Author: Randeep Singh / go to all articles on Yoga Concepts
Do you miss out on important points discussed in a meeting with your boss the moment to walk out of the room, do your collegues tell you that you are a bad listener, and do you miss out on opportunities for making impression, or a connect with your clients as you are not able to recall the vital information related to the discussion at hand? If yes, then mindfulness is what you need to practice in order to succeed at work.
Mindfulness is paying complete attention to what is happening around you at the present moment. Sounds very simple, but very difficult to achieve. Difficult because human mind is inherently prone to distractions.
At any given moment either you are judging the happenings around you, or you are overpowered by the happenings of the past or the probable future events, rarely does the mind stay in the present, or only in the present moment.
Why you Need Mindfulness at Work?
To be productive, you need to be completely focused on the task at hand. This is more than true for your work place. Mind is nothing but a melange of thoughts, each thought is nothing but a separate packet of energy, or in terms of spirituality the ‘prana‘.
Energy, mental here, is the fuel for accomplishing any task successfully. More pure, concentrated energy that can be consumed in carrying out a task, the better would be the outcome.
For keeping the mental energy concentrated the thoughts which are comprising the mind at that moment need to be together, or in one direction, not scattered. Scattered energy is leass potent than concentrated energy.
Keeping the mind, all its thoughts, in the present,or together on one aspect only, helps keep the mental energy concentrated. Mindfulness is holding all your attention on to the present, as it is now. Here, you experiemce the present without judging it or allowing it to be colored via the filters of past memories or future thoughts.
Once the mind is setlled in the present it can understand it better, logic comes easy, and all the available mental energy is ‘only’ used for the task at hand, which enhances the quality of the process and the outcome or the intended result.
In other words your performance gets emhanced.
Mindfulness doesn’t come naturally to the mind. By default, the mind is programmed to be scattered, one needs to train it on or habituate it to stay mindful.
Learning to stay mindful at work can not only enhance your productivity as a professionl but it can parallely rehash your life’s quality after office as well. Anyone is expected to possess the ability to simultaneously spin multiple discs at work. You may be sitting in a month end meeting with your boss when you most signficant client,s name starts to scream on the screen of your phoneas an incoming call.
By the time you return back to your boss after excusing yourself from the meeting, and attending the call, you have already lost the threads of the thoughts your boss was impatiently holdig on to. In case the call with the client wasn’t very pleasant, anything that blurts out of your boss’s mouth after that just miss to hit your mind at all. Gosh! you just grapple with holding your attention to the immediate present as your mind is still floating with the client. And, in the end you miss out a lot of crucial details related to both which impacts your over all quality of work.
You often miss out on promised call backs, have issues with prioritizing daily work, and struggle to keep your attention on the task at hand as either you mind is loiterng in the past, or racing to what is yet to happen, all without your permission , or control on it. Mindfulness at work will help you regain this control over the only tool – your mind, which is central to achieving anything at work.
Mindfulnes cannot be just switched on within a day or two, it has to be cultivated, slowly, as a way of going through life on a daily basis. It involes changing your perspective related to everyday tasks. Mindfulness at work helps you delve deeper into the task, experience subtler aspects of it which you were missing hitherto, gain deeper insights into it and thus, carry it out to the best of your abilities.
Its all about involving more and more of your mind in whatever you do, be in present , or be mindfull.
How to Train for Mindfulness at Work?
Here I present a few ways you can train your mind to be mindful at work ot otherwise too. You do not need to be at work to practice these exercises, these can be practiced anywhere or as suggested as when needed, and can then cn applied to work situations.
Important note: In order to practice these exercises one need to learn to be ‘aware’ of when the mind wonders away from the present. First become aware of what is it like being in the present or keeping your attention in the ‘NOW.’
The first exercise will train you to achieve that.
Practice to remain in the present:
Look at anything or any view available around you at this moment, from where ever you are now. Note down your thoughts in the notes app of your phone or on a paper in case available there. Do not worry about the number and quality of your thoughts, just jot them down as it is, even if they sound stupid or nonsense to you.
Now read those thoughts once; grade them as neutral, judgements and having past or future influence. Thoughts which seem to be judging anything, like good, bad, dark, positive, negative etc., in your view go under judgement category, the once which make you link the view to the past or to the future goes under that category, and the thoughts which seem to bebbereft of all these go in neitral catgory.
Mindfulness is nothing but keeping all your thoughts neutral, these thoughts remain unaffected by the modifications of the mind. These are just an experience of the present, as it is, bereft of any mental filters. Do this exercise a number of times over a period of some days and then you would not need to write down your thoughts as now you will be easily able to sense the real present, or the experience of being in the now, this moment.
Take a Mindful walk to Experience Mindfulness
Go on a walk, a light stroll at normal pace. The mind wil begin to wande by creating thoughts related to judgments, past or the future. The mind will tend to attach emotions to everything you come across during your walk. Emotions are nothibng but charged up thoughts; charged up with the negative or positive energy.
In order tp keep the mind in present, or mindful, consciously fix the mind on the objects, people or spaces around you. Just observe, do not think about them. Notice the color spread in front of you. Focus on the subtle differences in the shades of green sprinkled all over a bush or a tree in your view.
Your mind will make all the efforts to distract you away from this direct experience of the world around you. Be aware of that and keep the mind fixated in what is now in front of you, Take your attention on the faces of the people moving around you. Enjoy the variety in everything spread around you.
Maintain this state of your mind till you finish the walk. Now reflect back on what all you noticed, you may have walked a multiple times on the same path before but this time you will notice things and objects which you had missed earlier. Since you were walking mindfully this time the experience would be more enriching and engrossing. Now you will understand the same path better and will aquire deeper insights into it.
Take the Mind on a Holiday
Whenever you yourself take a holiday, whether from work or from daily routine in general. You may take a break from the physical activities which can be defined as constituting a non holiday day, but your thoughts never go on a holiday, these remain as entangled and scattered as always.
The trick to training for mindfulness is to shut you thought patternsrelated to your routine living and tie them down to the present, wherever you are on a holiday. In case you are home, wake up with an intention of experiencng your home in a different way today.
Change your routine for that day, refrain from doing your general morning activities you do on general days; change the placement of your computer and the mobile phone, go out for a walk in case you used to just sit on a chair and sip tea or coffee earlier. If you like try sketching on a computer or a paper. Use a different mug for havingyour morning tea or cofee etc.
This will help break you default, pre-programmmed thought patterns and force you to feel and think differently. Look aorund the room and look out for objects that you normally do not notice on regular days. Feel the mattress or the floor underyour feet. Go barefoot around the house in case you were using footwear earlier; experience your floor for the first time.
Touch and feel the objects in your house which you had picked up from your earlier travels, so fondly, but weretoo busy to even notice them of late. Go out, walk bare foot on the bare earth, experiemce and feel yourself as the part of everything around you in that moment.
Try to do everything for the first time. This will keep your attention in the moment, and that is what is mindfullness in reality. When you apply the same, or take a break from your routine thought pattens, atwork too, you will learn to look at the same task or job from a different angle and that will help you accomplish it with renewed insight, zeal an d vigour. THe results would be excellent as obvious reward.
Set a Mindfulness Notification Alarm
As you set your phone on alarm to wake you up at 5 am everyday, set up a an alarm, on your phone or the wrist watch, to alram you every hour or so to come back in the present fro that moment.
Name it ‘ Back to Present’ alarm. Say you havethis this alram at an interval of every two hours for the entire day. So, what ever would be engaged into at that moment, as the alarm rings, take a stock of your thoughts at that second. Become aware of how much are your thoughts in the present and how much are not.
Suppose your are thinking about a pending dedline at work and the ‘BAck to Present’ alarm rings, screech halt your thinking, look at your thoughts from the outside, as a witness who is observing you from a distance. Immediately, pull your thoughts back to the presemt; look around where you are, how is the space set. the oobjects, furniture, the compute placing with respect to each other.
Try to hear your breath, focus on the soubds around you and be in the NOW and only NOW, for at least 5 mins and then revert back to your previous engagement, till the next alarm goes off.
Reflect on your Day before Bedtime
Do you want to check the level of mindfulness you go about your day with in general? Here is a test as well asa technique for training your mind tp be more mndful of the present moment. It is about reflecting back on the activities of the day before you go to sleep.
To practice it just empty your mind a bit before bed time and sit down whereever makes you feel comfortable and relaxed. Now start recalling (reflecting back) on the activities of the entire day, right from the moment you had woken up to the moment you are reflecting on them.
Make sure that you recall these activities and tasks in the right sequence they had occured on the correct time line. In case you are unable to recall some task in the middle of others , leave it and move onto the next task. You will realize that you are not able to recall everything thing you dad that day and that too in a proper sequence they were done.
This tests the level of mindfulness you move with through the day. Moreover, practicing this technique regularly will train your mind to be more mindful of the activities happening in the moment as you go through the subsequent days.
Benefits of being in the Present moment | Mindfulness
As you focus yor entire attention, or the mental energy in the present moment, you are adding more power to the experience of your present you are in then. Now, you will experience more of what actually is, and not what your thoughts were carrying you to.
This helps relieve stress and amxiety; stress emerges from the dreadful possibilities of the futture, which are beingprojected by your thoughts on the screen of your mind. Being in present takes away this projection ability of your thoughts, because in the now they are bound to the present and not just free to conjure up anything.
By the same reasoning your creativity is also enhanced as the mind which is n the present gains more insights about the present moment and thus can create alternatives or something completely original ( since it is free and not bound to any notions or prejudices her) which neverexisted before.
As our thoughts aremain arrested while being mindful, the mental energes are more concentrated and thus calmer, this maks us more receptive and a better listener than the one who is constantly voicing one’s own views out of insecurities as here the lack of mindfulness keeps the mental energies more flighty and scattered.
Practicing mindfulness also helps us gain better understanding of our own personalities; as the mental fog clears up we can now see more clearly our own motivations and drives behind our thoughts and actions.
Apaprt from knowing ourselves better we also gain direct nsights into three main areas of our lives.
- Realising that everything is changeful and subjet to decay and death.
- Realising that all the external means we employ to achive joy, happiness, or so called security are ulitmately leading to frustration, irritation or suffering.
- Realising that our ego , the ‘I” is neiher the ruler of the universe mor the final entity.
A direct, meaningful, and deep understanding of these areas will transform you with time and help us come out of any illusions or fantasies about the nature of life. The more we understand the more we can participate and enjoy in life and yet remain free. Isn’t that inspiring enough to keep our mindfulness practice going.
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