Chapter 1

Exploring Mindfulness in the Workplace

In This Chapter

Identifying what mindfulness is and is not

Retraining your brain

Introducing mindfulness into the workplace

I n tough economic times, many organisations are looking for new ways to deliver better products and services to customers while simultaneously reducing costs. Carrying on as normal isn’t an option. Organisations are looking for sustainable ways to be more innovative. Leaders must really engage staff, and everyone needs to become more resilient in the face of ongoing change. For these reasons, more and more organisations are offering staff training in mindfulness.

This chapter talks about what mindfulness is and why so many leading organisations are investing in it.

Becoming More Mindful at Work

In this section you discover what mindfulness is. More importantly, you also discover what mindfulness is not! You also find out why mindfulness has become so important in the modern-day workplace.

Clarifying what mindfulness is

Have you ever driven somewhere and arrived at your destination remembering nothing about your journey? Or grabbed a snack and noticed a few moments later that all you have left is an empty packet? Most people have! These are common examples of ‘mindlessness’, or ‘going on auto-pilot’.

Like many humans, you’re probably ‘not present’ for much of your own life. You may fail to notice the good things in your life or hear what your body is telling you. You probably also make your life harder than it needs to be by poisoning yourself with toxic self-criticism.

Mindfulness can help you to become more aware of your thoughts, feelings and sensations in a way that suspends judgement and self-criticism. Developing the ability to pay attention to and see clearly whatever is happening moment by moment does not eliminate life’s pressures, but it can help you respond to them in a more productive, calmer manner.

Learning and practising mindfulness can help you to recognise and step away from habitual, often unconscious emotional and physiological reactions to everyday events. Practising mindfulness allows you to be fully present in your life and work and improves your quality of life.

Mindfulness can help you to recognise, slow down or stop automatic and habitual reactions, and see situations with greater focus and clarity.

Mindfulness at work is all about developing awareness of thoughts, emotions and physiology and how they interact with one another. Mindfulness is also about being aware of your surroundings, helping you better understand the needs of those around you.

Mindfulness training is like going to the gym. In the same way as training a muscle, you can train your brain to direct your attention to where you want it to be. In simple terms, mindfulness is all about managing your mind.

Recognising what mindfulness isn’t

Misleading myths about mindfulness abound. Here are a few:

Myth 1: ‘I will need to visit a Buddhist centre, go on a retreat or travel to the Far East to learn mindfulness.’

Experienced mindfulness instructors are operating all over the world. Many teachers now teach mindfulness to groups of staff in the workplace. One-to-one mindfulness teaching can be delivered in the office, in hotel meeting rooms or even via the web. Some people do attend retreats after learning mindfulness if they want to deepen their knowledge, experience peace and quiet, or gain further tuition, but doing so isn’t essential.

Myth 2: ‘Practising mindfulness will conflict with my religious beliefs.’

Mindfulness isn’t a religion. For example, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) are entirely secular — as are most workplace programmes. No religious belief of any kind is necessary. Mindfulness can help you step back from your mental noise and tune in to your own innate wisdom. Mindfulness is practised by people of all faiths and by those with no spiritual beliefs.

Myth 3: ‘I’m too busy to sit and be quiet for any length of time.’

When you’re busy, the thought of sitting and ‘doing nothing’ may seem like the last thing you want to do. Just 15 minutes a day spent practising mindfulness can help you to become more productive and less distracted. Then you’ll be able to make the most of your busy day and get more done in less time. When you first start practising mindfulness, you’ll almost certainly experience mental distractions, but if you persevere you’ll find it easier to tune out distractions and to manage your mind. As time goes on, your ability to concentrate increases as does your sense of wellbeing and feeling of control over your life.

Myth 4: ‘Mindfulness and meditation are one and the same. Mindfulness is just a trendy new name.’

Fact: Mindfulness often involves specific meditation practices.
Fiction: All meditation is the same.

Many popular forms of meditation are all about relaxation — leaving your troubles behind and imagining yourself in a calm and tranquil ‘special place’ Mindfulness helps you to find out how to live with your life in the present moment rather than run away from it. Mindfulness is about approaching life and things that you find difficult and exploring them with openness, rather than avoiding them. Most people find that practising mindfulness does help them to relax, but that this relaxation is a welcome by-product, not the objective.

Training your attention: The power of focus

Are you one of the millions of workers who routinely put in long hours, often for little or no extra pay? In the current climate of cutbacks, job losses and ‘business efficiencies’, many people feel the need to work longer hours just to keep on top of their workload. However, research shows that working longer hours does not mean that you get more done. Actually, if you continue to work when past your peak, your performance slackens off and continues to do so as time goes on (see Chapter 4).

Discovering how to focus and concentrate better is the key to maintaining peak performance. Recognising when you’ve slipped past peak performance and then taking steps to bring yourself back to peak is also vital. Mindfulness comes in at this point. Over time, it helps you focus your attention to where you want it to be.

Applying mindful attitudes

Practising mindfulness involves more than just training your brain to focus. It also teaches you some alternative mindful attitudes to life’s challenges. You discover the links between your thoughts, emotions and physiology. You find out that what’s important isn’t what happens to you, but how you choose to respond. This statement may sound simple, but most people respond to situations based on their mental programming (past experiences and predictions of what will happen next). Practising mindfulness makes you more aware of how your thoughts, emotions and physiology impact on your responses to people and situations. This awareness then enables you to choose how to respond rather than reacting on auto-pilot. You may well find that you respond in a different manner.

By gaining a better understanding of your brain’s response to life events, you can use mindfulness techniques to reduce your fight-or-flight response and regain your body’s ‘rest and relaxation’ state. You will see things more clearly and get more done.

Mindfulness also brings you face to face with your inner bully — the voice in your head that says you’re not talented enough, not smart enough or not good enough. By learning to treat thoughts like these as ‘just mental processes and not facts’, the inner bully loses its grip on your life and you become free to reach your full potential.

These examples are just a few of the many ways that a mindful attitude can have a positive impact on your life and career prospects.

Finding Out Why Your Brain Needs Mindfulness

Recent advances in brain-scanning technology are helping us to understand why our brain needs mindfulness. In this section you discover powerful things about your brain — its evolution, its hidden rules, how thoughts shape your brain structure, and the basics of how your brain operates at work.

Discovering your brain’s hidden rules

Imagine yourself as one of your ancient ancestors — a cave dweller. In ancient times you had to make life-or-death decisions every day. You had to decide whether it was best to approach a reward (such as killing a deer for food) or avoid a threat (such as a fierce predator charging at you). If you failed to gain your reward, in this example a deer to eat, you’d probably live to hunt another day. But, if you failed to avoid the threat, you’d be dead, never to hunt again.

As a result of facing these daily dangers, your brain has evolved to minimise threat. Unfortunately, this has led to the brain spending much more time looking for potential risks and problems than seeking rewards and embracing new opportunities. This tendency is called ‘the human negativity bias’.

When your brain detects a potential threat, it floods your system with powerful hormones designed to help you evade mortal danger. The sudden flood of dozens of hormones into your body results in your heart rate speeding up, blood pressure increasing, pupils dilating and veins constricting to send more blood to major muscle groups to help you sprint away from danger. More oxygen is pumped into your lungs, and non-essential systems (such as digestion, the immune system, and routine body repair and maintenance) shut down to provide more energy for emergency functions. Your brain starts to have trouble focusing on small tasks because it’s trying to maintain focus on the big picture to anticipate and avoid further threat.

Threat or risk avoidance is controlled by the primitive areas of your brain, which operate quickly. This speed explains why, when you unexpectedly encounter a snake in the woods, your primitive brain decides on the best way to keep you safe from harm with no conscious thought and you jump out of the way long before your higher brain engages to find a rational solution.

This process is great from an evolutionary perspective, but can be bad news in modern-day life. Many people routinely overestimate the potential threat involved in everyday work such as a critical boss, a failed presentation or social humiliation. These modern-day ‘threats’ are treated by the brain in exactly the same way as your ancestor’s response to mortal danger. This fight-or-flight response was designed to be used for short periods of time. Unfortunately, when under pressure at work it can remain activated for long periods of time. This activation can lead to poor concentration, inability to focus, low immunity and even serious illness.

Mindfulness training helps you to recognise when you’re in this heightened state of arousal and be able to reduce or even switch off the fight-or-flight response. It also helps you develop the skill to trigger at will your ‘rest and relaxation’ response, bringing your body back to normal, allowing it to repair itself, and increasing both your sense of wellbeing and ability to focus on work.

Recognising that you are what you think

For many years it was thought that once you reached a certain age your brain became fixed. We now know that the adult brain retains impressive powers of neuroplasticity; that is, the ability to change its structure and function in response to experience. It was also believed that, if you damaged certain areas of the brain (as a result of a stroke or other brain injury), you’d no longer be capable of performing certain brain functions. We now know that in some cases the brain can re-wire itself and train a different area to undertake the functions that the damaged part previously carried out. The brain’s hard wiring (neural pathways) change constantly in response to thoughts and experiences.

Neuroplasticity offers amazing opportunities to reinvent yourself and change the way you do and think about things. Your unique brain wiring is a result of your thoughts and experiences in life. Blaming your genes or upbringing; saying ‘it’s not my fault, that’s how I was born’ is no longer a good excuse!

In order to take advantage of this knowledge, you need to develop awareness of your thoughts, and the impact that these thoughts have on your emotions and physiology. The problem is that, if you’re like most people, you’re probably rarely aware of the majority of your thoughts. Let’s face it; you’d be exhausted if you were. Mindfulness helps you to develop the ability to passively observe your thoughts as mental processes. In turn, this allows you to observe patterns of thought and decide whether these patterns are appropriate and serve you well. If you decide that they don’t, your awareness of them gives you the opportunity to replace them with better ways of thinking and behaving.

Another common problem you may encounter is that, although you may think that your decisions and actions are always based on present-moment facts, in reality they rarely are. Making decisions based on your brain’s prediction of the future (which is usually based on your past experiences and unique brain wiring) is common. In addition, you see with your brain; in other words, your brain acts as a filter to incoming information from the eyes and picks out what it thinks is important. The problem with all of this is that you routinely make decisions and act without full possession of the facts. What happened in the past will not necessarily happen now; your predictions about the future could be inaccurate, leading to inappropriate responses and actions.

Practising mindfulness helps you to see the bigger picture and make decisions based on present-moment facts rather than self-generated assumptions and fiction.

Mindfulness helps you to notice when your thoughts begin to spiral and to take action to stop them spiralling downwards even further. You can observe what’s going on in the present moment, and separate present-moment facts from self-created fiction. This ability gives you choices and a world of new possibilities.

Think of a person or situation that triggers your primitive brain’s threat system. (Don’t pick anything too scary or threatening!)

When developing new neural pathways, practice makes perfect. Changing your behaviour or learning to do something new takes awareness, intention, action and practice — no short cuts exist! Understanding a few simple facts about how your brain works and making small adjustments to your responses can help you to create new, more productive, neural pathways.

Exploring your brain at work

Before diving into more detail about mindfulness, and how it can be of benefit to your work, you need to discover a little more about how your brain processes everyday work tasks.

Mindfulness shows you how to mentally stand back and observe what’s going on around you and in your brain. It also helps you to develop different approaches to life that are kinder to you and usually more productive. Mindfulness helps you observe and reduce the mental chatter that distracts you from your work, allowing you to focus on it more fully. By intentionally taking steps to recognise and avoid distractions and focusing your full attention on one task at a time, you can get things done more quickly, with fewer mistakes and less repetition. Using mindfulness techniques when you feel your attention waning can help you to restart work feeling refreshed and focused.

Mindfulness can also be useful in high-level meetings when emotions can sometimes be charged. In avoidance mode, people are motivated by the desire to avoid something happening. With their threat system activated, they may fail to see the bigger picture, be less able to think clearly, and be less creative in their ideas and solutions. Often the effort taken to avoid something happening is disproportionate to dealing with the thing you seek to avoid. On the other hand, in approach mode you’re able to explore new possibilities and opportunities with an open mind.

When working in avoidance mode, cognitive thinking resources are diminished, making it harder to think and work things through. You’re also likely to feel less positive and engaged.

The brain can have a significant impact on how you work. Finding out about and practising mindfulness gives you the tools you need to harness this knowledge to manage your mind better.

Starting Your Mindful Journey

Congratulations! The fact that you’ve picked up this book and started reading it means that you’ve already started your mindful journey. The chapters in this book describe lots of ways to learn mindfulness, one of which is sure to suit your learning style and fit in with your busy life. You’ll also discover that mindfulness involves much more than sitting down and focusing on your breath. In this book, you should find a number of mindfulness techniques that work for you.

A good book is a great starting point, but nothing can replace experiencing mindfulness for yourself. As with learning anything new, you may find it difficult to know where to start. Learning mindfulness from an experienced teacher who can help you to overcome obstacles and guide your development is advisable. The idea behind this book is to demonstrate how and why mindfulness can benefit you at work, and provide suggestions of how to apply simple mindfulness techniques to everyday work challenges.

Being mindful at work yourself

Getting caught up in the manic pace of everyday work life is common. You, like many workers, may feel under pressure to deliver more with fewer resources. You may also be keen to demonstrate what an asset you are to your company by working longer and longer hours, and being contactable round the clock.

Being mindful at work can involve as little or as much change as you’re able to accommodate at this moment in time. At one end of the scale, you may simply apply knowledge of how the brain works and some mindful principles to your work. To gain maximum benefit, you need to practise mindfulness regularly and apply quick mindfulness techniques in the workplace when you need to regain focus or encounter difficulties. The choice is yours! The benefits you gain increase in line with the effort you put in. You should see a real difference after practising mindfulness for as little as ten minutes a day for about six weeks.

Following these initial practice sessions, most people then introduce a few short mindfulness techniques at work. Over time, as mindfulness becomes second nature to you, you’ll develop the ability to practise wherever and whenever the opportunity arises. As your confidence builds and you apply mindfulness to your work further, others will probably notice changes in you. You may appear calmer, more poised and better focused. Possibly your work relationships have improved. If you’re lucky enough to be offered mindfulness sessions in work time, don’t be surprised if people are curious, and ask you for tips and techniques to try out for themselves. Organisations that offer mindfulness classes often have a long waiting list of staff eager to attend.

Overcoming common challenges

Probably the most common challenges you face when learning mindfulness are finding the right time and place to practise, and breaking down habits and mindsets in order to do things differently.

You now need to address each of these challenges in turn.

Finding the right time and place to practise

If you’re lucky enough to be offered mindfulness training by your organisation, you will quickly discover that mindfulness is unlike any other course you’ve attended. Unlike most courses that employers routinely offer to staff, simply attending isn’t enough. Classes help you understand the principles that underpin mindfulness and how mindfulness techniques work. They also provide you with a safe environment and guidance to try out different mindfulness techniques. However, the real learning usually happens outside work, as you practise it. You can’t get fit without exercising, can you? The same applies to mindfulness. Think of mindfulness as a good workout for your brain; the more you practise, the easier it becomes.

On a typical workplace mindfulness course, you’re taught a different technique each week, which you need to practise for at least six days before moving on to the next one. This process can prove to be one of the most challenging aspects of learning mindfulness. For many busy workers, their entire day is scheduled, and sometimes extends into their home life. With a mindset of ‘so much to do and so little time’, even finding 10–15 minutes a day can feel daunting. The question to ask yourself is, ‘Why am I doing this?’ For many people, the answer is, ‘Because I can’t continue working in the way I do.’ If this is your reply, re-arranging your life to make time for mindfulness is certainly worthwhile. Try not to think about mindfulness as just another thing that needs to be fitted into your busy life. Rather, view it as a new way to live your life. Think of the time you spend practising mindfulness as ‘me time’ — after all, this time is one of the rare moments in which you have nothing to do but focus on yourself.

Breaking down habits and mindsets

Habits are formed when you repeat the same thoughts or behaviours many times. Habits are highly efficient from a brain perspective because they’re stored in the primitive brain, which can repeat them quickly without any conscious thought, using very little energy.

Learning mindfulness may take effort, especially if you start to challenge your habits and patterns of thinking. Make sure you remember that, just as it takes time to form habits, so it takes time to replace old habits with different ways of thinking and being. With a little time and perseverance you can find new ways of working that are more productive and better for your health and sense of wellbeing.

Creating a mindful workplace

Every great journey starts with just one step. A young, single mother of three was once given the opportunity to climb Mount Everest. Three-quarters of the way up the mountain she became exhausted, felt overwhelmed by the whole journey and declared that she could go no further. The trek leader calmly stood in front of her and asked whether she could see his footsteps in the snow ahead. She nodded in agreement. He told her that all she needed to do was put one foot in front of another, following his footsteps. By focusing on the present-moment action of her feet, she was able to avoid worrying about the remainder of the journey. She made it to the summit — one of the greatest achievements of her life.

Getting caught up in planning the journey ahead is common and at times you may feel overwhelmed by all the things you need to do and think about. When finding out about and practising mindfulness for the first time, focusing only on the next footstep, rather than the journey as a whole, is often the best approach. Try to let your mindful journey unfold, day by day, moment by moment. If you truly want your organisation to become more mindful, you need to start by focusing on yourself. As you gain a deeper understanding of what mindfulness is, and start to experiment with integrating mindfulness into your life and work, you discover for yourself what works and what doesn’t. Only then are you equipped to make a real difference to your organisation. The building blocks of a mindful organisation are mindful employees who start to transform their organisations one step at a time. See Chapter 10 for more on mindful organisations.

Living the dream: Mindfulness at work

Sometimes the hardest part of a journey is taking the first step. In this book, you can find a wealth of information about mindfulness. You also discover mindful techniques for different situations that you may encounter at work and for different occupations (see Chapter 6).

The potential of mindfulness to transform the way you work and live your life is immense. The extent to which you benefit from it is entirely up to you and the effort that you’re able to put into it.

When discovering how to become more mindful, remember ABC:

As with all new skills, the more you practise mindfulness, the easier it becomes. Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb coined the phrase ‘neurones that fire together, wire together’. In other words, the more you practise mindfulness, the more you develop the neural pathways in the brain associated with being mindful.