Can encouraging mindfulness in your agency increase creativity? There’s been a lot of buzz lately about mindfulness and mindfulness meditation. From daytime TV to popular print and digital magazines, the info-sphere is awash in mindfulness meditation courses and downloads. Touted as curative, and proven in numerous studies to reduce stress and increase wellness, it’s an intriguing concept. The question is, does it have a place in the modern workplace… and should it be embraced in your agency as a way to improve focus and creativity?
Loosely defined as a period of time (from five to 30 minutes) spent quietly focused on one simple thing, either a specific object, an idea, the “non-judgmental acceptance of one’s own thoughts,” or even breathing, mindful meditation can offer a respite from our day to day “busyness.” It can involve yoga, guided meditation, or merely sitting and focusing, non-critically, on one thing. Jon Kabat-Zinn, bestselling author and pioneering founder of the UMass Medical School-based Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Healthcare and Society, offers research-based proof that mindfulness meditation is a very useful tool in decreasing overall stress and increasing health… even at the cellular level.
Breaking the Cultural Bias
In the US, many of us feel an extreme, even competitive, pressure to be busy at all times. Our agency workdays are packed with activity, then our evenings are filled with home life… still fielding texts while talking over the day with spouse, partner or kids; making plans for tomorrow; talking while throwing together a quick dinner, while the TV jabbers in the background. We do not have a quiet culture, and we are not particularly contemplative.
In fact, we have an ingrained need to “look busy,” to talk about how busy we are, and make sure that our calendars (and even our children’s calendars) are full at all times. We work more hours than people in any other country… in the world! And for this, we can thank everyone from the Puritans to Zig Ziglar.
A productive employee who is kept busy working at his or her job is far more likely to be happy at that job and less likely to look for employment elsewhere.
Zig Ziglar
In my corporate life, I had one boss who took this approach to extremes, assigning busywork projects and more busywork projects to track the many projects in progress… and running weekly, three-hour, yawning-and-eye rolling department meetings to discuss and track the tracking of all of the busywork projects.
Integrating the Idea
How do you begin to integrate mindfulness meditation into the work day? Don’t be surprised if the idea is not met with enthusiasm. For many people, it goes against the grain to take a half hour and just think about the work, think about the day, or focus on one object intently. It just feels, well, odd. The first step may be having an informal session with your people to discuss the topic as a strategy and stress reduction tactic. Agency people can become stressed at both ends of the work spectrum—either we’re too busy to get the work done at a high level, or we’re not busy enough (and worried about job security).
Some Tactics…
Keep it incremental. Start small, and work on “mindful moments.” Just like any other in-house initiatives, you need to roll it out and build support within the group.
Find an in-house champion. Perhaps you have someone, or a few people, in your agency to champion the idea, and find ways to help others adopt the practice.
Approach mindfulness meditation as a creative tool. Recognize that it is a way to do better work, and a way to get to better, deeper levels of understanding regarding any creative project.
Realize that mindfulness improves clarity of thought improving the quality of the work. Actively encourage your people to take time to just think about the work.
Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.
Henry Ford
Keep your people informed regarding the benefits of mindfulness meditation: Health benefits range from better sleep to lower blood pressure. Studies have documented improvement in brain and immune function.
In many instances, short meditation improved mental focus, lowered stress levels, made people less prone to emotional (over rational) thinking, and enabled people to be more “in the moment.” Circulate articles and books on the topic. Consider engaging an expert for a lunch and learn. Invite employees to test mindfulness meditation and share results with co-workers. Any tool that can improve mental focus, reduce stress and potentially enhance clarity of thought has to offer benefits to creative organizations like advertising agencies.
