Mindfulness Teaching & Courses

What is the Mindfulness for Life Teaching Programme?

The Mind Being You Mindfulness for Life programme is based on the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training (MMTT) written by Nick Cooke, Mindfulness Now, and taught at the East of England College in Birmingham and throughout the UK in licensed schools and courses.

The Mindfulness Now course content  is based on the evidence of scientific research of the benefits of mindfulness and the theories of positive psychology and as a result, offers a fusion of mindfulness based approaches including the evidence based, Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) programmes mentioned above.

The Mindfulness for Life course offers a similar blend.

So, when you decide to learn mindfulness with Mind Being You, you will gain access to a wide range of benefits:

• In-depth, comprehensive programmes of teaching which includes the history and development of mindfulness.
• A structured programme of learning that includes experiential mindfulness exercises, guided teaching of mindfulness meditations, structured guidance on home practises to build and integrate your own knowledge of mindfulness and mindfulness ways of being.
• A comprehensive Mindfulness for Life Teaching Manual.
• Ongoing support and guidance.
• Assessments and feedback on your mindfulness meditations and practices.

Mindfulness for Life Teaching Aims

Regardless of whether you choose to learn mindfulness through a 1-1, group, face to face or online route, the aims are consistent and are simply to introduce you to and teach you a range of essential mindfulness techniques and meditation skills which you will then be able to apply to and enhance  your personal and professional life.

From the start of your learning until the end of your chosen course, you will have the opportunity to participate in practical experiential exercises that will allow you to feel the benefits of Mindfulness.

You will learn how to adapt these mindfulness techniques to your own life and will receive guidance on how to build your mindfulness abilities so that you can incorporate mindfulness into your working and personal lives.

Mike is bound by a strict code of ethical practice which includes commitment to personal mindfulness practice.

You can be assured then that you will be taught mindfulness by a teacher who has mindfulness practice at the heart of everything he does in both his therapeutic, coaching, teaching & training and his work with corporate clients.

All you need to do is:

• Commit to turning up to each session, whenever that is.
• Practice the short exercises and meditations daily for 6 days out of 7.
• Read the chapters from your training manual that you are asked to read.
• Read and/or listen to any material you’re given as well.
• Come to your learning with an open mind and allow yourself to enjoy the experience and meet others of like minds.
• It is a commitment, but you will reap the rewards of your investment. They will be worth it.

Mindfulness for Life Teaching Programmes

Fees for Mindfulness Coaching

• An initial FREE consultation of 30 minutes is available for you from Mind Being You to assess if your problem would be appropriately treated with mindfulness or a combination of techniques.
• Afterwards, each session, lasting around 50 minutes costs £80 or lasting around 75 minutes costs £120.

To cover administration costs, appointments not cancelled 48 hours beforehand or no shows may be charged a fee of £50.

Please contact Mike for more information on mike@mindbeingyou.co.uk or call him on 07446 005472 for a confidential chat.

Corporate Mindfulness for Life Programmes

Mindfulness at work: what are the benefits?

Mindfulness.  Everybody seems to be doing it.

From Google to Transport for London and the NHS, everyone is talking about it and are apparently doing it.

Even Apple are teaching their staff mindfulness techniques and exercises and Harvard Business School include it now in their Leadership Development courses.

So, what is mindfulness? In its simplest form, mindfulness means awareness.

Mindfulness is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not be overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us.

So, how can mindfulness help in the workplace and how do you practice it at work?

Practicing mindfulness offers a way to pay attention to the present moment, without judgment and in the workplace, mindfulness can help to reduce stress, anxiety and conflict.

It can also build resilience and improve emotional intelligence, whilst enhancing communication with colleagues, customers and clients or patients.

A good guide to judge whether you are mindful in the workplace is to take a moment to answer this.

In a typical week at work, can you remember ever having experienced any of the following:

• Found you were unable to remember what others have said during conversations?
• Had no clear recollection of your daily commute?
• Regularly eating at your desk without tasting your food?
• Focusing more on your mobile phone than to those close to you?
• Ruminating on past events or worrying endlessly about what the future holds?
• Are you skim reading these words?

If the answer to these was a YES, then it’s a good chance that you were zoning out on a regular basis and were on autopilot for some of that time.

Before incorporating mindfulness into their workplace, Harvard Business Review concluded that:

“Mindfulness should no longer be considered a “nice-to-have” for executives. It’s a “must-have: a way to keep our brains healthy, to support self-regulation and effective decision-making capabilities, and to protect ourselves from toxic stress. It can be integrated into one’s religious or spiritual life, or practiced as a form of secular mental training. When we take a seat, take a breath, and commit to being mindful, particularly when we gather with others who are doing the same, we have the potential to be changed.”

In the corporate world, employees are being asked to do more with less, working long hours with increasingly heavy workloads.

Professor Mark Williams, professor of clinical psychology at the University of Oxford, and who developed Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) says working in a culture where stress is a badge of honour is counterproductive.

“We can spend so much time rushing from one task to another. We may think we’re working more efficiently, but as far as the brain is concerned, we are working against the grain. No wonder we get exhausted.”

Mindfulness also enables us to take an emotional step back and consider alternative perspectives rather than simply reacting to events and using the least intelligent area of our brains to make decisions.

Mindfulness helps us to flick the switch back to the smart parts of our brain to put us back in control of our emotions, enabling us to choose a more appropriate response to things that happen around us.

Alongside the overall benefit of improved performance that comes from mindfulness, research into using mindfulness in the workplace indicates that there are clear benefits and include:

• Reduces Anxiety & Stress
• Improves Focus
• Enhances Creativity
• Increases Emotional Intelligence and Resilience
• Improves Communication

Reduces Anxiety & Stress

Mindfulness makes perfect sense for dealing with stress and anxiety because it takes you out of fight-or-flight mode and brings you into a relaxed state of mental clarity and calm.

By becoming more aware of your thoughts and body, you can better assess and identify your feelings and approach them in a more positive way. Scientifically, mindfulness practice reduces activity in the stress initiating part of your brain called the amygdala.

Improves Your Focus

Studies show that meditation training can improve your ability to focus on one thing at a time and help curb our tendency for distraction.

This ability to focus will start to translate to everything you do.

It helps you to avoid multi-tasking, and places an emphasis on mono-tasking.

A focused mind is a productive mind.

Enhances Creativity

Creativity greatly depends on your mental state.

Mindfulness helps you to get into a creative frame of mind by combatting the negative thoughts that hinder creative thinking and self-expression.

The fact that mindfulness focuses on the present helps you to think freely and creatively and allows your mind the space to bounce off ideas.

“I believe that mindfulness represents a state of mind that speaks

rather directly to the kind of cognitive flexibility and creative insight

required in the modern workplace.

It builds unique cognitive abilities that enable creativity in individuals that otherwise would be trapped in conventional ways of interpreting their world.

It is all the more promising because unlike other individual difference factors, it is directly trainable, which increases its promise as a possible workplace creativity intervention.”

-Ravi S. Kudesia, Journal of Business Ethics, 2018, Mindfulness and Creativity in the Workplace

Increases Emotional Intelligence and Resilience

According to an article in The Journal of Spirituality in Mental Health, (first published in 2014 by Peerayuth Charoensukmongkol), mindfulness meditation helps increase emotional intelligence in three major ways:

• It improves your ability to comprehend your own emotions.
• It helps you learn how to recognise the emotions of other people around you.
• It strengthens your ability to govern and control your emotions.

It also notes that mindfulness improves a person’s ability to use their emotions effectively by helping them determine which emotions are beneficial when undertaking certain activities.

Archana Patchirajan, successful CEO and Founder of Sattva, shared that in her early years as a leader, she wanted things to happen how she wanted them to happen and on her schedule:

“I didn’t tend to understand what my team was going through. I would just get angry if they did not perform according to my expectations. Thanks to meditation I have developed patience,” Archana says. “I have a better relationship with my team. Best of all, I maintain my peace of mind.”

Improves Communication

We live in a world full of distractions.

With the constant influx of emails, texts and tweets many of us have lost our ability to actively listen and be present.

By incorporating mindfulness into your day, you can retrain yourself to focus on the present moment and truly listen to people with compassion and kindness.

Not only does this have a positive impact on the people around you, it makes your day more interesting because you are engaging in active conversations with people and learning about them.

Mindfulness & Return on Investment (ROI)

So, can pursuing mindfulness be good for the bottom line?

In David Gelles’ Mindful Work, How Mindfulness is Changing Business from the Inside Out, (first published in 2015), he delves into the subject of mindfulness in business, revealing evidence to support its benefits and real-world examples of companies who are seeing results.

Probably the most compelling case of this can be seen with Aetna.

Mark Bertolini, the CEO of Aetna, initiated the company’s mindfulness program after mindfulness helped him deal with chronic pain after a ski accident.

Aetna partnered with the American Viniyoga Institute and eMindful and began a pilot program with 239 employees.

Now, more than one-quarter of Aetna’s work force of 50,000 has participated in at least one mindfulness class, and those who have report, on average:

• 28% reduction in their stress levels,
• 20% improvement in sleep quality
• 19% reduction in pain.
• They also become more effective on the job, gaining an average of 62 minutes per week of productivity, each which Aetna estimates is worth $3,000 per employee per year.
• Additionally, Aetna is seeing a decrease in healthcare costs as a result. The following excerpt has been taken from Mindful Work, Chapter 7: “Socially Responsible.”

One of the findings was that highly stressed employees incur an additional $2,000 per year in health care costs, compared to their less-stressed peers. Scaled across a large company, this quickly amounts to millions of dollars a year in stress-related charges.

And while it’s hard to draw a direct causal connection, Aetna is already starting to see results.

Health care costs at the company — which total more than $90 million a year — are going down.

In 2012, as the mindfulness programs ramped up, health care costs fell 7 percent. That’s $6.3 million going straight to the bottom line, partly thanks to mindfulness training, it appears.

Not all of that is attributable to meditation, of course.

But stress exerts a tax on an organisation — in terms of both productivity and health care costs.

Reducing stress, therefore, is going to help the bottom line. Aetna figures the productivity gains alone amounted to $3,000 per employee, an eleven to-one return on its investment. That’s an impressive ROI for any program. “

As can be seen, bringing mindfulness to the workplace has the potential to decrease people’s stress and anxiety through heightened awareness, which in turn leads to improved performance.

Also, perhaps most importantly from a leadership perspective, mindfulness encourages engagement.

Being fully present as a leader— and allowing your team to be fully in the moment — will reap rewards both personally and professionally.

Mindfulness expert Mirabai Bush, famous for introducing it to Google, says: “Introducing mindfulness into the workplace does not prevent conflict from arising or difficult issues from coming up. But when difficult issues do arise… they are more likely to be skilfully acknowledged, held, and responded to by the group.

Over time with mindfulness, we learn to develop the inner resources that will help us navigate through difficult, trying, and stressful situations with more ease, comfort, and grace.

Becoming more aware of your own emotions as they arise gives you more choice in how to deal with them. Mindfulness helps you become more aware of an arising emotion by noticing the sensation in the body. Then you can follow these guidelines: stop what you are doing. Breathe deeply. Notice how you are experiencing the emotion in your body. Reflect on where the emotion is coming from in your mind (personal history, insecurity, etc). Respond in the most compassionate way.”

So, how can you start?

Take a few mindfulness breaks at your desk each day.

Stop what you’re doing, close your eyes, relax, and take a few deep breaths. Breathing in I know that I’m breathing in, Breathing Out I smile.

That’s a great place to start and you can build from there.

Corporate Mindfulness Teaching Courses & Programmes

Mike is a fully accredited Mindfulness Teacher and provides a range of bespoke and modular Mindfulness courses for businesses and organisations that will suit every budget and requirement.

The Mindfulness for Life courses that Mike teaches are a blend of MBSR (Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction) and MBCT (Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy).

These are just some of the features of his programmes that can be built into bespoke courses and workshops:

• Breathing techniques that will help reduce stress and anxiety and return you to the present moment.
• How to stay in the present moment mindfully – fully accepting in a non-judgemental way.
• Mindfulness Exercises to build awareness and understanding.
• Full Body Scan Meditation.
• Mind-body connection.
• Mindfulness of Movement.
• How to incorporate mindfulness practices into daily life.
• Integrating mindfulness into the working day.
• Life and work balance.
• Overcoming current difficulties.
• Mindfulness Coaching.

 

For more information on Mike’s Corporate Mindfulness programmes, courses, workshops and seminars or talks, please contact him on mike@mindbeingyou.co.uk or call him on 07446 005472 for a confidential chat.