The benefits of mindfulness & meditation in the workplace

Personally, I have now been practicing mindfulness & daily meditation for over 10 years.  I am often asked “what are the top 4 things for your health & energy?” and these always include mindfulness & meditation, along with great sleep, great nutrition and morning exercise.

In 2014, energiseYou celebrates its 10^th year in helping companies to improve the health, energy & performance of their employees.  For almost a decade we have brought mindfulness & meditation into the workplace via our workshops, webinars, podcasts & health events.

That aside, I have observed a very interesting polarity with this subject. On one hand, there are so many amazing benefits associated with mindfulness & meditation, such as:

-       Improves happiness

-       Increases your energy levels

-       Improves sleep

-       Makes you more successful in business

-       Helps you manage pressure at work

-       Improves problem solving & creativity

-       Lowers blood pressure & boosts the immune system

-       Reduces negative emotions, stress, anxiety, fear and anger

Yet, on the other hand, there are so few people that actually practice mindfulness & meditation on a daily basis.

So given all of these benefits why is it not practiced more? Here are some of the reasons:

-       People and companies are not fully aware of its transforming benefits

-       Some of these benefits cannot be fully appreciated until they are personally experienced

-       People often expect to be able to quieten the mind and meditate like a Buddhist monk on day one, which just doesn’t happen

-       People often try meditation without being shown how, find it very hard and then immediately give up

-       People often over look mindfulness as a practice because it seems too basic and simple, yet it is in its simplicity that the magic lies.

-       As with many things, people need to be inspired by someone to start.  My personal inspiration to start TM meditation was the film director David Lynch who has been meditating everyday for the past 35 years and he’s still loving it!

So the reasons that mindfulness & meditation should be a key part of your wellbeing programme are because of their profound benefits that can transform overall health & energy. To achieve this we need to address the challenges in the list above to ensure we can actively and regularly embrace the gift of mindfulness & meditation into our lives.

Positivity is central to success

It can be difficult to remain positive when something goes wrong or you experience a setback. But being optimistic and taking a positive approach to how you deal with challenges is central to success.

In a world where change is constant it is only natural that we face challenges along the way, inside and outside work. These may appear to have a negative impact on circumstances/things around us but it is how we deal with them and move on that will determine the real impact.

Listen to any great leader and you will hear them talk about the little (and sometimes quite big) setbacks that they have experienced along their road to success. One thing they all have in common is that they don’t dwell on these setbacks or consider them ‘problems’, they focus on addressing them and then quickly move on.

Follow in the footsteps of the likes of Richard Branson and Steve Jobs – acknowledge mistakes, learn from them, make relevant changes and then move on. The moving on part is crucial and it is often this that so many people find impossible to do.

But dwelling on what’s gone wrong all the time and taking a negative approach to things around us or setbacks that we experience could leave us stuck, unable to move. This will not only get us down it will get everyone down around us.

Negativity feeds negativity and this is dangerous in the workplace. Because it not only has an impact on how we feel as individuals but it can lead to low employee engagement levels, poor productivity, an increase in sickness absence and high staff turnover. Positivity, on the other hand, builds successful organisations. It creates an engaged and high performing workforce.

So, how do we encourage our people to focus on the positive?

We need to ensure the culture supports this positive approach. This means making sure that our leaders and managers create a positive working environment for their teams, where people can talk openly about mistakes and learn from them but also where people are encouraged to share successes and build on what is good.

Doing this will not just influence how we feel, but also how we perform, individually and as teams. The more we are able to move our attention to what makes us feel good, the more able we will be able to deal with challenges that come along our way.

Creating an environment that builds on positive emotions can build the pathway to success. To find out more click here to register to listen to our free webinar on the 21 August, at 12pm – I will be joined by Chris Samsa, Positive Psychologist, from the NeuroLeadership Group, to discuss the power of positivity in boosting performance.