Mindfulness and Success: How Being Attentive Can Transform Your Professional Life

In today's fast-paced and demanding professional world, finding success can often feel like an uphill battle.

But what if there was a simple and effective tool that could transform your approach to work and propel you and your business towards your goals?

Enter mindfulness – a practice that has been gaining momentum in recent years for its ability to enhance focus, productivity, and overall well-being.

By cultivating a sense of presence and attentiveness, mindfulness allows us to fully engage with our work, resulting in improved decision-making, increased creativity, and better communication.

Moreover, it helps reduce stress and burnout, allowing us to navigate challenges with resilience and a clear mind.

Whether you're new to running your own business or an ambitiously seeking to take your business to the next level, integrating mindfulness into your daily routine can be a game-changer.

Prepare to embark on a transformative journey towards professional success fueled by the power of mindfulness.

Focused Daydreaming

As with any change in behavior, becoming more attentive and mindful Is not an instant snap of the fingers occurrence.

Our brains need practice to slow down and experience the present.

Practice start by devoting 10 minutes to paying close attention to what’s happening around us.

Like many people, I start each day with a period of mindfulness, which takes the form of a short meditation.? For me, this is like clearing my brain of any dream leftovers and creating space for whatever the day may bring.

In all honesty, it felt really weird starting this practice.? But as time progressed it became increasingly comfortable.

The secret is to gradually increase both the length and frequency of the periods of mindfulness.?

If you are uncomfortable with the woo-woo type feeling that may be attached to mindfulness, think of it as focused daydreaming.? ?

According to the experts, mindful exercises?can be whatever length works best for you.? All that is necessary is the creativity to finding appropriate times and opportunities to practice mindfulness.

Be Present At Work

Instead of completing routine tasks on autopilot, a more mindful approach is about getting your head into the action and paying close attention to what’s going on around us and also what’s happening to us.? This means paying close attention to what we are doing and also how specific actions affect us.

What physical and emotional sensations are we experiencing, how do we feel inside?

Although your mind will still wander, recognize this wandering as the distraction it is and consciously refocus on the task at hand.?

It’s helpful to consider our time and attention as valuable resources that are best applied to completing meaningful tasks.? Allowing someone or something else to demand or grab our attention is comparable to having other valuable resources taken without our consent.

Stop Multi-Tasking

Once upon a time, I prided myself on my ability to multi-task.

At the time, I was a young lawyer with a new law practice as well as a husband, new father with two small children, one large dog and a fixer-upper house.? And if that wasn’t enough, I also responsibility for the administration of two legal aid offices in different county towns.

I saw myself as a juggler who could keep eight plates spinning simultaneously, each on its own stick.??

But that was then. Now I recognize that I really wasn’t spinning those plates simultaneously: I was actually spinning them sequentially.? In actual fact, it was more like moving from plate to plate to keep each one spinning independently.

From bitter experience, I have come to recognize that multitasking?makes us more distractible and prone to errors. When we are constantly shifting attention from one issue to another, we lose track of what is happening to those issues that we are ignoring.

In the worst case scenario, we can become so focused on keeping the plates spinning, that we ignore why we are doing in the first place.

Professional jugglers spin plates to entertain their audience.

Clients hire professionals to help them with their specific issues…not watch us try to juggle as many issues as we can.

The Hurrieder I Work, The Behinder I Get

Often attributed to Lewis Carroll who wrote the famous fantasy works “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass”, the true source of this quote is unknown.

However, despite its anonymous origin, the wisdom behind it remains sound.

Counter-intuitive as it may sound, trying to work faster frequently creates problems that can actually slow things down.

As is the case with multi-tasking, when we try work faster, we are a greater risk of becoming distracted and making errors.

Slowing down, or even stopping, can help us become more efficient, productive,?happier in our work.

Mindfulness includes slowing down and reflecting.? And don’t be surprised if slowing down creates the opportunity if finding new solutions that allow us to work smarter…not harder.

Having introduced the above suggestions as elements of twin concepts of attentiveness and mindfulness, this would be good place to stop and reflect.? I will offer more suggestions at some future point.

In the mean let consider how you might apply any or all of these suggestions to how you run your service business and help clients.

Increasing Your Mindfulness

If you have even the least bit of interest in becoming more mindful, which of the four suggestions appeal most to you?

Based on your current understanding of that suggestion? how might it be useful in either or both of running your business and marketing your services?

How might it be useful in your personal world?

If however, you are not interested in coming more mindful…that’s fine.? Thanks for taking the time to read this article.