Mindfulness at work

Why is work so difficult?

Generally, because of people.

As Sartre put it: "Hell is other people".

In a stressful situation other people annoy us and throw us out of balance. If everybody works the way we do, we won't feel as challenged. The larger our companies grow, the more awesome people we have the chance to work with. However, when we are stressed, a large team means there are just more people that potentially will annoy us. The more mixed and diverse our teams get, the more different our team members become compared to us and the more we can learn from them. When we are under the gun, those differences may become reasons for misunderstandings and cynical arguments - and a much less mindful and harmonious office.

Being a part of a start-up journey is not always easy, and there is widespread evidence of start-up founders and employees developing severe depression from the stress they are under when trying to make it big. A certain level of stress and pressure is good - it helps you kick into gear and get on with things. However, too much of it can be paralyzing and have severe consequences to you and the people around you.

I've been through several ups and downs in start-up environments and these are tips to help you find better balance and mindfulness at work, i.e. reducing stress and working better with those around you.

Mindfulness tip #1: Get some Headspace

Headspace is a meditation app that is a great to help anyone to start meditating. I was very skeptical to starting to meditate at first, and whether it could really be useful to me. I have so much stuff going on, how can sitting down and focusing on my breath possibly help me with any of those things? Surely, it'll be a waste of time, no?

No.

If you're a Tim Ferriss fan, and perhaps even read his book Tools of Titans, you know that 80% of all the alpha male and female overachievers he interviews in his book do some sort of meditation on a regular basis. The evidence of the positive effects from meditation is vast and plentiful.

The fact that it was an app was pretty key for me, as it bridged the gap between technology - something that I’m very used to, and meditation - which I wasn’t. The first time I downloaded the app I realized that all I had to do was to sit and listen for 10 minutes to this guy called Andy Puddicombe, a former Buddhist monk with a degree in Circus Arts, and his calm voice in a British accent.

After three 10-minute sessions I was already feeling the positive effects.

Headspace has had an amazing impact on many users in a very short time and a token of its rising popularity is the fact that they a while back raised a $34m financing round where celebrities such as Jessica Alba, Jared Leto and Ryan Seacrest participated. Hard to beat those type of brand ambassadors.

Is there a good way to measure the effects of something as intangible as mediation? Yes, the energy quadrant is a pretty good way of illustrating our emotions and mapping out what type of feelings are generated when we have high vs. low energy, against positive and negative energy.

We go from low energy to high energy on the vertical axis, and from negative to positive along the horizontal axis. Where do we want to be? I'd say green or yellow. Where do we not want to be? Red, you might say. I argue grey. If we’re in the red we're angry and frustrated, but we are angry because we still care. Moving to grey means you have lost even your angry energy and resorted to fade into oblivion.

If you don't want to live in the red zone, and you don't want to end up in the grey zone, you'll have to try to get to green or yellow. In fact, I think it'd be pretty hard (and perhaps not optimal) to always stay in either of the green or the yellow zone, so the ideal situation might be being able to oscillate between the green and yellow zones. 

It is not about spending time sitting under a tree picking flowers and living in a carefree bubble. Instead, it's about understanding what drives you from the upper right to the upper left so that you, your prefrontal cortex and not your amygdala, is in charge.

Two things that are a bit of a mouthful to pronounce, yet fairly straightforward to understand.

The amygdala is the reason we are afraid of things outside our control. It also controls the way we react to certain stimuli, or an event that causes an emotion, that we see as potentially threatening or dangerous.

Our prefrontal cortex is where we coordinate and adjust complex behavior, impulse control and the control and organization of emotional reactions. This is the part of the brain we learn to use more and better in our strife towards more mindfulness.

Meditation is a great way to get out of your grey zone as it creates awareness. Why am I angry? Why am I frustrated? Raising that awareness is the first step.

Awareness creates choice. You activate the prefrontal cortex and you get to choose, am I going to be angry right now? Am I going to be frustrated right now?

Being able to choose how to react in a certain way gives you freedom. Freedom to control your emotions. That freedom unshackles you from the grey zone and lifts you over to the yellow zone.

Three other good ways to get out of your grey zone:

1) Exercising (releases natural endorphines and helps you feel better both physically and mentally).

2) Charity work (it is hard to feel worried about petty issues in the office when you are f.ex. helping someone to their first meal of the day).

3) Watching comedies (also hard to be grumpy when you're laughing).

Mindfulness tip #2: Traffic lights

We step in to our respective office environments assuming that everyone else is feeling normal and perform effectively day in and day out. Like a machine that doesn't have an off-day. That is not always the case though. Someone might have had a rough trip to work, received an angry email from a colleague the night before that is still spinning in their head or burdened by personal issues.

We sit down in a meeting and perhaps wrongly assume that everyone is as energized, happy and balanced as we are that morning and therefore expect everyone to contribute equally in said meeting.

So, what if we checked in with each other at the start of the meeting to better understand where everyone is?

Red: I am on a different planet, stressed out of my mind and really need some space to get myself together.

Yellow: I am worried about many things but nothing seems to be too much out of control.

Green: I am here. I am in balance. I am present. I can hear you. Let’s do this.

That would help us to manage our communication and reduce friction. It is not about turning every meeting into a therapy session, but to tune in to what really is going on with your colleagues.

This is important, because what happens when you're in the red and someone comes up to you and asks you a question? It feels like yet another burden and might make you snap, meaning a little more violence happens in the office, and a little more soul gets destroyed. But if you knew I was in the red today and struggling to keep my head above water, you might give me a little more space than usual and be more mindful in your approach towards me.

My experience in applying this has overall been amazing and when people hear that others might be in the yellow or red, they change their approach immediately and become more compassionate. A very simple exercise that take no more than a few minutes, yet very effective.

Mindfulness tip #3: Go first

Gabrielle Reece has been named one of the “20 most influential women in sports” by Women’s Sports & Fitness and is best know for her success in volleyball. She is also a model, one of the trainers on “The Biggest Loser” and the first female athlete to ever design a shoe for Nike.

Gabrielle has a habit about going first.

“I always say that I’ll go first. That means if I’m checking out at the store, I’ll say hello first. If I’m coming across somebody and make eye contact, I’ll smile first. I wish people would experiment with that in their life a little bit. Be first, because – not at all times, but most times – it comes in your favor. The response is pretty amazing.”

I have started doing the same. For example, when I drop off my daughter at school in the mornings I run into parents of other children in other classes. Even if I don’t know them or haven’t met them before, I always lead with a look in their eyes followed by a “good morning”. Even if they don’t respond (some don’t and it’s funny how uncomfortable some people are with human interaction) I don’t care. I just keep going, because once in a while that simple “good morning” is a segway into a conversation and a new relationship.

Going first is a great way to instill a habit of being proactive, taking charge of your surroundings and leading by example. It can be as simple as being the person who steps up and repeats the agreed deliverables before a meeting ends to ensure total clarity, or being the person in a networking event that steps out of the circle of familiar faces and walks up to a new group of strangers and introduces him/herself. Scary? Could be. Uncomfortable? Totally. Rewarding? Every. Single. Time.

Mindfulness tip #4: Use your loving-kindness ray gun

This one comes straight from Chade-Meng Tan. Who is he? Chade-Meng is a Google pioneer, award-winning engineer, international bestselling author, thought leader and philanthropist. He is Chairman of the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, and Co-chair of One Billion Acts of Peace, which has been nominated eight times for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Chade-Meng is from Singapore and was an early hire to Google as one if it’s first engineers. Chade-Meng gave a training at Google called Search Inside Yourself, which eventually became a bestselling book. His training is still to this day the highest rated course at Google. Chade-Meng’s nack for emotional intelligence made him the first practicing engineer in Google’s history to move from engineering to people operations. When he retired from Google, at the age of 45 and after 15+ years of service, he did so with the title “Jolly Good Fellow (which nobody can deny)” and a job description that read: “enlighten minds, open hearts, create world peace.”

The loving-kindness ray gun is a 10-second exercise anyone can do, anywhere. Once an hour, every hour, randomly identify two people walking past your office and secretly wish for them to be happy. You don’t have to do or say anything, just think: “I wish for this person to be happy” and since nobody knows what you’re thinking, it’s not embarrassing. You can do this exercise entirely in stealth. After 10 seconds of that, go back to work. That’s all. 80 seconds of “work” a day that will transform the way you think about people around you.

Where does the ray gun part come in? Chade-Meng once presented this exercise to a class at Stanford. A few weeks later one of the students emailed him and said what an amazing tool this was, and how it had positively impacted her life. She considered it to be her loving-kindness ray gun of positivity, and even disclosed that she makes a small “pew pew” sound every time she uses it for added effect.

Everyone has this loving-kindness ray gun at their disposal. Use it wisely. Batteries not included.

Mindfulness tip #5: Stop complaining

We complain more than what we think we do on a daily basis. I am a huge culprit myself. Much of our complaining is subconscious and sometimes we don’t realize when we do it. However, it has a huge negative impact on the people around you, and how you are viewed by others.

A great way to stop complaining is to take the 21-day no complaint challenge. I discovered this through Tim Ferriss, but originally comes from an man called Will Bowen, an author and the founder of AComplaintFreeWorld.org. The rules are simple: You put a bracelet on your wrist and go 21 days without complaining. Each time you complain, you have to switch the bracelet to your other wrist and start again from day 0. This is a simple but effective metacognitive awareness training and the effects will be immediate.

Will's bracelets have spread like wildfire as others observed these transformations, and, to date, almost 6 million people have requested them.

What is the definition of a complaint?

Will has his set of rules that Tim adjusted a little bit and I am using those of Tim, where complaining is defined as describing an event or a person negatively, without indicating next steps to fix the problem.

For example:

Instead of saying: “Ah, I hate this friggin’ morning traffic” you could instead go: “wow, traffic always seems to be bad at this hour, tomorrow I will try to go earlier to avoid it or test another route”.

This is not an easy challenge. However, shortly after starting it I fairly quickly noticed some significant changes:

1. My thinking has changed from a lazy, complaining auto-pilot mode to a problem-solving way of thinking.
2. I helps me be much more mindful and aware when negative events come around and force me to create a buffer between it and my reaction.
3. It helps me with relationships around me. People want to be around action-oriented problem solvers. Training yourself to offer solutions on the spot attracts people and resources.

Mindfulness tip #6: Be focused in your interactions

If other people at the workplace is a great source of stress, how can you better try to communicate with others? According to Chade-Meng, a good trick is to remember the story about king's three questions.

A king decided that if he knew the answer to the three questions, he would always do the right thing. The three questions were:

1) When is the most important time?

2) Who is the most important person?

3) What is the most important thing to do?

He traveled far and wide in the kingdom to seek the answers to these questions. After searching high and low, he met a wise man who answered the three questions for him as follows: "The most important time is now, because now is the only time which you have some control over. The most important person is the person you are interacting with. The most important thing to do is to do your best to serve the person you are interacting with. Know these, and you will always do the right thing."

If you manage to apply this type of focus in your interactions they will be much more fruitful. Turn off your phone when you sit down for lunch with someone and stop typing emails whilst answering questions to a colleague. It'll greatly help with your communication and mindfulness towards others. It is equally applicable outside the office. I keep this in mind when f.ex. I am around my daughter. I try to avoid being physically present but mentally absent. I think it is better to spend 30 minutes in which I am fully engaged with her, i.e. doing my best to serve her, at this moment (no emails, no calls, no distractions) than 3 hours together in which she has to fight for my attention.

Thanks for making it all the way. Massive credit due to Tim Ferriss, Chade-Meng Tan and Jerry Colonna on all of the above.