Conscious Business and Mindful Leadership

It’s a Tuesday afternoon and you’ve just wrapped up a phone call with your manager. You let out a long sigh–the call didn’t go the way you anticipated; you spent hours drafting your proposal for a potential client, only for your manager to shoot down your efforts—she points out errors in your approach, disagrees with details you spent much care integrating, and dismisses what you feel was a significant task you undertook. What’s worse is that because of the situation, you can’t help but feel an unsettling sense of irritation and stress that is starting to permeate its way into other aspects of your personal and professional life. You already know that the rest of your day will unravel and lapse into an unproductive cycle that you have experienced before.

On the other hand, take the same scenario, but this time from the manager’s perspective. You’ve just spent the last hour redirecting your employee in his attempt at a client proposal that is due by the end of the day. You’ve already explained to him twice that his approach for this specific client proposal needs to be altered. But instead of taking your advice and incorporating your insight into a modified version of the proposal, your employee spends a majority of the call defending his work. You want to convey to him that you’re only making suggestions to help the overall quality of his product, and that he shouldn’t take your advice personally, but he refuses to listen. Frankly, you’re frustrated at the outcome of a session that didn’t go in the direction that you expected.

Does either situation sound familiar to you? If so, you’re certainly not alone. 

As individuals with busy, demanding professional lives, we want to be successful in our work environments. After all, for a majority of us, a significant amount of our day is allotted to work. In fact, according to a report by Gallup, the working individual will spend an average of 47 hours during the week at work, and will dedicate over 90,000 hours to work over a lifetime.

We understand, as writer Annie Dillard rightfully said, that “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” So it makes sense that we want to maximize our productivity and success in the corporate space. It makes sense that we aim to present the best versions of ourselves at our work environments, where we spend a good portion of our day.

Part of being the best version of ourselves at work, then, includes fulfilling the image of the ideal working individual: someone who is organized, efficient at communicating exactly what she thinks, perceptive, quick thinking but impeccable at stepping back and holistically assessing her environment and its needs. Furthermore, the ideal working individual is an emotionally intelligent leader and collaborator, a thoughtful interlocutor, and above all, perfect in what she does.

As people who put immense expectations on ourselves to practice our best performances day-in and day-out, we forget how much pressure we undertake. We strive to satisfy the image of the ideal employee we have created in our minds, but we forget that we too, are only human. We find ourselves accepting nothing less than the best. So in lieu of understanding constructive criticism and honest feedback, we tend to react harshly with radicalized emotions when someone provides us with a critique.

But what we truly want, or rather what we should want, is to grow and develop from every experience in our work environment. We aim to negate negative thoughts and reflect on ourselves with kindness, compassion, and curiosity.

For purposeful augmentation of our professional lives, we need to approach our limits as learners in the most constructive way possible, which entails not only identifying our limits, but learning to accept and progress beyond them. Between life and work, being swamped fulfilling daily family routines, running to meetings, attending conferences, or overseeing groups it seems like an impossible feat.

You’re a hard worker who’s got the fullness of your work life to carry on your shoulders, especially now more than ever. Ideally, you would love to take a break from all the deadlines, calls, and ever-impending tasks, but duty calls! So where and when do you start with this introspective journey–can you even do that as a busy working professional?

Conscious business coaching and mindful leadership coaching for professionals is an effective tool for enhancing the performance of individuals in the workplace. It focuses on allowing one to be mindful, to unlock and navigate one’s own consciousness of both themselves and their surroundings.

But why is it important, as a working professional, to be mindful and conscious in a corporate environment? The answer to this question is perhaps an endless and ongoing list of benefits. As an individual, you will be able to tap into your innermost potential by becoming duly aware of your nature and actions in your workspace, thereby allowing yourself to achieve new heights of personal and professional progression you never thought you could obtain. This means seeing immense growth in productivity, creativity, and communication, along with significant reductions in stress and anxiety.

In fact, according to a report by Aetna, those who have participated in at least one mindfulness class report, on average, a 28% decrease in their stress levels, and a 20% improvement in sleep quality. Their advantages also translate to enhanced performance on the job, as they receive an average of 62 minutes more of per week productivity.

Mindfulness and conscious business practices in the workspace even goes beyond providing individual value to spreading all-around benefits. Because of mindfulness practices, companies see a widespread growth in employee attitude and performance, whether this means seeing employees become more organized, efficient, or even treat each other with more respect, which in turn fosters better, meaningful relationships between employees and with their respective customers and clients. And if there’s anything to be realized, it’s that the conscious, human-centric approach in conversation and understanding is fundamental to the unilateral growth of any company; customers and clients, after all, are looking to work with individuals who are not only skilled in their performance, but are also able to practice compassion and be friendly and caring in conversation.

Mindfulness and conscious business practices see themselves more relevant than ever especially today; with the global work environment and shift to work from home (WFH) being enabled widely across many companies, and becoming perhaps a larger, permanent impact, it’s now very important to consider what benefits corporate coaching can provide all employees.

For working individuals, a WFH may have taken a huge toll on work productivity and efficiency simply because at home, our surroundings are rife with distractions, whether that be kids, family, unique stressors, or simply a lack of concentration. Additionally, working in different time zones and dealing with other colleagues, clients, or customers across multiple countries and cultures can make for a difficult, frustrating work experience. But with careful techniques that corporate coaching through mindfulness can lend us, employees can certainly be helped with refining and honing in on the key skills that tap into their maximum productivity. After all, with all the uncertainty around when employees will be able to be back in the workspace (not at least for the next half year, or year for some!), we need to make the best of online platforms we are provided.

Conscious business and mindfulness leadership programs in the workplace is an ideal solution to maintain the interests and growth of the managers, partners, and employees.

Have you read?
World’s Happiest Countries.
Countries With The Highest Life Expectancy.
World’s Most (And Least) Religious Countries.
World’s Best Countries For Investment In Travel And Tourism Sector.