Chapter 3

Applying Mindfulness in the Workplace

In This Chapter

Dealing with uncertainty in the modern-day workplace

Changing your mindset

Making time for mindfulness in your day

Exploring mindfulness exercises

M indfulness is all well and good, but how do you apply it effectively in the workplace? That’s exactly what you find out in this chapter. You also discover why mindfulness is more important than ever in the modern workplace and find out lots of practical ways to start ‘mindfulnessing’ within minutes!

Gaining Perspective in the Modern-Day Workplace

Fifty years ago, a sizeable proportion of the population got a job and worked for that organisation until they retired. The key benefit resulting from this scenario was a sense of security and stability — you knew what to expect.

For students looking for a job today, things are very different. A recent survey of workers found that one in three remains in a job for less than two years. This massive change in people’s working lives is bound to have an impact — sometimes positive, but often negative. In this section, we cover how mindfulness can help you deal with uncertainty in the workplace.

Applying mindfulness in changing times

The current rate of change in the workplace is faster than at any other time in history. The past 15 years have seen an explosion in communications technology and social networking, and a rapid rise in economic growth in the emerging economies of India, China, Russia and Brazil. These changes have a big impact on the workplace and affect employees at all levels. How can mindfulness help in managing these changes?

Change isn’t always easy. Sometimes change in the workplace can be met with resistance. The human brain works through habit, which creates a sense of familiarity and security. Poorly managed change can make people feel threatened and they resist it.

Mindfulness is about being aware of the emotional impact of change. You need to prepare employees in advance, providing relevant training if necessary. Following the change, you must be a good listener and respond quickly if employees express frustration or distress.

A unique way of thinking about change is provided by a deeper understanding of the principles of mindfulness. Most mindfulness teaching stresses that the world is in a constant state of flux. Mindfulness exercises demonstrate this perpetual change. Try focusing on one of your senses for more than a few minutes and notice the variety of thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations and distractions that you experience.

The universe is constantly changing. Atoms are continually moving; in fact, scientists are unable to achieve absolute zero, the temperature at which atoms stop moving. If constant change is the way of the world, you need to expect some in your own life. Resisting that change leads to pain.

You need to expect and embrace the change that is bound to come. If you find yourself reacting with sadness or anger to that change, give yourself the time and space to work through those emotions using mindfulness exercises.

To better manage change in the workplace, try these tips:

Change can be challenging. But in our experience, regular mindfulness practice makes managing external changes easier because you realise that, beyond your changing thoughts and emotions, a deeper sense of peace, calm and spaciousness exists that is simply your own awareness. That awareness is always the same, ever present and unchanging. When faced with too much change, you can take refuge in mindfulness to rest your body, mind and emotions in your own, unchanging awareness.

Building resilience

Facing too many challenges at work makes you feel overwhelmed and frustrated. In response you trigger your fight-or-flight mechanism. This threat response, if switched on for too long, leads to inefficient use of your brain and possibly disease in your body. Building resilience is a way of managing challenges more effectively. For more on mindfulness for resilience, see Chapter 4.

Take the example of Thomas Edison, legendary inventor of the light bulb. He famously said that each time he failed, he didn’t view the experiment as a failure; rather he saw it as another way that didn’t work. Seeing failed attempts as stepping stones to success is an example of a resilient attitude. Edison bounced back from attempts that didn’t work to discover what did work. He certainly thrived on success, inventing the phonograph, motion picture and telegraph.

The achievements of Edison may seem hard to emulate. He seemed to be almost born with a positive attitude and destined for success. And, as far as we know, he didn’t formally practise mindfulness! How can mindfulness help you?

As you become more mindful, your tendency to ruminate declines. Rumination is how much you think about and dwell on your problems. Rumination is like a broken record that keeps replaying itself — that argument you had with your colleague, that error you made in your presentation. If you ruminate, you overthink about situations or life events.

Mindfulness may be one of the most effective ways to reduce ruminative thinking because you become more aware of your thought patterns and more skilful at stepping back from unhelpful thoughts.

Mindfulness helps you to spot those little niggling negative thoughts before they grow too large. And mindfulness helps you to naturally see tough situations at work as challenges to be faced and overcome rather than avoided. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by adversity, mindfulness won’t offer a quick fix. But dealing with each challenge, step by step, combining mindfulness with help from your colleagues and/or a coach, means that you can begin to thrive at work.

Think of someone in your workplace who seems to thrive on change and whom you respect. Identify:

Spending time talking with those who thrive on change in the workplace can help you to see things from their perspective.

Adjusting Your Mental Mindset

When Shamash discovered mindfulness, his mindset shifted 180 degrees. Before that first lesson in mindfulness, he was completely goal-orientated. He was halfway through a degree in chemical engineering and wanted a career working for a big corporation. He was only 20 years old, but ever since he was a boy he had striven to achieve the top grades at school so that he could get into a good university. He aimed to be among the best at university so that he could get a good job, and so on. The obsessive desire for success was draining. But after that mindfulness class, something shifted. Shamash discovered that life was not only to be enjoyed in the future, after attaining all of your goals; life was to be enjoyed right now, here in the present moment. There’s nothing wrong with achieving success and attaining goals, but not at the expense of the here and now. Ironically, by living in a more present-focused way, Shamash has been better able to achieve success — the best way to prepare for the future is to live in the present.

Everyone experiences being fully in the moment at some point. Consider the last time you were fully present at work — what were you doing? How did you feel? How productive were you?

Treating thoughts as mental processes

Some people estimate that they have up to 60,000 thoughts a day. If you’ve tried practising mindfulness exercises already, you probably think that’s an underestimate. In the East, the brain’s tendency to constantly go from one thought to another is called the ‘monkey mind’ because it resembles a monkey swinging from branch to branch.

Thoughts can be great. Through the power of thinking, humans have managed to achieve feats way beyond what any other animal on earth has done. We’ve created cities, designed planes and landed on the moon. Unfortunately, we’ve also designed nuclear weapons and heavily polluted the planet.

Thoughts have another disadvantage on a personal level too. If all your thoughts are taken to be true, and if those thoughts are self-critical, your mental wellbeing suffers. As a result, your performance at work declines too.

Try this thought bubble exercise:

How did you find this exercise? Did your thoughts float away? More importantly, were you able to observe your thoughts? If you were, you’ve demonstrated that you are not your thoughts — you can observe them from a distance.

The thought bubble and similar exercises help to show you an important mindfulness skill: The ability to step back from your thoughts. You may have all sorts of thoughts popping into your head in the workplace, such as:

These types of thoughts have an effect on your emotions, bodily sensations and ability to get your work done.

Mindfulness offers a solution. As you become more mindful, you notice these thoughts more often. You’re then able to step back from them, seeing them as mental processes in your mind rather than absolute truths.

Being able to step back from your thoughts takes practice, especially in the hustle and bustle of the workplace. For this reason, we recommend that you try out some of these exercises when you’re not under too much pressure. Once your brain gets the hang of how to watch and step back from unhelpful thoughts, you have a powerful and life-changing skill.

In the old days of personal development, self-help gurus promoted ‘positive thinking’. For most people, slapping positive thoughts on top of negative beliefs means they just slip off. Instead, you need to become aware of those negative beliefs and see them for what they are — just thoughts.

Use the following exercise to deal with your thoughts and mind state when you’re judging things negatively. It’s a simple process but has long-lasting effects once it becomes a habit for you.

You can deal with your negative thoughts by following these three simple steps:

Approaching rather than avoiding difficulties

Say that work causes you anxiety. You worry about all the meetings you have to attend, the deadlines you have to meet and the colleagues you have to deal with. How do you cope with that feeling of anxiety? Should you continue to face up to the challenges at work and just get on with the uncomfortable feeling of anxiety, or should you avoid anything that makes you feel that way?

You can avoid the feeling by working even harder so that your attention is completely focused on the task in hand and not on your anxiety. Or you can go for a drink every evening after work, causing the emotional sensation to reduce. Or you can start eating every time that feeling arises, so your attention is focused on the food instead of your anxiety.

All these strategies help you to avoid the feeling of anxiety in the workplace. Unfortunately, however, none of them work over the long term. The feeling of anxiety is still there and requires an increasing number of avoidant strategies to help you suppress it.

Mindfulness is about approach rather than avoidance. It helps you to approach unpleasant feelings at a pace that’s right for you.

Approaching difficult emotions when you’ve always found a way to avoid them isn’t easy at first. To help you get better at doing so, you need to approach your feelings as you’d approach a kitten. You don’t rush towards a kitten because it gets frightened and runs away. You approach a kitten slowly. First you walk towards it and then you crouch down so that you don’t look too big. Next, you reach out and gently stroke it. Hopefully, the kitten begins to trust you and eventually you can pick it up.

Treat whatever emotion you’re dealing with in the same way. Notice where you’re holding the feeling in your body. Approach the feeling slowly and tentatively, with a sense of curiosity. Gradually you come to fully feel the sensation, just as it is. This experience is like having a kitten in your hand. Unlike a kitten, however, the feeling is likely to change as you approach it.

Sometimes it grows, sometimes it dissolves. But that’s not the point. The point is that you’re willing to feel that emotion and approach rather than avoid it. This empowering move leads to greater emotional regulation — you have control over your emotion rather than the emotion controlling you.

Approaching emotions involves a process of non-judgemental acceptance — a key aspect of mindfulness. When you’re practising mindfulness, you’re endeavouring to experience thoughts, emotions, sensations and events as they are in the moment, without trying to judge them as good or bad, desirable or undesirable.

Approach a challenge rather than avoid it, if you can, and discover how to accept the sensations that it produces. Being able to approach your difficulties makes you feel more confident and you’re less likely to let your emotions control your life.

Rewiring your brain

Your brain is made up of neurons, which are like wires that carry electrical current from one place to another. Each neuron is connected to many others. The brain is the most complex organism in the known universe and scientists still have very little idea about how it works.

If you were at school in the 1970s, you were probably taught that your brain gradually deteriorates as you get older. The prevailing view was that the brain can’t improve itself and that neurons die off as you age. That view was incorrect! We now know that you can create new connections in your brain at any age.

Your brain is unique and shaped by your daily experiences and what you pay attention to. If you’re a violinist, the part of your brain that maps touch in your fingers is actually larger. If you’re a taxi driver in New York, the part of your brain responsible for spatial awareness is more pronounced. And if you’re a mindfulness practitioner, the area of your brain that controls focus is more powerful, as is the part that manages emotions. If you’re a mindfulness practitioner, the area of the brain responsible for higher levels of wellbeing is more active — the left prefrontal cortex.

An explosion of interest in the study of mindfulness has recently occurred. Centres for mindfulness have been established at numerous universities all over the world.

Throughout this book we share insights about the effects of mindfulness on the brain. In this section we describe findings from the world of neuroscience.

Re-sculpting your brain to make you more productive at work

Most people feel that their mind is all over the place. In fact, some people who practise mindfulness even think that the exercises make them less focused! Studies show that the opposite is actually true. When you sit down to be mindful, you’re much more likely to notice each time your mind gets distracted. Usually, your mind is even less focused — so much so that you don’t even realise it.

Brain scans reveal that even after just a week or so of daily mindfulness practice, the parts of the brain dedicated to paying attention (which include the parietal and prefrontal structures), become more activated. In other words you’re actively improving your brain’s ability to pay attention. Longer-term practitioners appear to have more permanent changes in the brain, showing a greater propensity to be in the present moment even when in a resting state.

In his most recent book, Focus, psychologist Daniel Goleman argues that incessant use of technology, such as emails and text messages, has rendered young people increasingly distracted. He goes on to say that current research suggests that mindfulness exercises enable the brain to rewire itself and become more focused.

Goleman identifies three types of focus that are required for different types of tasks:

Mindfulness directly helps to strengthen the networks in your brain associated with concentration and open presence, and allows you to choose to engage in free association when you need to.

Using mindfulness to increase your present-moment circuitry

Children love stories. Adults love stories. Have you ever wondered why? The brain is designed to be hooked by stories. Stories switch on the visual part of your brain. Because stories are formed of connecting ideas, they tune into the connections in your own brain.

Some people refer to the brain as a storytelling machine. Think about when you first wake up in the morning. Your mind is blank and then, suddenly, whoosh! Who you are and where you live and that long to-do list come to mind.

Your storytelling mind is the ‘default’ network in your brain. In other words, your brain’s normal mode is to tell you stories about yourself and others. For example, ‘I need to finish this project by noon, then I need to have a chat with Paul before I get dressed to meet my editor. I must make sure that I’m on time. That hotel we’re meeting in looks very big. I hope we can find a table. I wonder if my co-author can join us …?’

That’s the storytelling brain at work — not always terribly exciting and often repetitive. But mindfulness is different and much more interesting. If your brain is in a more mindful state, you’re focused on the present moment, which engages a different circuitry in your brain. You can access the present moment right now by noticing the sensations that your body is experiencing as it sits on a chair. Do you start to become aware of your poor posture or notice tension in your neck? You can now start to notice information from the world around you: The coolness of the book you’re holding, the size of the tree outside, the wispy clouds and hints of a blue sky beyond. That’s present-focused attention.

When you’re more present-moment focused, rather than running on your default network all the time, you’re more in control of your life. Instead of finding yourself aimlessly surfing the internet, you can catch yourself and choose to get on and finish your work. If you’re lost in thought after thought, you can’t make a choice about what you’re doing until you snap out of the dream. Mindfulness offers you that choice.

Balance is the secret to success. Combining one longer period of mindfulness with short mindful exercises throughout the day makes you a mindfulness-at-work superstar!

Fitting Mindfulness into Your Day

It’s a common misconception that the only way to practise mindfulness is to sit down, close your eyes and focus for a period of time. In reality there are lots of ways to weave in mindfulness throughout your day. In the next section you will discover some easy ways to integrate mindfulness into your day, both at home and at work.

Starting the day mindfully

The way you start your morning often sets the tone for the rest of your day. If you make a positive start with a short mindful exercise, you’re off to a conscious, perhaps calmer, start. You’re then more likely to be able to maintain mindful awareness throughout the day.

Waking up too late every day, not stopping even for a moment to be in the present, makes your life more difficult. Rushing releases a burst of adrenaline into your bloodstream, narrowing your brain’s attentional resources. You’re much more likely to see others as annoying threats to your goal of getting to work on time — little mindfulness is evident in that state of mind. You’re then probably running on automatic for most of the day, having used up a lot of your energy just getting to work and, before you know it, the day has ended and you’re feeling shattered. If this scenario sounds familiar, don’t worry. Discover a different way of starting your day in this section.

Here is an example of a mindful morning routine. Feel free to adjust it depending on your lifestyle, responsibilities and preferences.

We know this scenario may sound hopelessly optimistic. The purpose of this description is to help you find one or two ideas that you can implement in your life. Begin with where you are at the moment. Try going to bed a little earlier and waking up a bit earlier. Spend a few moments deliberately thinking about what’s going well in your life as a positive way to start the day.

Travelling mindfully

A Gallup poll of over 170,000 people revealed that commuting to work is the least enjoyable of daily activities. Longer commutes are correlated with higher divorce rates, obesity, decreased exercise and higher consumption of fast foods. A third of those with journeys of over 90 minutes had chronic neck or back pain issues. But, if you have a long commute, don’t despair!

These findings suggest that identifying ways to make travel more mindful can have a significant effect on people’s health, happiness, relationships, productivity and work success. Use this section to make travelling more tolerable, and perhaps even fun!

Driving with intent

Here are a few tips for making your car journeys more mindful:

Trains

If you commute on the train every day, you can do so mindfully so that you arrive at work focused rather than frazzled.

Here are a few tips to help you be mindful on the train:

Planes

Several of Shamash’s clients regularly use mindfulness practices when they’re on long-haul flights and swear that they no longer suffer from jet lag.

Sitting in a confined space for hours can be frustrating. If you can’t sleep, what do you do? Practising mindfulness is a great idea in this situation.

Taking mindful pauses

A mindful pause is simply a chance to stop and practise a short mindfulness exercise. People love the short mindful exercises that we offer when we’re running a workshop or coaching session. The thought of a two-minute mindful exercise puts a smile on their faces.

We recommend that you do several short mindful exercises per day rather than one long mindfulness session. We suggest this approach because mindfulness is about being more present and awake in your everyday life — at work and at home. If you practise regularly, this result is more likely to happen.

Pausing at your desk

A mindful pause isn’t a relaxation break. Relaxation can often be not only about letting go of muscular tension but also allowing the mind to drift freely. A mindful pause is about gently waking up — noticing thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations rather than tuning them out.

One of the challenges of mindfulness is remembering to practise. Use the following tips to remind you to do a mindful pause:

Waking up and smelling the coffee

Another way to take a subtle mindful pause is when you go on your coffee break.

Most people let their minds have free rein and drift. But the problem with allowing this drift too often is that the mind goes to the same old worries and concerns. Tune in rather than out to fully recharge yourself.

Follow these steps:

If you work in a busy environment, taking this length of time over a drink may not be possible. Modify the exercise in accordance with your needs. Stopping for 60 seconds to really taste your drink can make a big difference to your mindset in that moment.

Ending your day mindfully

Ending your working day with mindfulness helps to set boundaries. You signal to your brain that you’ve now stopped work — you can shift gear from the busy, doing mode to a more mindful being mode.

Creating boundaries

Creating a boundary between your work and home life is key. Consider practising a mindfulness exercise as soon as you’re off work and at home. This signals to your brain that work time is over and you can shift mental gears and begin to relax and rejuvenate. Try to avoid checking your emails in the evening. To become more mindful, you need to set aside time to do something different and reset your brain so you’re recharged for the next day. If you’re checking your work emails after your workday is done and just can’t help it, you may be addicted to doing so. This type of addiction is more common than you think. Check out Chapter 5 for more on technology addiction.

Following a mindful evening routine

Your routine evening activities are a great opportunity to be extra mindful. You can be mindful when you cook, do the ironing, mow the lawn, vacuum and so on. These household chores are normally thought of as repetitive and boring — mindfulness allows you to see them in a different light.

Here’s a list of a few typical evening activities and ways to make them more mindful after a busy day at work:

Sleep is important. A good night’s sleep has a positive effect on energy levels, willpower, general wellbeing, and the ability to communicate and focus. Studies suggest that you need 7.5 to 9 hours’ sleep per night to operate at your optimum level. The exact figure varies from one person to the next. Mindfulness will probably help you to sleep better too. And if you can’t sleep, try a mindfulness exercise when you’re in bed. Mindfulness is restful and should help you drift off.

Avoid looking at any form of screen in the last couple of hours before going to sleep. The light from screens sends a signal to your brain that it’s still daytime and makes it harder for you to fall asleep because it lowers your levels of melatonin.

Developing Your Mindfulness Practice

This section describes some of the key principles of true mindfulness, which are important both in the workplace and beyond. Some of these principles have emerged from ancient practices, developed by millions of people over thousands of years. Take a few moments to consider the key aspects of mindfulness at work and whether these ideas resonate with you. The end of this chapter also outlines some key mindfulness practices, and the free MP3 downloads that we have prepared to help you develop your own mindfulness practice.

Examining your attitude

Your attitudes are also important. Jon Kabat-Zinn, co-developer of mindfulness-based approaches in the West, recommends developing the following attitudes to life.

Being non-judgemental

Your mind is constantly judging experiences as good or bad. Mindfulness practice offers time for you to let go of those internal judgements and just observe whatever you’re experiencing, accepting the moment as it is.

Being patient

Mindfulness requires patience. You need to bring your attention back to the present again and again. If you’re naturally impatient, mindfulness is probably the best training you can undertake!

Adopting a beginner’s mind

If you adopt a beginner’s mind, you undertake each mindfulness practice as if the experience was a completely new one. To work with a beginner’s mind means that you approach your work with freshness as if you’ve never done that kind of work before. Adopting this attitude helps you to switch off your habitual, automatic ways of doing things.

Being accepting

Acceptance is a fundamental aspect of mindfulness. To accept means to stop fighting with your present-moment experience and just be aware of whatever is happening. For example, if you feel discomfort in your body when you’re practising mindfulness, and shifting your posture doesn’t ease it, just acknowledge the sensation and let it be.

Letting go

When Shamash was writing his first book, he struggled. He wanted it to be perfect. But the more he strove for that, the longer the book took to write. When Shamash finally let go of the idea of perfection, the words began to flow. Letting go was the key. Letting go is an act of freedom. When you let go of old ideas, beliefs, people, jobs or ways of working, you create space for the new. When practising mindfulness, you need to let go of each stream of thought that you notice. The process is a continuous movement of observation and letting go.

Remembering that practice makes perfect

Monks practise mindfulness for years. Early scientific research into mindfulness investigated the effect it has on monks. Brain scans revealed that monks’ brains operate far more effectively than those of people who don’t practise mindfulness. The researchers also found that the more practice a monk had undertaken, the greater number of positive changes observed. Monks have an incredible ability to focus, they can manage their emotions very well, they experience lots of positive emotions (that’s why they’re always smiling!) and rarely, if ever, lose their temper.

The good news is you don’t need to become a monk to benefit from mindfulness. Positive changes have been observed in the brains of people who’ve been practising mindfulness for just 10–20 minutes a day for a few days.

Daily practice is the key. Consider the process of discovering how to ride a bike. If you spend just one minute a day practising, you eventually get better but doing so takes years! If you practise for 20 minutes a day with a teacher, you may be able to ride within a week or two. Once you get the hang of riding a bike, to be able to cycle faster you need regular practice. You may need to train with a coach, read books about cycling, meet other cyclists to share ideas, and so on. Mindfulness is similar. You need to practise regularly, and the more time you can dedicate to being mindful, the better you get at it. You can start slowly with short mindful exercises and gradually build up to longer sessions. If you want to get really good at mindfulness, you need to read about it, get a coach or trainer and practise diligently.

Key mindfulness practices

The following practices are available as audio downloads from www.dummies.com/go/mawessentials. Try them yourself. You might pick one a week, and practice it for a full week, once or twice each day. Alternatively you might want to experiment with trying out different ones each day. Remember that all of these practices are straightforward and easy to learn, but do take some effort to master. Approach each of them with a ‘beginner’s mind’, letting go of expectations of success and failure. As mindfulness teacher and author Jon Kabat-Zinn puts it, ‘You don’t have to like it, you just have to do it!’

Mindfulness of breath

One of the core skills of mindfulness is being able to direct your attention at will to where you want it to be. Sounds easy? Most people find this simple task really difficult at first.

This exercise uses the breath as an anchor point on which to focus your attention. The reason we use breath is that breath is universal — everyone breathes! In this exercise, make sure that you do not try to control your breath, just observe it.

The exercise isn’t about relaxing (although many people do find it so). Rather, the exercise is about ‘falling awake’ — becoming more aware of what’s happening in your mind. Think of yourself as a kind scientist, inquisitively observing everything that’s going on without judging or categorising it.

Mindfulness of Breath is Track 1 of the audio downloads available at www.dummies.com/go/mawessentials, which guides you through the exercise.

The body scan

The body scan is all about getting back in touch with your body. Your body has more of an impact on your mind than you may expect. Mindfulness of your body sensations encourages you to shift into approach mode rather than work in avoidance mode. When practising the body scan you slowly move up your body from your toes to your scalp, focusing on each area of the body in turn.

A guided, audio version of this exercise is available (Track 2) at www.dummies.com/go/mawessentials.

Three-step body check

This version of the body scan can be done anywhere, as long as you have a chair, about three minutes to spare, and are unlikely to be disturbed. It’s quick and easy to do at your desk.

Follow the instructions in the audio download available on www.dummies.com/go/mawessentials (Track 3).

Mindful walking

Mindful walking is about being present as you’re walking, rather than letting your mind just aimlessly drift to other thoughts or things you need to do.

You can practise mindful walking in lots of different ways. You can walk slow or fast, focusing your attention on the present-moment sensations of walking. Listen to Track 4 of the audio downloads that you can find at www.dummies.com/go/mawessentials. We suggest that you practise this technique slowly at home and then, when you’ve got the hang of it, you can mindfully walk at your normal pace when you’re at work. Try this exercise for five to 10 minutes to start with.