Take a moment to stop and check-in with what your brain is thinking?
Try that again. Take another moment. What are you thinking now?
And one more time.
Did you notice how many thoughts you had in those few moments?
This is how the brain works. We think about many things, every second.
Add on top of that our day to day lives, and stress levels have become dangerously high.
These stress levels impact employee health, which affects the productivity of corporations.
A powerful practice is growing: mindfulness programs in organizations. According to the Guardian, Google has trained about 2000 employees through their mindfulness program. We’re also seeing the proliferation of meditation groups too. Dina Kaplan, Founder of the tech company Blip, started The Path in New York, which is among the latest meditation groups to pop up in the city. It’s focused on bringing professionals together to learn how to meditate and develop a mindfulness practice. It’s taken off quickly. Of course, Los Angeles and several great San Francisco clients of ours have been working out the benefits of this practice, for years.
Meditation and yoga have gone mainstream in western culture. These practices cultivate mindfulness. They enable you to become more aware of your own emotions and reactions, as well as sensitivity to your environment. They cultivate your ability to be fully present in the moment with a quiet mind. Mindfulness works. The results include: boosting productivity, better problem solving, developing emotional intelligence and more focus. The premise: A quiet mind is a balanced mind. The practice represents a massive paradigm shift among western countries where multitasking, workaholism, and burnout is the norm.
Tech companies such as Adobe, Intel, and Google have led the way to develop and encourage mindfulness among employees. And it’s catching on – I heard one of our candidates praise our tech client during the interview process because when things got too stressful at work, they suggested a yoga time-out to refresh, center and re-focus. The effect increases talent’s sense of well-being and thus they can achieve at greater levels.
More people are realizing the importance mindfulness plays overall in increasing performance by developing self-awareness and the ability to self-regulate. Mindfulness trains people to be in the moment. By doing so individuals begin to harness the power of their mind and discipline their thoughts. Let’s take a moment to sit on that point for a minute – harness the power of their mind and discipline their thoughts. The result? Focus and create a solution to the problem at hand.
The practice increases your ability to be present, and thus not be distracted by thoughts. As a result, you become more astute, a better listener and more observant. The effect results in higher levels of emotional intelligence because you are able to see things from another person’s point of view to create a win/win partnership with clients. Hence, emotional intelligence grows exponentially. It becomes a powerful tool that makes you more effective in understanding other people, as well as contexts and situations. And it’s not just me that believes that, so does emotional intelligence guru Daniel Goleman
Practicing being present increases your ability to regulate your emotions, which is critical to being able to remain calm during difficult high-pressure situations and not acting impulsively. Meditation develops self-awareness, as a result you become less reactive in the world – which as anyone who’s undergone an EQ Inventory with us will know that strong impulse control prevents derailment.
The whole mindfulness program is a great perk, a great addition to the team to ensure they’re less stressed in their personal and professional lives – to deliver. Being mindful of self and others helps talent to focus on all the major composites to create better leaders, communicators, and results from a behavioral perspective.
If you’ve heard of “monkey mind,” which refers to how most people are controlled by their thoughts rather than being in control of them – a mindfulness program enables the opposite. The more mindful you become, the abler you are to act at a much higher level, and perform better in every area of your life. You become fully present instead of stuck in the past, which is gone or in the future which has not happened yet. You get truly get grounded in the reality, which only exists in the present moment.
Bringing mindfulness to the office represents a significant paradigm shift in corporate culture, which marks a divergence from traditional corporate culture. The big motivator- it pays off in terms of better decision making, more effective works and achieving at much bigger levels. Corporations are noticing these areas of development to keep moving FORWARD.