Meditation boosts business skills
The average person’s mind wanders 47 percent of the time. Combine that with our less-than-a-goldfish attention span of 8 seconds, and we all have to ask ourselves: Is anybody listening to what others are saying?
Insight mindfulness meditation helps boost employees’ focus, decision-making, strategic thinking and communication skills, more important now than ever before as we are all bombarded with myriad attention-grabbing technology.
BUSINESS SKILL 1: Focus
Productivity suffers when employees cannot focus, which damages your bottom line. Take a typical eight-hour day. If an employee’s mind is wandering 47 percent of the time, that means they are actually working a little over four hours a day.
With insight mindfulness meditation you learn to focus on your breath, and when your mind begins wandering, you notice and return to the breath. That constantly returning to your breath builds neural pathways that change patterns of behavior. Soon you will notice that you are paying more attention to every facet of your day.
You begin to pay attention to every detail or your work day, and by focusing, you naturally boost your productivity.
BUSINESS SKILL 2: Decision-making skills
There is a measurably thicker prefrontal cortex in the minds of meditators, the area of your brain that is responsible for decision making and impulse control, in addition to regulating attention, emotions and actions. You want to increase the gray matter here, exactly what studies have discovered meditation accomplishes.
So the good decisions you are able to make before lunch follow through your whole day. You become as bright and sharp at 5 p.m. as you were at 9 a.m.
And let’s not stop there. By regulating your emotions and actions, when a stressful situation or annoying person pops up you remain calm, able to diffuse what could turn into a contentious exchange.
It is estimated that managers devote a quarter of their time to resolving conflicts at work. Imagine a workday minus those conflicts.
BUSINESS SKILL 3: Strategic thinking
Those who train their minds by meditating 20 minutes most days have a thicker cortex in the hippocampus, which helps them put things into perspective, improve their executive functioning skills and boost their working memory.
As we age, the cortex shrinks.
No matter what age you begin a meditation practice, you will begin to build your cortex, staying sharper throughout your life.
What employer would not wish that for every employee?
BUSINESS SKILL 4: Communications
In addition to your employees being better able to focus, hone their decision-making skills, decrease their stress and build their strategic thinking capabilities, they will learn communication skills that enable them to begin to really listen to people.
How often do you sit in a meeting and listen to your co-workers regurgitate back someone’s previous thoughts? They really are not being rude. They are simply not listening to what other people are saying. Instead, they are fighting to get the attention they need.
Through insight mindfulness meditation, people learn the importance of listening without interrupting. And when they listen, they will find the right words to respond with thoughts that are their own and not someone else’s ideas said in their own words.
They are calm, focused and in control.