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 […]
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 can 3 breaths make such a difference?
The simplest and quickest way I know to get a bit of relief from stress goes like this: Take 3 deep breaths. Each time, breathe in deeply (without forcing it), then breathe out slowly and smoothly. How can this be so effective? Well, it’s having a direct effect on two parts of the brain
Double (or halve) People’s Creativity
When you’re leading, the way you communicate can make a huge difference to people’s creativity. In one mode, they can be twice as creative as the other. How so? Fleeing an Owl or Seeking out Cheese? In an experiment at the University of Maryland (Friedman & Forster 2001), students were asked to solve a simple puzzle. […]
Why cavemen didn’t need mindfulness
The human brain evolved in stressful conditions – avoiding Sabre-Tooth Tigers, hunting just to eat, and lots of hard physical graft. And yet it’s now, in times of great luxury and abundance, that we need mindfulness. What’s going on? Well, our brains evolved some fantastic mechanisms to handle those tough conditions: A fight/flight system to […]