Mindfulness is a wonderful state of mind. When you enter it, you are fully in the moment and free from all your preconceptions, biases, and habitual responses. You are thinking clearly and prepared to act in the most effective way. Moments of mindfulness are “time outs” from that double-edged phenomenon of the modern world, the constant bombardment of information, and media stimuli.
When you become mindful of your surroundings, you can reflect effectively and concentrate on accomplishing the job in front of you, to the best of your ability. You become the master of stress rather than the victim of it. And it’s better than a power nap.
For businesses of all sizes, mindfulness training can reduce sick time, build trust in your leadership, and fully engage your employees. By developing mindfulness in each individual employee, you instill a holistic organizational culture that is agile and able to respond effectively to anything the market, the economy, or your competitors throw at you.For businesses of all sizes, mindfulness training can reduce sick time, build trust in your leadership, and fully engage your employees. By developing mindfulness in each individual employee, you instill a holistic organizational culture that is agile and able to respond effectively to anything the market, the economy, or your competitors throw at you.
Consider The Mindful Employee…
To create an agile enterprise, today’s entrepreneurs need to carry their employees with them by developing four competences, not just in the top team but throughout the enterprise:
1. Openness to Change: Meditation and other mindfulness techniques learned in a business-integrated program help individual employees face up to proposed change with confidence and curiosity, rather than the untrained, fight, resist, or flight responses that are the natural inclination of people when challenged to change. Ask yourself: How is my new initiative coming along?
Faced with unprecedented ideas and circumstances, mindful employees do not panic, but calmly and rationally look for ways to turn the new world around them to their own and to their employer’s benefit. At the organization level, mindfulness-based stress reduction will significantly reduce absenteeism. When people feel better, they work better.
2. Self Reliance: Existing ways of working, with strict departmental roles and detailed job descriptions, may leave employees without discretion to act and with defensive reflex responses aimed at stabilizing the current situation. Refer to the manager or consult the “expert” becomes the unthinking default, as opposed to riding the currents and upheavals to new, safer higher ground. Breathing meditation, a key part of micro-mindfulness training, enables people to reflect on their habitual responses objectively. In this way, it develops their ability to choose the best course of action from a range of possible responses.
3. Continuous-Improvement Contributors: Mindfulness is proven to improve our short-term memory and develop our ability to do complex tasks. Employees go beyond being an “admin assistant” or a “number cruncher” to being the sources of ideas and innovation.
A culture of mindfulness is synonymous with continuous-improvement and learning organizations. The guided practice of mindfulness techniques reduces distraction and “wandering mind” syndrome. It achieves this by developing people’s moment-to-moment awareness, not just of the task in hand but also of their mental processes and habitual behaviors.
Mindfulness improves communication and teamworking because it emphasizes observation and insight over theoretical knowledge. It is a foundation stone of “matrix” working.
4. Adaptive Learning: Mindfulness training opens new neural pathways and enhances cognitive flexibility. It enables mindsets to change from “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” to “let’s try this controlled experiment and see what happens if…” You and your employees learn to reflect on and adapt their reactions in short cycles. You learn to relax into consideration of second thoughts, third thoughts, and so on. In this way you can rethink your attitudes and expectations to make yourselves comfortable with uncertainty and decision making under circumstances of incomplete knowledge.
Mindfulness takes people away from “that’s the way we’ve always done it” to a beginner’s point of view on all workplace problems and ideas.
We appreciate that it sounds almost too good to be true. Right? But check it out for yourself and discover why the term Mindfulness is Googled four times more than any other. Then call PBC for a free consultation and let us help you customize your mindfulness program to your enterprise’s needs and unique circumstances.
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