When you think of a change management consultancy, you wouldn’t necessarily think of mindfulness programmes. Organisational change and mindfulness are two different worlds altogether and cater to different sorts of people, right!? Nope!
Increasingly, mindfulness methods are being utilised within organisational change and performance management programmes to help employees build resilience. We’ve talked about building resilience before – it’s an important part of coping in unsteady times such as through turbulent economic times, organisational change and just generally coping with life’s day-to-day stresses!
Corporate wellbeing and resilience are actually becoming such a valued skill set that even world leaders are beginning to recognise its significance. More than 150 world leaders discussed adopting a sustainable development agenda at the UN Sustainable Development Summit, where wellbeing and resilience was one of the 17 goals identified towards sustainable global development. Economies aren’t the only things that need to flouish – humans do too!
Mindfulness as a resilience tool
Mindfulness is fast becoming the number one tool for building resilience! Everyone’s doing it, including Google, the NHS and Transport for London – even Harvard Business School includes mindfulness principles in its leadership programmes!
But does it really work? Do mindfulness practices really help us to build up resilience?
Research has shown that the neurological benefits of mindfulness lead to an increase in emotional intelligence, empathy and self-regulation. These are the areas of our brain which help us to manage stress, conflict and to communicate effectively.
With these new neural pathways, we should be able to take a step back and consider our response before reacting, considering alternative perspectives rather than acting on emotion and impulse. This allows us to use the more intelligent parts of our brains and put us back in control of our emotional responses to events. These skills enable us to be more resilient to changes, setbacks or any other unexpected events which might get thrown our way.
Mindfulness alone may not be the only answer to a turbulent or changing work environment, but it can certainly form part of the journey. Resilience is something we can build as part of a process to understand our environments and what it takes to realise our full capacity. When it comes to resilience in the workplace, mindfulness practices could be utilised as part of a wider employee engagement & wellbeing programme focused on creating a happier, healthier & more productive workforce.
Start building resilience today
We’ve discussed the benefits of building resilience in the workplace in a previous blog, and we have created bespoke resilience programmes for many of our clients in various industries. To find out more about what it might include or how it might be done within your company, speak to Richard at Brightstone.
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