mindfulness

And this moment… and this moment…

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I have a built-in resistance to things like meditation; while you can point me at the statistics and show me that it is a good thing, I still kick against it and I don’t know why. But it might be to do with the terms.

There’s this thing called Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Bollocks: it’s talking to yourself. Before you can persuade me that this is good, you have to get by me thinking you’re trying to con me by giving it a pseudo-scientific name.

Emotional intelligence. Bollocks. It’s street smarts. I am forever against this term because of an Emotional Intelligence expert who tried to show me a mathematical formula for why this was more powerful than regular intelligence. He didn’t have enough regular intelligence to answer a simple question about a base assumption that the formula depended on.

He also told a group of us that one man with Emotional Intelligence can defeat an army and in fact is literally unstoppable. I don’t really mind that he had no answer when someone asked what happens when such a man is in conflict with another one. That just amused me. I mind very much that he genuinely had not thought of this before.

I miss out on some things because of this twitching bias.

I’m generally okay with that as it’s also a useful filter against the nonsense. But I am now persuaded that mindfulness meditation helps.

I just had to tell myself that it was really shutting up for a minute and stopping thinking.

Mindfulness or Don’t Multitask (part 99)

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From Canada’s HR Reporter:

The concept of mindfulness is to focus on living in the moment and avoiding distractions, particularly when one is involved in important tasks or activities. As well as tuning out potential distractions such as smart phones, e-mails and social media, mindfulness is about focusing on what you’re currently doing and giving it your full attention. In many ways, it’s also about living in the present and focusing on the here and now without thinking too much about the future.

How many times do we end up just going through the motions and not really paying attention to what we’re doing? I don’t know about others, but modern life is so hectic I often have five or six things on my mind at any one time. It’s so easy to lose focus by worrying about what’s coming next or some other important task that needs done.

The impact of ‘mindfulness’ on employers and employees – Brian Kreissl, HR Reporter (17 June 2014)

Kreissl argues primarily about how businesses would benefit from encouraging this type of step-back-a-sec and ponder about the moment thinking. But does also take a good potshot or two at how rubbish multitasking is.

Hat tip to reader Angela Gallagher.