Can Mindfulness Help You Run Your Business?
In recent years, mindfulness has become a staple of mental health and wellness in corporations such as Spotify, Google, Goldman Sachs, and others. Google has a Mindfulness Training for their employees called “Search Inside Yourself,” which hinges on the proven benefits of meditation.
There’s a reason companies are including this as a requirement for their teams: it works, in various ways for different participants. Mindfulness has been thought to help in a number of ways, but the most significant include reducing anxiety, heightening productivity, and contributing to a greater sense of presence. Because these benefits are preferred for employees, they’re also great for entrepreneurs, and can likely help you better run your business.
Why Mindfulness is Important
Understanding why the brain thinks and reacts certain ways to different situations can help founders take greater control of stressful moments in a business. Many entrepreneurs decide to amplify their mindfulness by working with a neurocoach, whose main specialty is helping someone discover the layers within their brain.
Neurocoach Heather Crider shared that mindfulness is important because “when people can find peace and happiness within themselves they can then become more successful.” This focus on the brain should be a priority - Crider also noted that “most understand the importance of physical fitness but rarely emphasize the importance of mental fitness, and yet mental fitness can be more beneficial because it’s the key to success in all areas of life.”
Since everyone is looking for some type of competitive advantage in their marketplace, perhaps getting to know our own brains and coaching them to work for us is the greatest advantage yet.
Here are a few ways that mindfulness can take your business to the next level.
1. It can improve your self-confidence, helping you with decision making. On a daily basis, entrepreneurs are faced with big decisions ranging in importance from “should I hire another virtual assistant?” to “what color should my business cards be?” The more these decisions stack up, the harder it can be to make a decision.
Mindfulness and meditation focus on calming the little voice inside the mind, so that a decision can be made. Psychotherapist Linda Espoctio wrote in an article for Psychology Today that approaching a decision with mindfulness could entail approaching the situation from a different mindset, such as asking yourself, “How would I advise a loved one in the same situation?”
2. It can help you be more creative. There’s nothing better than coming up with a genius new marketing idea when you’re in the throes of your daily operations. However, creativity often seems to be scarce, and to come in small spurts. To create more opportunities for creative brainstorming, incorporate mindfulness before a brainstorming session. Crystal Goh noted in an article on Mindful.org that taking time for meditation before thinking or solving a problem can make all the difference in reducing distractions and anxiety, which allows clear ideas and thoughts to come through.
3. It can heighten productivity. Humans are able to be more productive when they’re less affected by mental and physical stress. Mindfulness gets to the route of stressors, and redirects brain waves to ensure that focus and attention remains squarely centered on the task at hand, whether it’s building out a new sales funnel or putting together a pitch deck.
Ciara Conlon, author of Chaos to Control, wrote in an article for Lifehack that “one of our biggest challenges to getting things done is the distraction of the mind, while we try to get one job done, our mind reminds us of ten others that still need doing.” Mindfulness however, “jumps in the way of all these distractions of the mind and says, ‘Hey, come back to the present moment!’” The more that mindfulness is practiced, the more the mind is trained in focusing, which will mean fewer distractions get in the way of a productive day.
Other potential benefits of mindfulness include lower stress levels and more empathy, which can strengthen entrepreneurs as leaders in their business. In whichever way you are hoping to improve the way in which you run your business, mindfulness, whether through neurocoaching or a few grounding deep breaths, can help.
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