Our Blog
Our modern world has become unbalanced, with little time allocated for just “being” and reflection. Mindfulness can restore that balance to leaders and workplaces. Mindfulness, practiced in organizations, can be a powerful antidote to the fear and aggression build-ups.
High-performance organizations, such as Apple, Procter and Gamble, Unilever, Raytheon, Microsoft, SAP, NortelNetworks, Comcast, Yahoo, Google, eBay are offering employees classes in mindful meditation and senior executives such as Bill Ford Jr., Michael Stephen, Robert Shapiro and Michael Rennie practice regular mindful mediation as part of their leadership-enhancement routines.
Mindfulness can restore balance to leaders and workplaces
Research contests that mindfulness-enhanced traits include the capacity to suspend judgments, to act in awareness of our moment-to-moment experience, to attain emotional equilibrium.
Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, describes mindfulness as “paying attention in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgmentally.” Other definitions are: “bringing one’s complete attention to the present experience on a moment-to-moment basis,” and “it includes a quality of compassion, acceptance and loving-kindness.”
Researchers and mental health professionals contest that ancient mindfulness practices – originating in Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist and other traditions – hold great promise.
Daniel Siegel, a neuroscientist and author of The Mindful Brain: Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well-Being, contends that the development of perceptional blind spots is a killer.
David Rock, writing in Psychology Today argues that “busy people who run our companies and institutions …tend to spend little time thinking about themselves and other people, but a lot of time thinking about strategy, data and systems. As a result the circuits involved in thinking about oneself and other people, the medial prefrontal cortex, tend to be not too well developed.” Rock says “speaking to an executive about mindfulness can be a bit like speaking to a classical musician about jazz.”
The three fundamental elements of mindfulness are:
- objectivity,
- openness, and
- observation
All together, create a threefold that enable the mind to become conscious of its mechanics and liberate it from its preoccupations of indecisiveness.
