Enhancing your presence with mindfulness

Jane has a critical video presentation for a valuable client this afternoon and she wants to be in her best form. She has been running from call-to-call all morning and knows she needs to take five minutes to ‘get in the zone.’ As she settles down, she fumes at an email on budget allocation while wistfully looking at a social media notification from an entrepreneurial ex-colleague. Her phone buzzes to pick-up her daughter from dance in an hour. She rolls her eyes and just as she connects to her call, the doorbell rings. What a great time for the delivery man to come!

Does this sound familiar to you? I’d be surprised if it doesn’t. In a study in 2008, Mark et al. found that the average worker gets interrupted every 11 minutes and takes 23 minutes to get back to the task at hand. While workers adapt by multi-tasking, it takes its toll on their stress levels, leaving them more susceptible to burnout. This has only become worse as the boundaries between work and home get increasingly blurred in a post-pandemic hybrid world.

Why is multi-tasking a bad idea?

To thrive in today’s world, we need to learn quickly to master difficult tasks and produce great results consistently. Being able to focus on an activity with absolute concentration helps establish patterns in your mind (neural pathways) which are critical for mastery. In the absence of focus, these pathways are unevenly formed.

Flow follows focus. Flow is described by Csikszentmihalyi (2002) as a state of happiness in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else matters. And besides making you happy, why is Flow important? McKinsey conducted a study across 5000 business executives to declare that Flow results in 500% improvement in productivity (Cranston & Keller, 2013). By multi-tasking, we lose this opportunity!

Another reason to avoid multi-tasking is because we have some amazing tools as humans to connect with others – braincells called Mirror Neurons and the face/heart connection of the Vague Nerve. Both are sending/receiving information all the time – from small changes in facial expressions to tone of voice. By multi-tasking, we miss signals and this inherent connection. Another challenge of having mirror neurons? The other person always knows when you are not fully present. This gets in the way of forming strong relationships which is essential for leaders and coaches to do their job well.       

How can mindfulness help?

Mindfulness is described as non-judgemental, present-centred awareness where all that rises in our attention is acknowledged and accepted as it is (Bishop et al., 2004). We can be mindful through a variety of activities – meditation, deep-breathing, body-scan – anything that we can do while being able to deliberately stay in-the-moment, non-judgemental and observing. Research shows that mindfulness is effective in improving resilience, listening skills and the auto-immune system (Kabat-Zinn, 2013; Passmore, 2019). Even organisations like Google have invested in corporate mindfulness to encourage greater self-awareness, well-being and performance.

Mindfulness helps us manage ourselves better in the following ways:

1.       Mindfulness engages the executive-thinking part of our brain preventing our emotions from hijacking our mind.

2.       It activates the para-sympathetic nervous system, moving us away from fight-flight-freeze responses and helps create a safe environment.

3.       It strengthens how we empathise, makes us more self-aware and able to come back to the present moment.

For Coaches: Mindfulness can help coaches be more present and be better, more empathetic listeners. It can also help them move away from being focussed on their own emotions and thoughts and become more observing of the client. It is well known that the coach-client relationship is one of the most important factors of success. Mindfulness can help improve this relationship.

For Clients: Leaders can benefit from mindfulness by creating greater psychological safety within the teams they lead, creating the conditions for Flow within themselves and their teams as well as being able to observe themselves dispassionately and non-judgementally, thereby leading with better control on their emotions and developing higher EQ.

Practical ways to be more mindful

You can compare mindfulness to a muscle – you use, or you lose it! Although a very simple construct, mindfulness is hard to do. Here are 3 practical ways of being more mindful:

1.       Introduce a short mindfulness practice every day: The Japanese concept of Kaizen encourages us to do things consistently but in small amounts so that we can form good habits. Are you able to introduce a short practice, say 5-10 minutes – either first thing in the morning or just before you start work? There are various apps available (Headspace, Insight Timer, Calm) that have simple mindfulness exercises to use.

2.       Reduce distractions: Before you can focus, you need to create the conditions for focus. If it is an important meeting or a coaching session, can you make sure you have all notifications turned off and the phone on silent? It may be hard to do this at every meeting but prioritising the most important ones to start with will help.

3.       Group mindfulness: Spending some time with like-minded individuals in a mindfulness exercise is a great way of building social connections while also being mindful. Once a week, you could set up a meeting at work for just 15 minutes where people take turns to chair a 10-minute mindfulness exercise. If you’re a leader, you could role-model by making sure you attend these as often as possible to encourage others and create a safe environment where people can practice this.

I hope you can make one or more of these practices to work for you. I will leave you with a great quote from Sharon Salzberg as something to consider:

‘Mindfulness isn’t difficult. We just need to remember to do it!’

Priya Hunt is a member of Coaching Reading and an executive coach and non-executive director

References

1.       Bishop, S.R., Lau, M., Shapiro, S., Carlson, L., Anderson, N.D., Carmody, J., Segal, Z.V., Abbey, S., Speca, M., Velting, D. and Devins, G. (2004). Mindfulness: a proposed operational definition. Clinical psychology: Science and practice, 11(3), p.230.

2.       Cranston, S. and Keller, S. (2013). Increasing the meaning quotient of work. McKinsey Quarterly, 1(pp.48-59).

3.       Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2002). Flow: The classic work on how to achieve happiness. London: Random House.

4.       Mark, G., Gudith, D., & Klocke, U. (2008). The cost of interrupted work: more speed and stress. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 107-110).

5.       Passmore, J. (2019), "Mindfulness in organizations (part 1): a critical literature review", Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol. 51 No. 2, pp. 104-113.