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Mindfulness for Organizations: Foundations for Performance and Productivity, with Rasmus Hougaard, Managing Director, The Potential Project
So there is a general huge misconception around mindfulness. Many people think that mindfulness is a spiritual thing. Many think that it’s a private thing that we do at home. And most people think that mindfulness is about slowing down. That’s wrong. Mindfulness, in short term, is really about speeding up our mental processes whereby we can be more effective with whatever we’re doing that we have this attentional muscle that allows us really to be on task with what we’re doing. So while mindfulness could have a personal benefit, which it certainly has– we do become more happy, we do become more kind. But it also has a real strong business benefit in terms of our performance and productivity going up.
The PAID Reality
The PAID reality is something that we are seeing that in organizations all around the world, whether it’s Australia, Asia and Europe or North America, is facing. The P stands for Pressured. A stands for Always “on”. I stands for Information Overloaded. And the D stands for Distracted.
Even though this PAID reality, according to researchers and certainly our experience, is leading to attention deficit traits we can also see that there is an antidote, which is mindfulness. Mindfulness in short terms is basically learning to manage our attention. And learning to manage our attention means that we can actually train our minds, train our brains to be more focused with the task at hand, whether that is an email, whether that is a meeting, whether we’re communicating with others, whether it’s staying focused on our priorities. So we are not destined to suffer from attention deficit trait but we can train.
Rewiring the Brain
Mindfulness is a practice of basically rewiring the neural networks of our brains. So we have basically three parts of the brain, one of them being the reptilian brain that is in the very middle of the brain and it’s very, very powerful and has one objective of basically surviving. Now in an office environment we are encountering many things, many situations that is triggering this fight and flight response of the reptilian brain. What that does is that we sometimes say things that we later regret. That we sometimes do things that we later regret. And with mindfulness training we can train ourselves through the mental strategies of patience, of presence, of kindness to be more real and reality. To be more focused on what really matters. Basically what training these mental strategy is doing is it is helping us to maneuver through life using our prefrontal cortex more than our reptilian brain which means we are more rational, we are more in charge, we are more in the driver’s seat of our actions and our words.
Maneuvering More Skillfully
There are two very basic practices in the practice of mindfulness. Sharp focus and open awareness. The first one, sharp focus, is really the foundation of mindfulness practice. It is the ability to be single point of focus on the object of choice. In mindfulness practice that is the breath. Then we train that ability, that attentional muscle of being focused on one object. And we can apply that to anything, say an email you’re writing. It’s the same muscle we’re using. Or having a conversation with an employee.
The second practice of mindfulness, the open awareness, is really about learning to be skillful about how we engage with other people and how we engage with our life. While sharp focus is having that single point of focus on a task at hand, open awareness is having the ability to notice what’s going on inside of us, what’s going on around us. And certainly what’s going on with other people. So that we have more skillful applications of how to engage with other people. We know what’s going on with them because we have a stronger awareness and thereby more able to give them what they need so that we as an organization can grow more vast.