3 ways mindfulness breathing improved my life at work

Mindfulness. It was a concept and a practice that was all around me for years, and yet, I never tried it. From my yoga teacher’s biweekly reminder to breathe for an hour, to the therapists on my team at work who facilitated a course in mindfulness for people with addictions—I heard about it, wrote about it, supported it, and never actually tried it.

Then a colleague told me to read a book about mindfulness in the workplace called One Second Ahead by Rasmus Hougaard, founder of The Potential Project. I picked up a copy of the book from the New York Public Library and took my time reading it. Truly, I renewed it 3 times. I would read a few pages, put it down, think about what I read, sit with it, and soak it in. I think I was taking the time because the wheels were really turning. After I finally finished the book, I started integrating some of the suggestions like limiting my screen time before bed, and observing my inhaling and exhaling for 5 minutes every morning. This may sound shocking but I started to see results on the very first day that I started observing my breath. It’s now been about 1 month since I started my morning breathing and here’s what’s happening.

  1. I can see the limits of that which I have control over and am letting go of that which I cannot own. On day 1 of my morning breathing routine, I found myself having a mindfulness epiphany. I was facilitating a meeting and the beginning of it was very chaotic—participants were distracted and several were joining late. I noticed that the meeting was chaotic. Quickly thereafter I thought that the chaos meant that I was a bad facilitator. But then I pushed that judgment aside, and just observed the chaos, without owning it or judging it. There were several people in the meeting contributing to the chaos, and I was not one of them. I had control over only my behavior. I felt this expanse of space in my head—like I had room to look at the chaos but in an open space where no thoughts about the chaos existed. It felt like an out of body experience.
     
  2. Experiences that would typically bring about negative emotions—stress, anger, aggravation—are no longer doing that. Last week I attended a monthly meeting that, for the last several months, I’ve found nothing but frustrating. This month, the meeting didn’t impact my mood. On another occasion I found myself compromising on something that would typically leave me feeling annoyed. However, this time I wasn’t annoyed. I felt okay. I actually didn’t feel any negative emotions around either of these situations, despite my track record of routinely getting irritated by situations like these.
     
  3. I’m better able to focus as I’ve stopped trying to multitask at work. I used to try to do several things at once, which just made each of those things take longer than necessary. Very often I would go to clock in upon arriving at work and while the website would load (this takes about 30 seconds), I would grow distracted. I would start checking email, or reviewing my to do list. Inevitably, I would forget to clock in. I’m now trying to repurpose pockets of time—like the 30 second pause I have to take before clocking in—to breathing. Those 30 seconds are not really an opportunity to get other things done. In fact, distracting myself actually caused more of a problem than just sitting still for 30 seconds and focusing on the first task of my day.

Do you practice mindfulness? How does it impact your professional life?

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