As I’m sure you have noticed the topic of ‘Mindfulness’ has been everywhere for the last few months – it is in the press daily, Ruby Wax is touring the country talking about it, over 20 sessions on mindfulness ran at the World Economic Forum in Davos this year and ‘innovator’ employers such as Apple and Google offer sessions to their employees as part of the workplace package. It is promoted as the NHS’s best answer to the rising issue of mental health and MPs are using it to facilitate effective policy making (for an intelligent view on that read Lord Layard’s views on it). No one can be surprised it’s an HR issue but I’ve asked my good friend and recruitment guru (she will hate that I’ve called her that) Emma McDonnell to write a blog post about mindfulness AND how it can fit into the recruitment model.
In case you have not come across it, or have been too busy to take it in, Mindfulness is essentially the practice of focusing on what is happening inside your body and mind. It attracted my attention when science started to support it as a practice – our understanding of the brain has changed dramatically over recent years and we now know that we can change the way our brains work, if we want to. Stress conditions such as anxiety and depression flourish in the workplace but most of us just accept that as being the way it is – to work means to worry, to take on responsibility means anxiety and worse, we also believe that we NEED to feel this way in order to continue to be good at what we do. I put my hand up to that one – my 5am ‘planning’ head, the one that wakes me up and stops me going back to sleep, was, I thought, a vital tool in my arsenal. But the truth is that it came from a place of dread, a place of fear, the place where I hid all the scariest thoughts until they had no choice but to force their way out in the form of a sleepless night, or a day spent in low level, but constant, stomach churning.
But you see, the thing is that our brains, parts of which have not evolved at all over the last few million years, CANNOT distinguish between a thought and something actually happening. So, as far as your brain is concerned, those late night/early morning fears are actually happening – and so it triggers our good old threat response. We need that threat response, without it we would have perished as a species within centuries – we would not have run from that angry woolly mammoth, nor would we have eyed rocky outcrops with suspicion. But we had it, where other species did not, and glory be, here we are all these millennia later, alive and well. Well, alive, anyway. For the modern threat is not as identifiable as a woolly mammoth, indeed in many case we do not even realise that our threat response has been triggered – we just make decisions about ourselves and others instead. When our threat response triggers it creates a physical reaction to equip us to face that threat – whether we fight, flee, submit or appease, and that physical reaction is what we can manage, so that a thought remains a thought and not a reality, as far as our bodies and brains are concerned. And without undergoing the physical sensations of fear, anxiety or grief (increased heart rate, decreased, appetite, leaden legs, the urge to hide under a duvet all day) you find that you are stronger, more resilient, able to handle conflict, willing to take risks, better prepared to work well within all your relationships. You are present and you perform.
Let me give you an example that relates to recruitment. Mindfulness can take you away from the transactional processes, the black and white of placed candidate and invoiced fee through to a process that supports a series of powerful, long term relationships. The candidate that turns down the role you were handling, costing your quarterly bonus. Hard not to ‘hate’ them, isn’t it? Hard not to have that ‘failure’ sit at the forefront of your mind, telling you that not only have you failed but in fact you are a failure, and in a few short moments EVERYONE is going to spot that, and then it will all be over. Very often, particularly in the contingency field where no success means no fee, this results in a number of things – an unhappy consultant, an unhappy Manager, an unhappy client, a candidate who feels guilty for making the best decision for them, even though you were doing your best to convince them otherwise. Not a nice process. Alternatively, by introducing the compassion that mindfulness allows (nothing smothers compassion better than your threat response yammering away), by putting your own needs to one side and operating truly in the best interests of both your candidate and your client, the process feels very different – you ask the question you have been avoiding, you tell your client of your concerns, you listen to your candidate and commit to finding the best outcome for them, not you. And you will still have the same outcome – the candidate will not have taken the job you presented to him/her in the first place – but what you will have is a client who felt well informed, and as a result able to THEIR job, and who will use you again because they trust you. A candidate who felt they mattered, that you advised them with impartiality and wisdom, and who will come to you again and more importantly, trust you to recruit for them when the time is right. But most important is the sense of wellbeing that comes through doing a job well – if you can keep focused on the NOW of recruitment, as opposed to the distant fee or KPIs that you need to hit, listening to what is being said to you without the background narrative of ‘OMG if they don’t take this I am going to miss target and won’t be able to get a mortgage’, without that lurching drop into a pit of despair when your offer is not accepted, you will perform better, sound better and most importantly feel better. We all know that recruitment is a blast when everything is going well, but now we have a way of feeling like that even when things don’t work out as we would wish. Given that we all work with people, for people we cannot expect a better level of control than this – but by using mindfulness to put aside that internal narrative, we can effectively plan for every potential outcome without experiencing it – it becomes OK to say ‘So, Mr/Mrs/Ms Client, I am worried that candidate x is not going to take your job, so should we start planning what to do if that IS the case?’ – if there is one thing I hear from clients time and time again is that they just want to know where they are – they do not need, or want, a stream of positive messages. They want someone who is going to enable them to do their job properly.
We cannot change much of what surrounds us, but we CAN change the way we react to it, and how we feel about it. And that in turn offers the opportunity to do extraordinary things in an extraordinary way, and feel extraordinary whilst we do it.
And the beauty of this? It starts with breathing. And we can all do that, right?
