Mindfulnet recently held a conference to discuss the issue of work stress and ways to tackle this problem. A key message passed across is the essence of self-meditation for dealing with stress, a technique which can help relieve one from the pressures associated with working in corporate environments. The effect of which is deemed to enable workers overcome work related stress and improve personal and professional relationships.
Organisers of the event, including London Business School, have introduced new mindfulness programme amongst other executive education programmes and management training sessions, to create awareness on the topic and help more people understand the importance of recognising the early signs of stress and methods of dealing with the problem.
The Vice president and chief information officer of the IT department of Carlberg has recently initiated the mindfulness training for all members in the department. As someone who has practised mindlfulness for stress management, his experience has helped him to create and sustain a mental capacity that deals with stress on a daily basis. Mr Egelund stated, "I realised that the turmoil, the noise and the information flow would never stop," says Schmidt. "It's just a fact of life. So I needed the personal capability to cope with it on an ongoing basis. Mindfulness is a practical way to cope with all the noise in your head and the noise around you. It's a way of letting go of it and not letting it control you. By offering all my colleagues access to mindfulness skills, I'm actually getting each employee to take responsibility for coping with reality themselves, rather than shouldering the entire burden myself."
He mentions that his biggest obstacle was overcoming the wrongful perception that the approach of self-meditation to deal with stress was a type of religious practice, where people sit and vibrate supposedly meaningful words.
There is increasing evidence to show that the mindfulness technique is effective for stress relieve. Studies show that after four weeks of continuous practice (10mins daily) symptoms of stress starts to reduce, while healthy mental well-being improves. (MacKenzie et al, 2006; Hölzel et al, 2010)
More organisation are incorporating this stress relieve technique in their business and management training sessions to help improve workers mental being and capacity to drive the organisation.
For more information of Management training programmes, visit http://www.london.edu/
