What is mindfulness?

Mindfulness is the practice of cultivating greater awareness of the integration of mind, body and spirit  and the effect this can have on unconscious thoughts, feelings and behaviours. It is a natural capacity, present in all of us and involves paying purposeful attention to our experience, with an attitude of openness and curiosity.

We are all too familiar with the opposite: a heedless, distracted state that is often described as ‘autopilot’. This default inattentiveness and disengagement from present experience means we react to life out of habit or impulse rather than care and consideration.

When we spend more time alive to our experience, we unlock our potential for learning and growing and are better able to respond creatively to life’s challenges.

Why implement a corporate mindfulness programme at your organisation?

When mindfulness becomes a shared social practice in an organisation, and permeates routines, processes and practices between people and across teams, the organisation as a whole becomes more resilient and performs more sustainably.

We spend more of our time working than doing anything else, and researchers have found that these hours are on average the least happy of our lives. Endemic stress in knowledge-based industries accounts for a large proportion of workplace absence and represents a huge loss of national productivity. Meanwhile, success in most organisa-tions relies on the very things that unhappiness and stress erode – collaboration, creativi-ty, cognitive flexibility and effective decision-making. New perspectives from psychology and neuroscience, and publications like the UK Government’s 2008 Foresight report ‘Mental Capital and Wellbeing’, are increasingly helping leaders to see that the cognitive and emotional resources of their colleagues determine the health, resilience and future performance of their businesses and institutions.
Corporate mindfulness is a multi-level concept, associated with benefits for individual employees as well as for the organisation as a whole, and it can be trained through personal, relational and social practices in addition to meditation and contemplation.