Meditation at work can improve focus, lower stress

A new trend in employee coaching and assistance programs applies neuroscience to help employees reduce stress, quit smoking and become more focused and productive in a variety of business environments. Among executives, this type of coaching can increase performance so they can tackle difficult problems while managing employees and leading a company.

“What we found is by assisting the person through a coaching process to be more resilient through neuropsychology, they can focus more mindfully and can make decisions more lucidly that positively problem-solve issues for their team,” explains Justin J. Kennedy, a professor at Monarch University in Switzerland and the University of Pretoria in South Africa.

“We’ve done research in South Africa, Europe and the United States, looking at how to apply neuroscientific principles into performance and resilience-strength-based psychology,” adds Kennedy, who is also the CEO of Sherpa Coaching Africa. He has coached executives, call center employees and workers in both office and manufacturing environments to improve their cognitive abilities through these neuroscientific techniques.

One participant in his leadership development program explains how she felt “particularly daunted and a bit directionless” after starting a new position as relatively young and newly appointed unit manager in a local hospital.

“Through the process of examining my intrapersonal skills ([emotional intelligence] and stress resilience), extra-personal skills (conflict management and team effectiveness) and legacy building, I have emerged at the end of the process as a confident, calm and driven manager and, as Professor Kennedy puts it, an ‘elegant’ leader,” says Claire Pitt, a unit manager at Mediclinic Panorama.

These tactics can also be applied to wellness initiatives that strive to motivate and engage individuals by improving their health and wellbeing. For example, this type of training can help people quit smoking.

“People smoke in order to have a sense of wellbeing. Even though smoking has bad side effects such as cancer, smoking has the benefit of giving you an immediate feeling of relief,” explains Kennedy. Smokers need to learn other techniques to achieve that sense of relief in a way that is healthier and more productive. 

Employees can learn to inspire a relaxation response to combat stress or disruptive situations, such as the strategy developed by Dr. Herbert Bensen, a Harvard professor and pioneer in mind/body medicine.

“Mindfulness” practices encourage the individual to pay full attention to their present-moment experience without judgment or emotional reaction. Practicing this calms the individual both psychologically and physiologically. And since roughly 60% to 90% of doctor visits are for conditions related to stress, according to the Bensen-Henry Institute website, mindfulness could potentially reduce doctor visits and lower health claims costs. Mindfulness has also been found to reduce stress and improve morale in workplace studies, including in the U.S. Marine Corps.   

“Neuroscience has become very fashionable because we’re learning a lot about the brain. The mind is informed by the brain. The brain is initially an emotional machine, and only later in the cognitive process does it become a thinking machine,” explains Kennedy. 

Kennedy says the benefits of mindfulness are “the ability to stay attentive to the present moment so that you don’t get affected by the noise in your mind or the noise of the environment that distracts you." 

Workers in an office environment, for example, can use mindfulness to “help the individual turn off the mental pollution they might be experiencing,” he adds. 

For a worker at a manufacturing plant, these techniques come in handy during work breaks.

“The skills for the manufacturing environment require the factory worker to be intelligent in what they do in their breaks [so that it] gives them a clear mind and a relaxed body,” says Kennedy. He also suggests coaches give those workers “the neurological and cardiac tools that give them a sense of wellbeing” so that they don’t spend the break smoking or watching TV, but instead find a quiet space to meditate for five to 10 minutes.

Neuroscience principles in employee coaching can help them become more resilient and better at channeling stress to productivity, while improving their cognitive performance and a direct sense of wellbeing.