Mindfulness for imperfections

Being mindful is a buzz word these days; we see several apps and courses that aid to its management. Many C suits and executives are moving to be more conscious about their health and are using such forums for qualitative networking as well.

What is being mindful?

Mindfulness is a state of active open attention on the present. When you’re mindful, you observe your thoughts and feelings from a distance, without judging them as good or bad. Instead of letting your life pass you by, mindfulness means living in the moment and awakening to the experience.

Mindfulness helps you observe your inner critic and silence it while you start focusing inwards; incidentally, you tend to be less judgemental on both yourself and others. Mindfulness or observation is not developed only by sitting cross-legged and closing your eyes, it can be developed by simply journaling your day and all your reactions and feelings. It can be also be developed by having a chat with your mentor, boss, or a counsellor.

All you need is to make a conscious effort to gaze within yourself? What is triggering the reaction within you, and where it is originating from? Silence gives us strength, but most of us are scared of this silence. We tend to keep our surroundings as noisy as possible to avoid meeting one’s true self. This could happen when your inner critic is very strong; growing up under strict parents generally leads one to have a strong inner critic whom we want to constantly escape. However, the reality is that we cannot escape from this and will have to face this monster and make peace with it!

We must give this monster its due time and let the complaints follow; I learnt this technique while I was coaching a person. She was so filled with emotions that she was unable to find merely 10 good things about herself, I asked her to write 50 bad things about herself and she was ready with a list. We must let all shortcomings and deficits come into play. Once she did, she discovered nearly 30 of them and continued to find more. Thus, we need to accept the imperfections within ourselves; we have enough and have more reasons for why we are the way we are. It may prove that our core beliefs, parenting, or socio-economic conditions that we grew up in could have contributed to our misfortune or imperfections.

This is where I came up with an idea called “corporate confessions” we often try and hide our mistakes, and we hide under the wrong “hide” to pretend and showcase a better version of us. We are constantly under the fear of being judged and undervalued. All large organizations spend billions of dollars in mistake-proofing and maintaining the quality of their products. Moreover, people spend many hours logically analysing where people can go wrong. All they need is to have a transparent defect registry that can record all the defects that a learner goes through and then work on them to make it. Most defects can become windows of opportunity for innovation. We have several examples such as the 3M Post-it notes. If the organization is open to sharing defects and allowing such confessions to happen, they would certainly have better defect prevention in place in addition to a way for innovation.

Few year back, when I was struggling to manage a crisis within my team, I overheard a team member talking that he had done something similar but fortunately he could correct it quickly. That’s when I realized instead of allowing people to sing their best practises and success stories, we need to have a forum to discuss bigger goof ups. More “how I saved...” stories would give an insight to people to prevent such mistakes and leave the people humble with an acceptance for their errors and shortcomings. One can only improve themselves if they are aware of their baseline and goals. If we continue to be in the hallucination of being perfect and great, we have no place to move or improve.

Thus, being mindful about our team and our own imperfections can lead us to greater pursuits. Especially, being non-judgemental and being open to mistakes need greater ground work that we actually have. The gap between what we “know” and what we “are” is often large and needs a fundamental shift in the way we think.

Very few organizations a have budget to spend on such transformational trainings and gear up their team for sustainability. However, as a society or community, we need to switch to this mode for a healthy mental and physical status.