The Innovator’s Guide to Mindfulness in Business
On Mental Health Awareness Week and with workplace stress one of the biggest contributors to poor mental health — is mindfulness in business an oxymoron?
Our Global Head of Innovation, Tia Castagno, is going to take 5 minutes of your time to show the two can in fact live in harmony together. And how you and your organisations can fight some of the toxic blocks that plague your people and stifle creativity, through the very simple step of shifting mind-sets. Which is much easier than it sounds. Promise.
Let’s have a recap of some of the worst toxic blocks running through our work veins:
1. Stress — Got to love that feeling of when your head’s about to explode or your hearts about to combust…
2. Jealous/Competition — Yeah you over there, with your big bulging brain, well I’ve got ideas too ok?
3. Self-criticism — The double-guessing, the internal berating, the endless doubting. No-ones a bigger critique of us than ourselves.
4. Perfectionism — The fear is real. And until our idea is perfectly perfected then no-ones seeing or hearing it.
5. Always-on attitude — Outlook, Gmail, Whatsapp, Yammer, Slack — how do we escape this technological prison?!
6. Workaholism — With commitment and passion comes the real risk of addiction. Incorrect use of technology has made this worse…
We’ve all felt each and every one of these blocks. And if you’ve been really unlucky then you might have had all these at once….
The solution to treating these blocks lies in your mind-set. And mind-sets fall into one of two groups — fixed or growth mind-set.
A fixed mind-set believes our character, intelligence and personality are prescribed with little room for change. This fixed mind-set creates a sense of urgency that you need to prove your ability and hide any deficiency. Breeding the perfectionism, always-on attitude and workaholism that we see every day at work.
A growth mind-set is open to challenge and sees failure not as evidence of inability but as a springboard for growth and expansion of your strengths.
I believe a 4 step process to shifting mind-sets will help treat each of these blocks and build resilience against any future outbreaks!
1. Observe the voice of your fixed mind-set — Be more aware of your inner saboteur (the fixed mind) raising its ugly head. Likely to be when you hit a problem in a project and your default position falls to ‘I told you so’ or ‘I don’t have what it takes’.
2. Choose how to interpret the situation — Once you’re aware, you know you have a choice. Either you believe you don’t have the ability to overcome it (fixed). Or see this setback as an opportunity to rise to the challenge by learning new ways and building new approaches.
3. Answer with the voice of your growth mind-set — Fight the inner saboteur with the ‘growth-queen’ as I like to call her. The inner saboteur might ask ‘but what if you fail’ and the growth queen answers ‘ but all queens have failed along the way’ and ‘with the right attitude & effort, I can do this’.
4. Take actions based on the growth mind-set — Whether that’s responding positively to feedback or embracing a new challenge. Go forth and grow.
Our relationship with success and failure in work is dependent on our mind-set. And it is this which ultimately impacts on our capacity for happiness in the workplace. So lets get watering those mind-sets and watch them grow!
