The mindful practices in this article are designed to support and deepen your ability to navigate the workday. Here, you can connect with your natural resilience, intelligence, and kindness. The exercise in this article includes a specific focus on empathy, compassion, forgiveness, generosity, service, and seeing goodness in others instead of negativity.
So in this article, we will explain to you: how you can use mindfulness techniques to continually find moments of ease, release, and stillness. While the difficulties you face daily be it at work, or home may be overwhelming at times, you can still find ways to live with a creative and joyful spirit.
Table of Contents
So here are 11 Ways to Mindfully Improve How You Work:
We on Prokewnsho.com are always looking for ways to improve your life and its overall quality. So I hope with this article you will take one more step towards your ideal mindful life with a peaceful mind grateful heart.
The key to successful working in any environment is less stress and more clarity. And through this article, you’ll develop a transformative meditation practice, and more importantly, you will learn how to bring that wisdom and balance to the challenging situations that arise at work and in your day-to-day life.
1. Mindful Tip #1: Empathy and compassion
Our authentic and pure abilities to empathize and respond with compassion to each other is one of our most precious and rewarding capacities, and often it’s hardwired into us.
But when we are flooded by too much information, or when we are facing too many competing demands, when we’re anxious about our performance or otherwise stressed circuits can be blocked.
Most of us have experienced this, and we know that when we’re under pressure when we’re worried or upset at these times, we’re less than sympathetic with ourselves, our colleagues, our clients, and our family.
Mindfulness based Compassion
So this is where the mindfulness meditation-based compassion comes in, and as we automatically respond mindfully with pure love, with caring: that tenderness blossoms. Because when we lose our empathic connection with others, we’re no longer bringing our full potential to our work.
The primary goal and key aspect of mindfulness-based meditation compassion training are to genuinely recognize and authentically turn toward vulnerability rather than away from it. Now, this can be especially challenging if you have a negative reaction to someone.
For a moment, imagine yourself walking in the dark woods and coming upon a small puppy under a tree. Okay, so you go over to pet it, but it lunges at you. Its fangs are bared. Your immediate reaction is anger and fear, but then you notice that the dog’s leg is in a trap, and your anger turns into concern.
In the same way, when people around us behave in ways that cause us to react in anger or maybe fear, it means their leg is in a trap and they are in pain. The moment you realize that and let yourself truly open to that person’s anxious feelings and pain, your natural response will be that you want to help them and lessen their pain somehow.
2. Mindful Tip #2: Forgiveness
As you continuously continue to practice mindfulness, you may find the unfinished painful business of the heart arise. The pains you carry from the past may appear, including those unfortunate situations you’ve not been able to forgive. As you develop the state of mindfulness and compassion, you start to discover that a necessary dimension of well-being is also genuine forgiveness.
Forgiveness is the release of one’s anger and blame to start fresh and anew. Without forgiveness, we often remain chained to the past and its painful experiences. Without forgiveness, we are locked into a cycle of continuous suffering.
We can live and relive past grievances with an unfair boss or continue to harbor resentment for an unrecognized contribution or carry anger over being unfairly fired from a job.
Perhaps you’re still holding a grudge against someone at work for something they said that was rude or demeaning, or you’ve sworn to never forgive a certain manager for passing you up for a promotion.
If we are determined to remain unforgiving, then rather than unfolding in fresh, engaged, and creative ways, our hearts are armored and stuck in the past.
Forgiveness is a way of releasing your own heart
Understand that forgiveness is not primarily for others; it is a way of releasing your own heart. Forgiveness often means giving up all the negativity and false hope for a better future.
The past is over, and you need to move on, like the ex-prisoners of a terrible war, forgiveness can release you from the pain of continuous anger, hatred towards others, and the hurt you still carry. Forgiveness takes its own time, so bear with it. We can’t just paper over the past hurt or harm with a quick phrase: I forgive you.
It’s a long patient practice, and it also helps us to recognize that the person who’s harmed us was in some way hurting like the dog in the woods with its leg in the trap. We can bring compassion to our wounds and see what Longfellow calls the secret of the suffering of others.
No matter, simply hold whatever comes with forgiveness. You can’t will or force forgiveness, but you can be willing. It is your genuine intention to forgive that gradually opens the door and leads to a fresh and peaceful life.
3. Mindful Tip #3: Seeing positivity and goodness in others
In this section, we will discuss some effective mindful ways of seeing goodness in others. We each need for our essential value to be genuinely seen, heard, and honored. This means that when we can bear witness to goodness in others and ourselves as well, it’s a precious gift.
Focusing on the good doesn’t usually come naturally to us (especially in this social media world). Our survival-based negativity bias means we are inclined to continually scan the world for negativity, danger, not for what we might genuinely appreciate. Now, while this capacity, might have saved our ancestors in the war, or jungle, it’s not necessarily a very, healthy, desired, or a gratifying way to move through the modern world.
At work, we’re usually trained and are also rewarded to see and fix problems continuously. Sadly, this pattern and negativity have most often fixated on what others are doing badly or wrong or how we’re falling short, and how others are doing great than us.
So whether at work in the office or your day-to-day life or a retail store or maybe in school, scanning for how we or others are not good enough or deficient, creates an oppressive and tense atmosphere all around us which continues to grow every day.
It directly undermines our capacity to be generative, empathetic, and clear thinking. A growing body of research indicates that students who receive explicit messages from teachers, affirming their capacity to have greater academic success.
Conversely, those who are expected to fail to receive the implicit message and fail. The same is true at work.
Nelson Mandela famously puts it this way:
“It never hurts to see the good in people, they often act even better because of it.”
Research has also shown that typically a person needs six times the number of appraisal and positive comments to every negative one to believe, and let in the truth of their goodness.
We need each other’s genuine support in this. When others see our true goodness, we trust it more and give in, allowing it to beautifully blossom. It’s important to bring this practice to ourselves. As we’ve discussed, we easily get into the mindful habit of focusing on what’s wrong with us and living inside the trance of unworthiness.
Yet by practicing seeing our goodness continuously, we begin to undo this negative mindset and conditioning.
Conclusion:
So before we begin with our fourth way to improve how we work more mindfully, please practice the above-mentioned ways and incorporate them in your daily mindfulness practice. We will continue part II in another article.
For now, be consistent with these three ways and learn here how you can start with basic yoga poses to relieve anxiety and stress. (Read Here)
(Also Read: Mindfulness and Life: Does Mindfulness Leads to Life Satisfaction?)
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