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 […]
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 […]
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
Burnout – back from the brink
Stewart had been pushing himself for years – achieving great results, but at a price. He’d got used to being stressed, but now something very strange was happening. He felt like he’d gone into a vague cloudy world in which nothing really mattered. He’d completely lost his edge. Then he came for coaching – just […]
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. […]
The Art of Decluttering: 3 More Tips
Last week I suggested that de-cluttering might be the best way to reduce stress and make best use of your time. I gave you three tips: Pick a focus. If you try and tidy everything, you’ll fail. But if you pick a small area and stay focused, you’ll stand a much better chance of getting […]
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 […]