Yoga and meditation have become an integral part of the daily lives of people. Performing meditation on a daily basis can help students as well as professionals to maintain their mental composure and focus on their work.
It helps people to prepare for future challenges and helps them to solve long standing issues with greater maturity.
At present, MNCs such as Google conducts mindfulness programs since they want their staff not only to develop a high level of focus and problem solving skills, but also to think clearly so that they can be more innovative in their approach towards their work.
Ways Meditation Can Help Your Career and Improve Your State Of Mind:
1. You will be able to show warmth and compassion to others:
Recent studies have confirmed that meditation helps in increasing compassion among people. Neuroscientists have conducted brain scans to show this miracle in action. It has a major impact on a person’s ability to lead. It enables him to reciprocate warmth to others.
Well known leadership experts such as Barry Posner and Jim Kouzes have observed hundreds of leaders and found that this trait separated top leaders from others. They appeared to be more warm and friendly to their co-workers.
They were also more compassionate to their subordinates and created a fellow feeling within the teams. Through mediation, you can develop a feeling of compassion for others. This will result in good understanding within your team who respects you deeply.
2. You will be able to handle stress in a better manner at your workplace:
The gap in communication prevents people from handling stressful situations at the workplace. A colleague may acquire a quicker promotion than you, your business partner may abandon you in the middle of a project or your desktop might crash. There could be many unexpected events at a workplace where you may react. Each of these occurrences creates a reaction that could be sudden and immature.
There are high chances that you won’t pause to relax before you are overwhelmed with emotions. Your heart will start beating a bit faster and cause stress. You may get hurled from the present moment into a state of despair regarding what might happen.
Through meditation, you will acquire the quality of ‘’mindfulness’ which will pull you back into the present moment. It helps you maintain your composure and deal with the situation. It will provide you with an opportunity to pause, control the situation and start things anew.
Mental stress cannot be handled by the use of antibiotics alone. Medical experts state that this is a lifelong process that can help you stay engaged over a long span of time.
Practicing mindfulness will also help you in acquiring peace of mind. It will help you get over the feelings of anxiety and stress and remove negative, self-defeating thoughts.
Medical experts such as Cohen suggest that meditation is the remedy to our hysterical, future-focused lifestyle. Even if you don’t continue with it in the long run, it will help you in all walks of life- from preparing corporate presentations to planning a family trip.
Compassion will bring around a positive change to your self as well. In a world characterised by cut throat competition, people are often self-judgmental.
Meditation plays a major role in developing a sense of mental peace and self-acceptance within you. It helps you in a major way while you are looking for a job change and during the interview process. Mindfulness will make you more confident than before.
You will learn to be in perfect control of the present situation and will be able to handle it in a better manner.
3. Detect and remove patterns:
Our daily life flows in a certain pattern. The manner in which you wake up, get dressed, drive to your office and your daily routine has a specific pattern. Patterns are the major tools which can be used in order to manage a highly taxing and complicated life. However, there are a number of patterns which are not very useful and are likely to cause stress and have a negative impact on your work.
Many people do not realise when they get caught in a negative professional pattern like getting no attention in meetings or being completely ignored by colleagues when you suggest important changes.
Most people never come out of their comfort zone to have a complete view of their life and lifestyle, and find out what drives them unconsciously. Meditation can help you find out the unproductive patterns, find out how they work and refrain one from doing them. Once you do that, you will become far more effective in your day to day work. The change sure will be noteworthy.
4. Relax your brain:
On a working day, there is a ‘tug of war’ which takes place in your brain between your hypothalamus, that manages your ‘fight or withdrawal’ response, and your prefrontal cortex. You will remain in perfect control when there is more blood flow that goes into your prefrontal cortex to ensure that ‘’you’’ remain in perfect control. You can guide your actions and be more productive.
Yet, when your mind feels that it is besieged, your hypothalamus grabs the robes and takes control. It captures the blood supply running to the rest of your brain, making it almost impossible for you to focus on significant events of the day.
This is a major reason why you find it so difficult to think of your speech while speaking in front of a live audience. You start getting nervous when you are stressed with an upcoming deadline. The part of your brain which handles complex tasks has been completely turned off.
Meditation helps you in reversing this process and gradually minimising its hold of the hypothalamus. You will learn to let your prefrontal cortex drive, even when you feel stressed out if you meditate regularly. This will, in turn, improve your effectiveness in handling critical projects.
5. Acquire clarity in your thought:
Stress at the workplace is one of the major reasons for reduction in mental stability. Psychologists claim that people who practice mindfulness have a higher chance of achieving more than adrenaline-junkies. This is because they are more conscious of what is happening around them.
A 2011 study confirmed that those people who underwent an eight-week mindfulness meditation course were effective when they switched between tasks and had a better memory.
Daily meditation helps in improving concentration and ensures that you are not distracted by your surroundings. These are all essential for improving your performance. It ensures that you don’t focus on the negative.
There are some people who even refuse to admit that they are stressed out. If you are one of those, you need to assess your condition and take necessary steps to get rid of stress.
6. You will acquire greater emotional intelligence:
When was the last time that you listened to someone with a high level of attention? What we want to ask is weren’t you creating a response while your colleague was still speaking? Good listening skills helps in improving connections with others since they feel that you are really paying attention to what they are saying.
Acquiring this skill isn’t an easy thing to do-but it has immense value. Meditation helps in removing the clutter from your mind and creates a greater bandwidth for your brain.
An open mind plays a major role in developing emotional intelligence (EI), which needs a high level of awareness. Most of the people tend to lose emotional intelligence while handling responsibilities both at home and at work.
In order to improve your emotional quotient, you need to find out what motivates you. You read the body language and other nonverbal signals with a high level of accuracy. You empathize with others sincerely and know when and how hard to push. All this requires a little bit of practice, but making an effort will prove to be beneficial for your career.
Higher EI can improve your possibility of being accepted as a part of your team and also for leadership positions. This helps you to stand apart from competition if you are looking for a promotion.
Employers always look for candidates who have good listening and communication skills-both of which are trademarks of a high level of emotional intelligence.
Experts emphasize that people who have a high level of confidence and self-awareness can play a major role in contributing to an organization’s success through their creativity.
Therefore, having a high level of Emotional Intelligence(EI)is a good thing for your career. Companies value staff with a high level of EI, as they know that such staff can contribute a lot to the company.
7. You will develop better skills of execution:
Regardless of your level of smartness and talent, you won’t rise up in the organizational hierarchy if you cannot organize, plan, decide, focus and manage time. These skills are normally known as executive functions and are the stepping stones for your cognitive and problem-solving abilities. Therefore, if you cannot maintain a high level of calmness in your mind over a significant period on the work that you are doing, you are going to miss a deadline. Meditation helps to improve these skills too.
