Whatever Happened the Mindful Revolution?

It is now almost three years since Time Magazine announced “The Mindful Revolution” with a cover story that heralded a new age of happiness and productivity for both corporate America and , naturally, the people who make up corporate America… or, perhaps, the so-called little people… those who actually produce, make and generate “bottom line”.

In the intervening years, not a lot has happened – if all revolutions were like this Sky, CNN, BBC, CNBC… none of them would have any news to talk about! In the intervening years, we’ve seen a few examples of the corporate world embracing mindfulness – always the same examples: Google, Facebook and Apple, always articles about how you can go meditate – kind of like you can pop outside for a cigarette!

“Corporate Wellness” has emerged as a desirable – as if the words actually went together!! For example, Arianna Huffington’s new venture, Thrive Global, is championing “Corporate Wellness” with a heavy emphasis on mindfulness – because it will enable people, and I quote, “be a more holistically integrated cog in the machine”!

Mindfulness is about an awful lot more than that and corporate initiatives to date haven’t grasped the potential of mindfulness – not for their bottom line but for the creativity, the enhanced decision-making and problem-solving, for the focus and visionary nature of the mindfully focused and, as a result, for their bottom line… everyone’s a winner.

The point is that mindfulness is not just about meditation – that would be like saying that running on a treadmill will simply enable you be the next Usain Bolt! Mindfulness is not just about (corporate) wellness – that would be like saying that nuclear energy is just for cooking the Sunday roast! Mindfulness is about discovering who we are and what we can do for ourselves, each other and together. That’s why mindfulness enables great leaders and high-performance Teams – not doing what they would have done anyway better or with less stress – but doing what they could never have imagined doing with no stress at all.

Or should I say purposeful mindfulness – because, in the all the hype that mindfulness has generated over the last couple of years, one could be forgiven for thinking that all you need to do is be calm and focused and everything else will just flow. But calm and focused on doing what? Without purpose mindfulness is a train wreck waiting to happen. Without purpose, we’d be better off staying mindless which, by the way, is our normal state of mind! Evolution has seen to it that, mindlessly, we’ll make it through the day – it may not be pretty, but we’ll muddle through!

Purposeful mindfulness, on the other hand, is the recipe for extraordinary success and wellbeing (not really keen on the wellness word!!). A healthy mind and healthy body, because they go hand in hand, will come up with goals and objectives, personal and corporate, that will take us all to a life where corporate objectives will not be as pathetic as doing better than last year or keeping the top line growing! Purposeful mindfulness will take us to a place where we, once again, experience a burst of invention and, of course, a totally different quality of life… to say nothing of the savings of billions of dollars otherwise lost each year to stress related illness and premature death.

But purposeful mindfulness is not something you read about one day and put into action – it demands, to quote one of my long-standing, world-leading clients “relentlessness” – relentless discipline to be committed enough to look after what’s going on between your own two ears. When you do that, everything else changes utterly and a wonderful beauty is born.