Eating more fat will help you lose weight.
Giving more of yourself to others will leave you better than giving little or nothing.
Going slower will help you go faster.
We may, at first, believe the path to the goal is obvious.
Yet, sometimes ‘obvious’ is just flat-out wrong.
This past week, I hosted the first lunchtime mindfulness meditation session at my workplace. These 12 wise individuals believe what they’re reading and what they’ve experienced.
Taking time out of the hustle creates energy to hustle harder.
In 2001, Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr published an article in The Harvard Business Review called The Making of a Corporate Athlete.
Their premise is that top performance depends on physical capacity, emotional capacity, mental capacity, and spiritual capacity. They ask us to think of executives as corporate athletes and harness the leading techniques in athletic training to create a mental model for high performance at work.
Athletes follow a cycle of practice, perform, recover.
Executives, however, perform. Perform again. And, then perform some more.
Without a mindset of practice or recover, today’s corporate employee will never achieve our top performance potential.
It was a beautiful thing to watch 12 colleagues close their eyes, breath deeply, and tune into themselves for 15 minutes.
It will be an even more beautiful thing to watch corporations realize that helping employees refuel is as critical to achieving profitability as hiring outstanding talent.
- Mindfulness Isn’t Much Harder than Mindlessness, Harvard Business Review, Jan 2016.
- Is this the answer to office stress? BBC.com, Nov 2014.
- The Physical and Psychological Effects of Meditation, A Review of Contemporary Research, Murphy, Donovan, Taylor. (PDF will download).
- How Meditation Benefits CEOs, Harvard Business Review, December 2015
- Here’s What Mindfulness Is (and Isn’t) Good For, Harvard Business Review, September 2017