Mindful or Mindless?
I'm on a journey (I know, aren't we all), but twelve months ago I went through a major life-shift when a decade-long relationship ended. It painfully changed my perspective on life in terms of what is important and even more importantly, what is not. The idea that my success was linked to building and selling yet another business suddenly held no merit.
I realised that 2017 wouldn't be about the continued pursuit of commercial success, measured by incremental wealth and its stereotypical trappings. Instead, it would be about a quest for a greater understanding of what I really want from life. After many hours of soul-searching, I found myself exploring the realm of mindfulness and developing a greater understanding that very little in life is really under our control; a nightmare for a control-freak like me.
I found myself heading to Zeist, São Paulo and Sydney - searching for a greater understanding in the art of not searching. Almost a year down the line, I'm back home and feel as though I've not only learned much personally but also that I've benefited in a commercial capacity too; as an innately entrepreneurial character, I can't help but apply my learnings to all things business - it's what I do.
Surprisingly, I have also found myself using what I’ve learned as an opportunity to challenge the popular myth surrounding mindfulness practice in the west; focusing on its authentic form, free from the misinterpretations, or calculated manipulations for pure self-gain, exclusive of anyone else. Here's what I learned....
A layman’s guide to mindfulness
Firstly, the term mindfulness seems to be at least a misdirection if not a misnomer given the implication is that it’s focusing on the mind, rather than being orientated towards being able to step back from the mind and let go of all thoughts while focussing on the present; that is… being aware. In fact, I have found the term seemingly interchangeable with awareness and consciousness. I personally prefer awareness as the descriptor for this practice, but for the purposes of this article, I’ll use mindfulness because that’s what the mainstream Western practitioners seem to have adopted.
Mindfulness is commonly associated with Buddhist traditions, though the last three or four decades have seen western culture appropriate an element of this Buddhist philosophy and mix it up with Jungian psychology to create its own secular flavour for the masses.
A good place to start is with Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard brain scientist who had the unusual opportunity to study, first hand, the experience of the left-brain failing intermittently and eventually shutting down through having a stroke. Her TED talk is entitled ‘My Stroke of Insight’ and I urge you to watch it. The reason for this reference is because she succinctly portrays the vast difference between left and right brain functionality, describing our logical, language based brain as a serial processor and the experiential, sensing right brain as a parallel processor operating at an entirely different level. Her work isn’t to be confused with the now discredited theories from Roger Sperry in the sixties, which suggested people were predominantly right or left brained depending on character. It is now widely understood and accepted that both hemispheres operate fully among all healthy individuals, but how they operate and the functions they perform differ dramatically.
Why consider brain-science at all though or Jungian psychology for that matter? It’s because the left-brain is where the ego is formed; all things language, concepts and thoughts. This is the area most people associate with ‘I’; ‘I think therefore I am’. And herein lies the basis for mindfulness in the western world which focuses on accessing the space beyond thought, the right brain function, which has no understanding of past or future; it cannot operate in the realms of reflection or projection (all ego based functions), so the right brain is the antithesis of the ego, in that it can only operate in the present moment.
The art of mindfulness seems to be the practice of accessing the still depths of your consciousness, which gives a much greater perspective when considering the ‘waves’ of thoughts that typically preoccupy the majority of people.
Accessing the depths of the ocean puts the waves into perspective. But what is this depth? It works well as a metaphor, but where is it in real life? Actually, all of us already access it subconsciously from time to time; that terrifying/exhilarating moment when someone leaves the plane on their first parachute jump cannot be described with words, or the overwhelming rush of emotion experienced when seeing your child born – it’s beyond thought, a whole body sensation which isn’t restricted to the left brain logic. This is the right brain in action; pure consciousness, experience without thought. The belief is that, with practice, we can learn to access the right brain frequently in every day life and not wait for the take-your-breath-away moments, that we can proactively step out of thought and into just being, with supposedly stunning results.
The start of my journey
After several FaceTime calls with a good friend of mine who is both an experienced CEO of a Nasdaq floated company and a mindfulness counsellor, I found myself challenging his every premise; I didn’t want to believe it – it sounded like religion and that’s definitely not for me; I’m firmly of the belief that the tooth fairy is more plausible than a higher deity. So he challenged me to experience mindfulness first-hand and then continue the conversation with him. Within twenty-four hours I’d located a weekend seminar in Zeist with Jeff Foster, the UK’s poster child for mindfulness teaching, and I’d booked a flight to Holland.
Checking into a hotel alone, in a strange town, was reminiscent of my days peddling telecoms software throughout Europe and the US. The only difference being it was a Friday night and I was preparing for a weekend of exposure to something that made me a little nervous. The feeling within me wasn’t one of intimidation, but there was definitely discomfort. Determined to keep an open mind and seek first to understand, I joined a group of circa 100 people and failed immediately at trying to blend in. I won’t bore you with the details here but I learned some key points. The majority of the crowd had a high degree of anxiety. It was stated as fact that hope is a prison as we ‘cannot know anything’ and being in the now is ‘all we have’ so that projections of any sort were futile. Everything was deemed ok, no matter how bad, including death. Whatever it was, it should be accepted; accepting the here and now just as it is and giving no consideration to the future was the flavour of the weekend.
It wasn’t long before I couldn’t keep quiet any longer and I found myself challenging several of the messages. I asked if the human psyche is really okay with no trajectory. My belief is that the secret to a contented life, once core needs are met, is having a sense of direction. I was told categorically that whatever we dream to be our sense of direction is really just our ego convincing us that it’s in control; the reality being that life happens to us rather than us happening to life. I felt as though I was in a room of people asking for permission to get off the train; permission not to have to aim for anything because then they couldn’t fail. And from my layman’s understanding of what went on that weekend, they were all given that permission and went home happier. I left thinking that mindfulness could be a movement for the emotionally vulnerable, a club populated largely by introverted people with a penchant for anxiety, but nonetheless I felt compelled to understand more.
All was not lost on my first foray into the spiritual realm however. Several elements resonated with me; one in particular being the idea that the mind plays a significant role in creating anxiety through projection and fear, rather than maintaining an objective evaluation of the facts at hand.
Back in the UK with the FaceTime conversations, I continued the debate with my American friend. I could feel there was something quite powerful in being able to be fully present. Even though I hadn’t mastered it, effectively being able to self-deliver a detox from the mind could provide a more balanced perspective on everything. It also occurred to me that the vast majority of the attendees in Zeist were employees in companies. They weren’t spiritual nomads, retirees or unemployed; they were everyday people with everyday problems, looking for help in accepting their challenges and reducing the anxiety associated with them. The idea of having any effective tool to alleviate stress would be a benefit to both the individual and the company they worked for.
Several video calls later, we decided that communicating via a screen wasn’t sufficient and a meeting would be in order, if I really wanted to learn the art of ‘dropping in’, being fully present and experiencing ‘what is’, without thought. Two weeks later I was on a plane to Brazil. Yes, he is an American friend but he had found himself in Sao Paulo for a few months.
An Interview with Richard Skeie
Having founded and floated CE Software, creator of Quickmail among other applications, Skeie was a very successful pioneer of email communications in the pre-internet era. I had a joint venture with him in the nineties. After much deliberation, he exited his role as CEO to pursue his curiosity in spirituality. He has practiced mindfulness teaching, among other things, for the past twenty years and has no regrets.
Richard is my kind of guy; he knows how to make money from software. He knows how to build motivated teams from scratch. But he has this other side of his character to which I could barely relate; a spiritual aspect that is no longer seeking. He has a deep contentment with life and accepts all that is in it, including the bad stuff. Nothing seems to faze him; he seems to have comfort in not knowing. It is immediately apparent, when in his company, that you are in the presence of someone deeply compassionate and gentle, with an aura of altruism; I thought I could benefit from some of what he has.
Richard, tell me about Mindfulness as you see it. “Let’s de-mystify this a bit. Many business people express appreciation for their gut-feel. Let’s add an exploration of the source of this intuition. It’s as simple as paying attention to what previously went unnoticed. I prefer the term ‘awareness’ to ‘mindfulness’ but ultimately they both point to the same thing - the wisdom that underlies knowledge, rationality, and even one’s very identity.
“There’s an interesting documentary called Innsaei (intuition in Icelandic). It’s on Netflix in some territories or on YouTube’s pay channel. Once you’ve watched “My Stroke of Insight,” it’s worth a view. It uses the terms rational/intuitive rather than left brain/right brain, but it points to the same thing - that our rationality is 2% (two tablespoons) of our brain, while intuition (the right brain) performs up to 40 million operations per second! As The New Yorker journalist Malcolm Gladwell says in Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking: ‘You can’t know why you arrive at the decisions, but something in you knows’. Imagine being able to encourage those rare ‘aha’ moments. Awareness practice is about getting yourself out of the way and de-emphasizing the over-active rational left brain.
“As westerners, we’ve overdeveloped rationality to where we consider it to be all there is. When our identity (the ego, ‘me’) is centred on thought and the conceptual world, we’re blocked from ourselves. This rationality screens out intuition. Most people never know there is more. We’ve trapped ourselves. What’s the first thing you need to know in order to get out of a trap? That you’re in a trap! To explore beyond rationality, we need to know there’s more to us that is accessible.
“Awareness is already you. It’s readily accessible, and yet, once you know about it, at first, it seems small and uninteresting. It’s the screen upon which the movie is playing. We go to movies for the drama. Exploring the screen can seem boring, but you can find numerous articles about the importance of letting children be bored. The place from which creativity emerges has no sound, no images, no drama.”
Google, Nike, HSBC and Apple are all using mindfulness training for their employees, but can it benefit the average company? “Small companies, like large ones, are made up of individuals having human experiences. Human experiences go through peaks and troughs. We try to avoid feeling the troughs (sad, mad, scared) while we try to cling to peaks through our various flavours of addictions (endorphins, food, sex, drugs, alcohol, power). An addiction is an unconscious avoidance of feeling bad.
“When we believe the workplace is limited to rationality and processes and goals, emotions get lost. Then, consciously or unconsciously, they dominate us. They get stuffed away into an internal pressure cooker, which guarantees they will eventually explode and run our lives. Those who are able to experience and embrace ‘undesirable’ emotions are far less run by them.
We’re all familiar with the expression “mid-life crisis.” It happens when all that rationality eventually turns upside down. SoundsTrue.com has a great resource for that. It’s an audio download by James Hollis, a Jungian analyst, called ‘Through the Dark Wood – Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life’.
It makes more sense when we look at brain development. Eighty-five percent of our brain is developed in the first three years of our lives. The limbic system of the brain which supports a variety of functions including emotion, behaviour, and motivation is developed around birth and is based upon sensory stimulation. So, the rational self, our identity, is mostly a mass of programs created by an infant! The pre-frontal lobes develop much later.
Essentially, by referring to ourselves in the third person, we more effectively deal with emotions and life situations. You can’t update the limbic system, but with “the third person effect” you can move into the higher brain centres and interact with it. Yes, have a talk with yourself — observing rather than being. If you can observe the process, you are not being run by it, which means it doesn’t control you. It’s effectively the difference between letting the child within you run the show (your ego) or using a more developed part of your brain to allow and effortlessly contain the emotions to pass through you.”
Does this mean that people can increase relaxation and clarity of thought through acceptance of all emotions within us, both good and bad? - “Yes. It’s about anchoring our awareness in the senses rather than being hijacked by thought. The ocean is a wonderful metaphor for this. As we breathe and tune into the senses, we sink into the ocean (the right brain) where it’s peaceful, yet fully allowing the stormy waves above (thought battling thought) to do their thing. Sleep is necessary for sanity in that the left-brain goes offline. Meditation is similar to a nap for the mind; it’s a detox. An actual nap does it unconsciously whereas in meditation we do it consciously.”
But it doesn’t have to be meditation does it? “It doesn’t have to be formal meditation. Awareness always underlies thought. It’s what lights up thought. Yet being aware of awareness is meditation. Brief moments eventually become longer.
Set an alarm every half hour. When it goes off, take a breath. Take another and notice your breath. Focus on just the senses; feel your body on the chair, sounds, temperature - just notice. Let what comes come, let what goes go; stay with what is always there. Involve as many senses as possible. Just sixty seconds every half hour. See what happens.
You’ll discover that thoughts come and go. Emotions (which in reality are only reflections of thoughts) come and go, but if you are anchored in the constant, and don’t try to control the flow, it’s life changing. We don’t work well when we’re tired or hungry; this is because the pre-frontal cortex is starved and decision-making moves down to the primitive brain centres. Meditation reverses this.”
What about those of us who are too busy with work and home to even consider any level of self-analysis or improvement (which we’d cynically call introspective naval gazing in the UK)? “Anyone who doesn’t think they have any issues to address, or are too busy to learn to relax themselves from the increasing weight of anxiety in the western world, - they’re screwed!’ Life will eventually come for them in the form of relationship, addiction issues, and health issues. One way or another, no-one gets out alive.”
What about the issue of different demographics within the staff? Millennials will soon make up 50% of the workforce and yet their attitude differs materially from the incumbent Gen X and the emerging Gen Z. Can it really be a ‘one size fits all’ with Mindfulness? “No matter what age they are, all people will have various levels of stress. For those who recognise the benefits of awareness to help them resolve these issues, it will be hugely motivational. As with every proposition that’s launched, there will be the innovators (2.5%) who pioneer the way, followed by the early adopters (13.5%) and then a tipping point at which enough momentum and enthusiasm for a proposition has developed in order to jump the chasm into the early majority (34%) and mainstream audience – in this case, a greater number of staff. Whether you’re dealing with external or internal customers, the theory is similar.”
But how do we get them to do it? “We don’t get them to do it, we let them! If you lead by example, then start with you. Give them an introduction, then let them find it themselves; provide them with the tools to educate themselves, and once the innovators have experienced it first hand, it shows, and others will ask. The key is to tune into your people and when life makes demands on them that cause a need for resources beyond their current knowledge, the tools will be there to help manage their challenges.”
What about timing? Is this a thirty minutes per day type of practice? Would you give them work time or is it offered in their lunchtime like a gym facility? “Wow, you really are stuck in your left brain aren’t you. I would not be so prescriptive; that’s just the left-brain function trying to control everything as usual. I’d let them have access to what they need as they need it. People usually open up and grow through crisis, and they do it at their own pace.”
What about the average business that’s managing things nicely and not in crisis? “Stop thinking business and start thinking people! The whole of the people working together should be greater than the sum of its parts. Every leader attends to the people. Think about a single spark plug causing issues, the engine doesn’t need overhauling, but an element needs attention. Tuning into and facilitating individuals when needed will always improve the running of the whole.
Anchoring in the senses and stepping beyond thought, even for two minutes every hour could change your business stress dramatically. And good health is inversely proportional to stress. Clear thinking doesn’t come from thought, it arises from the stillness. The penny-drop moment, the clarity, the “aha” moment comes from what seems to be nothingness and then the left brain appropriates it and says ‘I did that’.”
Is mindfulness a form of religion, because I don’t think businesses should get caught up in peddling that. “This isn’t about belief. This is about experiencing “what is.” It points you to greater resource within yourself that has gone largely unexplored. When you begin to source your life from the still point that’s actually your larger identity, it’s called ‘waking up’. Yet, it’s not like flipping a switch. It’s realisation after realisation. Awakening has entered the realm of science; Google ‘brain science’. Awareness is not a religion; its singular aim is to just notice. It’s observing, sensing and experiencing; it’s not a belief.
Next Stop - Sydney and an Interview with Nick Verykios
A serial entrepreneur in the technology sector and a practicing tantric buddhist, he built his latest business up to £400million revenue, with 180 staff, before it was recently acquired by Arrow ECS . Currently managing director of the Australian and New Zealand operation, Nick is a stark contrast to Richard; his aura is about as gentle as a brick. Covered in tattoos, smoking like a chimney and swearing like a trooper, he’s more like a rock star than a guru, but there is a blunt honesty about him that is palpable; a ‘take-no-prisoners’ kind of guy who seems constantly ‘on’ and full of energy. He’s someone who doesn’t immediately strike you as being able to access ‘stillness’.
Nick, what’s your take on the emergence of mindfulness? “You’ve got it all wrong, it’s not new; it’s something that we were born to do and did naturally once upon a time. It’s all about purpose; just focus on ‘purpose’ and you lose all distractions. Whether eating, walking, showering or even doing business centric tasks, you focus on what it is that you have to do, within the framework of its purpose, and let go of everything else.”
How do you feel about the left-brain / right-brain analogy; is it a case of just living in our 2% and being ignorant to the rest? “What’s all that really about? It’s still a western world’s need to try and prove everything, come up with rationale, describe it. If you did it properly, you’d just know, without the need for explanation. We get so engrossed in having to prove or disprove things rather than just be the witness to what is truth, your truth, and our minds are perfectly equipped to do that.
“In the west, the other side of mindfulness that doesn’t get talked about is interconnectedness; nothing exists on its own, for example, in launching a new product, there are myriad things that need to work in order for it to be successful, so working on any element should be in context of the knowing that it’s part of something bigger– the purpose. Making a great wheel means nothing if you don’t have a car to put it on.”
Hmm, I’m not sure I’m following. Are we talking mindfulness now or project management? “The whole point of mindfulness is to get the most out of the thing you’re trying to do.”
But isn’t it about detoxifying the mind and having a mental nap? “It could be, but it absolutely doesn’t have to be about that. If you spend those minutes being mindful of having a break, it’s just a break and that’s fine, but mindfulness isn’t just about taking a break from thought. The key to mindfulness is being able to apply yourself in a singularly focused way to any task in hand. Starting out by focusing on stepping back is probably a good way to learn the skill of mindfulness. If you don’t apply it practically as well, then it’s just a relaxation technique for reducing anxiety, but it is so much more when used in every day life.
“Being mindful is simply amplifying the one thing you are doing, rather than being overwhelmed by many. This is important because using mindfulness to perfect the task at hand, and in relation to awareness of the purpose of the task, you end up feeling useful. When you feel useful you don’t have stress. Stress doesn’t come from doing too much or doing too little, it’s about not feeling useful.”
Interesting; so I’ve been looking at mindfulness as an aid to clear thinking by just stepping back, whereas you’re using it as an aid to productivity by singular focus. Do you subscribe to the wave and ocean analogy that is so often used? “Absolutely. The wave is still the ocean, but when you’re focused on an element of the ocean that you call a wave, it illogically separates it from the ocean. But you can only get this perspective and correct it, when you’re mindful of the ocean, and all of its collective forms that form an ocean. The problem is that you add your projection to an object and it then becomes your subject that is tarnished with your pre-conceptions so you can’t see it for what it is.
“Let me give you an example. You’re in a dark room and you think you see a snake, but it’s actually a rope! The problem is now that you see the object as a specific subject; you’ve polluted it with your projections and it stops you from seeing what it really is. Your projections, like fear, drive your perspective and creates overwhelming anxiety, yet if you could only look at what is, you would see the rope.”
Got it! So the point here is that living in the 2%, the ego, we are constantly reflecting and projecting, which means our fear drives our anxiety and stops us evaluating clearly and affects our decision-making through over thinking. “If you say so. You’re still trying to put all the rationale to it, it’s all left-brain thinking trying to stick labels on things. If you’d just stop and experience it, you’d just know, and you wouldn’t have to keep describing it. It’s typical of western thinking, to pick and choose the bits you like and combine it with the psychobabble to make yourself feel better.”
“In fact, what is true is that we live in a conceptual world, so we need an ego to survive ‘it’. But it’s actually the ego that shines light on what you need to look at, to attend to ‘it’, to work ‘it’ out, so that ‘it’ becomes the object that takes away everything else; you have reworked ‘it’ to be of benefit to you. Mindfulness helps here, not an understanding of the 2% rule.”
“Those who really know don’t need to subscribe to the bullshit. And another thing that’s bullshit, is the spiritual festivals that have popped up in every Western country offering to get everyone together under the guise of connectedness and oneness, and dare I say mindfulness. It’s a blatant borrowing of eastern culture being executed with a western agenda. These festivals are just a ruse for people wanting to get laid; there’s nothing spiritual about most of them. If you want to really learn about this stuff, go to a silent retreat where you don’t even look at each other; these help you singularly focus on the purpose in hand. That’s mindfulness. Stay away from festivals, go to authentic retreats, and get skilled up, not knocked up.’
Right, noted… silent retreat, not a festival. Let’s talk about practical applications of this in the workplace. “Dispel the myth and provide definitions and examples for staff. I’ve brought mindfulness to every company I’ve built in the last thirty years, but they don’t think of it as mindfulness; it’s training to be singularly focused on the task in hand and to recognise the connectedness within the bigger system. Educating them on how to focus on what they do and the importance of where they fit within the bigger picture.
This is delivered with internal coaching, taught from chief executive down. We define value as giving someone something that they can’t do without, whether that’s the person in the next cubicle, someone in the warehouse or a customer and vendor or reseller. If you’re singularly focused on what it is you need to do to deliver this value, and why, the results are amazing.”
I totally get that, but it sounds like something I’d say to my staff without any reference or connection to mindfulness at all. “So, you get my point. And it’s what I said at the start. This isn’t new; it isn’t magic, its just common sense, being delivered on a spiritual card. That’s not to say that what you would tell your staff is going to work, if it’s absent of purpose, absent of focus and absent of value. We make more profit than our four largest competitors combined and I put this down to mindfulness training delivered as purpose and the purpose is delivering value.”
“I have five direct reports and I coach them an hour every two weeks and they coach their reports, in turn, an hour every two weeks and so on – the entire staff has an hour training, every two weeks specifically on the art of being singularly focused in their purpose.
Trained staff aren’t interested in the mumbo jumbo that validates what they’re already doing; they don’t need this terminology you keep spouting - left brain, right brain stuff. Most of them aren’t interested in what Jung had to say on the matter. What they need is validation through results. When they see it works, they don’t have to understand why, they just know. We have twenty-four vendors in our market where we have a 70%-100% market share for all of them. This is unheard of globally. Our secret sauce is staff who are singularly focused on delivering purpose in a way that the stakeholders can’t do without it. And the only way they can do this is being focused on what they have to do and knowing where it fits within the bigger picture - they aren’t individual waves, they are all the ocean.”
Do you think people can take mindfulness too far and then become directionless because the focus is only on the now? “Only by misinterpreting what it really is. If you use it as a concept to inform your own misguided agenda, boy you’re going to be screwed. Proper mindfulness is knowing that each element is interconnected and knowing where it fits and how it benefits the whole. A perfect example where no-one else benefited but the CEO and their cronies is the banking industry and that’s why it had to eventually fall and take a correction.”
“It’s all about vision really, a shared vision with a reason for being - purpose. If you’re vision/purpose is good or bad, mindfulness will amplify it. So mindfulness in the workplace is powerful but it has to be applied to the right agenda. Think about Steve Jobs and Elon Musk – they are examples of guys with a singularly focused positive purpose; a vision manifested through applied mindfulness.”
What advice would you give the average leader of, say, a business of up to 200 people? Can they benefit from mindfulness the same way Google and other corporations think they can? “Anything beneficial to the people will be beneficial to the organisation. But, don’t forget that it’s completely useless if you haven’t set your expectations right on what you’re trying to achieve as an organisation because it will amplify everything – the right, the wrong, even the confusion! So, get your purpose nailed first. If you don’t have a clear purpose, perhaps use mindfulness training to get one and then train staff to be singularly focused on whatever it is that you’ve identified that people want to pay for - start with why.”
Lastly Nick, aside from the training, do you encourage staff to meditate? “When you meditate you stop giving anything a name. As soon as anything is given a name, it’s analysis, which is also important, but it’s not a calm abiding practice, which I think is what you are referring to when you say meditation. You have to know what you’re bloody doing. If members of staff want to meditate, of course they can. Tools are available and of course I do it frequently myself too. But our focus is purpose and delivering value, as a whole. That’s mindfulness in my workplace.”
After all that, I started to follow a theme. I couldn’t relate to 100% of any one of them, but several key messages kept resonating from every conversation. This isn’t a leap of faith at all. And it’s not a faith (thank God). Awareness/mindfulness is a practice that yields results, on both an individual and organisational level. Accessing the right brain, the stillness, the ocean depths, whatever your fancy - it works. Understanding the programmes within which we operate (the ego) is the first step in overcoming them and accessing something bigger.
Mindfulness in the workplace can be implemented at both an individual and team level, benefiting the people and the organisation simultaneously, if done correctly. Benefits include improvements in wellbeing, decision-making, creativity and relationships, to name a few. These in turn have a positive impact financially, through improved performance. However, it isn’t for everyone, though evidence shows that interest in this subject is on the increase, which ties in with the evolving priorities of millennials and Gen Z.
While Richard Skeie and Nick Verykios approach the subject from seemingly very different perspectives, it’s clear that they are both saying the same thing; tune into the senses, just notice. In many western businesses, it’s implemented instead predominantly as a way to distract from the day-to-day stresses. In eastern philosophy mindfulness is anything but that. It’s the singular focus to avoid straying from exactly what it is you are doing.
When you eat, you are singularly focused on everything that involves eating. When you walk, you are singularly focused on walking. What this means is purposefulness. But the application of mindfulness in business is to singularly focus on the purpose of what the business is.
That’s all.
How can this practice have so many interpretations? Simple, the west likes to take a foreign concept and use it as an excuse to execute on an agenda unrelated to purpose. Mindfulness seems to be the latest fad, adopted to do that by many companies. But if executed correctly, the result is immense productivity, profitability and success. If you stay mindful of these outcomes.
At the beginning of 2017, I felt like I was done with business. Now I realise that I’m just done with business as usual.
References:
Jill Bolte Taylor - My Stroke of Insight
James Hollis - Through the Dark Wood: Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life
Malcolm Gladwell - Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Further insight in how to step beyond the ego can be found in Eckart Tolle’s - A New Earth
Acknowledgements:
My heartfelt thanks to Richard Skeie and NickVerykios
RETURN TO RECENTLY PUBLISHED ARTICLES »