Stress has become an epidemic. It’s so widespread, we often don’t even notice it. It’s just a part of everyday life. Yet it can sap our energy, vitality and zest for life if we’re not careful.

Mindfulness is an incredibly powerful tool for dealing with and handling workplace stress. Mindfulness can help reduce your body’s cortisol levels, which quickly lowers stress on a neurochemical level. It can also help you eliminate internal resistance, so you can meet life’s problems as exciting challenges rather than as taxing crises.

Here’s how to reduce workplace stress with mindfulness.

Center Yourself Before Beginning Your Work Day

Before you jump into the day, spend 5 to 10 minutes centering yourself. Use your favorite mindfulness practice to bring you into the present moment. Ground yourself in non-attachment. Experience the present moment as it is.

One proven basic practice is to pay attention to your breath. Begin by sitting down and setting the intention to be mindful. Remind yourself why you’re doing this – in this case, to prepare yourself for the day, or to reduce stress.

Then, just watch your breath. Don’t avoid any sensation that comes up and don’t try to create any particular experience. Just watch your experience, exactly as it is. Be relaxed, yet alert at the same time. As your awareness deepens, your stress will naturally dissipate. You capacity to handle stress for the rest of the day increases.

Doing this for just 5 to 10 minutes before your work day can work miracles for your stress levels.

Two Minutes, Twice a Day

Pause twice in your day to spend some time on mindfulness. Even just two minutes can transform your whole day. Anytime you find yourself feeling stressed, take a minute to be mindful. One great habit is to spend 2 minutes meditating right after taking your lunch break.

Let Go at the End of the Day

It’s very easy to take stress from the workday home with you. Spending a 5 to 10 minutes on mindful breathing at the end of the day can be a great way to cleanly separate your work related stress from the rest of your life.

Sit down with the intention of ending your work day. Watch your breathing and notice all the sensations that arise. Breathe in and out while watching your breath, again doing nothing but being aware.

Taking the time to slow down, pause and be mindful sends a clear signal to your brain that you’re shifting gears. You move from a hectic “work time” pace to a much more leisurely “personal time” pace.

If you want less stress in your work, try adding these three habits to your daily routine. In total, they take less than 30 minutes. They can easily be the most emotionally impactful 30 minutes of your life.

[1] http://www.statisticbrain.com/stress-statistics/

So what is leadership? One great definition is:

“Leadership is the art of leading others to deliberately create a result
that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.”

It’s not just the creation of results that makes good leadership. Good leaders are able to deliberately create challenging results by enlisting the help of others. They can single handedly turn failing companies into Fortune 500 organizations. They can change company cultures. Good leadership is an essential key to corporate success.

The Characteristics of a Good Leader

What makes a good leader? Here are some of their most important characteristics:

Self-Awareness. You have an intimate knowledge of your inner emotional state. You know your strengths and your weaknesses. You know when you’re working in flow and you know when you’re over worked. You know yourself, including your capabilities and your limitations, which allows you to push yourself to your maximum potential.

Self-Direction. You’re able to direct yourself effectively and powerfully. You know how to get things done, how to organize tasks and how to avoid procrastination. You know how to generate energy for projects, to calm yourself when angered. You can make decisions quickly when necessary, but can also slow to consider all the options on the table.

Vision. You’re working towards a goal that’s greater than yourself. It could be something small, like the success of the team, or a larger vision like world peace. Working towards a vision is far more inspiring than working towards personal gain.

Ability to Motivate. Leaders don’t lead by telling people what they have to do. Instead, leaders cause people to want to help them. A key part of this is cultivating your own desire to help others. When others sense that you want to help them, they in turn want to help you.

Social Awareness. Understanding social networks and key influencers in that social network is another key part of leadership. Who in the organization has the most clout, both officially and unofficially? Who moves the hearts of the group?

These are some of the most important characteristics of good leaders.

Emotional Intelligence and Leadership

Most of these traits tie directly into emotional intelligence (EQ). Leaders with high EQ are intrinsically more self-aware. They understand their mental processes and know how to direct themselves. They’re more in touch with what they’re deeply passionate about. They naturally care more for others and receive more compassion in return. They’re more socially in tune.

Leadership is more often than not about “soft skills” rather than hard skills. Yes, a leader who understands what drives the bottom line is valuable. Yet it’s the leader who can get others to perform at their best who ultimately creates winning organizations.

What are some of the main ways you see your leadership skills impacting your workplace performance?

Researchers at the University of Iowa conducted a study on intuition using polygraphs and four decks of cards. Two decks were blue, two decks were red. The red decks had a much lower probability of winning. After just ten cards, a sweat response could be measured when a participant considered taking a card from the red deck. It wasn’t until after fifty cards that participants could articulate why they preferred the blue deck. Their physical “gut feeling” intuition knew the red decks were bad five times faster than their logical mind.

2. Reduce Fight or Flight Response. This is your body’s response to perceived threats to your survival. In caveman days, a threat might be a lion or a hyena. Social exclusion was also seen as a real threat, because if you were cast out of the clan, your chances of survival were greatly diminish.

Today, that fear of social exclusion is triggered by less deadly events: your boss yelling at you, being blamed for failure, or even an unreasonable client. All of these can trigger a “fight or flight” response, whether or not your livelihood is actually at stake.

Adrenaline enters the blood stream, your heart rate goes up. Creativity goes down and you become more apt to stress, anger and other negative emotions. Vision narrows into an frenzied “I have to get this done” mentality, making it difficult to come up with creative solutions to problems. It becomes almost impossible to enter a flow state.

Mindfulness can help you significantly reduce the body’s fight or flight response. Julie Brefczynski-Lewis conducted a series of neuroimaging tests where she measured the amygdala’s response to fear-inducing stimuli. The amygdala is the part of the brain responsible for the fight or flight response. She found that the more meditation experience a participant had, the lower their response to fear-inducing stimuli.

3. Choose How You React to Emotions. Without mindfulness, it’s easy to get swept away by emotions. The “response time” between feeling an emotion and acting on that emotion can be virtually non-existent. For example, if you feel anger, you might act on that anger without thinking. In the workplace, being run by emotions can be highly detrimental.

Mindfulness training can help you notice when emotions come up, so you can choose how to act on them. For example, you can notice anger as it arises. Then, you can consciously choose whether or not to act on that anger. Sometimes acting on it is the right course of action. At other times, walking away is the better choice. Mindfulness gives you the option to choose from your higher self, rather than be run by the emotion.

4. Reduce procrastination. Procrastination can be caused by any number of unconscious emotions. It could be a project that seems so big, it feels dreadful just to think about starting. It could be perfectionism or fear of doing a bad job. It could be fear of self-criticism. It could be a wide mix of different negative emotions associated with work.

Mindfulness practice will allow you to deeply understand what causes procrastination for you personally. You’ll be able to watch it develop in your mind and body. You’ll be able to notice how it starts, how it takes shape and when it disappears. Then you can start to unravel it, until it disappears (almost) completely from your mental habits.

5. Boost happiness for yourself and your team. Mindfulness can help raise your happiness “baseline.” In other words, how happy are you when there’s nothing in particular to be happy or unhappy about? We all have a baseline. Most people’s baseline is somewhere between “depressed” and “neutral.”

A mindfulness practice can help you raise that baseline, so you’re happy by default. Numerous studies have shown that happiness can help increase workplace productivity, improve leadership and boost overall performance.

These are just five of the many different ways mindfulness can help you improve as a leader. How has mindfulness improved your leadership or your work?

Comment below – we read every comment!

At SIYLI, we know that mistaking being electronically connected for being mentally connected is a mistake that many workers can make. Instead of doing your job as quickly as possible, consider taking a moment to really evaluate the importance of your work. What are you contributing to when you come to work? Who do you impact?

By bringing mindful practices to your work day, you’ll find that you’ll become more efficient and happy as you go through your day.

How do you get the most out of your workday? SIYLI has three suggestions:

Pausing at the Start

Before you begin your day, before you open your email or start returning phone calls, take a minute to help you clear your head of distractions. Pay attention to your breath and quiet your mind before you allow yourself to work. Take a moment to consider what you want to accomplish today and what you need to do to accomplish it. If you start the day with a clear mind, it’s easier to spend time on what matters.

Focus

Don’t get buried under multitasking.

 Instead of trying to multi-task, perform one task at a time. It may seem like you’re more productive when you’re answering emails, writing reports and making phone calls all at once, but what you’re really doing is dividing your attention and short changing all three activities.

Instead of stretching your mind in several directions, work on honing your mental powers to focus on one job. Choose the task that’s most pressing, and begin it. If you feel yourself getting distracted, take a couple of breathes to redirect your attention and focus. You’ll be amazed how quickly you accomplish your tasks and at the great quality improvement of your work.

Context

What are you building with your work?

It’s essential to put your work in the proper context. Whether you’re answering phones at a reception desk or running a billion dollar company, take a moment to really understand how you contribute to the company and the world around you. As a receptionist, your kindness and efficiency with a caller could make their day brighter, help ensure effective communication for the company and set the tone for a better business interaction. It’s important to remember that you’re working as part of a team and value your place in your company.

At SIYLI, we know that mindfulness is the key to developing great work habits. When you learn to fully utilize your mind and focus, you’ll unlock new levels of productivity. With your new found efficiency, you might find that you’ll have more time and creative ideas.

SIYLI Suggestion: Who is impacted by your work? What are you contributing to?

“In some way I think when we pay attention to our lives, if we pay attention to what it means to be a human being, everything about it is paradoxical. How did we get here? What does it mean to be born into this world and to have consciousness? To discover our family and our life and our body, that’s all to me pretty mysterious stuff,” explains Marc.

Lesser believes that by embracing life’s mysteries, we actually allow ourselves to open up and accept new and different worldviews.

“Basically, I think, people often get hung up on feeling like we need to either be very confident or very questioning, or we need to be very accepting or fighting for change,” says Marc. “It starts with just seeing the paradoxical nature of everything in our lives, so it’s a way of bringing more awareness and understanding to our lives. It’s also a way to practice and expand our own worldview, perception of ourselves, who we are and what we’re doing.”

Being open to paradox also helped Marc become successful in the business world without compromising his values. When Marc was fired from the company he founded — Brush Dance Publications — after 15 years, he embraced the setback as a learning experience. He realized his heart was no longer in the business and set out to find work he was passionate about.

“I learned so much from the process and it opened doors for me that allowed me to do what I’m doing now. Eight years later, I’m back in the seat of running another organization, getting another shot at leadership and growing a company here with SIYLI.”

Now his mission is to spread mindfulness to the world, offering corporations and offices tools for a better business and a better life.

“Most of my time is spent bringing mindfulness and emotional intelligence into organizations through SIYLI,” says Marc. The need for a fresh perspective in business is great. “I think the overarching complaint that I hear is too much to do and not enough time.”

So what is Marc’s key to happiness in the workplace?

“In some way the quickest answer is: Resilience, flexibility and seeing the good in others. I think there is a lot of unhappiness when we don’t see that people actually do have good intentions. I talk about this in the book: The goal is to become really familiar with our own story, our own worldview and to make it wider and more flexible.”

Though paradoxes can offer confusion when we focus on them, they can provide clarity when we learn to embrace the power of paradox. In essence, Marc believes that embracing contradiction allows us to become more accepting and more open to the world around us. This allows us to make a greater positive change in the world.

“We don’t get to choose our parents, we don’t get to choose a lot about who we are, but we get to choose a lot about how we direct our own lives.”

SIYLI Suggestion: Think about the paradoxes in your life. What are they? How can you use them to become more open?