How can you bring mindfulness to work?

And not let it become just a fluffy word on your company website

How do you actually define mindfulness?

Mindfulness is a hot topic today. So many people talk about this that its definition is starting to become somewhat confused. Therefore it is important to clearly explain what I mean by this term.

For me, mindfulness is an expansion of a person’s awareness. In other words, it is a state of being in which the individual is more aware of themselves, their environment, and their own thoughts & emotions. As they gain this greater awareness, the result is (often) increased creativity, improved efficiency, better working relationships, and higher motivation.

This area of study is starting to appear with more frequency, as an important subject in our daily work routines. The reason for this, is that some leaders already understand the positive outcomes for both human and comercial growth, that such a journey can offer. Yet, few truly know how to implement this in practice; and mindfulness suddenly becomes another fluffy word that businesses use to attract new talent.

Why are people failing to implement mindfulness in companies?

The reason that leaders and even experienced consultants are failing to implement mindfulness at work, is due to two reasons.

First, is because of the overwhelming amount of information from different authors on the subject.

Second, is the fact that there is no easy way to support people in achieving a mindful state; there is no one month program or 10 easy steps to follow.

With my insights after studying mindfulness for one year at DeRose TriBeCa, one of the leading schools in the subject founded sixty years ago, I will try to answer two questions in this article.

Where can we look to for guidance when bringing mindfulness to our lives and work?

How can our companies support us to achieve a mindful state at work?

Part 1 — Bringing mindfulness to the workplace

When dealing with this subject many leaders relate mindfulness to meditation. They want to use meditation as a technique for people in organisations to became more mindful.

This idea is not new.

Throughout the whole world today, is it possible to find plenty of schools on meditation. And the process seems to work.

What does meditation mean? The most accurate translation for this word, comes from the Sanskrit alphabet, meaning, contemplation. The idea is that by contemplating and observing our thoughts, instead of getting attached to them, we will saturate our minds and stop thinking. This provides a higher states of consciousness to us, which means, we became mindful people.

Therefore the process that we are using today is:

Companies + Meditation = Mindfulness at work

The problem with this formula

The flaw of this approach is that our cognitive activities (decisions, emotions, actions, behaviour). Which we rely on in every aspect of our working day, are being constantly damaged by the way we eat, relate to others, fell, and act.

Then, if you ask people to STOP THINKING, the only possible outcome (unless you are one of a few people that have an innate ability to achieve higher states of consciousness) is that nothing is going to change. Try it now to see for yourself.

Stop thinking. Right now.

Try harder.

So, the reason we are failing to bring mindfulness to our companies is because we are implementing solutions in the wrong order.

If the way we eat, feel and relate to others is undermining our capacity to be mindful, we shouldn’t be looking at meditation at first. When bringing mindfulness to work, we should look at all levels of our lives. And just than, meditate.

One way of doing that is by using our five senses to perceive and improve our current approach to mindfulness from:

Companies + Meditation = Mindfulness at work

The equation changes to:

Companies + Breathing + Seeing + Touching + Smelling + Hearing + Meditating = Mindfulness at work

The Senseless Revolution

We’re losing touch with nature

We are losing our capacity to fully use our 5 senses. One of the reasons is that, since the scientific revolution, human beings have lost their contact with nature.

I want to take you through an everyday life case:

When we go to the bathroom. The first thing before taking down our pants is to take our cellphones out of our pocket. Then we start doing what we have to do. At the same time as answering our WhatsApp messages and swimming through our Snapchat feed.

We do this, once, twice, a thousand times. What is happening to our sense of touch? Our feeling of eliminating the toxins and waste from our body? The action is the same, the feeling is lost.

Our disconnection with natural instincts today, is immense. From the way we communicate to the way we eat and relate to others. And our companies are dragging us even further down. And I will prove how.

Proof 1 — Eating (Sense of taste)

Look at the way we are eating today. Our sense of taste use to be trained by hunter gatherers. Who ate from every tree they passed by, the most fresh variety of colourful foods, and drank clear clean water from the rivers. Today our trees are McDonalds and our rivers are Coca-Cola.

In our daily work, the diagnostic is in most cases the same. We all know that maintaining our health is fundamental, yet our actions as companies are quite contradictory. Instead of increasing the awareness of our senses, companies are giving us tonnes of beers to appear cool and keep their talent happy.

Proof 2- Physical health (Sense of touch)

Imagine now, you have a great idea when walking in the street. You are very excited about it, you feel “thats the idea I want to bring to reality in my life”. Than you suddenly take a false step and hurt your knee. Your mental idea will immediately disappear and you will focus on your physical pain instead.

“What is more dense eclipses what is more subtle” DeRose

The same happens when you do not take care of your physical body. Having great and creative ideas at work and forgetting or not pursuing them because of our health situation, is quite normal for us.

As the Buddha teaches us, our body is like a palace. We need to clean it, take care of it, and build it so we can receive guests (happiness as well as sadness), and be a leader who takes care of all the rest.

Has your company helped you to take care of your body? If yes, you are a lucky exception.

Proof 3- Breathing (Sense of smell)

When you are stressed, people often advise you to take a deep breath. Many studies have proved the positive power of breathing.

“By changing patterns of breathing, we can change our emotional states and how we think and how we interact with the world,” Gerbarg.

Breathing is the most basic human need. We can last for weeks without any food, days without water, but we can only last a few seconds with no air. Yet, we almost never stop to appreciate and learn how to control our breathing.

Bringing consciousness through breathing in our organisations will lead to low levels of stress, increasing awareness, presence and happiness in your company.

At DeRose TriBeCa School, I have learned how to use my breathing to stabilise or increase my levels of energy. Remember that day at work when you felt tired, almost sleeping and unmotivated? By simply training how to flow the air in different parts of your body, at different speeds, you can boost your energy and create much more. Wouldn’t you try it?

Whenever I feel blue, I start breathing again. L. Frank Baum

Part 2 — What can our companies do to support us in this journey?

Right. Now that we know where to look to guide us in this journey, how can we use our companies to bring back our senses?

Let me take you to the story of my journey on mindfulness to illustrate how. In one year, I started exercising regularly, became vegetarian, started writing, learned how to cook, started reading books every day, improved the way I relate to others, and stopped drinking.

How this was possible? I have always been the king of mess.

For me the secret to achieving this was having a supportive community of people where I could share my fears, my challenges and my experiences. If it wasn’t for that I would have never changed. So who was the protagonist of this journey, me, or my community?

This change in my lifestyle, besides giving me much more focus at work and discipline, taught me a great lesson. I learned that having a strong community in this journey is fundamental. Therefore the way companies can can help us on the journey to mindfulness is by creating a supportive community inside the company, where people can take this journey together.

Conclusion

Stop offering free beers

It’s time to think about how corporate attention can shift from current compliance-based practices to a fundamental corporate repurposing based on truly addressing human needs.

Pravir introduced a fractal-based system of mindfulness into the Stanford University Medical Center’s Leadership Academy training. His hypothesis suggested that by addressing dysfunction at the micro level (i.e. personal discontent, frustration, anger), that larger patterns at higher levels would be affected in a positive manner. He envisions these growing scales of collective consciousness as fractal in nature, all part of a larger, inseparable system.

Companies like Google who have already understood that, are developing mindfulness programs across the entire organisation.

Finally, As laid out by Rich Fernandez, Co-Founder and President of Wisdom Labs, mindfulness is a way to “improve our minds, our bodies, our health, our overall well-being, and even our relationships with others.” What workplace would not benefit from the people who work there approaching tasks and relationships more mindfully?

With better organizational design and increased emphasis on personal and team mindfulness, businesses can become more dynamic and adaptable.

Choose mindfulness over ignorance

In this scene of Matrix, Cypher holds a piece of meat in his fork and says:

“I know this steak doesn’t exist, I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious, after nine years you know what I realised?… Ignorance is bliss.”

This is one of my favourite movie scenes. Because, it illustrates for me the fact that even if a company is supporting the transition to a mindful organisation, individuals always have the last call, and they can choose ignorance.

Therefore the ultimate responsibility of bringing mindfulness to work comes from the members of that specific workplace.

Gandhi is known to have said, “Become the change that you wish to see in the world.” This statement is imbued with fractal reality: by changing the base-pattern (at the individual level) the subsequent levels of an organization, and its entire interaction and approach to the market, environment and society, are also fundamentally changed.

What’s the point?

If you ask me what’s the point of taking such a hard journey? It’s this: the important thing with mindfulness is that you change your own baseline.

This is very different from the temporary sensation of feeling good, that you might experience when you watch your team scoring a goal in the last minute of a game. Or the ecstasy you feel drinking in a happy hour. What you have to do is raise that baseline.

Therefore this journey will only be taken by those who choose mindfulness over ignorance, with the goal of being free to be truly creative to design their unique paths in life.

Hope you have enjoyed this article. I’m having the pleasure to connect with great people through these articles and this is my main motivation to keep doing it. Please if you want to connect my email is marco@flux.am. My mission is to support companies, teams and leaders to achieve high levels of innovation, creativity and self-awareness.