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BOOK REVIEW: Meditation in the workplace

Mindful Work: How Meditation Is Changing Business from the Inside Out, by David Gelles

THE author of this book, David Gelles, has been a business reporter for two of the world’s best newpapers - the Financial Times and the New York Times - where he currently covers US mergers and acquisitions. With the thoroughness one expects from a financial reporter, he addresses mindfulness in the workplace and has produced the most intelligent, compelling and thorough contribution to this subject.

Mindfulness, put simply, is paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgementally. It is responding from a place of clarity and compassion rather than fear, insecurity or greed.

Mindfulness is about being fully present, in meetings, on the telephone and while doing work, and being fully present with family and friends.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, an MIT PhD in molecular biology and the doyen of academic programmes on mindfulness, developed the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programme. There are now over 720 clinics teaching this approach, making it one of the fastest-growing forms of meditation, with more than 20 000 people trained at the Massachusetts centre alone.
The success of Kabat-Zinn’s method is in no small measure because he secularised it.

If a meditation technique can reduce stress, improve concentration and general well-being as well as produce a sense of compassion, it carries considerable weight. Tens of thousands of graduates of MBSR over decades attest to it being a reliable method to achieve these results. Presented in this form, mindfulness can’t be considered Buddhist, any more than the law of gravity can be considered English, just because Newton discovered it.

The focus on stress is a valuable entry point with increases in stress levels of 18% for women and 25% for men over the past 30 years. “Stress finds you. You have to go looking for relaxation”, explains Dr Mark Hyman.

Mindfulness also helps practitioners grow more compassionate through the “Loving-kindness” meditation. It hones one’s ability to “conjure up feelings of compassion, goodwill, and caring on demand”.

“I began to hear about mindfulness being practiced in corporations and I knew it was something I had to investigate,” Gelles explains.

What he found was that companies such as Monsanto, General Mills, Google, Goldman Sachs, Apple, Medtronic and Aetna all had their own mindfulness programmes.

Phil Jackson, the most successful professional basketball coach ever and a Zen practitioner, used mindfulness to get the most out of his players for 20 years. This included the likes of Michael Jordan. In a study of employees at a bank in Johannesburg, university researchers found an inverse correlation between mindfulness and job burnout.

Green Mountain Coffee Company offers “Mindful Stretching” to its 5 000 employees. Though meditation is no guarantee of a rising stock price, Green Mountain’s market capitalisation did increase fifteenfold in the five years after it introduced this mindfulness programme.

At the 2013 World Economic Forum in Davos, world leaders from all sorts of arenas attended the mindfulness training session. It had standing room only.

Harvard Business Review’s article on mindfulness was their most-shared article of the year and Gelles’ Financial Times story about meditation, The Mind Business, went viral.

Bill Ford, former chief executive and chairperson of the Ford Motor Company, told Gelles how practising mindfulness meditation had changed his life and the fortunes of his family’s company.

Mindfulness meditation requires only that you assume a comfortable position which could be sitting, lying down or even standing, and observe your thoughts, emotions, and sensations. This can also be achieved by following the movement of breath in and out of the nostrils, and focusing on it.

Compassion as instinctual as breathing

Through the use of FMRI brain activity measuring machines, we have evidence that a person’s neural circuitry can be rewired to make mindfulness and compassion as instinctual as breathing. Mindfulness appears to increase activity in parts of the prefrontal cortex, the region of much of our higher-order thinking – judgement, decision-making, planning, and discernment.

All these higher-order benefits probably explain why one of the most popular meditation courses targets the development of mindful leaders.

A Massachusetts General Hospital study showed that meditation reduced the size of the amygdala after just eight weeks. The effect makes the meditators less likely to overreact, and less likely to let their anger get the better of them. It also showed that “emotional regulation” increased by meditation endures long after the meditation.

The growing academic interest in meditation is evident in the number of academically rigorous, “peer-reviewed papers” that deal with mindfulness. Meditators have been shown to perform significantly better than non-meditators on all measures of attention, processing speed and inhibitory control.

Lack of focus has always existed, but was more visibly evident in “channel surfing” a few decades ago, and then in web browsing. Social media such as Facebook and Twitter followed with their ever-refreshing bits of easily digestible nuggets of news and gossip, further decreasing our attention span.

What has been left out of the observation of the negative impact of these technologies and multi-tasking, is any mention of an antidote.

Enter mindfulness.

Readability: Light --+-- Serious
Insights:    High +---- Low
Practical:    High -+--- Low

*Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on leadership and strategy and is the author of Strategy that Works. Views expressed are his own.

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