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 on holiday: being fully there
Photo by Jude Beck on UnsplashSo it’s finally happening. You’ve managed to get the time off work, travelled to this wonderful destination, and you’re on holiday! All you want to do is enjoy the place, the special people you’re with, and this moment…. you’re just starting to relax into it and….. “Bing!” you find yourself thinking about work. Maybe something […]
Double the Value of your Holiday!
We normally think of mindfulness as an antidote to the difficult things in life. But it’s also relevant when things are going well, for example on holiday. You see, our minds are wandering about 47% of the time. We pay good money to go away and get the finest experiences – the place, the weather, the food, and […]
Ann’s Perfect Storm of Change – and how Mindfulness Helped
One of my readers, let’s call her Ann, emailed me about her “perfect storm of change.” She wrote about changes at work: regular messages on the intranet announcing “more change, more people losing their jobs, more of the surviving jobs being made unmanageable, more service being eroded, more things I value being destroyed ….” She wrote about […]
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, […]
Like Mindfulness but can’t find the time?
Mindfulness has tremendous benefits: it reduces stress while increasing clarity of mind, enjoyment, effectiveness and many other benefits. But it does take time. This article is for you if you’d love to practice Mindfulness, but simply can’t find the time. What’s the quickest way to practice Mindfulness?
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. […]
Does Stress Awareness Help?
It’s National Stress Awareness Day. Taking the theme literally made me wonder – is it helpful to be aware of stress? My conclusion: “It depends!” It depends on what you bring your awareness to, and how you do it. Say you’ve just been landed with an additional big project, or someone just said something cruel about […]
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 […]