few people in the workplace are immune from periods of extreme demand these days and it’s hard to imagine anyone whose work and productivity would not benefit from an increased capacity to deploy their attention in ways that their tasks require.

The last quality of mindful awareness that Kabat-Zinn draws attention to is that it is ‘non-judgemental’. This doesn’t mean that if you are mindful you don’t make judgements or that you give up the powers of discrimination. Far from it. But it does involve dropping a certain kind of judgementalism, especially the tendency constantly to judge ourselves in a critical light. Many of us have a habit of judging ourselves that disguises itself as an attempt to help us lead better lives and be better people. But actually it’s a kind of irrational tyranny that can never be satisfied.⁷ The mindful approach, by contrast, is to let yourself experience what you’re experiencing without censoring it, without blocking things out or constantly wishing they were other than they are. Mindfulness training encourages us to bring an attitude of warm, kindly curiosity to whatever we experience – in thoughts, feelings and body-sensations – from moment to moment. It enables us to let what is the case be the case.

Imagine the case of Laura, who is based in the London office of her ...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 What Is Mindfulness?
• 2 What Is Mindfulness Practice?
• 3 Positive and Negative Stress
• 4 Approach and Avoidance
• 5 Metacognition
• 6 Respond
• 7 Mindfulness and Emotional Intelligence
• 8 Mindfulness for Leaders
• 9 Mindfulness in Coaching
• 10 Living Mindfully
• 11 Putting on an Eight-Week Mindfulness Course in a Workplace Setting
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Appendix 3
• Appendix 4
• Index