Blog | Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute

How to Reduce Stress With Mindfulness

Posted on May 8, 2013 by Derek Pankaew

Over 73% of the American workforce experiences stress that causes psychological or physical symptoms. 48% feel that their stress has gone up over the last 5 years. 54% say that stress has caused fights with loved ones and almost 50% say stress keeps them awake at night. [1]

Stress has become an epidemic. It’s so widespread, we often don’t even notice it. It’s just a part of everyday life. Yet it can sap our energy, vitality and zest for life if we’re not careful.

Mindfulness is an incredibly powerful tool for dealing with and handling workplace stress. Mindfulness can help reduce your body’s cortisol levels, which quickly lowers stress on a neurochemical level. It can also help you eliminate internal resistance, so you can meet life’s problems as exciting challenges rather than as taxing crises.

Here’s how to reduce workplace stress with mindfulness.

Center Yourself Before Beginning Your Work Day

Before you jump into the day, spend 5 to 10 minutes centering yourself. Use your favorite mindfulness practice to bring you into the present moment. Ground yourself in non-attachment. Experience the present moment as it is.

One proven basic practice is to pay attention to your breath. Begin by sitting down and setting the intention to be mindful. Remind yourself why you’re doing this – in this case, to prepare yourself for the day, or to reduce stress.

Then, just watch your breath. Don’t avoid any sensation that comes up and don’t try to create any particular experience. Just watch your experience, exactly as it is. Be relaxed, yet alert at the same time. As your awareness deepens, your stress will naturally dissipate. You capacity to handle stress for the rest of the day increases.

Doing this for just 5 to 10 minutes before your work day can work miracles for your stress levels.

Two Minutes, Twice a Day

Pause twice in your day to spend some time on mindfulness. Even just two minutes can transform your whole day. Anytime you find yourself feeling stressed, take a minute to be mindful. One great habit is to spend 2 minutes meditating right after taking your lunch break.

Let Go at the End of the Day

It’s very easy to take stress from the workday home with you. Spending a 5 to 10 minutes on mindful breathing at the end of the day can be a great way to cleanly separate your work related stress from the rest of your life.

Sit down with the intention of ending your work day. Watch your breathing and notice all the sensations that arise. Breathe in and out while watching your breath, again doing nothing but being aware.

Taking the time to slow down, pause and be mindful sends a clear signal to your brain that you’re shifting gears. You move from a hectic “work time” pace to a much more leisurely “personal time” pace.

If you want less stress in your work, try adding these three habits to your daily routine. In total, they take less than 30 minutes. They can easily be the most emotionally impactful 30 minutes of your life.

[1] http://www.statisticbrain.com/stress-statistics/

Posted in Practicing Mindfulness

What is “Leadership” and What Makes a Good Leader?

Posted on April 19, 2013 by Derek Pankaew

There are many definitions of leadership. The Collins English dictionary defines leadership as “the leader(s) of a party or group.” Yet true leadership is much more than that. A leader can be the CEO of an organization, or a first year employee who leads his or her team to success behind the scenes. A leader might lead through official authority and power, yet just as often great leaders lead through inspiration, persuasion and personal connections.

So what is leadership? One great definition is:

“Leadership is the art of leading others to deliberately create a result
that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.”

Leadership through emotional intelligence

It’s not just the creation of results that makes good leadership. Good leaders are able to deliberately create challenging results by enlisting the help of others. They can single handedly turn failing companies into Fortune 500 organizations. They can change company cultures. Good leadership is an essential key to corporate success.

The Characteristics of a Good Leader

What makes a good leader? Here are some of their most important characteristics:

Self-Awareness. You have an intimate knowledge of your inner emotional state. You know your strengths and your weaknesses. You know when you’re working in flow and you know when you’re over worked. You know yourself, including your capabilities and your limitations, which allows you to push yourself to your maximum potential.

Self-Direction. You’re able to direct yourself effectively and powerfully. You know how to get things done, how to organize tasks and how to avoid procrastination. You know how to generate energy for projects, to calm yourself when angered. You can make decisions quickly when necessary, but can also slow to consider all the options on the table.

Vision. You’re working towards a goal that’s greater than yourself. It could be something small, like the success of the team, or a larger vision like world peace. Working towards a vision is far more inspiring than working towards personal gain.

Ability to Motivate. Leaders don’t lead by telling people what they have to do. Instead, leaders cause people to want to help them. A key part of this is cultivating your own desire to help others. When others sense that you want to help them, they in turn want to help you.

Social Awareness. Understanding social networks and key influencers in that social network is another key part of leadership. Who in the organization has the most clout, both officially and unofficially? Who moves the hearts of the group?

These are some of the most important characteristics of good leaders.

Emotional Intelligence and Leadership

Most of these traits tie directly into emotional intelligence (EQ). Leaders with high EQ are intrinsically more self-aware. They understand their mental processes and know how to direct themselves. They’re more in touch with what they’re deeply passionate about. They naturally care more for others and receive more compassion in return. They’re more socially in tune.

Leadership is more often than not about “soft skills” rather than hard skills. Yes, a leader who understands what drives the bottom line is valuable. Yet it’s the leader who can get others to perform at their best who ultimately creates winning organizations.

What are some of the main ways you see your leadership skills impacting your workplace performance?

Posted in LEADERSHIP

5 Ways Mindfulness Can Improve Your Leadership

Posted on April 5, 2013 by Derek Pankaew

1. Improve Your Intuition. There’s a reason intuition is called a “gut feeling.” Intuition is felt in the body long before a corresponding thought forms in the mind. Learning to be more mindful of the sensations and emotions in your body will help you tap into your innate intuition.

Researchers at the University of Iowa conducted a study on intuition using polygraphs and four decks of cards. Two decks were blue, two decks were red. The red decks had a much lower probability of winning. After just ten cards, a sweat response could be measured when a participant considered taking a card from the red deck. It wasn’t until after fifty cards that participants could articulate why they preferred the blue deck. Their physical “gut feeling” intuition knew the red decks were bad five times faster than their logical mind.

2. Reduce Fight or Flight Response. This is your body’s response to perceived threats to your survival. In caveman days, a threat might be a lion or a hyena. Social exclusion was also seen as a real threat, because if you were cast out of the clan, your chances of survival were greatly diminish.

Today, that fear of social exclusion is triggered by less deadly events: your boss yelling at you, being blamed for failure, or even an unreasonable client. All of these can trigger a “fight or flight” response, whether or not your livelihood is actually at stake.

Adrenaline enters the blood stream, your heart rate goes up. Creativity goes down and you become more apt to stress, anger and other negative emotions. Vision narrows into an frenzied “I have to get this done” mentality, making it difficult to come up with creative solutions to problems. It becomes almost impossible to enter a flow state.

Mindfulness can help you significantly reduce the body’s fight or flight response. Julie Brefczynski-Lewis conducted a series of neuroimaging tests where she measured the amygdala’s response to fear-inducing stimuli. The amygdala is the part of the brain responsible for the fight or flight response. She found that the more meditation experience a participant had, the lower their response to fear-inducing stimuli.

3. Choose How You React to Emotions. Without mindfulness, it’s easy to get swept away by emotions. The “response time” between feeling an emotion and acting on that emotion can be virtually non-existent. For example, if you feel anger, you might act on that anger without thinking. In the workplace, being run by emotions can be highly detrimental.

Mindfulness training can help you notice when emotions come up, so you can choose how to act on them. For example, you can notice anger as it arises. Then, you can consciously choose whether or not to act on that anger. Sometimes acting on it is the right course of action. At other times, walking away is the better choice. Mindfulness gives you the option to choose from your higher self, rather than be run by the emotion.

4. Reduce procrastination. Procrastination can be caused by any number of unconscious emotions. It could be a project that seems so big, it feels dreadful just to think about starting. It could be perfectionism or fear of doing a bad job. It could be fear of self-criticism. It could be a wide mix of different negative emotions associated with work.

Mindfulness practice will allow you to deeply understand what causes procrastination for you personally. You’ll be able to watch it develop in your mind and body. You’ll be able to notice how it starts, how it takes shape and when it disappears. Then you can start to unravel it, until it disappears (almost) completely from your mental habits.

5. Boost happiness for yourself and your team. Mindfulness can help raise your happiness “baseline.” In other words, how happy are you when there’s nothing in particular to be happy or unhappy about? We all have a baseline. Most people’s baseline is somewhere between “depressed” and “neutral.”

A mindfulness practice can help you raise that baseline, so you’re happy by default. Numerous studies have shown that happiness can help increase workplace productivity, improve leadership and boost overall performance.

These are just five of the many different ways mindfulness can help you improve as a leader. How has mindfulness improved your leadership or your work?

Comment below – we read every comment!

Posted in MINDFULNESS

Three Ways to Get the Most Out of Your Day

Posted on March 19, 2013 by siyli

Often in our modern society, it’s easy to feel as though life and work is speeding by. We have high speed internet, phones that serve as a mobile office and increasing amounts of work responsibilities. It’s become normal to carry on conversations while browsing emails and checking messages. You might even be reading this blog while you’re trying to work

At SIYLI, we know that mistaking being electronically connected for being mentally connected is a mistake that many workers can make. Instead of doing your job as quickly as possible, consider taking a moment to really evaluate the importance of your work. What are you contributing to when you come to work? Who do you impact?

By bringing mindful practices to your work day, you’ll find that you’ll become more efficient and happy as you go through your day.

How do you get the most out of your workday? SIYLI has three suggestions:

Pausing at the Start

Before you begin your day, before you open your email or start returning phone calls, take a minute to help you clear your head of distractions. Pay attention to your breath and quiet your mind before you allow yourself to work. Take a moment to consider what you want to accomplish today and what you need to do to accomplish it. If you start the day with a clear mind, it’s easier to spend time on what matters.

Focus

Don’t get buried under multitasking.

Instead of trying to multi-task, perform one task at a time. It may seem like you’re more productive when you’re answering emails, writing reports and making phone calls all at once, but what you’re really doing is dividing your attention and short changing all three activities.

Instead of stretching your mind in several directions, work on honing your mental powers to focus on one job. Choose the task that’s most pressing, and begin it. If you feel yourself getting distracted, take a couple of breathes to redirect your attention and focus. You’ll be amazed how quickly you accomplish your tasks and at the great quality improvement of your work.

Context

What are you building with your work?

It’s essential to put your work in the proper context. Whether you’re answering phones at a reception desk or running a billion dollar company, take a moment to really understand how you contribute to the company and the world around you. As a receptionist, your kindness and efficiency with a caller could make their day brighter, help ensure effective communication for the company and set the tone for a better business interaction. It’s important to remember that you’re working as part of a team and value your place in your company.

At SIYLI, we know that mindfulness is the key to developing great work habits. When you learn to fully utilize your mind and focus, you’ll unlock new levels of productivity. With your new found efficiency, you might find that you’ll have more time and creative ideas.

SIYLI Suggestion: Who is impacted by your work? What are you contributing to?

Posted in Attention Training, LEADERSHIP, MINDFULNESS, Practices, Practicing Mindfulness, SIYLI | Tagged attention training, awareness at work, Exercises, happiness at work, mindfulness, mindfulness at work, Search Inside Yourself, SIYLI

Be Confident, Question Everything: Marc Lesser Talks the Power of Paradox

Posted on March 12, 2013 by siyli

In his last book, Less, SIYLI CEO Marc Lesser discussed how a focused mind can make you a more effective worker. In his new book, Know Yourself, Forget Yourself, he examines how five paradoxes — Know Yourself, Forget Yourself; Be Confident, Question Everything; Fight for Change, Accept What Is; Embrace Emotion, Embody Equanimity and Benefit Others, Benefit Yourself — can help you achieve clarity in life and at work.

“In some way I think when we pay attention to our lives, if we pay attention to what it means to be a human being, everything about it is paradoxical. How did we get here? What does it mean to be born into this world and to have consciousness? To discover our family and our life and our body, that’s all to me pretty mysterious stuff,” explains Marc.

Lesser believes that by embracing life’s mysteries, we actually allow ourselves to open up and accept new and different worldviews.

“Basically, I think, people often get hung up on feeling like we need to either be very confident or very questioning, or we need to be very accepting or fighting for change,” says Marc. “It starts with just seeing the paradoxical nature of everything in our lives, so it’s a way of bringing more awareness and understanding to our lives. It’s also a way to practice and expand our own worldview, perception of ourselves, who we are and what we’re doing.”

Being open to paradox also helped Marc become successful in the business world without compromising his values. When Marc was fired from the company he founded — Brush Dance Publications — after 15 years, he embraced the setback as a learning experience. He realized his heart was no longer in the business and set out to find work he was passionate about.

“I learned so much from the process and it opened doors for me that allowed me to do what I’m doing now. Eight years later, I’m back in the seat of running another organization, getting another shot at leadership and growing a company here with SIYLI.”

Now his mission is to spread mindfulness to the world, offering corporations and offices tools for a better business and a better life.

“Most of my time is spent bringing mindfulness and emotional intelligence into organizations through SIYLI,” says Marc. The need for a fresh perspective in business is great. “I think the overarching complaint that I hear is too much to do and not enough time.”

So what is Marc’s key to happiness in the workplace?

“In some way the quickest answer is: Resilience, flexibility and seeing the good in others. I think there is a lot of unhappiness when we don’t see that people actually do have good intentions. I talk about this in the book: The goal is to become really familiar with our own story, our own worldview and to make it wider and more flexible.”

Though paradoxes can offer confusion when we focus on them, they can provide clarity when we learn to embrace the power of paradox. In essence, Marc believes that embracing contradiction allows us to become more accepting and more open to the world around us. This allows us to make a greater positive change in the world.

“We don’t get to choose our parents, we don’t get to choose a lot about who we are, but we get to choose a lot about how we direct our own lives.”

SIYLI Suggestion: Think about the paradoxes in your life. What are they? How can you use them to become more open?

Posted in Featured, Marc Lesser, Practices, Practicing Mindfulness, Search Inside Yourself, SIYLI | Tagged Conditions for Success, emotional intelligence, Exercises, happiness at work, Know Yourself Forget Yourself, marc lesser, Paradoxes, Search Inside Yourself, SIYLI

Two SIYLI Ways to Change Your Mind

Posted on March 5, 2013 by siyli

A mind is a terrible thing to waste. At SIYLI, we know the most powerful leadership tool you have is your mind, so it pays to develop good mental habits. Projecting positivity is an excellent attribute for business and life. When people are drawn to you, you become a natural leader.

There are two ways to develop these positive mental habits: Kindness and Empathy.

Kindness:

What we think, we become.

The practice of creating mental habits is based on a simple, intuitively obvious yet profoundly important insight. It has been described this way: Whatever one frequently thinks and ponders upon, that will become the inclination of his mind.

In other words, what we think, we become. The method itself is simple; invite a thought to arise in your mind often enough, and it will become a mental habit.

For example, if every time you see another person, you wish for that person to be happy, then eventually, your instinctive ﬁrst thought is to wish for that person to be happy. After a while, you develop an instinct for kindness. You become a kind person. Your kindness shows in your face, posture, and attitude every time you meet somebody. When you project kindness people intuitively trust you. They will sense you have their best interests at heart. Developing a trusting relationship with employees and coworkers is one of the essentials of working in an office.

Once you’ve discovered how to project kindness to all you encounter, it’s time to develop your empathy.

Just Like Me Practice:

The practice reminds us how similar other people are to us, thereby creating the mental habit of equality.

Visualize somebody you care about in your mind while doing the exercise. Then consider the following:

This person has a body and a mind, just like me.

This person has feelings, emotions, and thoughts, just like me.

This person has, at some point in his or her life, been sad, disappointed,

angry, hurt, or confused, just like me.

This person has, in his or her life, experienced physical and emotional

pain and suffering, just like me.

This person wishes to be free from pain and suffering, just like me.

This person wishes to be healthy and loved, and to have fulﬁ lling

relationships, just like me.

This person wishes to be happy, just like me.

Given how social we are and that we need others to survive, it makes sense for kindness toward other people to be intrinsically rewarding to ourselves; it is probably an important part of our survival mechanism. One study even suggests that performing one kind act a day over just ten days can measurably increase your happiness.

Develop these healthy mental habits and you’ll find that you relate better, communicate more effectively and hold greater influence at the office. Kindness and empathy can be the keys to becoming an effective leader.

SIYLI Suggestion: This week, practice the just like exercise with a different person each day.

Posted in Emotional Intelligence, LEADERSHIP, MINDFULNESS, Practicing Mindfulness, Search Inside Yourself | Tagged emotional intelligence, empathy, Exercises, happiness at work, kindness, mental habits, Search Inside Yourself, SIYLI

SIYLI Steps for Jump Starting Motivation

Posted on February 26, 2013 by siyli

The journey of self-discovery begins with a single step. But are you motivated to take that step?

In an office, it can be easy to let your motivation slip. Facebook, answering emails, browsing blogs (hi there!) can become tempting distractions to your workday.

At SIYLI, we know the key to motivation is you. Yes, you.

You are the world’s greatest living expert on you and with this valuable information you can keep yourself motivated and productive all day. How do you unlock this motivational power from within? SIYLI offers you three steps to motivation and productivity.

Alignment: First we must align our work with our values and higher purpose. The secret is to create a situation in which your work is something you do for fun and somebody just happens to pay you for it. The best way to do this is to look at the work you do and see the importance of it. Do you keep schedules and organize meetings? Think about what an important task is entrusted to you and how valued your work is. Look at how you can apply your values to your work. Consciously think about what value you are demonstrating by the task you are currently working on.
Envisioning: Envisioning is based on a very simple idea: it’s much easier to achieve something if you can visualize yourself already achieving it. In Search Inside Yourself, we teach an envisioning practice that can help you clarify your goals. The basic idea is to envision, discover, and consolidate our ideal future in our mind by writing about it as if it were already true. Write a paragraph about who you are, what you’re doing and why it fulfills you. You’re literally writing your future right now. It is much easier to walk a path, once you have some idea of what it looks like.
Resilience: The ability to overcome obstacles in our path. To do this you need three basic tools: Inner Calm, Emotional Resilience and Cognitive Resilience. Inner calm simply means being able to calm your mind no matter what is going on around you, your mindful minutes will help you achieve that. Emotional resilience is the practice of viewing success and failure as emotional experiences and choosing to embrace a mindful outlook. Cognitive resilience is the process of understanding unproductive mental habits and learning how to stop them in their tracks.

Combined, we know these practices constitute a complete package of tools to help you ﬁnd out how you want your life to unfold and to navigate the path to get there. Enjoy each step.

SIYLI Suggestion: Write a paragraph envisioning where you want to be in the future. What did you find out about yourself?

Posted in LEADERSHIP, MINDFULNESS, Practicing Mindfulness, Search Inside Yourself, SIYLI, Uncategorized | Tagged alignment, awareness at work, envisioning, Exercises, happiness at work, mindfulness, Motivation, resilience, Search Inside Yourself, SIYLI

Easy Steps to Being an Effective Leader

Posted on February 19, 2013 by siyli

Perhaps the Empire wouldn’t have lost if Lord Vader was a more effective leader

In business, it’s common to assume that being an effective boss means being and exacting taskmaster. At SIYLI, we know that the best leaders are loved by employees. In fact, being liked may be the most effective way to get things done in the long term.

So how do you win over your workforce while remaining an effective leader? SIYLI has a few suggestions:

Kindness Counts: Even in difficult situations, it is sometimes possible to make important things happen while still creating workplace friendships. It requires a kind heart, an open mind, and the right social skills.

When you must have an uncomfortable conversation with someone, instead of avoiding it or approaching it emotionally, use your skills to make the situation a learning experience. If you’re unhappy with the performance of a worker, instead of speaking to them in anger, try using kindness. Show you care about their performance and work with them to identify possible avenues for improvement.. By offering to work with them, you make your employee feel supported and respected.

Lead with Compassion: Compassion is a mental state endowed with a sense of concern for the suffering of others and aspiration to see that suffering relieved. The most compelling benefit of compassion in the context of work is that compassion creates highly effective leaders.

So how do you become a compassionate leader? The practice of compassion is about going from self to others. In a way, compassion is about going from “I” to “We.” These are leaders who, in addition to being highly capable, also possess a paradoxical mix of two important and seemingly conflicting qualities: great ambition and personal humility.

These leaders are highly ambitious, but the focus of their ambition is not themselves; instead, they are ambitious for the greater good. Because their attention is focused on the greater good, they feel no need to inflate their own egos. That makes them highly effective and inspiring.

So instead of focusing on how your team makes you look, focus on how your team can improve as a whole. When you want everyone to succeed, you’ll get better results.

Supportive leaders build more effective teams.

Complimenting with Confidence: When your workers do a great job, it’s natural to want to praise their talents. But studies have shown that the phrasing of the compliment is just as important as the compliment itself.

If your team does a wonderful job on a presentation, instead of telling them they did a great job, tell them that you can see how hard they worked to put together a fantastic presentation. When you acknowledge the work your team puts into a project, it lets them know that you see their hard work and value it. They will feel appreciated and noticed, which is a greater motivator than a simple “good job”.

So when you want to hone your leadership skills in the office, remember that there is a benefit to benevolence. By making your group a cohesive and caring unit, you’ll find your productivity will skyrocket.

SIYLI Suggestion: Spend the week giving your workers effective compliments. Let us know the results.

Posted in LEADERSHIP, MINDFULNESS, Uncategorized | Tagged awareness at work, Conditions for Success, emotional intelligence, leadership, Search Inside Yourself, SIYLI

Job Skill Essentials: Five Steps to Emotional Intelligence

Posted on February 12, 2013 by siyli

John Donne said, “No man is an island.” At SIYLI, we agree. Offices should not be an environment where employees feel isolated. The best offices feature collaboration, interaction and best of all a sense of community. When your office has a sense of harmony and your workers feel respected and heard, your company will be more successful — and not just on a personal level. Studies show that employees who are happy at the office are better workers.

Intelligence is just the tip of the iceberg.

So how do you create a happy environment for you and your employees? Try adding emotional intelligence to your list of job skills.

Emotional intelligence, as defined by researchers Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer, is the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions.

How do you identify feelings in others and yourself? With practice. It turns out that emotional intelligence isn’t some innate gift given to us at birth, but a skill, like any other you learn for your job.

Emotional Intelligence can be broken into five steps for you and your employees to work on. Once you’ve mastered all five steps, you’ll be amazed at your effectiveness as a communicator and motivator.

Self-awareness: As with most mindful activities, the first step is to look within. Work on accurately identifying your emotions and what causes them. Do you feel anxious before a big meeting? Take a moment to acknowledge the emotion and consider why it arose.
Self-regulation: The second step is realizing that just because you feel an emotion, doesn’t mean it has power over you. If you feel angry, take a moment to acknowledge the emotion, then decide if acting on it is appropriate. Instead of giving into an impulse, recognize that your emotions don’t control you, they are just there to give you information. If you decide that the emotion isn’t helpful to you (ie: anger won’t help you communicate with a coworker in a meeting), take a mindful minute to focus on your breathing until you feel calm and prepared to continue.
Motivation: Identify the emotions that drive you in a positive manner. Do you feel accomplished after a concise and productive meeting? Use that feeling of accomplishment to keep yourself focused and engaged.
Empathy: Empathy doesn’t mean that you have to agree with other people, it simply means that you’re aware of their emotions and acknowledge them. If you understand what a coworker is feeling, you’ll be better able to communicate with them. Acknowledging what your coworkers feel and think is one of the more effective ways to get them to trust your judgment and feel respected.
Social skills: The last step to emotional intelligence is honing your social skills. No, we don’t mean logging on to Facebook. For this exercise, you’ll have to turn off the electronics and dive back into human interaction. Chat with someone at the office and concentrate on listening to what they say. When you feel comfortable interacting, communicating your wants and needs in an effective way becomes easier.

You don’t need a bullhorn to be heard. We can show you how.

Emotional Intelligence may not be taught in business school, though that may be changing soon, but it’s an essential skill for everyone in the workforce. When you help build a work environment based around communication, motivation and empathy you become a better employee and a more effective boss.

SIYLI Suggestion: Practicing taking a breath before a meeting, does it help you focus?

Posted in Emotional Intelligence, LEADERSHIP, MINDFULNESS, Practicing Mindfulness, SIYLI | Tagged Conditions for Success, emotional intelligence, empathy, Exercises, happiness at work, John Donne, mindfulness, mindfulness training, Search Inside Yourself, SIYLI

SIYLI Profiles: Lindsay Van Driel

Posted on February 5, 2013 by siyli

At SIYLI, we know that mindful practices can change not only your life, but also your job, and eventually the world. We’re going to profile mindful office pioneers and tell their stories of office transformation.

Lindsay Van Driel is a Business Operations Manager at Intel, who co-founded the Awake Inside program which taught workers how to incorporate mindful techniques into their home and work lives.

“When I said I was going to create a Mindfulness program at Intel, I didn’t really have any idea what I was doing,” says Lindsay. “I just had a very strong intention.”

Since Van Driel already had an active interest in mindful practices, she decided to attend the Wisdom 2.0 Conference which addressed how mindfulness could be incorporated into the tech industry. She was inspired by those promoting mindful movements at Google (SIYLI’s own Meng) and Cisco to encourage calm and creativity in the typically high-stress tech industry.

“I knew that Intel faced all the same challenges of an intense, fast-paced work environment,” she says.

“Intel is filled with incredibly gifted and brilliant individuals, but in general, they were feeling weighed down, stressed out and exasperated,” Lindsay notes. She says that with the pressures of emails, meetings and tense deadlines, employees were stressed.

Van Driel, center right, believes that mindfulness is key to a better office environment.

“People felt that they were being pulled in multiple directions all the time. Meditation and Mindfulness are powerful tools to calm and center the mind and body and would be of tremendous help to Intel employees,” says Lindsay. “I resolved to implement a program for Intel.”

She began blogging about mindfulness at Intel and stating her intention to start a program. She partnered with mindfulness and leadership development expert Anakha Coman, who was teaching meditation at Intel to create The Awake Inside program.

The Awake Inside foundational 8-week program focuses on making mindfulness meditation simple and accessible. The program starts with a 10-minute meditation and conversation about presence, offering individuals the opportunity to start noticing how often the mind wanders.

Each class has 2 meditations in it. The first is designed to center the consciousness in the present moment and the second is based on the content of the particular class. We build on the individual’s self-awareness; we introduce topics of relational intelligence, we talk about group dynamics and opening up the channels of creativity by cultivating vulnerability and trust.

After implementing the program, Van Driel, who was already a mindful practitioner, says that her work life has only improved.

“The number one thing I noticed is that I laugh more,” she says. “When problems arise, and they always do because it is the nature of engineering, I don’t feel anxiety about it. I know the issues will get resolved and excessive worry or stress does nothing to help solve the problems. I have the ability to relax and let the process flow.”

Van Driel also feels that the program has given her the ability to empower others. Her goal is to engage participants so that they have a truly fulfilling, engaging experience at work every day.

So far, it’s worked wonders.

“The results that we’ve seen have been nothing short of extraordinary,” says Lindsay. “The program is having far-reaching and profound impact on employees at work and at home.”

She reports that employees feel they have a better engagement in meetings and with co-workers. They can also listen better, have better meetings and enjoy increased mental clarity.

“We’ve seen technical breakthroughs and personal breakthroughs. We consistently hear the people are having better conversations with their children and the spouses and that less stress at home translates to less stress in the work place.”

SIYLI Suggestion: Do you know a business committed to mindful practices? Let us know for future SIYLI Profiles.

Posted in Attention Training, Emotional Intelligence, LEADERSHIP, MINDFULNESS, Practicing Mindfulness, Search Inside Yourself, SIYLI | Tagged Awake Inside, Cisco, Exercises, Google, happiness at work, Intel, Lindsay Van Driel, mindfulness, mindfulness training, Search Inside Yourself, SIYLI