Mindfulness can help us to less influenced by habitual ways of thinking, and instead respond to the world in productive, creative ways. Here’s a few ideas about mindfulness can be helpful at work.
Find moments to pause
Take a few mindful pauses during your workday, perhaps just after you get off the phone or when arrive somewhere in the car. You could try a “5 Breath Holiday”, where you take a mindful pause for five relaxed breaths. Or take 10 minutes of your lunch break to sit somewhere quiet and follow a simple guided mindfulness meditation. Your mind and body will feel calmer, it will help you focus, and you’ll have more resilience for challenges that arise during the rest of the day.
Accepting experiences allows us to move past them
When we avoid work tasks, there’s often an emotional charge to that avoidance. Bringing awareness, acceptance, and friendliness towards what we’re experiencing can help us to move past emotionally charged avoidance. Going through this process can help you to then engage more fully with the task.
When facing a challenging moment, notice the physical sensation of your emotions. Notice any tendency to react sharply to uncomfortable emotions. Try to slow down and “breathe into” difficult sensations. This can help to relax into the uncomfortable experience, creating space to “respond” in a productive way, instead of “react” in a habitual pattern.
Don’t believe everything you think
As we sometimes say in mindfulness, “thoughts aren’t facts”. Our mind will tell us all kinds of stories about ourselves and the world, and they’re not all categorically true. For instance, you might have a task that you’ve been putting off for some reason, telling yourself that you haven’t got the energy or motivation for it.
Look for creative ways to test these stories you tell yourself, perhaps just by promising yourself that you’ll just sit down and do a few minutes work on the task then stop again. You might be surprised and find yourself sticking with the task for longer than you planned.
Imperfection is normal
Be honest if you don’t understand something. Ask for help if you need it. When we’re under pressure, the mind tends to contract into a “fight, flight or freeze” response. The mind’s bias of focusing on negative experiences easily kicks in, and imposter syndrome comes into play. These types of reactions can cause us to close off and feel like there’s something wrong with us.
But pause for a moment and consider how you’d respond to a good friend in the same position. You’d probably be more lenient, more forgiving, and more encouraging in your response to them. This is normal, we judge ourselves harshly as a survival mechanism. And of course, most people want to help each other. You can challenge these common habitual patterns, let a bit of vulnerability out and ask for help. You might be pleasantly surprised.
There’s lots of ways that mindfulness can be helpful at work. These are just a few examples. If you want to learn more about the many ways that mindfulness can be a valuable life skill, drop us a line to chat about how we can help.