Mindfulness in business and education

This excellent article in The Daily Telegraph published on New Year’s Eve caught our eye as it’s one of the best we’ve seen articulating the case for mindfulness in business and education.

We’ve used mindfulness as one of the components of our sales-mind sales training programme for the last 12 months. At first glance, exercises that ask rooms full of hard-bitten sales people to shut their eyes and “follow the breath” might seem a bit of a risk. But on every occasion we are pleasantly surprised by how positively received these exercises are. Life for the twenty-first century sales person is a welter of distractions from emails and conference calls to forecasting updates and so on – not a great environment for cognitive performance. So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at the appetite for mindfulness. It is, after all, the perfect enabler for focus, empathy, optimism and motivation.