Why now is the best time to practise mindfulness at your work.
Last week I ran a mindfulness workshop at my corporate job on one of my favorite topics, procrastination.
Although it was not my first workshop on procrastination, it was the first time I had spoken about this topic from the angle of the corporate world.
Why?
1. The corporate world is starting to open up to the subject of mindfulness in a new and different way.
With the subject of mindfulness becoming more and more mainstream, corporate companies are starting to catch on to the idea and looking for different ways to improve or reduce the stress of their employees.
When I started my career around 2007, there was no concept around mindfulness in the work environment. There were workshops around how to improve your soft skills, how to work as a team etc.
Around 2012-2014, the concept of coaching started to be a hot topic. There were workshops popping up around coaching or your company would assign you a coach if you were high performer. Whilst that style of coaching is still dominant, in the last 3 years various types of mindfulness coaching have become visible in the corporate world. It started around highly accepted topics like yoga, meditation.
But I feel like with Covid there has been an even bigger shift towards mindfulness and employee mental health. As employees are in lock down in their houses, it has become harder to help them with stress.
Most employees are juggling various responsibilities as they work from home; home schooling, cooking, cleaning…
Therefore, we are all looking for new ways and resources that can help us
to become motivated to start the day working at home
to differentiate various aspects of our life and work at home
to balance yourselves with distractions, noises, the media
Having this sudden new need has shifted senior leadership’s perspective to look at alternative methods for supporting their employees.
I can tell even my manager (hi David 😀) is interested in this topic after being so skeptical over the years. I have spotted the same interest in my partner as well, suddenly previously skeptical brains are more open to try alternative ways and understand the science behind it.
2. People are not shy to share their struggles and ask questions
I have done a couple of other workshops related to mindfulness in the corporate world before, especially in 2019. At that time people were reluctant to ask questions in public, they did not want to share their vulnerability.
At the end of the workshop, when I run the Q&A part, I found I was getting questions only from people who were already invested in their self-healing journey. I was answering 3-5 questions publicly; however, I was receiving more than 10 questions through private email afterwards.
With this latest workshop I found that everyone was much more open to share their struggles and there were a lot of questions on what to read, where to start etc.
3. Generation Y / Millennials are in charge
I also believe (based on my observations at work and home 😀) that the increase of Generation Ys/ Millennials in the workspace is shifting the needs of the corporates. Yay to the new generation!
They question more, the want to shift their environment more, and they want more than just saying Yes to their managers. There is less fear of “how I look, what they say about me” within millennials, asking for help does not looks like being incompetent.
I hide my healing journey almost 5 years in my career. I remember when I opened up to my first mentor about the topic; he kindly dropped me as his mentee! Now I am getting several requests from various podcasts and companies around the same topic and my mentors are supportive. As the world is shifting to a new reality, the urge to shift internally increases not for only individuals but also corporates.
You might immediately say ‘How can one webinar/ workshop make any change in the corporate world? It’s not enough!’ There is no end to criticism if we want to see the negatives, however those efforts can be the baby steps of transformational cultural shifts.
The efforts of individuals have been significant over the last years on shifting public view on topics like global warming, plastic in the ocean or healthier plant-based eating. Therefore, I very much see in a similar light, an individual’s effort for bringing their team to a meditation activity.
This week, I wanted to share my observations and benchmarks as someone who is combining both corporate and spiritual worlds for living.
I hope it gives you ideas to initiate change in your daily work life. Why not start with your small team?
Our work life takes most of our day. If we do not have balance there it is quite hard to create work life balance in our life overall. I hear you, I know it is not EASY! I have had many horrible work life balance stories in my career, but remember you can always be the change that you want to create🙏.
Are you finding it hard to work from home? Do you want to initiate and create change in your life? I'm opening up some slots to support you, my community, in starting to unpack what change you want to see and what the steps towards that could look like for you.