 Hi, everyone. I'm really looking forward to sharing some of my content with you this evening. Now, when Mel and I were organizing this event, she said, look, Debbie, expect around 40 or 50 people to come. That's what the normal amount of people they can get to these is over 100 of you here tonight. I think that just goes to show the real interest in this area. So I'm really looking forward to sharing the content that I have with you tonight. Well, I'd like to understand a little bit about what brought you along tonight. So who is here because I'd like to get some more, some benefit for themselves to build a more of a personal mindfulness practice. Who's here for some tips and tricks for themselves? Nice. Who is here because they're perhaps thinking about, because they're perhaps thinking about taking mindfulness in some shape or form into their organization? A few of you. Lovely. And who is a little skeptical about mindfulness, if they're honest, but still curious? Yeah, a few people are going to be honest with me. Thank you. Who has just realized they're in the wrong lecture theatre? Anyone? Good. Excellent. OK. So the content that I'm going to share with you today, can the people at the back hear me? No. OK. Thank you. So, what I'm going to share with you today is a little bit about why I think mindfulness is important. A bit about the research. Oh, that's a bit better, isn't it? Can you hear me now? A little bit about the research, so the benefits of mindfulness, and finally how organizations are implementing mindfulness programs. But before I start, the easiest way to describe mindfulness is often to describe mindlessness. Now, tell me if any of this sounds familiar. A typical mindless day. You wake up later than you should and the first thing you do is grab your phone. You check work email and scroll through Facebook and the Stuff website. You race into the kitchen to get you and your family out the door as quickly as you possibly can. You get to work, you sit down, determined to get the top three things on your priority list done today. You open your email. It floods with new emails, a quarter of which look urgent. You end up spending your whole morning responding to emails. By the time lunchtime rolls around, you're physically exhausted even though you haven't even left your desk. You know you should go to the gym but instead you have lunch at your desk looking at Facebook and the Stuff website. By the time the afternoon rolls around, it ends up being a blur of meetings most of which you're physically present but your mind is off worrying about your to-do list. The last bit of time you have before you go home you end up distracting yourself with tiny things because the things on your to-do list look daunting. The car on the way home, all you do is berate yourself about those three things you didn't get done and the fact that you haven't been to the gym and that's the tenth day in a row and why are you paying for this gym membership? Soon as you get home or you work yourself into such a ball of fury in the car all of this stuff going on in your mind that you walk through the door and unleash your ball of fury onto your unsuspecting family. You get through dinner and jobs and you get the kids into bed and you end up sitting on the couch staring aimlessly at the TV the glass of chardonnay in one hand and the crunchy bar in the other. Tell me if any of that sounds familiar to anyone in this room. Thank you, good. So that was pretty much a typical day for me about five years ago and still is some days if I'm honest but around that time I just felt like my whole life was an endless to-do list and I felt like I was constantly rushing. I remember I'd come home from work and I would look at my gorgeous kids but I couldn't see their faces, all I could see was an imaginary to-do list stamped to their foreheads, dinner, bath, bed, teeth, book any parents in the room can relate to that. Not only that but I was incredibly self-critical so I had this voice inside my head that was always harshly judging how I was doing and so what happened is that I was really grumpy and cross with my family but I was also really grumpy and cross with myself and yeah, I just kind of felt stuck and about that time a really good friend and colleague loaned me a book and it was called Mindfulness, Peace in a Frantic World. Now this book was written by Mark Williams, professor at Oxford University and it was no nonsense, everyday language and really easy to understand and there wasn't a kaftan or crystal in sight and so I thought this is pretty cool, I could try this mind for when I stuff out and as I read the book I learnt some pretty cool things like first of all to meditate you don't have to sit in the perfect lotus position up on a hill somewhere and snazzy lululemon gear which is pretty cool because that was never going to be me and I also learnt that I was never going to get so chilled out that I never got anything done so I decided to enrol myself in an eight week NBSR course that stands for Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction and that's offered globally and I took myself along for two hours every week for eight weeks and I learnt a whole range of formal and informal mindfulness practises and a whole lot around self-awareness and it was a really amazing experience for me and it made big changes in my life not only could I slow down and just enjoy the little things I could put the to-do list to the side but I was a lot kinder to myself and I don't know if anyone else has had this experience but I find that the kinder I am to myself the kinder I am to others so I just felt like I'd really found something that was quite practical and useful and I've since gone on to become a teacher delivering mindfulness based programmes to organisations because I could see that people needed help with this stuff it wasn't just me so let me share with you the reasons why I think mindfulness is useful scenes like this are becoming more and more common it's not okay anymore to do one thing at a time we have to do ten things at a time and do you know that even if you put your cell phone down and actually try and connect with the person next to you just having the phone on the table next to you actually interferes with your ability to connect with other people so we are living in a world of continual partial attention where we're just running around getting distracted all the time by technology and our pace of life now our screens are incredibly enticing aren't they look I know they are they're enticing for a lot of reasons first of all we're scared we're going to miss out on something so we have to constantly check our work emails second of all every time we see something new or novel on our screen the reward centre in our brain releases a small amount of dopamine so that's real good chemical so that's good right but we can get addicted to that so we're always looking on our phones for something new and novel in fact every time we click on a pop-up ad on Facebook or on LinkedIn they're making money off us because they get paid every time we do that but it's difficult to resist and third of all and I think this is a real issue is that people are using technology and busyness to avoid having to deal with difficult things that are happening in their lives or to deal with difficult emotions so I think pace of life and technology are really contributing to our sense of possibly unhappiness now a piece of research conducted by Microsoft a couple of years ago suggested that this has gotten so bad that we now have a shorter attention span than this guy I kid you not apparently we have an eight second attention span and a goldfish has a nine second attention span so it's scary isn't it so I think pace of life and technology but the next thing I think that is really messing with our heads is for some reason we're all stuck in this flawed notion that to be successful and happy we have to be busy all the time now if that was true why are we not all deliriously happy the truth is we're not we're rushing around so much we don't even stop to enjoy the small things the small things that could be moments of happiness for us so our pace of life and technology is really not contributing to our happiness the other factor involved here is that we're living in this kind of modern world that our bodies and brains are only still adjusting to because we've still got these primitive parts of our brains the same that our ancestors had so for example we've still got the fight and flight response most of you have probably heard about that one and all animals have it so what this means let's say for an example a zebra is just chilling out African plains, chewing grass suddenly a lion leaps out of a bush and the chase is on the zebra's body responds its sympathetic nervous system kicks into action pumping getting its heart pumping faster dumping a whole lot of blood into its core muscles to help it run chemicals like adrenaline and cortisol are also being dumped into his bloodstream its digestion is shut down its immune function is shut down so all that is happening so the zebra can survive now let's say the zebra does survive to eat grass for another day its parasympathetic nervous system suddenly kicks in and that cools everything down again and gives that zebra an opportunity to recalibrate and rest now this is called our natural resilience all mammals are able to do this respond and then rest in fact the root word of resilience in Latin means to jump again and the only way we can keep jumping is if we rest and I just think we've lost that ability to do that and mindfulness activates our relaxation response so not only do we have this fight and flight response in this busy world and all this technology we've also got another primitive part of our brain that is always pressing the panic button because it's looking for threat and seeing threat everywhere and that's useful for our ancestors you can understand if you think you're going to get eaten that it's helpful to look for threat but we still have this hardwired in us we're scanning subconsciously for threat constantly so we're more likely to see the negative I mean you know what it's like you go for a job interview you go for a performance review and you've got the 10 awesome things about how cool you are and then you get the one growth opportunity kind of piece of feedback and that's the only thing you can focus on and so our kind of panic button or our fight and flight response gets pressed all the time now and it could just be something like that flood of emails coming in that critical voice in our head in fact our brains cannot recognise the difference between external criticism and internal criticism so if you are constantly berating yourself then you're firing up that fight and flight system all the time doing damage to your health so it's good to know about these things right so that we can be aware of them and we can work with them we've got another part of our brain that has decided to kind of step up and help us out with this and it's a more modern part of the brain that's been developed more recently it's the executive functioning part of our brain and that gives us the cool ability to be able to think about stuff that we're not doing so we can operate an autopilot so that means that we can continuously be planning the future and evaluating the past just to make sure we're safe so you probably all have experienced autopilot you can drive home from work and pull into the driveway and actually just realise that you didn't see a thing on the way home that you're in a trance it's quite scary isn't it so that's autopilot so it's really really helpful but I actually think that we operate on autopilot too much of a time you can spend most of your day on autopilot if you allow yourself to live like that and once again I think we're missing out on those little opportunities of joy I'll give you a really small example and this gets me, still gets me now even though I've been practising mindfulness for five years it still gets me I'm a really fussy tea drinker I drink English breakfast teas anyone else in here really fussy tea drinker? so you're at a relate to this so when I make a cup of tea it has to be the perfect caramel colour the tea bag has to soak for three minutes and I have to use light blue milk it has to be piping hot so I spend a long time making my cup of tea just to make sure it's perfect and then I will sit down at my desk and I will put my tea cup down and I will get distracted by something on my computer and I will look down half an hour later and my cup is empty and I haven't tasted one drop and it seems so pointless and that's just a small example what about bigger examples? so I think that autopilot is being overused and in fact Killingsworth and his colleagues have even been able to prove that the more our minds wander the more unhappy we are and this is a really interesting piece of research and he had a sample of 12,000 participants in his survey he was able to figure out how much time our minds wander during the day so how much would you say guys how much do you reckon we spend thinking about something that we're not doing 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 47% of the time we're thinking about something that we're not doing so pretty much half so let's say you're in your mid 30s now and you live to mid 80s that's 50 years that's 25 years of your life that you're actually not even conscious for it's quite scary when you think about it like that and if our lives are just one moment of experience followed by another moment of experience then what is it that we're missing out on so a pace of life about our technology the way we're using technology our overactive panic button and our wandering minds I think are all contributing to some quite kind of serious things that are happening for us and it's affecting our health did you know that the number one reason that people visit the doctor today is for stress related illness a quarter of us will be diagnosed with anxiety in our lifetime and the World Health Organization has said that by the year 2020 depression will be the second biggest health burden globally but it's not just the health stuff for me that stuff is really important but I think there's something bigger here as well it's about what we're missing out on so it's about that potential to lead and that opportunity to innovate to really connect with each other and to really use our strengths at work so I just feel like there's a real opportunity to use something like mindfulness to help us with dealing with our modern lives and our primitive brains so let's have a look at the research and discuss what the research is telling us around mindfulness now I'm sure some of you know this but this could just be a bit of a review but in terms of studying mindfulness in the western world it started around 35 years ago a professor called John Cabot Zinn who was also a microbiologist he was based in the University of Massachusetts in the States and he worked in the local hospital there now he was also a long time meditator and what he noticed is that so many patients were being discharged from hospital that still had ongoing symptoms or conditions from their illness so it could have been chronic pain ongoing stress or anxiety related to the illness and he wondered if he could do something about this so it was a story goes he went to his superiors and he said, come up some funding apparently he was given a room in the basement with no windows and told good luck anyway 10,000 patients later and thousands of clinical trials there has been a mass of evidence to show the benefits of his program I mean it's just fantastic that he was a scientist because him and his colleagues did some wonderful research over the last 35 years and this is just a handful of some of the areas that they have researched the benefits of mindfulness based stress reduction so that's that 8 week program I mentioned and a very similar version called mindfulness based cognitive therapy which has been proven very effective for anxiety and depression so it's not surprising really that there's been a massive influx in the interest of mindfulness based on this and it probably feels for some of you like a little bit of a fad because it's kind of all over the place at the moment and I get that but just come back to the research and the benefits of it if you are able to build up a mindfulness practice for yourselves so let's have a look actually one of the studies that was really interesting that I thought I'd share with you that John Kabatzen and his colleagues did was on psoriasis so that's a skin condition and they took two sample groups and they were both treated for psoriasis going into a light treatment room and one of the groups was given mindfulness meditation exercises to do and they both underwent treatment and the group that were given the mindfulness based meditation to do psoriasis healed significantly faster than the other group and when you can't argue with that there is definitely something going on there that is causing that difference and they believe it's linked to the increases in immunity through mindfulness practice so what about in organisations? To be fair, there's 35 years of research on clinical uses of mindfulness mindfulness in organisations is still in its infancy there's just not enough mass of evidence-based data yet to meet the same level of scrutiny as the clinical trials however, there is a really promising studies that have been done and a piece of research done last year they reviewed all the scientific evidence in organisations last year and they were able to say that there is a strong connection between mindfulness and these areas for organisations which is really promising so well-being that makes sense, right? if you can activate your parasympathetic nervous system if you can calm yourself down if you can tap into your own natural resilience you're going to improve your own well-being relationships so really interesting studies around mindfulness and emotional intelligence and cognitive bias performance so that makes sense, I guess if we're able to switch off autopilot and make better decisions and innovation so it's actually been proven that stressed-out minds shut down creativity which is why organisations like Google have those really playful office environments to keep people kind of effeting creative and not effeting the pressure from work so mindfulness helps to reduce stress and increases creativity and leadership which is really interesting so one study in particular on leadership showed the connection between the mindfulness trait mindfulness of leaders and the well-being and performance of their team and we're able to show that there's a link between increased mindfulness and increased well-being and performance so the research is really promising but you know what really got me if I'm honest is the brain science I think that's really cool so that's what I'm going to share with you next now neuroplasticity is a really fancy word that just means that our brains have the ability to rewire or to change and some bits can get bigger and some bits can get smaller and a really good example of this is juggling so neuroscientists took two groups of people they taught one group how to juggle and then they did a brain scan at the beginning and the end of the sample of the trial so MRI scan that was able to measure different sizes of different parts of the brain they were able to see a significant increase in the part of the brain to do with visual awareness so that's how we're able to change our brains what we're focusing our attention on so what about mindfulness then well there was a piece of research done by Sarah Lizard and her colleagues and she's a neuroscientist and she did the same thing so she took two groups measured scanned before and after one of the groups did an 8-week based mindfulness reduction program and they found some really interesting changes in the brain for example structures to do with perception emotional regulation and self-awareness and hippocampus had increased grey matter now people that suffer from depression or post-traumatic stress disorder actually have a shrunken hippocampus so growth in that area is a good thing it helps to regulate our emotion and really interestingly a decrease of grey matter in the amygdala now the amygdala is our panic button that is like the control centre where the panic button is being pushed constantly so a decreased amygdala is a good thing I promise you if a lion jumps out of a bush you'll still be able to run away even if you've got a decreased amygdala so that's a good thing we're not reacting to stress we're able to respond to stress what is mindfulness? I guess we haven't really covered that yet so now's a good opportunity to talk about what mindfulness is we'll simply put it's a particular way of paying attention in that way of paying attention is on purpose in the present moment non-judgmentally to everything that's in our field of awareness and by non-judgmentally all we mean is noticing our tendency to appraise or to criticise everything including ourselves and just bring some kindly awareness to that but I can I can tell you about mindfulness or I can show you and we can have a little get you a little bit familiar with what mindfulness exercise might look like so if you want to join in I'll take you through just a two minute little exercise to get you familiar if you're not already with mindfulness so if you want to join in all you have to do, you don't have to go sit on a hilltop in lotus position all you have to do is stay in your seat and if you want to you can lower your eyes close your eyes or lower your eyes and that just shuts out visual stimulation which makes it easier for your mind to settle so if you want to join in just encourage you to do that and turn your attention inwards and just get a sense of your whole body as you sit here perhaps noticing places where your feet make contact with the floor where the body makes contact with the chair just getting a sense of your whole body as you sit here now allowing your breath to become the centre of your attention aware of the sensations as the breath enters and leaves the body you might notice the sensations as the air enters and leaves the nostrils sensations in your chest and abdomen and if you find your mind pulling you away from the breath just noticing what it got caught up in and just gently escorting your attention back to the breath not trying to change the breath in any way not trying to control it just noticing what's here watching as best you can the entirety of an in-breath from beginning to end and the entirety of an out-breath from beginning to end just watching the sensations of the breath as best as you can as it enters and leaves the body and now when you're ready turn in your attention outward again and opening your eyes now some of you might hopefully feel a little bit settled after doing that short exercise and you're probably wondering why the breath is a point of focus and it's really nothing too special it's just that it's quite good to give the mind something to do because it likes to keep busy and the breath is quite a nice place to focus your attention on because it's always changing and it's portable so you can take your breath with you and use that as a point of focus if you find the breath doesn't work for you you can always think about your hands and your lap or your feet on the ground so it's just giving your mind something to focus on so no doubt some of you would have been curious about what your minds were getting up to as you were doing that exercise and did any of you feel like this was going on? as soon as you start to settle your mind suddenly thinking starts and unless you're all a very calm bunch no doubt your minds visited hundreds of places just over that short little exercise so what I'd like you to do is tell the person next to you what your mind got up to while you did that exercise where did your mind go? where did it visit? attention back again minds visited a load of places while we were doing that exercise to get your attention back again so you'll notice how busy our minds are and what they get up to and this is really critical to understand because it's not like you've got a thought police it's not like you've got to kind of judge yourself and go oh there's another thought oh I failed it's not like that every time you notice a thought acknowledge it and come back to the breath that's a moment of mindfulness it's like strengthening your muscles at the gym just think of it like that so you know you go to the gym you get biceps and your triceps and the more you go the bigger they get it's the same thing with our minds every time we're practicing doing that you are strengthening your muscles your mindfulness muscle and that is kind of really helpful to develop mindfulness is those opportunities to practice noticing that your mind has wandered and bringing it back again so the last thing I wanted to share with you was oh, right so if you keep practicing mindfulness meditation you'll start to notice benefits on three different levels and really simply put the first one is you'll start to notice that you can hold your attention for longer to things so you'll be able to not get so distracted by Facebook and stuff when you're at work and you'll be able to just be more aware and then there's more awareness so you'll be more aware of what's happening around you so that's two types of awareness you'll be more aware of what's happening around you so your context better understanding of the context of what's happening around you rather than flicking into autopilot and also better understanding of what's happening internally in your internal landscape the critical thinking and then the third level is how you act so you'll notice that you don't respond to stress we act to stress so much and you're able to interact with people differently and when you listen to people your mind's not wandering off do you know how awful it is to try to talk to someone and you can tell when they get the glaze over they might have wandered off and yet we do that all the time now because we've got that to-do list going in the back of our heads so really simply put those are the three different levels and if we want to get technical about it there's a term called metacognition which really just means you've got that higher level awareness of being able to watch as thoughts come and go, watch as feelings come and go without necessarily getting caught up in them come back from them but let's now talk about organisations and programs that they've implemented now no doubt actually some of the organisations in this room either looking at or have implemented mindfulness based programs so I'm just going to share with you some of the examples that I know of but it's been really interesting watching this journey of mindfulness meditation in the business world because 12 years or so ago I was working at the ANZ and everyone went on this cultural change program run by a consultancy called McKinsey's and we all went off and basically learnt how to meditate and a whole lot of stuff around mindfulness but mindfulness and meditation weren't mentioned once it was called the breakout mind which was pretty cool back then and it was a really successful program but clearly they just felt like they couldn't use the words meditation and mindfulness but I just don't think that they have that much of a PR problem anymore I think that because the science is so sound it's actually okay to say this is a mindfulness based resilience program or a mindfulness based emotional intelligence program so here are some examples of organisations who are just getting out there and doing it and that is just a handful now I'm going to share with you a Counties Manukau example an SAP example and a General Mills example however it's worth mentioning that the UK Parliament formed a working committee in 2015 to look at mindfulness interventions in the system in the UK in terms of prison, teacher education and business and they've written some really good white papers so if you go to the Mindful UK website you can download those and loads of the Parliament members have been through the NBSR program so they're really taking it seriously Auckland District Health Board I don't know if anyone here is from Auckland District Health Board so there's a wonderful psychologist Nadav who's running a mindfulness based resilience program with the mental health workers and he's about to publish his results so yeah, great news and a lot of you might have heard about the Google program it's really kind of well advertised called Search Inside Yourself which is a take on the old search engine functionality and theirs is a little bit of mindfulness a little bit of emotional intelligence and career development kind of put together so that's just a few of the those examples but let's talk about some of the ones I know better so Counties Manukau have got a mindfulness based resilience program that they run for their doctors, nurses and non-clinical staff and it runs over four weeks and it's two hours and it's on site and I'm really lucky to be one of the teachers that's been trained up to deliver the program but it's been running for about five years they just need more teachers and Joe Soldin and Diane May are leading that program and they are about to publish some results and the findings are really interesting they were able to show a reduction in stress a reduction in burnout and increase in resilience in their and even its based research that they've done and actually the way they've implemented it is really neat too because what they've done is they've created a real culture around mindfulness they're wanting to create a mindful culture so they've got things like mindful champions that start little grassroots initiatives in the business and they've got things like a meditation room they've got a newsletter that goes out they have drop-in clinics so they're really creating this kind of momentum around the program they were short for anyone in the HR profession they were shortlisted for an industry HR INZ award two years ago too under the wellness category second example I wanted to share with you is SAP so they're a global software company they've got 18,000 employees and that's Peter Bostelman and he's got the coolest job title he is SAP's head of mindfulness practice globally which I think is pretty cool and they have had 3,500 people through their mindfulness program and apparently there's 5000 people on the waiting list and their program is offered globally and they've also done some research they haven't published the actual numbers yet but they are able to significantly see an increase in employment and increase in leadership trust which must have been an important factor for them a decrease in absenteeism and a 200% return on investment so this is actually Peter at a TED talk that he gave at the end of last year so I can send you the link for the TED talk if you get in contact with me but one of the things he shares in his TED talk that's really interesting is he said that when he started to ask people about mindfulness and do you think we could do it at SAP he said the response was really interesting he was trying to get a sponsor senior vice executive to sponsor the program and he said everyone said to him look I think it's a great idea I'll come on your program but the culture is not really he said he heard that so many times he realised the culture was more really than people thought but I thought was a really interesting point so if you're sitting in the room tonight thinking oh I'm not sure maybe just start asking around because maybe your culture is more really than you think and the final example is spearheaded by this wonderful lady Janice Maturano and she's just incredible and General Mills have got a seven week based leadership and wellbeing program and they've got some incredible results published on the Mindful Leadership website so you can go and have a look at it but she was able to prove a 40% increase in questions related to employee engagement and an average of a 35% increase in questions to do around decision making for her sample group but her journey to develop this program was really interesting so she was the Vice President of General Council in the early 2000s and she was responsible partly responsible for a huge merger going through for General Mills she said she was working 18 hour days, 7 days a week and at the same time her mother who was really ill tragically passed away and then six months later she lost her father as well and she said she could get the deal through but when the deal went through there was no mental resilience left anyway it was about that time that a colleague gave her a flyer for one of John Kabat-Zinn's retreats and so she went on that and that was the turning point for her and because she was quite senior in General Mills she had a real opportunity to do something in the business and apparently now they've got programs right throughout General Mills right down to the factory floor involving some form of mindfulness based intervention. So what are the learnings from what I've seen in the research and the organisations that I've read about and learnt about and been working with around how you could go about doing this if you think this is something you might like to take into your organisation. A lot of the people that I researched talked about the importance of working with skeptics and how important it is to lead with the science so lead with the data with the neuroscience with the facts around the benefits of mindfulness. Other thing that's really important is don't necessarily focus on stress reduction but really paint a picture of increased potential so you're talking about things like increased emotional intelligence increased innovation, increased leadership that's the kind of language that really attracts people to programs. Create lasting change and this is something I'm really passionate about because I see a lot of introductory programs out there that don't necessarily help people to get the neurobiological emotional and behavioural changes that we know mindfulness is capable of and so shorter programs are great introductions but they can end up just being a little bit of a light touch so it's about creating lasting change so that's where programs that run over weeks or have drop-in clinics give people that opportunity to form a habit. Also the Mindful UK White Paper just put a bit of a cautionary note in there around teacher education and background and around teachers needing to really embody the practice but also to have completed 12 months or some kind of learning education pathway and I can send you some information on the White Paper if you're interested. The last point is around building community so Counties Manukau have done that really well it's creating an environment where people are supported to continue to practice mindfulness. So I've shared with you why I think it's important I've shared with you some of the research and some of the organisation kind of examples and I think just one last quote that I'll share with you before I wrap up is Peter Bostelman at the end of his TED Talk said it's not a case of if mindfulness will come to your organisation it's a case of when and if your organisation will be an early adopter and I feel that is really the point that we're at where we're just seeing a shift and acceptance for these kind of things Now if anyone is wanting some help get started even if you just want to email me and talk to me more about building up your own personal practice then please just get in contact with me I also am able to run in-house programs and if you need someone just to come in and talk to the skeptics and show them the research I'm happy to do that and the other thing I thought I'd mention is I don't normally run a lot of public courses but I am going to do a public NBSR course starting in April or May the dates aren't finalised yet and so what you might like to do is if you think your organisation is interested you could just send one or two delegates along just to have a look and suss it out and see if it's something that your organisation could be interested in so if you did want to find out the dates of that program there's just a sign out sheet on the way out and just pop your name down and when I'll finalise the dates I'll send them through to you That's pretty much it for me now Take questions OK, so the question was what's the length of program I might do in a medium-sized organisation It depends on the culture for example if it's geographically spread they'll encounter difficulties so are you trying to get something that goes over weeks so that can vary anything from an intensive with some drop-in clinics to say four weeks like Counties Manukau or some kind of ongoing practice so you can take the basic structure built by John Kabat-Zinn and keep the ingredients but you can play around with it a little bit so it just comes down to the organisation That's a good question so mindfulness meditation involves form of an informal practice so the formal practice thank you I'd actually forgotten to mention that so the formal practice is the meditation but not on the hilltop so there's different types of that so there is body awareness practices there is gentle stretching yoga and there is things like the breath awareness exercise that we did today and then there's also on the job I guess practices that you can do so for example Counties Manukau have got mindful minute stickers up and it's just for one minute they count how many times they're breathing in a minute so it's ten times and then every now and again they just remember to have a break and count ten breaths they've also got mindful hand washing stickers up so they wash their hands mindfully each time so there's informal and formal practice that you use just to strengthen your mindfulness muscle but even things like sitting in the car on the way home rather than doing the whole self-critical thing about all the stuff you haven't done you can just use that as an opportunity so you can turn your radio off and just notice the hands on the wheel feet on the ground look at what's happening around you notice the breath yeah I mean that's actually very common for people when they start meditating and so things like the time of day that you choose can be really helpful so if you're exhausted and it's the end of the day it's really hard to stay awake and also suggesting you don't lie down sitting in a chair and you will notice over time that you stop falling asleep less but if you do fall asleep and it's fine just kind of notice that sense of falling asleep and waking up again that's just part of the practice Thank you, I'm just interested do you find that some professions and some areas of industry are more receptive to mindfulness than others so I'm giving you an example of a construction company and often when you introduce concepts like this you know immediately triggers the skeptic in a whole number of people so I'm just interested the particular professions or particular techniques to allow you to engage professions that might be by the skeptic Yeah, I can appreciate where you're coming from I've not seen research that suggests that certain industries are more open to this than others I think what it would come down to is finding a way in your particular culture so what's the language that you need to be able to talk or use in order for people to see a benefit for it and I'm not saying you have to use the word mindfulness now maybe a word like resilience or something else is just an opportunity to start the journey and start to work with the skeptics Is daydreaming actually useful sometimes when you're rehearsing yourself for a difficult conversation Yeah, that's a really good point I forgot to mention that You're absolutely right, it's not like mind wandering or thinking about something other than you're doing is a bad thing and it's a really important point because mind wandering is often how creative thinking bubbles up but also how we can solve problems So it's just a case of doing it on purpose or being aware that that's what you're doing and it doesn't kind of cascade into other parts of your life Yeah