Technalink is a big advocate of the idea that learning how to meditate is a good way to maintain a healthier work-life balance. However, one of the best things about meditation is that it’s not just a way to maintain good psychological, physical, and even spiritual health. Meditation can confer some real benefits for the workplace, especially in business settings. Here are some of the things that learning how to meditate can do for you and your work experience.
More Focus
Of course, the biggest goal of meditation is to attain a state of mindfulness, which is the ability to concentrate only on the present moment and not get lost in passing thoughts. However, the beauty of this technique is that just because you are learning to focus on the present during meditation doesn’t mean you can’t apply this same technique to other situations.
In other words, if you have a task before you, and you want to concentrate on it and not get slowed down by incoming, unrelated, drifting thoughts, meditation helps here. The same techniques and skills you used to focus on mindfulness can be applied to the task at hand so you can focus on it and not get lost in distractions.
Better Memory
Medical studies are now showing a correlation between consistent meditation and an increase in cortical thickness in the hippocampus region of the brain. In practical terms, this means that meditation actually strengthens the portion of the brain that is associated with long-term memory.
This means that for people who find it valuable to be able to retain information, meditation can make it faster and easier to keep valuable data in memory, rather than having to constantly refer to notes or look things up online for the same information repeatedly. In the world of business, where knowledge equals power, having more knowledge with easy access to your memory is a professional advantage.
Stress Reduction
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, meditation is one of the most effective ways to combat the accumulation of stress over a workday. Whether it is the anxiety of meeting a tight deadline or having to navigate different challenges in professional relationships, there are plenty of ways that stress can begin to feel overwhelming over the course of a work day, let alone the entire week. Letting that stress build up and simply enduring it is workable but not a healthy solution.
Meditation, however, is one of the most effective ways to confront and reduce stress both in personal and professional spheres. The ability to put distance between yourself and emotions and both observe the emotion and your experience of it is what gives you control over that emotion and the ability to set it aside. Because of this, meditation is an incredibly effective tool for stress management that doesn’t require elaborate preparation or equipment. It’s possible to meditate for just a few minutes in an office or other setting when there’s a need to quickly address a stressful moment.
A combination of all these benefits can have a beneficial impact on your workday experience, whether in an employee or management position. Improve your performance by increasing your memory and ability to focus, or simply managing the stress of a given moment so that it doesn’t negatively affect you for the rest of the day. Learning how to meditate gives you tools to be better at your business.
If you’d like to know more about how to integrate not just meditation but also a spiritual approach to your business ethics and practices, Alka Dhillon can help. Her book The Om Factor: A Women’s Spiritual Guide To Leadership is available in print, digital, and audiobook formats to show you the opportunities spiritual practices can create for your business.
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