Mark Higbie, senior advisor to Ford Motor Company, explains how the auto company began introducing mindfulness in the workplace. The video comes from the Greater Good Science Center and was filmed at Mindfulness & Well-Being at Work in November 2015.
Ford Motor Company: Mindfulness At Work
Do you currently maintain a mindfulness practice? If so, how did you get started with it? Maybe you read a book, watched an inspiring lecture, or listened to a podcast that prompted you to begin meditating. Or, perhaps your practice doesn’t involve meditation per se. Some people opt to build mindfulness into their daily lives by choosing to slow down, be more present and acknowledge the present moment rather than focusing on the past and future.
Either way, it’s easy to develop a tendency to think of mindfulness as a thing that we go and do somewhere else. If you’re at a busy grocery store, you might tell yourself that you’ll work on your mindfulness later, when you’re at home and with fewer distractions. Even more commonly, people often convince themselves that they don’t have much of a place for mindfulness at work. After all, there are high expectations being placed upon them by their boss and co-workers, and they have to keep up. Where is there room for mindfulness in such a scenario?
Encouraging Mindfulness In the Workplace
In fact, the workplace can be one of the settings where mindfulness is most useful, both through personal practice and through mindfulness teacher training for the people who bring it in. Many work environments are stressful almost by definition. You have deadlines to stick to, key performance indicators to evaluate, and numbers that you have to hit on a quarterly, monthly, or even weekly basis. That’s a lot of pressure, and it’s easy to get caught up in regretting past mistakes and worrying about the future.
In this video, Mark Higbie describes how mindfulness was introduced at Ford Motor Company. Practices like these may be worth considering for employees at many levels of many kinds of companies.
