by Juliet Adams and Dr Tamara Russell
With all the hype about mindfulness it’s hard to keep up with the reality. Is mindfulness at work turning into ‘soma’, the drug that kept everyone happy in Huxley’s Brave New World?Is 2018 the year that the ‘mindfulness boom’ goes bust?or are we at the stage of fine-tuning mindfulness to enable it to truly transform organisations?
According to Bravetta Hassell, writing for Chief Learning Officer,one study has suggested that as many as 43% of companies have run mindfulness programmes or plan to add a mindfulness training component to their existing training. While it is clear from a growing research base that mindfulness training improves performance, relationships at work and well-being, there remains scepticism in some quarters as to exactly how mindfulness can benefit organisations.
Shauna Shapiro’s three ‘axioms’ of mindfulness are Intention, Attention and Attitude. It is clear that intention drives attention; the intention of a company introducing a mindfulness programme, the intention of a trainer, and the intentions of individual learners all have a huge impact on the outcome of a mindfulness programme, yet this vital ingredient is frequently overlooked or completely missing.
In this article, our intention is to provide a summary of the story to date, highlighting our observations on what works and what doesn’t. We explore good versus questionable practice, and the next generation of mindfulness at work, including context-specific protocols, brain-based applied mindfulness and leadership models. We end by proposing a few key tweaks that can help individuals and organisations to ‘supercharge’ their mindfulness and ensure that they are getting value for money.
