Mindfulness has been a buzz word these past several years. But what is it in practice and how can it impact the workplace? Will it truly make a difference in productivity? And how might we get started? Pearl Waldorf, licensed professional counselor, joins the podcast to share her own perspectives on the impact of practicing mindfulness and walks us through how we can be mindful.
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Brandon: Welcome to the HR for Small Business podcast, this is your host Brandon Laws. Today’s guest is Pearl Waldorf, she’s a licensed professional counselor, and as she states in her story on her website, Pearl gets to use the gift of simply being with people right where they are. You can find her at pearlwaldorf.com. Pearl it is so great to have you, thanks for joining us on the podcast today.
Pearl: Thank you Brandon, I’m excited to be here.
Brandon: Yes, so today we’re going to talk about what you’re an expert in—mindfulness, specifically for productivity. First off, for those who really don’t understand what mindfulness is, help define it for us. I know people have probably heard the term but maybe don’t know what it is.
Pearl: The way I like to think of mindfulness is, it’s a capacity we all have to pay attention to what’s happening right here, right now, in the present moment. And the piece that can be challenging is to do that as best we can without judgment.
Brandon: Being right here right now would mean if I’m here listening to you and playing on my phone, that’s not necessarily being mindful?
Pearl: [laughs] That’s a beautiful example. Yes, if we can be paying attention to our experience as it’s happening, we unlock all kinds of resources that otherwise really aren’t available to us.
Brandon: You’ll probably walk us through how to be mindful and some exercises, but first I want you to explain how will mindfulness and the practice of it help us at work?
Pearl: Well, what I’m going to be talking about today is two basic brain states that we can use mindfulness to track in ourselves. And at work we tend to fall into experiences of high stress, we might find ourselves feeling really disengaged or kind of annoyed by assignments we may have, frustrated with co-workers, and if we begin to build our own capacity to pay attention to what’s happening inside of us, instead of only focusing of what’s going on interpersonally or with a project, we actually empower ourselves to be able to make better choices, so if we’re stressed, to be able to actually notice, oh man I’m stressed out, and I need to take care of myself in some way, I need to step back for a moment. If we’re feeling really disengaged like, what’s going on there, what’s happening with me, and what might I be able to do to shift that experience?Brandon: It sounds to me that mindfulness is about awareness; just recognizing that you’re not being mindful in the present?
Pearl: Absolutely. It’s interesting because when you say that, Brandon, what comes up for me is I think people mistake the concept of mindfulness for meditation. Meditation is a very specific task that we do. It’s almost like going to the gym, where we sit down and we kind of exercise our brain.
Now doing meditation can be a wonderful support for that mindfulness that we’re talking about. But it’s two different things, and what I have found in my experience is that really all of us have some capacity to notice what’s happening with us. It’s kind of like self-connection, and that’s one of the ways that I like to talk about it with clients, and maybe later if we have some time I’ll run you through a little exercise where I can support you to kind of notice what’s happening with you.
Brandon: You’re going to put me on the spot, I love it! I’m sort of nervous but it’s going to be great.
Pearl: Yeah, only if you are comfortable with it.
Brandon: Absolutely, I think that the listeners will definitely benefit from that, so we’ll definitely do that. You mentioned a little bit ago that mindfulness sort of has two basic brains states. What are those? If we can go scientific for just one second.
Pearl: Oh yeah. Well I’m sort of a brain science nerd, so scientific is good. I would say there may be more states of mindfulness, but the two that feel really pertinent to the workplace: I have termed on the one hand, there’s the skill of execution, so in this capacity we’re actually focusing our attention on a particular task. We’re able to find and analyze problems, this is a great state for making decisions because we’re really able to evaluate what’s going on. It’s kind of the organizer, the way of paying attention that enables us to complete our work tasks, right? So that’s execution on the one side.
On the other side, and this is really tricky because I think in great part – and I would love to hear your thoughts on this, Brandon. But I think in great part a lot of us really think of our work as execution only, it’s like we got to just kind of do stuff all the time, there’s this task, and this task, and we got to get this done, and what’s next, right?
And there’s other state of mindfulness, I’m terming receptivity. And really when we start to think about the whole flow of what actually supports productivity, we find that this receptive state is actually quite a large part of what supports us to be productive in our work lives. Receptivity has more to do with kind of opening up to our experience, pausing, stepping back, it enables us to step back and see the big picture. This state actually enables us to take satisfaction from the work that we do, which is a really important part of staying engaged in our work. It’s the part of us that actually notices our relationships and pays attention to how we’re engaging with others. In a certain way I’m guessing that this side of the spectrum kind of sounds like soft skills, and yet so many of our errors result from a lack of capacity to sort of open up and take in what’s happening around us.
Brandon: You’re so right, until you put those two sides together, I never would have thought about it that like that. The execution part absolutely makes sense and I think most people would go there. The receptivity to me, correct me if I’m wrong, it feels like it’s almost like the flow of information that’s happening. You being present and being able to absorb and then sort of understand where you’re at, mindfully in the moment.Pearl: Yeah.
Brandon: But do you think people are even paying attention to that side at all? You mentioned that execution is the part people go to.
Pearl: So execution is the part of the process where we’ve just taken action, maybe we’ve just completed a project. And not just in work, but in life in general, our culture is incredibly biased towards action, towards doing, and so our impulses are to complete a project and jump to the next project.
Some of these other receptive states that are really important are the process of taking stock. What have I completed here? What is the impact of this completion? What successes can I attribute to this process? It’s finding satisfaction and really taking stock of where are we in the big picture of our work direction? We also need to be able to find closure with a project. If we’re jumping to the next thing, we may feel like we’re just always in action, we don’t have those pause moments.
The reason these pause moments are so important is that those kind of the a-ha’s, the insights, the deep connections that we can make around what’s really important in our work lives, that kind of clarity, those things happen when we’re in an open receptive state.
Brandon: I want to run a scenario by you, and I want to get your reaction to maybe how this plays in the mindfulness. Let’s say throughout my day I’ve got people coming and going, I’ve got a thousand different projects on my desk, I’ve got calls, I’ve got emails, and in no part of that am I taking stock of where I am at mentally. But in some cases, and this happens all the time to me, but I may grab onto a project that I’ve got to dedicate three, four hours to, and I completely invest myself in it, and then by the time it’s over, I’m like did four hours just go by? What just happened? I sort of got in the zone and I was so consumed in what I was doing, that time just stood still to me. Does that play a part in mindfulness?
Pearl: Absolutely, Brandon. And what I would ask of when you come out of that state of like holy cow four hours just went by, how are you feeling? Are you feeling good about what’s happened or are you exhausted?
Brandon: Most of the time I’m on top of the world. I just accomplished everything I needed to and I feel great and I wish I could bottle that up somehow and do it again!
Pearl: That is actually that flow that we’re talking about, when we get into that flow where an idea arises and we act on it and we’re getting the satisfaction out of what we’re doing, and the next idea kind of comes. You have access to your most creative self when you’re in that flow. And I think what you’re naming is, that there are certain experiences in your work life that really support that kind of flow, where flow is easy. And all of those kind of phases of the receptive process are folded into the experience.And when we’re indundated with all those items on our desk and we’re feeling overwhelmed, that’s where the mindfulness comes in. That’s where we need to actually kind of pause and notice holy cow this is a lot of things! It’s actually worth pausing to sort of take stock, structure our process a little bit. And I think that can be challenging when we’re pressed for time, I think our work environments don’t support a lot of reflective time, a lot of pausing and taking stock. But the difference there is that some experiences we are just going to jump into flow and it’s just going to be happening. It’s easy to access. And in other situations it’s less easy to access, and that, I think, is where the mindfulness becomes important.
Brandon: Just to take it a little step further, when I think about those flow states for me personally, I have a hard time getting started, but when I intentionally start and invest myself completely into what I’m doing, that’s where I sort of open my mind up to that flow state. And I know it, it’s just how you engage yourself to get there?
Pearl: That’s interesting, because what I would say is that in a way, and one of the things in the class I offer around mindful productivity, the execution state and the receptivity state are both very important. And when we’re overloaded with a thousand things that we need to do, and we don’t have the capacity to actually have that laser focus that you’re talking about, that you’re able to access when you’re in deep in a project, that’s something we can actually cultivate. We can actually cultivate our capacity to focus, to make sure distractions aren’t pulling us away from what the priority is that we’ve set for ourselves.
Brandon: That seems like a low hanging fruit right there, if we’re always connected digitally and we’re trying to get a project done on our computer, turning off email notifications, putting your cellphone away, those sound like obvious solutions—getting rid of the distractions seems like number one.
Pearl: That’s absolutely right. And again I think we tend as humans to have a stronger capacity on one side of the spectrum than the other, so execution on one side, receptivity on the other. For some of us, if we struggle with execution, we may be inundated with lots of ideas, there’s all this input and we’re taking it in all the time, we’re highly creative. But we have that difficulty with focus, we can get overwhelmed, we can feel disorganized, we can be unclear about what our priorities may need to be.
On the other end of the spectrum, if we struggle with that receptive state, this is the state that sends us into hyper-work stress mode. If we’re hyper-focused all the time, we become exhausted, we have difficulty with actually letting go and opening up to take in the goodness of what we’ve accomplished. Your example, Brandon, it’s a lovely example because, what I hear is that there’s this way that you were able to execute, you were focused on your work throughout the project and it was flowing. And at the end, they was this sense of like ahhh that was fantastic, good work me. There’s this feeling of yes.
Brandon: Absolutely.
Pearl: Yeah, and if we don’t pause, if our tendency is to just move to the next thing, if we’re hyper in hyper execution mode, we’re not going to feel that satisfaction.
Brandon: Hearing you say that I want to make some assumptions, as you articulated that beautifully. When you talk about mindfulness, there’s two sides to this, there’s the positive outcome side which is the result of being mindful and in the present state you have the state of flow. On the other side of it, what do you think of the outcomes? It seems like stress, maybe disorganization, disengagement, something like that where if you don’t practice mindfulness and you’re not sort of present with what you’re doing, you are going to feel out of control.
Pearl: I think the words you’re choosing, they resonate with me, absolutely. Folks that I work with, their experience is that it’s a state that they find themselves in that is not connected to their own experience, they’re not be able to prioritize, they’re not able to ask for help when they need it. They’re just floundering around in a state of being overwhelmed, so I totally agree.I think practicing a simple awareness practice, just turning our attention towards our experience and noticing how do I feel? How is this going for me? And if we’re constantly feeling stressed or frustrated or disengaged or overwhelmed, there’s a problem, and we all know that. Mindfulness can actually be a wonderful tool to support a capacity to shift out of those states into more satisfying states of work.
Brandon: By now you’ve completely convinced me on practicing mindfulness, and hopefully the listeners feel the same way as me. But the million dollar question is how do we do this? How do we practice it? I’m sure there’s exercises or just other little tips that you could provide. I know you said you had a class on this, so people can go check that out, and I definitely encourage them to do that. But maybe you could just provide as a little bit of insight on how we can actually be mindful?
Pearl: Again when we think about this, and I like to think of the execution on one end and receptivity on the other as a spectrum that we can shift along, that we can move along, rather than I’m either here or I’m there. And there’re definitely ways we can use mindfulness to support our capacity to be able to notice. Am I receptive or am I in execution? Am I focused or am I open?
And what I want to name first are these tools of meditation, these types of practices, and I’ve given you a couple of resources that you could maybe check out, Brandon, that offer a more in depth description of these different types of practices. But if you notice that you struggle with execution, if you find organization is difficult, if you feel overwhelmed, if you’re feeling highly stressed, execution is probably the direction that you want to focus on. And the kinds of exercises that are going to support this side of the spectrum are what we would call focused attention practices.
So a simple practice of kind of pausing at your desk and closing your eyes if that feels comfortable, and just focusing on the experience of your breath coming into your body. You might feel your chest expand, you might feel the air kind of flowing past your nose as it comes in, just feeling your body. And the breath out, and a focused attentive practice means we’re staying with that.
Now it’s incredibly normal for the human brain to get distracted, that’s actually not a problem. But as soon as we notice that we have lost track of our breathing, we want to bring our attention back to the breath, and what we’ll find if we practice that, even just for five minutes a day right after lunch when we’re about to jump back into our work, we will find that our capacity to stay focused on our breath expands.
So on the other side of the spectrum, we would call an exercise that supports receptivity an open awareness practice. On this side of the spectrum, rather than kind of zeroing in, you could think of a camera zeroing in on a very specific detail, that’s execution. When we’re engaged in receptivity we’re opening that aperture and we’re just kind of taking in what’s around us. A great practice for open awareness is to just sit at our desk again, and pause, close our eyes, and open our ears to the sounds around us. What we’ll start to notice on this side of the spectrum, is we might start to interpret the sounds, oh I hear my officemate talking about that project. If that becomes too distracting it might be nice to step out of the office where you can just listen to the sound of the cars or the trees or the sounds that don’t have language attached to them, so that we can just listen. If we practice these two different forms of mindfulness, we start to feel the way our state shifts when we’re focused and when we’re open. It’s a very different state of engagement.
Brandon: What I find interesting is that, I expected there to be so much more to it, and big, long exercises, and just something that like for a busy person, we’re all busy, but for somebody who just feels disorganized and chaotic all the time, adding one more thing to the day seems insane, like to do mindfulness practices every single day. But the way you describe those is that they’re very simple to do, and we could easily add them to our day and this is more about being present and open as you said.
Pearl: When you said that Brandon, it really reminds me of that truth that sometimes self-care can feel like one more thing on the to-do list. It’s like we’re already so, so, so busy. Sometimes that simple practice of self-connection where we just, maybe it’s while we’re walking to the cafeteria. We’re walking from a meeting back to our desk, we can actually just turn our attention to yourself and notice, what’s my state? How am I feeling after that meeting? Am I feeling really revved up? Am I feeling really open and like access to ideas and possibilities are at my fingertips? And noticing that in that way can be an even simpler way to incorporate a kind of mindfulness practice into our work day.Brandon: What I find interesting is that you mentioned self-care. Now if we could just make mindfulness a part of our day like brushing your teeth, where it’s just automatic, and you’re already thinking about it and that you need to do it, how do we get to that?
Pearl: Well I love it, you could actually use brushing your teeth! You’ve got to brush your teeth every day. You could actually use brushing your teeth as a time of the day where you simply turn your attention towards your experience. How am I feeling in this moment? What’s going on with me? What’s happening in my physical body? What’s going on in the state of my mind? Is it full of a thousand to-do’s or is it pretty open and kind of ready for what’s to come? I feel like when we do self-connection, which is the practice that I really focus on in my practice, I like to offer people these resources around focused attention practice, open awareness practice, as kind of going to the gym and exercising the muscles in our brains to move us in the direction that we’re less capable. And you don’t even need to necessarily to do that right away. Just being able to pause at some point during our day and notice our experience is very, very powerful.
Brandon: By chance have you ever read the book called The Artist’s Way or The Artist’s Way at Work?
Pearl: I have, I have it’s been quite a number of years since I’ve read The Artist’s Way. I didn’t know that they was an Artist’s Way at Work.
Brandon: There is! We actually have a Xenium book club and we do podcasts on the books all the time. But we read it as a group, and I think we had about 12-15 people participating, we did weekly discussions on it for each chapter. Why I thought mindfulness was this overarching huge exercise you need to do, was because in the book The Artist’s Way at Work, it was so intense. You’d keep journals, you’d have to go to the museum for an hour and walk around and just be present. And it was like – there’s so many exercises, and it was just exhausting.
Pearl: Wow, isn’t that funny, and I think that we are really immersed in a culture that demands so much of us. And even our health culture demands so much of us. We have to track what we’re eating, we have to exercise, we have to do our mindfulness practice. I mean it really is impossible for all of us to do all those things, and that’s what I like something like this very, very simple self-connection check that we can incorporate into, any part of our day. We just have to find a time where our mind doesn’t need to be engaged in something else.Brandon: I found the time, do you want to walk me through it?
Pearl: Wonderful yeah, yeah I’d love to, great!
Brandon if it feels good to you go ahead and just close your eyes, okay. And what I want to support you to do is to just very intentionally, turn on your own capacity to really notice your experience right now. And that may require turning your attention from the world of the outside, all the tasks that need to be done, to the world of your inside.
And so you can just begin to notice for yourself, what’s going on in here? What’s going on in me right now? You might notice the state of your mind, maybe it’s busy with activity, maybe it’s very quiet, maybe you’re evaluating this exercise, any of those things are things that we can hold in our awareness, we can notice. You can notice the state of your body, how are your muscles feeling? Can you feel tension or relaxation? Do you feel sensations? Can you feel your feet on the floor?
Whatever it may be, letting yourself notice your physical experience, and there may be images or you may be thinking back to something that happened a week ago, and that’s not a problem in self-connection. What we want to do is just to notice that’s what we’re doing. Wow look at me I’m really caught up in that interaction I had with my wife last night. Oh look at me. Taking whatever time you might need, just to be curious, just to kind of take stock of your present moment, and when it feels right you can come on back into conversation with me.
Brandon: Wow, I could fall asleep right now.
Pearl: Interesting, tell me more. What was that like?
Brandon: What’s interesting about that is, that it has been a stressful day for me. I’ve got an event coming up in a couple of hours that I’m particularly stressed about. And I got a chance to take a moment to close my eyes and actually just kind of feel myself.
Pearl: Yeah.
Brandon: And I kind of felt, it was kind of weird, it was like the stress kind of went away for a little while and kind of just felt my body loosening up and I didn’t really care.
Pearl: That is so wonderful, I’m so happy to hear you have that experience Brandon, and that’s not always the case. For some of us we might stop and check in, and we might notice holy croly, my body is freaking out about this upcoming event! And the nice thing is that when we notice that, we can actually decide for ourselves like how do I want to respond to this? What might I do? Is there anything I can do before the event to calm my system?
And if not, maybe we can decide for ourselves, you know what I’m going to rest after this dang thing is over. I’m going to really give myself a pat on the back, take in the satisfaction of having done a great job, and let myself relax after a job well done. And I think the piece I also want to name, Brandon, about your experience is, this is what mindfulness does. Mindfulness actually shifts us back out of our experience and enables us to sort of observe our experience. And very often with that comes this settling, this kind of like oh wow look at that I’m kind of stressed out, but feels like here right now, I’m okay.
There’s actually brain chemistry involved in this. Mindfulness kind of releases a particular chemical into the brain that supports a kind of openness and availability to learning, so it’s a pretty powerful tool.
Brandon: Yes, it is, and what I’ll tell you that I learned from you just now and you didn’t necessarily say this but I felt it, is that, mindfulness is about taking control of things happening to you. Because oftentimes we let life just happen, and we sort of sleepwalk through it, whether it’s tasks or just things that happen. And mindfulness in the exercise that you just helped me through, it allowed me to sort of take control or take landscape of how I’m feeling and the things that are going on, and just to take the reins again.Pearl: Yeah. Absolutely. I couldn’t have said it better myself, it’s a tool that can really support more choice around how we respond to our experiences.
Brandon: Besides those exercises, I’ve seen a ton of apps related to mindfulness, are there any that you actually recommend?
Pearl: You know, I haven’t done a lot of research on the mindfulness apps, but I would say, Brandon, if you have any that you’re curious about, I’m interested in looking them over. What I would say is that an app that offers a really short practice that doesn’t feel overwhelming to whoever you are, you get to decide for yourself what to commit to. One of the things that I like to support my clients to actually value is, let’s actually have success. As opposed to trying, and trying, and trying to do something that doesn’t work for us, it’s too much we can’t fit it in into our schedule, try something small.
I would love to know if there are apps with small practices that offer that kind of pause opportunity. Most of the apps I would say probably kind of live in that realm that I was beginning with, with the sort of execution practices, and receptivity practices, probably not as many are going to be about just noticing your own experience. And something that I am very happy to do is to just record a little short one of those self-connection checks, and if you think that might be helpful to have access to, I would be happy to share it.
Brandon: As we wrap up this conversation, I want to bring it back to HR managers in the workplace; this is the audience. Why does mindfulness belong in the workplace and why should HR managers help support their employees practice mindfulness. Sum it up for us.
Pearl: I think there’s a few answers to that question, and the big things that come up for me are, we want our employees to be responding to the challenges in the workplace as opposed to reacting. So many of our problems in the workplace come out of reactivity. Mindfulness supports a kind of pause moment where we can respond.
And I think the other piece is that’s it’s a very powerful wellness tool. Simple practice like the self-connection check can support employees to be more aware of what’s going on with them. What do they need? What kind of support might they need?
I would say that those are the two big pieces that come to my mind. Wellness in the workplace, and I would say probably engagement as well, paying attention to how engaged are we in our work and what can we do about that. But also this piece of reactivity and managing reactivity, our relationships are so important in the workplace, and if we can engage in a responsive manner, we’re going to have a lot more success.
Brandon: Before we go, can you provide us a summary of what you do for your clients, and any other links, resources anything that you’re doing that would tie in really nicely with this just for people to find out more about what you’re doing and how you can help?
Pearl: There’s a couple of great blogs that I’ll direct you all to. For those of you that are particularly interested in the sort of gym workout mindfulness, on the one end execution, on the other end receptivity, check out these two blogs, one of them is written by Tara Brach, she’s a wealth of knowledge on the topic of mindfulness and has her own website that I would suggest that you check out.
And secondly there’s a website called Wild Mind and that’s another meditation resource that you can hop on and get a little more clarity on these skills. If you want something simpler, you want just a guided opportunity to kind of check in with yourself, you want to incorporate it into your workday, I have a recording up on my website, it’s really easy to get to at pearlwaldorf.com/selfconnectioncheck. This is a wonderful quick way to check in with yourself.
And then finally I am offering a couple of classes for folks here in Portland who might be interested in kind of exploring some of these topics a little more deeply, and you can find that information on my website at pearlwaldorf.com.
Brandon: Fantastic. Pearl thank you so much for being part of the podcast. I’ve really found this valuable and I know others are going to feel the same way when they hear this, so thank you.
Links and Resources:
http://www.wildmind.org/blogs/on-practice/open-mind-focused-mind
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/finding-true-refuge/201502/the-backward-step
Guided Mindful Self-Connection Check: http://pearlwaldorf.com/self-connection-check
Workshops: http://pearlwaldorf.com/2016-career-development-group