What does it mean to be mindful at work?

In this inaugural episode of the Zen Your Work podcast, I’ll walk you through my definition of how to be mindful at work. You can listen to the podcast in the player below, subscribe to it in iTunes, Podbean, or Stitcher, or read the key takeaways or the full transcript below.
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Key takeaways to be more mindful at work.

My definition of mindfulness is the following: judgmental awareness of what’s going on in the present moment. There are three components of this:

• Being aware of what’s going on in your mind, your body, and your context so that your thoughts and your actions can serve your goals and ambitions instead of detracting from them.
• Reserving judgment when things don’t go how you’d like them to. Everything that happens to us represents an opportunity. How you approach what you might perceive as set-backs will impact the opportunities you create for yourself in the future.
• Focusing on the present moment.

Though you don’t need to meditate to practice mindfulness strategies at work, it is a magic bullet shortcut for doing it well. If you’ve never meditated before, take advantage of apps like Headspace or Zen, or from free guided meditations that you can try on Spotify and YouTube to get started.

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FULL PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

What does it mean to be mindful at work?

I want to address a key foundational concept – What the heck is mindfulness and how can it apply in the workplace. Because at the end of the day that’s what it means to zen your work. Mindfulness is the thing that is going to help you take all the information that exists about psychology and how the brain works and actually make it useful.

The reason I think it’s important to start off here is this mindfulness is one of those key buzzwords you hear floating around an awful lot these days. And different people have different definitions of it based on where they first encountered the concept. So, I want to start off by offering you my definition of it. Not everyone out there is going to agree with my definition of it and that’s OK. This is a definition that I’ve developed over years of studying this years of practicing it and I feel pretty comfortable with it at this point. But whether you agree with it or disagree with it, it’s important for you to know where I’m coming from with this material and provide that common foundation that we can work from.

So here is my definition of what it means to be mindful at work. It’s about being non-judgmentally aware of what is going on in the present moment. There are three parts to that.

1. Being aware.
2. Being non-judgmental.
3. Being in the present moment.

So let’s talk about each one of those.

Being mindful at work starts with being aware.

Being aware is about being fully conscious of what’s going on in your mind, your body, and your surroundings in your current situation. Because these are the three elements that dictate our experience and our behaviors at work – mind, body, and context.

So let’s look at an example. Say you’re in a meeting. It’s your typical weekly staff meeting. Let’s start off with being aware of what’s going on in your mind.

• What stories are you telling yourself about the meeting? What are you thinking about?
• How do you feel about how the meetings going?
• Does anything excite you about the ideas being discussed?
• Does anything make you feel stressed out or anxious? Or are you ambivalent at best?
• Are you telling yourself that this staff meeting is really productive?
• Or are, you like most people, telling yourself that you think the staff meeting is a huge waste of time?

Here’s why this is important. Our actions and our behaviors at work are dictated by the stories we tell ourselves in our heads. So, if you’re telling yourself the story that this staff meeting is a great and productive experience you’re going to get more out of that staff meeting – You’re going to have different interactions with your co-workers, you’re going to be more engaged in the conversation, you’re going to ask better questions, you’re going to be better at listening, and you’re going to walk away with takeaways.
On the flip side, if you’re telling yourself this staff meeting is a huge waste of time, you might not even be paying attention – you might be on your laptop checking your e-mail. You might not engage with your co-workers and have a generally standoffish demeanor that tells people DO NOT TALK TO ME. You’re going to have a much different experience in that staff meeting just based on the story you’re telling yourself in your head.
Now here’s the thing. We can always control the stories that we’re telling ourselves…but before we get to that step the first step is to become aware of what they are.
A lot of times at work, we just go on autopilot. We’re not consciously aware of those stories. Being mindful at work will help you to bring those stories to the forefront. Once you’re aware of what’s going on in your head, that’s when you can work to change it.

Being aware of the signals your body is sending.

Once you’ve got your mind squared away, you have to become aware of what’s going on in your body.

• How does your body feel?
• Are you tense and constricted, or are you loose and flexible?

Now that might seem a little silly, but here’s why this is important: Our body follows our mind. If you’re having a hard time identifying the stories you’re telling yourself in your head, the next best thing to do is just think about how your body feels.
Say, for example, you’re in that staff meeting and the things being discussed are really starting to stress you out. You might feel tense all over your body…you might even be shaking a little bit. You might have a headache or a stomach ache. You might be grinding your teeth, or you might be crossing your arms and having this generally standoffish demeanor that is sending nonverbal signals to every other person in that room that you are not engaged in this meeting. Each of these actions are important queues that things are not going well and that it’s time to change the story.
How our body feels also tells us what message we’re sending out to others in the room. We are constantly sending out non verbal cues to the people we’re working with, and most of the time we are completely unaware of the signals that we’re sending off. You’ve likely heard the term “resting bitch face“, an expressionless glare that sends, at best, a discontent look to those who see it. Most people are not aware of when they have resting bitch face – it’s not a conscious act. But intentional or not, it’s going to impact the experience that you have with your team members in the meeting and their perception of you. And whether you like it or not, the perception that your team members have of you impacts your ability to work with them. That’s going to impact your overall experience.

Be aware of your context.

And that leads us to our last point of awareness – when you’re mindful at work, you need to be aware of your context the situation in which you’re operating. Let’s go back to our meeting example:

• Who else is at that meeting?
• What did they need to get out of the meeting?
• How did they feel about how the meeting is going?
• How can you help them?

I know that for about 50 percent of you reading this article, you’re not going to want to hear this…but what your team members think of you how they perceive you matters. If you worked on a deserted island where you could lock yourself in your office, put your headphones on, and be left to your own devices, you wouldn’t have to worry about this part. But the fact is that in order to have a great work experience you need to have great relationships with the people that you’re working with. It simply impacts to many parts of your personal experience when you don’t have those relationships.
You can develop great relationships with almost any person that you work with. I know, I know, I know…you might not believe me right now (and we will definitely cover how to work with those more difficult people in future podcasts!). But for right now here’s the short version: It’s about coming to them on their terms rather than on your terms. In order to do that, you need to be aware of what they’re bringing to the table.

Remove judgment from your awareness.

So awareness is a pretty big piece of the puzzle. And when you start to become aware of all these moving parts, it can be really easy to start judging things as good or bad, right or wrong, better or worse.
We human beings we love to judge things we like to put them in categories. It helps us make sense of them but it’s also a part of our survival mechanism – if we judge something is dangerous or painful, we are going to do our level best to stay the heck away from it.
Now you might not think of work as a place of life or death…except if you work in health care or if you work in the military – then that’s a different story. But for most people, working in the average office environment work is not a place of life or death, so might seem weird to talk about it in terms of you thinking about it from survival perspective. But when we’re thinking about survival in a work environment it looks a little bit different.

• Am I going to keep my job?
• Do I have the respect of my colleagues?
• Am I going to be successful on this project, or is it going to be a colossal failure?

I know this might sound strange, but a lot of times at work our brain processes failure in the same way that it processes the potential of death. If you need proof, just look at someone that has just gotten fired from their job. “My life is over! My career is over!” They get really depressed and think there’s no point in trying anymore. They literally view the loss of a job as the same thing as death. They might spend a couple days in that mode and then (most of the time) they realize they can get another job – people who are fired get new jobs all the time. But that instant, gut reaction is that is the same as death.
That’s the mode our brain goes into when it judges something as dangerous, or painful, or something that is going to impact our ability to thrive in the world – It goes into survival mode. And that’s where the next piece of being mindful comes in: You want to reserve judgment, when possible.
Most of the time, things just are. They’re not good or bad, or black and white. We’re the ones who create the stories in our heads that provide the context for that judgment. And when you’re approaching things non-judgmentally, you’re in a much better position to create the story that best serves what you want to get out of the situation.
So, we’re back in that staff meeting and one of the things you really wanted to get out of that meeting this week is to get approval for a project that you’re really excited about pursuing – it’s a pet project that you’ve been cultivating. You pitched the idea and are feeling really good about it…but instead you’re told by your boss to put that project on the backburner because they want you to focus on something else.  You’re disappointed. And, on top of it, you’re not feeling great about what they asked you to focus on you’d much rather be working on your pet project.
So you might have a knee jerk reaction to this reaction from the boss. “This is horrible. They don’t believe in me my ideas never get approved.” Those are the stories that you might be telling yourself in your head – you’re making judgments about the situation that are overtly negative. These judgments lead you to shutting down and at best (let’s be honest) half assing that project that your boss just gave you to work on that you don’t really feel excited about right. Does that serve your purpose? Probably not. Your boss isn’t going to let you do the fun thing if you can’t even do the thing that they just gave you.
Instead, let’s see what happens when you reserve judgment about the situation. It’s not good or bad. Your boss has just told you to focus elsewhere. That doesn’t mean you’ll never do your project – it just means your projects time hasn’t come yet…but someday it could. How do you set yourself up for that to happen? The best way to achieve the work you want to do is probably to do a really great job on the project your boss just gave you. If you find yourself feeling bitter or anxious about that project it’s because the story you were telling yourself is that the project doesn’t serve the goals you have.
Reserving judgment allows you to open yourself up to the possibilities and opportunities you have in front of you right now. Maybe your boss actually loves your project idea but wants to give you an opportunity to work on something else. First it’s an opportunity to prove yourself, to demonstrate great work, and to show you’re a team player that’s willing to do what’s best for the organization instead of focusing on your pet project. When you approach it with this attitude, you’re much more likely to give your all to this thing that your boss has just asked you to do because it’s going to set you up for greater success. It’s all about perspective. Reserving judgment helps you to create the perspective that serves your ambitions.
Any time you’re feeling anxious or stressed out or you’re just not feeling great about something happening at work ask yourself how you’re judging the situation. What are you looking at the situation and saying “This is bad. This is painful. I don’t want this in my experience.” Then, once you’ve got that identified, find a way to remove the judgement. Just look at the variables – as if you are playing chess. You don’t make decisions in chess based on whether or not you like the Knight or the Bishop. You make decisions based on what is strategically best for you.
Once you’re aware of the judgements you’re making, that will help you remove those judgements from your thought process so you can make that choice the best serve you.

Become fully present

So we’ve talked about being aware we’ve talked about being non-judgmental. The last part of how to be mindful at work is to be fully present.
Most of our anxieties come from things that have happened to us in the past. For example, we learned that work must be hard because we watched our parents come home miserable every day, or we learned that our bosses are to be feared because so many of us have had bad bosses before. When you let those past interactions and outcomes influence how you perceive what’s going on in the present, you might find yourself focusing on the most negative possible outcome to your situation because you’re basing it on the most negative things that you have experienced in the past.
The problem is that predicting the most negative possible outcome almost never helps you achieve your greatest successes at work. Instead you have to let the past be simply that – the past. It happened. There’s nothing you can do to change it. You don’t have a time machine where you can go back and change what you did three years ago. But if you focus on what happened three years ago as a possibility in your present time, you are just setting yourself up to repeat it.
Human beings are amazing at creating self-fulfilling prophecies. If, in your head, you’re re-living in that experience three years ago, your actions and your behaviors are going to follow the story that played itself out three years ago instead of responding to what’s playing out and right in front of you right now. It’s like comparing apples and oranges – what happened to you three years ago is not the same as what’s happening to you right now. Even if there are similarities, they are two completely different things. So, use that beautiful non-judgmental detachment that you’ve just learned to focus on the variables you have in front of you right now. That’s what’s going to lead you to making better decisions.

A word about meditation and being mindful at work

So right now all three of these concepts being aware being non-judgmental and being in the present moment they might still seem a bit abstract right they might seem a bit nebulous. You’re not quite sure what to do with them at work because we’ve just scratched the surface here today. That’s OK! As we make our way through this podcast we’re going to talk about all three of these concepts a heck of a lot more, and you’re going to get really used to hearing about them and learning how to apply them to your job to create a better experience for yourself.
But before we conclude, there’s just one more mindfulness concept that I want to touch on – meditation. When some people use the word mindfulness meditation instantly comes to mind. You see those little zen-like people sitting on the floor with their legs crossed. In fact many people even use the words interchangeably.
Now, I’m a big fan of meditation. I meditate for at least 30 minutes almost every single day, and when I don’t do it I truly feel as though I’m not at my best. I also believe that meditation is the ultimate shortcut to embracing this aware, non-judgmental, and present moment perspective that will really help you to zen your work and make it a much better experience for yourself.
And I’m a big fan of people trying meditation. If you want to try meditation there are all sorts of books and articles and blog posts and even free guided meditations on Spotify and YouTube you can use all that to get you started.
However, I want to be crystal clear: You do not have to maintain a meditation practice in order to embrace mindfulness strategies. It is a shortcut but it is not the only path. Remember we’re being non-judgmental here! Meditation is great for some people, but other people have a really tough time with it. And still others are simply not inclined to try. That’s okay! Just because it’s a shortcut doesn’t mean it’s your only way there, and a lot of you might be better served by starting off with the more practical strategies we’ll explore. And then who knows…maybe you’ll get a little curious about meditation and give it a try later on.
That is the show for today! If you’d like to participate in future episodes of the podcast, I’ll be taking your questions and doing live coaching calls to help you with your most pressing workplace challenges. Head over here to sign up.

Learn how to Zen Your Work

Being mindful at work is all about your perspective. Learn how to take control of it and create an amazing work experience using the exercises in my book Zen Your Work.

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