In the last 20 years the drive to find purpose and meaning has gained significant momentum, influencing the thinking of customers, businesses and investors and employees.

COVID-19 has accelerated the momentum further. In this article I have distilled latest research and thinking Purpose and Intention. More importantly the practical steps you can take to lead a more meaningful, purpose led, happier life

By Juliet Adams | LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-purpose-meaning-matter-more-than-ever-juliet-adams-ulyke

CNBC reports that teachers around the USA are using meditation apps, like Calm and Headspace, in their classrooms to help students with anxiety and encourage focus. Calm has created free access for thousands of teachers in 140 countries. Headspace is working directly with 300 schools in the US to enable access to its app.

By Angelica LaVito | @angelicalavito

From the article:

• Teachers around the country are using meditation apps like Calm and Headspace to introduce mindfulness to their lesson plans.
• The Calm app launched Calm Schools for teachers in May of 2016
• Headspace works directly with 35 districts and around 300 schools in 15 states to offer their teachers access to the mindfulness app.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/30/teachers-are-using-calm-headspace-to-teach-mindfulness.html

Sander Tideman gives his account of attending the summit at the House of Parliamant in London.

https://blog.mindandlife-europe.org/2017/10/28/first-summit-mindfulness-politics/

Jon Kabat-Zinn, keynote speaker at the confrence:

‘In a world that is increasingly divided, fearful and full of inequalities, mindfulness can help us to return to our innate human wakefulness and human-being-ness. From here we can make more wholesome and far-sighted decisions and design policies that bring wholeness and well-being to society. This is a most wonderful window of opportunity at a time when the world seems in a perilous state.’

‘It is my hope that together with you, Mind & Life Europe can support the emergence of a European platform for the dissemination of mindfulness in politics.’

From Linkedin Pulse •

In 2015 I contributed to the “Mindful Nation UK” report, a UK government policy recommendation document released in October 2015 in the UK Parliament.

The Mindful Nation UK report highlighted the lack of publicly available information about implementing best-practice mindfulness training in the workplace. In response the Mindfulness Initiative has published ‘Building the Case for Mindfulness in the Workplace’.

The aim of the document, which includes contributions from 30 workplace representatives, mindfulness experts and researchers, is to support organisations at all stages of the mindfulness journey – from those seeking to pilot mindfulness and assess the potential benefits, to those with well-established programmes who are ready to roll out mindfulness globally and embed a mindful approach into their culture.

I was pleased to serve as an expert advisor to the Mindfulness Initiative, a UK think tank, and helped to author and edit this new publication.

The Document was formally launched at the Offices of EY in Canary Wharf London. Around 180 senior managers, researchers and mindfulness specialists attended the launch. The launch event included Keynotes from Baron Stone of Blackheath*, former Managing Director of M&S, Labour member of the House of Lords and Fleur Bothwick OBE, Director of Diversity and Inclusive Leadership EMEIA, EY. Document summary and findings were presented by Jamie Bristow, Director of The Mindfulness Initiative, and Emma Wardropper, and, Leonie Schell, Manager, People Advisory Services and EY Mindfulness Network Chair.

I had the pleasure of leading a panel discussion on The case for and future of mindfulness in the workplace. My panelists included:

• Karen Bowes – Vice President International HR and Sustainability, Capital One
• Chris Tamdjidi – Managing Director Kalapa Academy
• Dr Jutta Tobias -Senior Lecturer Cranfield University School of Management
• Katy Owen – Cabinet Office – lead on the civil service working group
• Carmel Moore – Executive Director, People Advisory Services EY
• Debbie Jeremiah – Mindful Manager Leaders programme, General Electric

Questions answered by the panel included:

• What is ‘Organisational mindfulness’? How can it be developed?
• How can mindfulness training can help to improve resilience and well-being at work?
• How can mindfulness training can help to improve relationships at work?
• How can mindfulness training help to improve productivity?
• How to gain organisational buy in?
• Steps to take when planning the introduction of mindfulness into a company?
• How to evaluate programmes and measure Return on Investment (ROI)?
• When introducing mindfulness: what has worked or did not work?

‘Building the Case for Mindfulness in the Workplace’. was published online on the 28/10/16. It includes mindfulness at work case studies and guidance from organisations including EY, GE, GSK, HSBC and Jaguar Land Rover.

If you are unsure of how to get management buy in for mindfulness programmes in organisational settings, in Appendix B you will find an example of a Business Case for Mindfulness, including return on investment calculations.

If you’d like to read more, use this link to download your free copy of the document

* Lord Stone featured in an 8 page mindful leadership case study – Chapter 4 – Mindful Leadership for Dummies, published in July 2016.

Research about mindfulness has blossomed in recent decades, reflecting increased interest in this topic and further catalysing its popularity. As I’m passionate about meditation, yoga and everything linked with spirituality, this phenomenon is fascinating and holds great potential. In researching mindfulness, it’s important to ask questions to understand how mindfulness fits in regards to other practices and philosophies, both religious and secular, spanning from Islam to Buddhism, from spiritualist to humanist, to comprehend each evolving phenomena, how they interrelate, what motivations and changes are involved, and how the concepts are interpreted and applied by practitioners. Further, it necessitates incorporating social, economic and political factors, such as how people construct meaning, what influences our perceptions, what values we develop and display toward others and the environment. In these ways, we can gain deeper insight not only into mindfulness, but into various perspectives and aspects of psychology and philosophy.

To begin, it is useful to understand what kinds of research are being done about mindfulness. Most of the research up until now has been within clinical psychology, positive psychology, neuroscience and similar domains, and more recently, within management studies. The majority of the research about mindfulness has been done in a positivistic, and deductive approach, seeking to prove facts through observing and measuring, in an attempt to validate hypotheses, in this case about a multitude of benefits resulting from mindfulness practice including reducing stress, improved health and productivity.

This approach of observing and quantifying mindfulness has served to give it a sort of stamp of approval as a scientifically validated technique in a similar way as is done for testing the effectiveness of medicines and physical exercise. I carried out my doctoral research at ESCP Europe and Sorbonne University using these kinds of research methods, conducting quantitative studies in three organisations in France and Canada with groups of participants divided into experimental and control participants, to make comparisons on the extent to which eight sessions of mindfulness meditation enhanced their well-being and creative production.

Instead of merely focusing on specific pre-determined outcomes based on existing theories, like has mostly been the case up until now, more rich and diverse perspectives could be provided by research that explores the processes by which mindfulness is applied and how it develops.

While this type of research has been useful in bringing mindfulness to broader audiences by demonstrating tangible results from practice, this approach can restrict mindfulness to what is observable and testable, tending to instrumentalise it as a magic black box from which a plethora of benefits emerge, while the mechanism by which this happens, and more importantly, the broader picture of people’s lives and society, are often neglected. From the underlying philosophy within Buddhism, mindfulness is one part of the Noble Eightfold Path, which one could endeavour upon following the fourth Noble Truth, a pathway to liberation from suffering, ultimately leading to enlightenment.

However, in its recent re-appearance in the West, mindfulness is typically presented as a secular self-help technique, not linked with Buddhism, yet is purported to encompass all of its desirable wisdom. This contradiction has been questioned by scholars including Ron Purser and David Loy, who coined the term ‘McMindfulness’ to reflect this inauthenticity, and tendency for mindfulness to be ‘sold’ as a tool to maintain the status quo rather than igniting necessary societal changes, and others such as Edwin Ng who critique the ongoing cultural (mis)appropriation. Further notable scholars taking a critical stance are Stephan Stanley who looks at implications of ethics for secular mindfulness-based applications and Kevin Healy, who explains how the mindfulness trend creates ‘integrity bubbles’ for select individuals to lower their stress while failing to address systemic corporate dysfunction. Rather than dismissing mainstream mindfulness, most critiques serve as a reminder to notice what assumptions are made, what adaptations take place, and to pose questions about theories and methods, so as to present more complete and dynamic viewpoints, and bring about moral and sustainable practices.

Instead of merely focusing on specific pre-determined outcomes based on existing theories, like has mostly been the case up until now, more rich and diverse perspectives could be provided by research that explores the processes by which mindfulness is applied and how it develops. Such inductive approaches to research, including ethnographic and anthropologic studies, allow theory to emerge from data in contrast to ‘top-down’ deductive reasoning. To give some examples from my recent research articles which I co-presented at conferences and are currently in the review process at academic journals:

Patel, T. & Holm, M. (2016, May). Exploring mindfulness as a way of enhancing managerial adaptability in the workplace. Organisation Studies workshop: Mykonos, Greece.

Islam, G. & Holm, M. (2016, July). Banking on Mindfulness: Presence & Performance in a Financial Risk Office. European Group of Organisation Studies conference: Naples, Italy.

Both of these are empirical qualitative studies involving evaluating corporate mindfulness programs from various perspectives (managerial, instructor, participant, non-participants and course arrangers) to understand how concepts are integrated, along with what questions, changes and challenges arise through the process. This research uses the ontology of becoming, reflecting the spectrum from mindlessness to mindfulness, and the dynamics of how people change, or resist change, through time.

From the data collected and resulting assessment of our findings, we derive conclusions that address issues such as

• how, and to what extent mindfulness becomes a collective phenomenon,
• factors that hinder or encourage practise of mindfulness, and
• whether mindfulness serves as a means of transformation for individuals and their workplaces, or whether it remains as a self-help tool.

In doing so, we address some of the critiques that have been raised, and outline considerations that can be taken into account when implementing mindfulness programs in companies.

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