10 Mindfulness Tips For All Employees - EmployeeConnect HRIS
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Mindfulness

10 Mindfulness Tips For All Employees

In today’s techno-savvy working scenario where you have to juggle between replying to emails, attending phone calls, conference calls, meeting, and presentations, mindfulness at work is indeed a great challenge, because, in the midst of managing all these, you have your own work to attend to as well. This article provides you with a couple of helpful suggestion to be more mindful at work.

1. Focus in the moment

Being mindful is to be consciously present in what you are doing while simultaneously managing your mental and emotional state. Every time your mind wanders elsewhere, here are a couple of ideas which will help you to stay focused and more mindful at work consciously:

  • Set a clear intention at the start of your working day and decide to be mentally present to the best of your ability.
  • Strive to work more consciously, even if it requires you to work a little slower pace initially. If you do so, it will pay off, in the long run, you will see.
  • Motivate yourself by keeping all the advantages of working mindfully in focus.
  • Be in touch with your senses instead of getting caught in trails of thought while engaged in work.
  • Be fully aware while even doing mundane tasks such as washing your hands, opening doors, as well as breathing, etc., as these moments add up to make your day a more mindful one.

2. Be a Single-Tasker

While multi-tasking seems to be the trend, research has proved that it is, in reality, an ineffective method as your brain constantly switches from one thing to another and in the process, it often loses data. Listed below are some of the ways by which you can give up the multi-tasking habit and be a single-tasker effectively:

  • Maintain a time to track journal of what you have been able to achieve in a specified timeframe while you are single tasking as well as when you are multi-tasking. Make a note of what you achieved in that timeframe and how mindful you were.
  • Observe if your productivity increased when you single-task.
  • Organise your tasks by grouping them into categories. For instance, put together emails, phone calls, and meetings. Do these tasks all together in one block of time instead of switching between tasks.
  • Switch off as many distractions as you can and practice mindfulness in your breaks between tasks.

 

2. Exercise Mindfulness

Studies have proved that if you practice short mindful exercises, you can train your brain to be more mindful. It optimises your brain function. These mindful exercises can be as short, and you need not invest a lot of time to do them. Even if you spend one minute in consciously connecting with one of your senses, it can be considered as a mindful exercise. Be as creative as you can be about finding slots in the day to practice these exercises. You will realise that at times of excessive pressure at work if you do these exercises, they can be your saviour. The process helps to rebalance your nervous system, tones down the fight-or-flight response and engages the intelligent part of your brain so that you make reasonable decisions rather than automatically reacting to situations.

4. Use Mindful Reminders

The reason you forget to be mindful is that by default your brain’s normal mode is to habitually run a sort of internal narrative. While you are occupied with your usual daily activities, your brain switches you into this low unmindful state. To snap out of this state, you can use some of the below-mentioned reminders which will help you to be mindful again.

  • Setting a vibrating alarm on your cell phone.
  • Add a calendar event to be mindful.
  • A sticky note on your monitor or a picture on your desk to reminds you to stay mindful.

 

5. Slow Down To Speed Up

You can consciously be mindful at work if you stop or slow down in between. It helps you to be more efficient, productive, happy, resilient and healthy at work. In other words, if you rest, it increases your efficiency. When under stressful situations, you should pause, take a stroll, focus on listening, and take your time to slow down.

6. Make Pressure Your Friend

Research has proved that your beliefs about pressure have a direct impact on your health and well-being. According to another study, blood vessels are seen to be constricted in people who believed that pressure was bad for them, but the same blood vessels stayed open and healthy in people who believed that pressure was rather good for them.

So you should respond to your work pressures creatively rather than negatively. A small change in attitude can add years to your life and also improve your productivity in the workplace.

7. Be Grateful and Remember Mindfulness at Work

By nature, human beings are much more likely to focus and dwell on something that has gone wrong than on things that have gone well. By doing so, you end up adopting being negative and unbalanced in your manner of thinking. To snap out this, the attitude of gratitude is the antidote. If you feel you are stuck in a job that you do not enjoy, the first step is to look for things in the same job for which you are grateful. Staying mindful of what is going well at work helps to improve your resilience. You must consciously use gratitude to neutralise your negativity bias.

8. Embrace Humility

Cultivate humility within yourself. Jim Collin’s book states that the companies exhibiting the greatest long-term success had leaders who demonstrated all the skills of a standard leader but with one exception —personal humility. Humility does not mean that you consider yourself as inferior; rather, it means that you are aware of your natural dependence on and equity with others who are in and around you. Mindfulness is about accepting yourself just as you are, while staying open to listening to and learning from others.

9. Accept You Can’t Change Everything

At the heart of mindfulness lies acceptance. Acceptance does not mean giving up. Rather it means acknowledging the true state of things before trying to change anything. Acceptance always leads to change, and personal acceptance is an even greater boon. When you accept all facets pertaining to yourself, you cut down on energy-draining self-criticism.

10. Adopt a Growth Mindset

Individuals with a fixated mindset are of the opinion that their intelligence and talents are fixed traits. So, instead of developing their intelligence and talents, they spend their time hoping that these traits alone will lead to success. On the other hand, individuals with a growth mindset are of the opinion that they can improve their intelligence and talents with effort. Success at work certainly depends if you have a growth mindset. Mindfulness is to adopt a growth mindset and to pay attention to the present moment and not judging your basic talent or intelligence. If you adopt a growth mindset at work, it helps you to stay open to negative feedback, as you know that this is a chance to discover something new. The essence of mindfulness at work is to believe that you can improve and grow with experience and in the process discover new things about yourself and others.

Byron Conway
byron@employeeconnect.com

Content Coordinator at EmployeeConnect