Major companies have long understood that it doesn’t help to have employees working away long hours without offering them some kind of chance to do something nice for themselves: whether this is a discounted membership to the gym, the chance to go volunteering or pursuing a hobby- the smallest offering often makes a difference with engagement at the workplace and happy employees that are willing to work harder.
The talk on ‘mindfulness at the workplace’ at SMW 2014 invited founders of various mindfulness apps to speak: Buddify, Headspace, Breath Sync and Unplugged Weekend, facilitated by Head of Google Campus, Sarah Drinkwater. A very insightful talk, perfectly scheduled in the lunch break and rounded off by a 5 minute mindfulness session by Breath Sync founder Michael Townsend Williams, yoga teacher and mindfulness coach.
Here are 4 wisdoms I learnt about:
Work Life Balance
What does this phrase actually mean? Does it mean that one has to make sure that there is enough time for ‘life’ after work, which constitutes of not being on a computer and thinking of the thing you do to earn money; or does it mean to love what you do for money and therefore enjoy life more, even if that means you are constantly doing things that earn you money?
And in a white-collar world does ‘work’ being at a computer/ tablet/ phone and ‘live’ infer things to do away from the screen? If it does, then answer these questions for me please:
Do you check work emails after hours? Do you reply?
Do you check what’s going on at work while you are on holiday?
Do you have the feeling that your digital life controls you rather than the other way around?
If you have answered ‘yes’, to more than one of them and you’re not happy about this then read on. We need to talk.
STOP reading your mail and replying after work hours. If you have offices overseas, they will need to understand that you can’t always be ready for ‘breakfast in Japan’ emails, you should sleep and when you are back in the office for ‘breakfast in London’ then reply. I know you are going to say “yes, it doesn’t work like that in my office, people expect me to answer”, and I agree here with Headspace founder, Andy Puddicombe– it is simply time to change it. This behaviour shouldn’t be normal and there needs to be a person that starts changing this. Go to your boss and discuss it, maybe use Huffington Post’s founder Arianna Huffington as an example:
She said NO to answering emails after work hours a long time ago and urges all her staff to do the same; more radically, the system is coded in a way so that all emails that are sent to an inbox that has activated the ‘out-of-office’ feature to be deleted.
3 ways to unplug
And anyway, your brain needs a break from all of those screens and thoughts about stresses at work, whether you love your work so much you don’t consider it work, or not. Vikki from Unplugged Weekend knows that ‘tech hasn’t been designed to be good for us’ and that’s why she and her business partner set up weekends to ‘detox from the digital’.
For her pop up days or weekend retreats she came up with 3 ways to unplug:
- Reconnect with yourself: Eat healthy, engage in physical activities and be with yourself in meditation
- Connect to other people: make sure to meet new people and talk to everyone in the group to get to know them, be part of team building activities to find trust
- Connect to the environment: be in nature, spend some time getting to know your environment
Whether you pay to go on an unplugged weekend or not, there are easy ways on how you can do this at home: Laura from True Yoga Collective has just written a blog on ‘creating a retreat at home‘. And if you want to implement something into your everyday live, here are some top tips:
- Sleep with your phone in another room, be woken up by an actual alarm clock to avoid checking the phone at night and before you go to sleep
- Speak to someone new every day, or make a point of getting to know the people you work with better
- Take the time to do some physical activities and find the space in your day to breathe and be by yourself (Micheal Townsend emphasizes the out breath, breathing out fully and naturally replenishing your lungs after is therapeutic and calms you down)
- Do an activity that allows you to ‘be in the zone’ for at least 20 minutes a day
Find space
If you are a very busy person, Buddify founder Rohan Gunatillake, has some nice insights for you on how to manage your energy rather than your time. You might be one of those people who can wake up, get up and do; or maybe you are like me: you take ages to wake up and really get going just before lunch and power through the afternoon. Whichever person you are, Rohan believes you need be organised. Organised enough to take the liberty of finding space to breath and decide what you want to do when. He calls upon people to take the work schedule back into their own hands: Read you emails after lunch and do something creative in the morning, if you want, or go through your emails and put them into action folders- just do what you feel you have the energy for. Most importantly, focus on one task at any one time and get rid of your million open tabs that are just bound to distract you.
If you end up in a muddle and you find yourself loosing focus or have too much to do, ask yourself good questions like:
- What is the best way to organise things right now?
- How can I be kind to myself right now?
- How can I be calm right now?
These questions, he says are there to focus your mind and should give you the ability to find space to think and focus.
Control your life rather than it letting control you.
Last but not least, it is that which will lead us closer to happiness: Being able to control life and steer it in any way you want, gives you the space to decide when you want to do things in life and at this exact moment. It means knowing yourself and understanding what you want, which might be re-evaluated throughout life, re-adjusted throughout time, mood, weather and the environment you are.
It’s important to be with yourself and giving yourself time to breathe and refocus, before you wake up one day and ask yourself how you got there.
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I wrote this blog for TrueYogaCollective.com
Helene Maltz 