7 Ways Mindfulness Will Turbocharge Your Career
Stress is a big part of our everyday work lives. Whether it ‘s the amount of work we have on our plate, trying to balance all of our commitments or stress from dealing with others, it can be a job to know how to manage it all. In this article Margaux Diaz looks at how mindfulness can help reduce stress and turbocharge your career at the same time.
According to the American Institute of Stress , the biggest cause among 46% of American adults is workload related.
While this is a high statistic, some people can manage their stress levels and remain permanently calm like nothing just happened even when faced with several challenges. How do they do this? One method is “Mindfulness”.
Mindfulness has been considered as one perfect technique to turbo-charge a person’s career in some ways, as well as providing a whole host of other health benefits along the way.
It has been highlighted as a quite effective approach to various career-related stresses. In short, mindfulness has become quite popular in the workplace, with big brands like Google, Apple and Yahoo using it to boost the performance of their workforce. Google, for instance, offers its employees a 19-hour course on Mindfulness in which thousands and thousands of Googlers have taken it each year.
What Exactly Is Mindfulness?
This is a special form of meditation that enables one to gain control of inner thoughts and behavior. This ensures that you become more focused, even when you are not meditating. It is now used as a common approach to reduce stress amongst employees in an organization. The technique is quite useful in putting your thoughts under control such that you will not jump from one idea to another or be pondering on negative thoughts.
You can use this as a perfect technique to recharge without losing focus and manage to get through your busy and tedious day calmly and in a productive manner. According to a renowned Harvard University Psychologist Dr. Ellen Langer:
“Mindfulness is the process of noticing new things. Doing that puts you in the present making you more sensitive to perspective and context.”
She further states that process is more of re-energizing than energy consuming.
Why Is Mindfulness Becoming Quite Popular In the Workplace?
The benefits of mindfulness are many however, its ability to improve performance in the workplace is the main reason why companies such as Google are considering the approach in turbo-charging employees’ careers. Other than improving performance on all types of tasks, mindfulness offers other essential benefits.
Now that we’ve discussed what mindfulness is , let’s look at the seven ways it can boost your career.
1. Relieving Stress
Today, mindfulness is considered as the ultimate stress-reliever. As you all know, stress is a real performance killer. Besides, it is responsible for roughly two-thirds of all hospital visits according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Many severe health conditions are related to stress including high blood pressure, cancer, insomnia, heart disease, depression and anxiety among others. Mindfulness and meditation will help get rid of stress by getting you into a relaxed state whereby your mind is entirely calm and clear, allowing you to relax while still maintaining your focus.
2. Brings The Inner Joy
Mindfulness has been seen as an effective technique to help bring calmness to your place of work. By improving both the physical health like fighting such issues as stress, heart disease, chronic pain, inadequate sleep and blood pressure among others and mental health like treating various problems like depression, eating disorders, anxiety disorders and substance abuse. You will be able to bring the inner joy which propels you into becoming more productive than ever before.
3. Improving Your Ability To Focus
For better performance at the workplace, you are needed to focus on one thing at a time. Roaming thoughts make employees less productive due to distraction in the chronology of thoughts and events.
Mindfulness, therefore, comes in to help you to avoid distractions and boosting your level of concentration to your work. You can be sure to bring to an end the multi-tasking habit which in a sense is a productivity-killer. It is said a more focused mind is a highly productive mind.
4. Boosting Your Creativity
Creativity comes from the mind; mindfulness, on the other hand, helps you to fight the negative thoughts that hinder your creative thinking. Mindfulness training is based on training the mind to think of “now,” and this helps a lot in setting the mind free to come up with new ideas in a creative manner.
5. Improving Emotional Intelligence
Emotional Intelligence is said to be the other kind of smart that is intangible but significantly impacts on how we manage behavior, make personal decisions and how we navigate various social complexities to achieve positive outcomes. While taking a mindfulness class, you will learn about the two aspects of emotional intelligence, i.e., personal competence and social competence.
In the case of personal competence, you will learn self-awareness and self-management that will, in turn, boost your performance at work.
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With these skills learn, you will be able to stay aware of your emotions and manage your behaviors for the better good of the organization.
Social competence, on the other hand, deals with more of social awareness and relationship management skills as you get to understand other employees and people in general better. You will be able to understand their behavior, mood or even motives such that you can also improve the quality of your relationship.
This section also focuses on two aspects, i.e., social awareness and relationship management. Generally emotional intelligence is what helps you to focus your energy in one direction and achieve tremendous results. It is actually what sets stars apart from the rest.
6. Improving Memory
Memory is one of the crucial aspects of cognitive ability in any human being. However due to various issues related to stress, sooner many will become so bad at it. There may be many distractions and thoughts that will wash away your memory; however, mindfulness and meditations will help restructure everything thus improving your memory.
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This way, you will be able to be more productive in your workplace. Research by the Association for Psychological Science points out that taking a short class on mindfulness will do a lot to memory and focus thus boosting performance at work.
Combining your mindfulness training sessions with scientifically proven memory supplements, that has been tested and shown to fight distractions and improve memory. This way, you are likely to reduce any stress that may be related to your performance at work place.
7. Making You A Better Person
Other than boosting our performance at work mindfulness positively affects our pro-social life. A Harvard study shows that people who meditated showed more compassion and kindness to others when compared to those who didn’t. Mindfulness brings the calm and a present feeling which have been observed to deliver the best in people.
Conclusion
Mindfulness is a critical approach in steering your career to better heights, by boosting focus, memory, creativity, emotional intelligence and inner joy, you can be sure of improved performance at your workplace now and in the future. It is worth your try.
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