Mindfulness is the process of understanding our own minds to help us focus on the present, improve our awareness of the world around us and ultimately, to develop methods to ensure our continued mental wellbeing. Studies on subjects ranging from students to US Marines have shown that mindfulness reduces stress and improves overall mental health.

Many organisations have realised the importance of employee mental wellbeing in relation to overall performance. Healthy staff = healthy organisation, and many are now utilising mindfulness workshops to keep staff engaged and performing to the best of their abilities. In this blog post we explore how mindfulness workshops can increase staff resilience, improve efficiency and ultimately, deliver results.

A mindfulness workshop, like one of those ran by Richard here at Brightstone, helps your employees to understand their own thought processes and how they can affect their actions. In a tough economic climate where organisations may be squeezing more and more from their employees, stress and anxiety can lead to mistakes or negative thought patterns. In turn, this can make people even more stressed and anxious, creating a harmful feedback loop that is hard to stop. A mindfulness workshop teaches employees to understand the key aspects of mindfulness, including:

• Understanding what’s happening in the present and how to focus the mind on the here and now
• Understanding how their experiences shape their mental processes
• Understanding how mental wellbeing can affect decision making
• Recognising harmful or problematic thought processes
• Developing methods to prevent negative thoughts and emotions affecting mental wellbeing

In short, personal resilience is how good somebody is at dealing with adversity and overcoming problems. A more complete definition is:

Resilience is the capacity for an individual “to thrive, to keep going, to struggle through or to give up in the face of a stressor” and it is influenced by attitudinal, experiential and physiological differences.

This perhaps isn’t a surprise. When you look at your employees you almost certainly see a range of personality types, all of whom have different approaches to working and perform best in different situations. Some people thrive in a high pressure, backs against the wall environment. Others may prefer a calmer, more measured way of working. Neither is right or wrong, and in fact, a healthy workforce is one that contains a variety of personalities.

However, it’s important to the performance of an organisation that the staff are as resilient as possible, and that means being able to operate effectively outside of their comfort zone. Both personally and professionally, studies have shown the benefits of mindfulness, and the logical progression of it is resilience. Once people are aware of their thought processes, especially under times of stress, they can develop methods to cope.

Primarily, mindfulness workshops for staff resilience are tailored to ensure that your staff can perform at their best and overcome the sorts of challenges that the modern business world will throw at them.

Companies can and do spend millions in software and technology that improves operational capability, but it’s only relatively recently that organisations have started to pay more attention to the human aspect of their operations. Those that invest in their staff’s mental wellbeing and performance can see significant returns on efficiency and productivity. Who doesn’t want their employees to be resilient, emotionally intelligent and driven?

If you want to give your staff the tools they need to thrive then contact Brightstone and we can tailor a mindfulness workshop for your needs.