From the course: Mindfulness Practices

Why mindfulness?

From the course: Mindfulness Practices

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Why mindfulness?

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- What's your top challenge at work? LinkedIn actually did a study and found that the top three workplace challenges are finding work life balance, managing workload and dealing with coworkers. Mindfulness is a meta skill for the workplace because it helps us address each of these challenges. When we practice mindfulness, we're in a state where we notice what's happening in the present moment without any judgment. Multiple studies show that mindfulness practice actually changes the structure of the brain. Yes, my friends. It's true. Brain activity is redirected from their reactionary part of our brain to our rational thinking brain. Some studies show that just three days of practice can have an impact. So how can mindfulness help us with our top workplace challenges? Well, to experience more work-life balance we can use it to discover what's truly important to us. By noticing our experience in the moment we can realize what energizes us and what depletes us. With that self-awareness, we can focus our time on what truly matters to us. To manage workload better, we can use mindfulness to notice how we actually work. We notice habits that are inefficient where we might need to ask for help or that we need to learn to say no. Mindfulness helps us see these patterns in ourselves. It also helps us experiment with new and more effective behaviors. Finally, to help deal with coworkers mindfulness can help us better understand both ourselves and others. We often need to collaborate with people who have very different styles than us. Some of these people may irritate us or even be difficult to work with. The practice of mindfulness teaches us to observe without judgment. It helps us to see people and their needs more clearly. When we're able to soften our emotional reaction to others and accept people just as they are we're able to better influence and collaborate with them. These are just some of the ways that mindfulness practice can help us better lead ourselves, lead with others, and lead in challenging times. This is why I'm convinced that when each of us can learn how to be more mindful we can create workplaces that are more inspired, creative, collaborative, and just more fun. When we learn these skills we can experience more impact, satisfaction and wellbeing in the workplace.

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