How Mindfulness Teaches You the Soft Skills of the Future
Or how to compete with a robot in the job market of the 21st century.
Will computers make our jobs redundant? This is a growing concern among today’s workers. In this article, you will learn why soft skills will play a special role in the future’s job market and how you can strengthen the most important social skills through mindfulness.
The future belongs to soft skills
It is not the first time that the population is afraid of mass unemployment, as the historian Yuval Noah Harari writes in his book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Two centuries ago, the industrial revolution worried people just as much as the digital revolution today. The good news: when the invention of the steam engine revived the economy, for every job that was lost, at least one new job was created. So chances are that history repeats itself and the technological progress will grow our labor market again. The big challenge, however, is mastering the requirements of those newly emerging jobs.
Understand that it is precisely our humanity that will distinguish us from machines. Therefore, Harari recommends investing in social skills for making a living in the long term. Think about your coach’s fiery motivation shouts that send goosebumps down your sweaty back. Can you imagine a robot imitating your coach’s relentless personality?
If we can dump the repetitive, monotonous tasks to a computer, we gain time for the social tasks, such as building business relationships, feedback discussions or brainstorming sessions. According to a LinkedIn study, executives will value creativity, empathy and leadership skills as the most important soft skills of the future among others. And now some fantastic news: Studies show that mindfulness can promote these skills. Maybe that will make meditation apps eligible for tax deduction?
Creativity through mindfulness
The term creativity goes back to the Latin word creare, which means to produce or invent something new. Despite all technological advances, it will still take time before science can equip computers with this ability. So far, no computer has been able to create something truly innovative. A machine can merely imitate what it had previously learned through a program or the evaluation of data.
This means that not only the visual arts remain in the human domain but also any creative solutions needed at the workplace. Everyone who works more than just according to the book always needs to find new approaches: inventing products, keeping the employees motivated, developing ideas for customer acquisition or thinking about how to make your service an extraordinary experience.
How can mindfulness help with these challenges? Mindfulness promotes creativity by reducing stress. When we are in a stressful situation, facing the infamous saber-toothed tiger, our brain is mostly concerned to ensure acute survival and has no resources for creative thinking. If our boss is that saber-toothed tiger, we are not in the right mindset for original ideas.
In an experiment, psychologist and neuroscientist Britta Hölzel observed participants’ brains at a mindfulness training before and after the intervention. She found that the substance in the hippocampus, responsible for memory, learning processes and emotion regulation, had strengthened. In contrast, the amygdala — responsible for fight-or-flight reactions — had become smaller. Thus, creative ideas for new hunting strategies or ingenious business ideas will only come to you at the end of the day around the soothing campfire or the warm flickering of your TV.
For psychologist Dr. Frank Berzbach, silence and loneliness play a central role in giving room for creativity. These qualities are not always easy to attain in an office — although noise-canceling headphones are one of the most grateful gadgets since the invention of cube farms. But at least at home, we can turn down the radio and television and mindfully enjoy the quietness.
Emotional intelligence through mindfulness
Before we can understand other people’s feelings, we first have to fathom our own emotions. The further you explore the map of your inner world, the greater your repertoire becomes to understand the inner lives of other people. No matter whether yoga, meditation or body scan — most mindfulness exercises begin with capturing your inner state: How is your body doing? Where do you detect tensions? Do you feel restless, tired or happy?
An experiment shows the direct effect of mindfulness on empathy: participants in the study — all new to meditation — either practiced a 5-minute mindfulness exercise or engaged with trivial content. Next, photos were shown that only exposed people’s eyes. Now participants assessed what emotions the person in the picture had felt when the picture was taken. The meditation group proved significantly better results in assessing the right emotions.
In another exercise, the same participants watched a video in which a woman was ignored by her teammates while playing ball. The subjects were then asked to write a letter to this person. In the meditation group, the letters consistently contained more empathetic expressions towards the excluded player.
Leadership skills through mindfulness
The choleric boss with a bright red face shouting at his employees hopefully has become a mere movie cliché. Today’s managers are expected not to lose their heads, even when things get tough. Self-regulation is the key to not let your impulses overtake you but letting reason and prudence prevail. The Harvard Business Review has identified three effects of mindful leadership.
- Meta-cognition means the ability to take a step back in turbulent times and to observe your thoughts, feelings, impressions, and impulses before you act. Mindfulness training gives you that tiny moment in which, like in the Matrix movie, you are given the choice between two realities. Either you follow your automatic behavior, which in stressful situations is usually based on fear and aggressive instincts. Or you resist the first impulse and make a rational decision that you would have made in a calm, fearless moment.
- Mindfulness works like glasses of truth, allowing reality. The two most important prerequisites for a mindful state are openness to experience and goodness towards yourself and others. Instead of seeing what you want to see or what your fear or anger makes you believe, you can look at things as they really are. Only then you can see the true opportunity in any challenge.
- “Curiosity is the key to problem-solving,” said Galileo Galilei. The mindful leadership style invites you to look at internal and external events curiously and impartially. Mindfulness also gives the incentive to engage with reality and to be present in the here and now instead of having the head in the clouds.
All of these qualities keep returning to the core of mindfulness: engaging in the presence of the moment without judgment. This ability opens the door to an open-minded, constructive and calm leadership from which all employees — including the executive board — will benefit.
An investment in your future
In England, mindfulness has already been given a place of honor as a school subject. Mindfulness is a key skill that gives us access to other competencies, such as creativity, empathy, leadership and many other soft skills. Perhaps it is only a matter of time before job descriptions look for mindful qualities? In any case, an investment in mindfulness will be an investment in your future.
This article was originally published in the German Mindfulness Magazine 7Mind.
