As mental health issues spread through the office, HR leaders embed mindfulness into their benefit packages as part of their employee wellness programs. Such a winning move has advantages for both the employees and the employer.
Learn how mindfulness can drive personal and workplace success.
1. Promotes Productivity
There’s a reason why workplace experts insist that organizations implement mindfulness and wellness programs. It’s an effective driver of productivity. Being mindful helps employees disconnect personal issues from work and direct all their focus on everyday tasks. They learn to see what’s in front of them and delay matters that don’t require their present attention for later.
Research shows that just a few minutes of daily mindfulness in the workplace can make employees more helpful and productive. As mindfulness practices help workers in many psychological ways, it’s equally beneficial to organizations wanting to see an upswing in their employees’ performance.
2. Makes Better Decisions
Everyone follows a unique decision-making process and certain determining factors propel their choices. You may know people who decide based on their emotions while others use stone-cold logic. Despite the difference, one thing is universal — the unconscious biases wired in the brain influence your decisions.
Examples of these prejudices rise to the surface during the hiring process, where some HR inadvertently shortlist candidates based on the information they write on their resume or after a few seconds of meeting them. Mindfulness increases your self-awareness of your own biases and allows you to examine how they impact your decisions. You can apply this renewed self-awareness to the hiring process to make decisions from a more objective place. Being mindful helps you improve your decision-making skills and increase your chances of success.
3. Boosts Your Creativity
Mindfulness and creativity have a complex but generally positive relationship. They can be closely related — practicing mindfulness improves your mind habits and allows for deliberate mind wandering — a vital aspect of the creative process. The more you’re aware of your mind’s activities during the creative process, the better you are at embracing incoming creative ideas.
For example, you see the root cause of the problem when you’re mindful — rather than its adverse effects spilling into your life or career. Mindfulness also helps mitigate stress, an inevitable workplace issue. When stressed, your brain’s ability to creatively explore solutions to problems diminishes. Mindfulness repositions you in a state of creativity.
4. Improves Your Leadership
Most successful businesswomen and other leaders practice mindfulness in any form. It’s webbed in their lifestyle, implying it could be one of the shared traits among people with excellent achievements.
One study on women leaders of educational institutions in South Africa revealed that mindfulness, together with positive affect, is a significant predictor of resilience — a crucial leadership skill. Resilience allows those in command to cope with disruptive changes and sustain their energy, even under pressure. It’s a significant skill to cultivate as it helps leaders overcome setbacks and bounce back from difficulties. The study suggested investing in mindfulness resources to increase resilience and improve leadership.
5. Transforms Your Lifestyle
You’ll often hear gurus recommend practicing meditation to live a better life — and this is partially right. Aside from the well-documented benefits of stress relief and reduced risk for depression, mindfulness can also turn your life around by changing the habits that make up your lifestyle.
Meditation entails looking within. Spending a few minutes each day to examine your health, emotions and life at large is an opportunity to rate your habits and assess life areas you need to upgrade. For instance, you may find you lack physical activity or determine your nutrition habits could be better. Mindfulness makes you aware of your lifestyle choices and empowers you to make more conscious decisions.
6. Increase Your Happiness
Lastly, mindfulness can help you lead a more joyful life. How? It eliminates worries so you can live in the moment. Unnecessary stress ruins your chance to be happy. For instance, maybe you got a promotion but you’re worried about the new responsibilities that come with a higher paycheck.
Practicing mindfulness helps manage emotions and reactions . You can tune into the moment’s blessing, celebrate your success and feel happier.
Mindfulness as One of the Drivers for Success
Mindfulness is a tool to support your journey to success. You’d want to cultivate it through practice to boost your productivity, make wiser decisions, improve creativity and increase your happiness.
Harnessing the power of being in the moment lets you see things in a better perspective. When you do, solving setbacks in the workplace becomes easy. The benefits of mindfulness trickle down to other workplace aspects. You can work in harmony with your colleagues, build a good relationship with them and create a better workplace culture.
This is a Sponsored post – the author has requested this post be shared on WE Magazine for Women and we were compensated for sharing.