Why consider mindfulness training to build resilience in teams?
I read recently that the Indian military had introduced mindfulness training to train minds to manage extreme emotional distress, strengthen mental acuity and prepare their workforce for the journey ahead. This reminded me that my training programmes go way beyond the alleviation of workplace stress, and that mind training, when delivered by an expert, with experience in organisational learning and development and meditation pedagogy, has the potential to turn individuals, teams and businesses around in they deal with pressure, conflict, trauma and loss.
Mindfulness training is as much about how we interact with each other as it is about how we deal with stress. It elicidates how our core values and beliefs drive the decisions we make and how we behave with our colleagues. Interwoven in the meditation skills development is an introduction to the neuroscience of how mind works and how we have the potential to overcome life-long obstacles in emotion regulation with our innate neuroplasticity, allowing us to literally grow new neorones to by-pass earlier wounding and sources of overwhelm and mental illness.
Training takes place on an upright office chair, at a desk, like any other professional training. It involves reading source materials around scientific baseline, drawing on an increasing wealth of research into it's effectiveness. It necessitate daily practice, if only for 20 minutes a day, in order to build new neural pathways that becomes the foundation to new thinking patterns and behaviours. This explains the recommendation of a 6-8 week programme, the time taken by the mind to learn and embed new thinking pathways, so that the learning doesn't dissolve into the distant memory of another workplace training that never changed how we think, relate and work.
Of course, I would say this. I spent 20 years in organisational learning and development, then another 20 years turning old learning upside down to return to the as a mindfulness coach, dissolving the divide between professional and personal development, in favour of mind training for sensitive curious individuals who want to transform how they go about living their lives. I work in offices, in hospices, in woodlands and in rivers, as the Mindful Green Coach and Wellbeing Trainer.
Mindfulness training is as good as the skills and wisdom of the trainer in front of you. As with everything in this life, it comes down to relationship building, heart connection and a leap into the unknown.