A few weeks after completing an 8 week Resilient Mindfulness course, Matthew emailed me to say he’d just run a half marathon, and achieved a personal best (1 hour 21, exactly a minute off his previous PB). What’s remarkable about that? He’d done no focussed training! He found that “amazing, and hard to explain.” So what was […]
Being Generous without being a Doormat
Last week I wrote about generosity and success – how givers are at both the top and bottom of the success charts. I mentioned that the successful givers differentiate themselves by taking a win-win attitude: they consider their own interests as well as the interests of the people they’re giving to.There’s more to say on […]
Does Generosity Create Success?
There are takers, matchers, and givers. Takers are people who are always out for their own gain. Matchers like to evenly match their giving and taking. Givers just give. How do you think they compare?According to Adam Grant, in his book Give and Take, the least successful are givers. Studies in the fields of engineering, medicine, […]
Mindfulness Makes You Stronger
There’s a popular image of Mindfulness, that it’s about retreating inside yourself, quietening down and generally being rather feeble. But I disagree. So do the US Marines – their Mindfulness-based Mental Fitness Training programmes achieve excellent results. Many organisations disagree too. Google, eBay, EY, HSBC, the UK Parliament, the UK National Health Service, Unilever, KPMG, Microsoft, Bupa, […]
How Mindfulness Boosts Resilience
Faced with pressure, challenge and change, people’s stress response can easily kick in, making them rigid, inflexible and irritable. Sustained over time, the result is anxiety, depression and burnout. This is a growing issue for us in the modern world: in the UK, for example, more than 50% of sick-days are now due to such illnesses. […]
Achieve more by doing 20% less!
Jane spends her life on the road – covering 26,000 miles per year selling technical services products to companies around the UK. With so much ground to cover, she’s always been a rush, driving as fast as she can get away with. Caught in slow traffic? She would “Drive up close behind the car in […]
Do We Know Too Much?
There are so many different benefits of Mindfulness, I’m always interested to know what people are most interested in. So I was really pleased to hear from Julia, an L&D specialist for a large energy provider: A radio interview with Ruby Wax talking about mindfulness caught my ear a couple of years ago. She made a lot […]
Is Mindfulness changing Politics?
Mindfulness is really catching on the UK – even at government level. Last week I found myself in the Houses of Parliament, at a “round table” meeting on the future of Mindfulness in the workplace. We heard evidence, case studies and success stories from Cranfield University, CaptialOne, GlaxoSmithKline and others. I was particularly pleased to hear about the […]
Leaving The Office On Time
November 5th – here in the UK it’s “Bonfire Night,” an evening of festivity and fireworks. So lots of us will be thinking, “How can I get away from the office on time, even though there’s too much to do?” One option is to simply try and cram it all in. But today is also […]
Decluttering: 3 Tips
What’s the best way to reduce stress and make best use of time? Judging by the feedback I get from course participants, it could well be a spot of decluttering. After tidying up their workspace, their filing system or even a whole room, they tell me how much easier it is to get things done, and […]