In the fields of medicine and psychology, the idea of mindfulness has been accepted and successfully incorporated into many behavioral strategies. Although people often don’t really know their experiences and reactions. Developing the ability to pay attention at that same time is instructive, attainable and can be extremely helpful.
This is where Mindfulness Coaching as a behavioral approach comes into the picture. As we already read about being mindful. The next pressing question is how does one become mindful? Is it just simple meditation with spiritual tracks in the background? Or is it that road where one has to sacrifice their desires? No it surely is not any of those.
Research (Grossman, Niemann, Schmidt, & Walach in 2004) says that “mindfulness is a gradual, progressive process and one that requires regular practice.” Before we jump into the techniques of achieving mindfulness, it would make sense to know the WHY behind!
Why should we practice mindfulness?
Mindfulness allows us to be more emotionally intelligent, more attentive, more imaginative, be able to make better choices, better cope with stress, and more durable. Mindfulness has enormous opportunities both for individual well-being and for the enhancement of workplace environments in organisational and healthcare settings.
Our lives, from sun-up to sun-down, are encountered with multiple instances of anxiety and stress management or emotional wreckage. The answer behind knowing what to do next in such a situation is mindfulness. See, it is not your usual therapy. It is you being the driver, a cautious driver to your life.
A mindfulness coaching session should not be treated as motivation booster classes. The current scenario allows mindfulness to unlock opportunities and resolve conflicts at work, in family, improved health and a happiness enhancer.
At work, mindfulness can help you improve your wellbeing both as a personal and professional practise., Allows you to create a positive change not only for your own personal life and well-being, but also that of those you train. If seen healthwise, mindfulness has proved helpful in —
- Increasing awareness;
- Increasing attention and focus;
- Increasing clarity in thinking and perception;
- Lowering anxiety levels;
- High brain functioning;
- Increased immune function;
- Lowering blood pressure;
- Lowering heart rate;
- Experiencing being calm and internally still;
- Attain the feeling of being connected yet detached
So, if you are a leader or a coach in making, how does one become a mindful leader or a mindfulness coach? Next we are going to discuss some techniques to become mindful.
Techniques to Become Mindful
For a coach, an efficient way to enhance coaching performance, improve emotional intelligence and help develop key leadership skills is to develop mindfulness skills. Mindfulness gives the coaching session a great deal of benefit, including the reduction of tension; the ability to transcend self-limiting beliefs;, enhanced concentration;, more highly developed self-awareness;, calmness; and the ability to remain in emotional balance.
Our program Coaching The Brain capacitates enormous potential for one to ride high on the path of mindfulness. Coaching for mindfulness is fundamentally non-hierarchical in nature. You will carefully direct the experience of your clients in your capacity as an instructor in such a way that it develops naturally into a position of understanding the practise.
In this way, the goal is not to make yourself essential in exploring and learning mindfulness, but instead to inspire participants to explore their own experiences, thereby turning towards their own lives as a way of enhancing the practise of mindfulness at the present moment. The following methods are-
- For Beginners, this practice is about eating mindfully, spending time outside, meditating and accepting your emotions.
- If you are a budding coach, then you need to go deeper. The techniques for this section of our readers are-
- Pursue the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction or Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy programme for eight weeks. Research shows that only practising mindfulness literally rewires our brains for eight weeks.
- Regularly practise mindfulness (including meditation) (preferably daily).
- Taking a systematic coaching approach, “being mindful” of the larger structures in which you and your clients work.
- Approach to non-judgment coaching and life in general. Be transparent, show empathy and sensitivity. Remind yourself of this always.
- It may take as little as a few minutes to carefully plan for each coaching session. For instance, walk to your coaching session carefully, or sit in the park for a few minutes and pay attention to your breath.
- Share mindfulness activities in coaching sessions as “homework” wherever helpful and necessary for the client. You don’t have to label them mindfulness-you can call them activities of anchoring, or speak about exercises that help us become more inventive and imaginative. Keep another set of activities towards emotional intelligence.
- Be curious about all that emerges during a coaching session. Be prepared as it can turn out to be both the “difficult” and the ‘simple.’
- For yourself or your customers, don’t be too attached to the result. Especially for leaders. True coach is someone who is accessible to someone in a non-judgmental, curious, compassionate way.
Practising mindfulness allows us to cultivate compassion, which is a key component of coaching, we believe. Being self-compassionate, but well worth the effort, can be extremely challenging. Have some fun! We sometimes take matters way too seriously. Yeah, awareness helps us handle tension, be more innovative, enhance cognitive functioning and therefore the “performance,”. The coaches at Coaching The Brain say that ultimately, for them, mindfulness is a healing method to bring joy back into our lives and the clients lives.
How does mindfulness catalyse emotional healing? Read here next.
