Mindfulness as a management tool
When speaking about mindfulness many people associate it only to yoga and eastern philosophies or generally speaking the “soft stuff”. You may also think: what does that have to do with management and leadership? Actually it does and as a matter of fact a lot.
The current business life is filled up with interruptions, short sighted tasks and overflow of information. This repeats it over and over and over and over again. Long term exposure to this spiral dive may cause Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. In short terms this means inability to focus on anything on longer term.
Just think about your working day. How many times you check your email? In average an office worker checks his or her email 50+ times a day. This means in average every 9 minutes. On top of that come the telephone calls, meetings, ad-hoc discussions with colleges and coffee break and so on. For most of the people that is simply too much and hardly anything tangible is achieved.
Mindfulness can be used to address this clutter of information and interruptions. How? Basically practicing mindfulness exercises you can learn to slow down and focus. Mindfulness brings your wondering mind from past and future to present. You cut out the unnecessary information that is keeping your brain busy and preventing you to think straight. It simply helps you to focus on the things that truly matter.
Situations where mindfulness could be beneficial for you:
a) making big decisions
b) brainstorming a new diverse strategy
c) innovating
d) implementing (large) changes
e) braking routine
f) generally when “thinking out of box” is needed
How to exercise mindfulness?
There are many ways of exercise mindfulness and it varies which kind of exercise suits your personality. These exercises include:
* Mediation and relaxation
* Sport where you are alone away from the crowds
* Painting, photography and art generally
* Playing an instrument
* Listening to music
The old wisdom is that if you keep on doing the same you have been doing in the past you become more of the same you already have. Unfortunately that does not apply to money and business results. How about staring to think differently and trying something radically different, like mindfulness?
