I have just finished updating the 2009 ACCEPTional™ Resilience program to emphasise mindfulness. These changes were driven by compelling new research that suggests mindfulness is one of the most powerful stress resilience interventions currently available.

So what exactly is mindfulness? Simply put it is the ability to attend to our thoughts and emotions in a non judgemental way. By learning to accept (be non judgemental) our thoughts and emotions, we are less likely to experience negative emotions such as anger, anxiety and frustration. The problem with negative emotions is that they tend to adversely affect our thinking – for example we can make “mountains out of mole hills” and sometimes lose perspective.

If we adopt a mindful approach we are more likely to experience a positive emotion called calmness. This can be useful for a number of reasons. For example positive emotions have been shown to improve creativity which can be useful when dealing with stressful situations – we often need to look at things from a different perspective. And lets not forget the research that shows that calmness is the power emotion when it comes to predicting life satisfaction.

Many people associate mindfulness with meditation (personally I found meditation dull and boring and found it difficult to find the time to practice it on a routine basis). Meditation is only one pathway that can be used to develop mindfulness. The good news is that there are other approaches which are just as effective. For example in our ACCEPTional™ resilience programs we use Resilience Builder™ software to develop mindfulness. The advantage of the ACCEPTional™ mindfulness techniques are that they are much easier to learn than and also you can use them anywhere and anytime - for example in the middle of a stressful meeting.

Many people in our workshops often bring up the serenity prayer suggesting that mindfulness underlies it (I have to admit to not being religious, but there are always pearls of wisdom in everything). They are probably right.

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

Mindfulness makes it easier to accept what we cannot change. And given the current economic climate, there appear to be fewer things that we have control over. For example many people are realising that it’s no longer as easy to change jobs if they are unhappy at work.

But most importantly mindfulness enhances your thinking and allows you to but things in perspective (the wisdom to know the difference).

I suspect that mindfulness is a critical skill that will be needed in order to help us cope effectively with the challenging times ahead in 2009.

Click here to read more research on mindfulness.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, February 1st, 2009 at 5:44 pm and is filed under Mindfulness, Stress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.