Why Business Owners Benefit from Teaching Employees to Meditate
Most business owners will recognise that their employees’ skills, experience, and commitment are their company’s greatest assets. What they may not realise is that meditation is a brilliant way of enhancing these assets.
Providing a tailor-made meditation programme for teams and individuals in the workplace helps create a stimulating and supportive working culture. There have been plenty of studies to back this up, showing that meditation can have a positive impact on performance, ability, and productivity.
The ‘Stressed London Professional’
There’s no denying that many people living and working in London feel stressed and anxious a lot of the time. It’s common for people in high-pressure roles to find themselves frequently feeling out of sorts, unwell, tired, and under-performing at their job as a result.
People coming to learn meditation with me typically want to reduce their stress and anxiety levels, boost their energy and creativity, and generally feel better about their work and home lives. They want to do something for themselves which allows them to be self-sufficient, is easy to do, and gets results fast.
Learning Vedic Meditation – an ancient technique that’s a surprisingly perfect fit for our busy modern lives – improves quality of life, and supports the maintenance of good mental and physical health.
What are the main benefits of meditation for your business?
Improves productivity
Business owners are always interested to hear that meditation increases productivity. By activating the prefrontal cortex which controls important cognitive skills such as emotional expression, problem solving, memory, language, and judgement, meditation practice allows the meditator to think more clearly and make better decisions, even under pressure.
Improves physical and mental well-being
Meditation combats stress, improves physical well-being, and helps you stay feeling young at heart. Meditation can also reduce cholesterol levels and therefore risk of heart disease. It’s also been shown to provide relief from stress-related illness such as migraines, headaches and asthma, as well as reducing the desire for and dependency on alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs which can lead to sick leave and absenteeism.
Increases creativity and clarity
A de-cluttered, sharper mind comes from meditating regularly – I speak from many years of experience here. Regular meditation provides clarity of thought, allowing the mind to stay sharp and avoid distractions. Clearer thinking and improved memory leads to greater creativity and emotional intelligence.
Improves concentration and focus
Regular meditation practice enhances and maintains concentration and focus. There is an increase in ‘bigger picture thinking’ and the ability to hold numerous ideas at the same time. It also becomes easier to recognise and understand the differences, connections, and subtleties between thoughts which is essential in a high-pressure environment.
Improves teamwork and working relationships
In a team environment, attentiveness is often compromised by stress. This can result in a shift from a broad team perspective to a more narrow or individualistic self-focus, leading to degraded team performance. Increased attentiveness to, patience with, and compassion for colleagues as a result of regular meditation creates more effective teamwork.
With meditation team members also tend to stop regarding each other as potential competitors, but as working for something in common, and relationships in general become easier. Meditation improves working relationships and makes it easier for colleagues to connect with each other, take a step back, think before speaking, and understand how words and actions affect others.
Helps you meet your business goals
Business goals feel more easily achievable when priorities like staff retention and welfare, talent advancement, and innovation are successfully addressed. The bottom line will also be positively impacted, as a meditation programme contributes to reduced absenteeism as a result of improved wellbeing, and increased productivity during the working day.
Meditation also encourages both divergent thinking (a style of thinking that allows new ideas to be generated) and convergent thinking (the process of generating one possible solution to a particular problem).
How do we teach meditation in the workplace?
If you’d like me to teach meditation in your business, the course can be conducted on your premises provided there is a quiet room free from distractions. Both my initial introductory talk – which is essential before people undertake the course – and the meditation course itself give participants a great deal of information. We’ll talk about the latest research around decreasing the effects of stress, how stress and anxiety affect the mind and body, and how to get better sleep and wake up feeling refreshed.
We’ll also talk in detail about how and why meditation can boost energy and creativity, improve work and personal relationships, declutter and sharpen the mind, and help enhance and maintain focus, together with helping sustain a better perspective on your work / life balance.
Participants will be taught how to meditate from the very first day of the course and put their newfound skill into practice over the course of four days, with my guidance. After that, you’ll have a team of completely self-sufficient meditators.
After that, your staff will meditate twice a day for 20 minutes. The first is done shortly after waking, before taking breakfast and leaving for the office, and the second is done at the end of the working day, perhaps even on the commute home, as a way of drawing a line under the working day and preparing them for the evening ahead.