It’s time to talk about Mindfulness
Practicing Calm amidst Corporate Chaos
These days, it seems that everywhere I turn, I run into someone talking about “Mindfulness”. At the gym, posters proclaim the advent of “Mindful Fitness” programs. Doctors and hospitals are increasingly recommending some form of Mindfulness to their patients as a way of promoting faster healing from illnesses and surgeries, finally taking up the call of the now-famous Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, who has been touting the benefits of mindfulness on physical health since the 1970s. YouTube is rife with videos of various teachers promulgating various approaches to Mindfulness as well as various definitions of what it means. But when a longstanding, corporate client contacted Ascentador recently to ask us to help design an organizational structure and competency model for a “Global Head of Mindfulness”, and only a week later a senior executive shared over coffee how his strategic thinking and business results had improved since he began practicing Mindfulness, I knew it was time for me to move beyond my personal interest in the subject and share some thoughts.
Perhaps the simplest way to explain what Mindfulness means is to look at its etymological origins. According to Virginia Heffernan (New York Times, April 14, 2015, “The Muddied Meaning of Mindfulness”), the word has its origins in ancient Pali language, where sati - - a core Buddhist concept - - means “memory of the present”, “skillful attention”, or simply “awareness”. Put another way, the concept of Mindfulness is the conscious act of turning one’s thoughts to this moment, this activity, this set of feelings, sensations and thoughts. It does not require a meditation hall, though some people enjoy practicing together, or even a meditation mat in the corner of your home. Mindfulness can be practiced in the course of everyday activities.
As anyone who has tried to practice such “skillful attention” knows, this is easier said than done. Our minds are constantly drawn away from the present, either to think and re-think past choices (despite the fact that they cannot be altered) or to the boundless possibilities represented by the future, where we can busy ourselves for hours imagining the different options available to us. Even when we make a conscious decision to be mindful - - while driving to work, sitting on the train, doing the dishes, or in a more formal way, while sitting on a meditation mat - - within a breath or two, we may well find our attention diverted from now to then. Only with practice do we find that we are able, in longer and longer stretches, to ignore the countless thoughts, priorities, emotions, and “voices” that fill our heads, each demanding attention, and to instead focus on the feeling of the wheel in our hands, the sound of the train in its tracks, the sensation of the warm soapy water on our hands, the stillness of the meditation room. Like most things, it seems, Mindfulness takes practice.
The benefits of Mindfulness, say its seasoned practitioners, include elevated mood, increased happiness, and improved interpersonal relationships. Kabat-Zinn, and many others in the medical community, have established a large body of clinical research work that demonstrates Mindfulness can also reduce blood pressure, decrease the chance of heart disease, aid in better sleeping, and even in reducing physical pain. More recently, clinicians as well as human resource directors have begun to realize that Mindfulness can be good for business, not simply because of the emotional and physical health benefits - - and no doubt healthier, happier employees are preferred to their sickly, depressed counterparts - - but because Mindfulness seems to have a direct correlation to individual productivity as well. By helping executives learn how to focus deeply on the task at hand, rather than on the seemingly endless distractions that bombard us in the workplace, Mindfulness teachers enable longer periods of uninterrupted strategic thinking, creative problem-solving, and task achievement.
What’s more, says Charles A. Francis, author of Mindfulness in the Workplace, “Mindfulness in the work place leads to more positive attitudes, better interpersonal communication, and a greater sense of understanding and compassion between colleagues.” As Mindfulness deepens our awareness of the present moment, as well as our self-awareness, we begin to speak and act with less emotion and more empathy, with less irritation at begin interrupted and more compassion for the one doing the interrupting, and with more balance, equanimity, and calm than when our minds are one place and our bodies another.
All this sounds well enough, and on an individual level, many people may elect to pursue some form of meditation or related “stress-relieving” activity for the numerous benefits that practitioners report receiving, but how do we begin to inculcate such practices at a team or corporate level? Are we all supposed to turn up at the office in yoga pants, pull up a mat beside the assistant controller, and begin chanting? For most business environments, such an approach seems quite radical and perhaps even a bit “touchy-feely” and off-putting. But for those organizations who have introduced Mindfulness initiatives or similar programs have found the uptake by employees to be nearly overwhelming.
Google, for example, already well-known for its commitment to employee development, offers dozens of seminars, classes and workshops. Reportedly one of the most popular of these is called Search Inside Yourself (SIY), a mindfulness-infused offering developed by Google’s 107th employee, Chade-Meng Tan, then a soft-spoken, introverted engineer, but one inwardly determined to change the world. As he related to the New York Times (August 28, 2012, “Ok, Google, Take a Deep Breath”), “I was always very different from the other kids. I have an IQ of 156. I didn’t play sports. I thought big - - believed I could achieve great things. I don’t want to sound megalomaniac, but my whole life is about doing something for the world, from as far back as I can remember.”
Mr. Tan finally found that chance in Google’s openness to new ideas. Mr. Tan, himself a practicing Buddhist who knew first-hand the benefits of Mindfulness, proposed the course and won support from his boss to pull together a panel of nine external experts in Mindfulness and its application to business. The class they developed together begins with practical attention training (“Be. Here. Now.”), then moves on to using that controlled attention to develop deeper level of self-awareness, and ultimately teaches skilled practitioners the art of “self-mastery”. While that may sound a bit “new age” for some, in fact more than 2,500 Google employees have taken the course thus far, with deep waiting lists for the quarterly offering which spans two classes each week for six weeks. Mr. Tan reports that the course has received good reviews. “In anonymous surveys, on average, participants rated it around 4.75 out of 5,” he says. “Awareness is spread almost entirely by word-of-mouth by alumni, and that alone already created more demand than we can currently serve.”
Google employees who have completed the course and maintained mindfulness practice afterward consistently report lower levels of stress, greater resilience in the face of challenges or obstacles, and a greatly enhanced ability to listen carefully without unnecessary reactivity or emotion. Mr. Tan has since left the Company and, with its full support, founded The SIY Leadership Institute (siyli.org) to formalize and expand the offering to a much wider corporate audience. Not surprisingly, many companies have signed up as clients, while many others, including Aetna, Apple, Astra Zeneca, Deutsche Bank, General Mills, McKinsey & Company, and Procter & Gamble, have created their own offerings in-house. As reported in the Financial Times, General Mills “has even begun research into [the mindfulness program’s] efficacy, and the early results are striking……83% of participants said they were ‘taking time each day to optimize personal productivity’ – up from 23% before the course. Eighty-two percent said they now make time to eliminate tasks with limited productivity value – up from 32% before the course. And among senior executives who took the course, 80% reported a positive change in their ability to make better decisions, while 89% said they became better listeners.”
We live in a time, thankfully, when more and more employers recognize the importance and value of ensuring ongoing developmental for their executives and employees alike. Too often, particularly at executive level, these initiatives are focused on enhancing core skills, technical abilities, or other competencies specific to a given participant’s role. Even more sophisticated offerings focused on leadership development, strategic thinking and the like, seem mostly to focus on the conceptual and the organizational elements rather than on individual awareness, growth or change. To borrow a phrase from Kabat-Zinn in his bestseller, Wherever You Go, There You Are, Mindfulness “is the only intentional, systematic human activity which at bottom is not about trying to improve yourself or get anywhere else, but simply to realize where you already are.”
As corporate leaders and practitioners, perhaps we can benefit by shifting the emphasis of our developmental approaches away from skill and competency enhancement and, instead, help our colleagues and/or clients build programs that will deliver to participants greater levels of individual calm, an ingrained tendency to listen, higher degrees of health and fitness, and a self-awareness that improves day-to-day relationships and increases a personal sense of well-being.
With all these benefits on offer, it’s time to talk about Mindfulness.
-Chris van Someren