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The Power of Gratitude
TweetIn this short, readable book the author John Kralik tells the story of how he turned his life around by focusing his attention on what he had of value in his life rather than on what was missing. In Kralik’s case that was no hypothetical shift—a middle-aged, overweight divorcé, estranged from his older children, on the point of loosing his current girlfriend and possibly his business too, he felt things had come to such a point that he needed to make major changes in his life. Inspired by a thank-you note that he received himself he...
read moreBeing and getting the job done
TweetSo how do we bring awareness into action and learn to ‘be’ at work—while still getting the job done? One of the biggest misunderstandings in our line of work is when people think that practicing techniques such as mindfulness and meditation can only happen in one’s personal time and if anyone tries it out at work they’ll either get laughed at, or fired for time-wasting! Nothing could be further from the truth. These techniques can be integrated into a working day without taking out time from essential tasks and will actually add...
read moreBook Review (Part 2) – The Emotional Life of Your Brain
Tweet(This is Part II for Part I please click here, book available from Amazon here) The core of Davidson’s book crystallises research as to how we uniquely react and respond to ‘life’s slings and arrows’. Individual response is unique mix across six dimensions — Resilience, Outlook, Social Intuition, Self Awareness, Sensitivity to Context, and Attention. We have a mix of these styles which means we could easily bounce back from a setback (resilience domain) but not very good at reading the body language of others (social...
read moreBook Review (Part 1) – The Emotional Life of Your Brain
Tweet (This is Part I for Part II please click here) Some texts are perfect for particular needs of our time. For me The Emotional Life of Your Brain is one such book. It’s written by a pioneer in neuroscience Professor Richard Davidson and an award winning health & science correspondent Sharon Begley – who has a deft skill at making such books light on the eye and easy to digest. I must admit to Davidson being a bit of a hero of mine, both because of this pioneering work (in 2006, he was named one of the 100 most influential people...
read moreThe Kindness Formula
TweetIn the last blog we took a brief look at how it could change our working environment if we included ‘random acts of kindness’ as part of our daily routine. This time we will take this idea a bit further and introduce the idea of the Kindness Formula. The Kindness Formula goes like this: Make it a habit to do at least three kinds things every day: one for yourself one for someone you know one for a stranger Having a formula helps us to make kindness a habit and to think more deeply about how we wish to express it. If you find doing...
read moreRandom acts of kindness
TweetThere is a very efficient tram system in Amsterdam where I live. The trams are clean, speedy and run on time. The other day I was slow to get up and ended up as the last one to get off the tram. There is a chip card system to get on and off the tram and I fumbled my card, so that the doors shut before I could get off. Just I was envisioning myself being carried way off down the road past my stop, the doors slid open and I could disembark. As I was getting down I realized that a man sitting in the seat by the door had noticed my...
read moreGoldilocks and a well balanced, resilient brain
TweetJust as the heart is part of a system that moves blood around the body, in a similar way the nervous system which includes the brain, is part of a structure that moves and responds to information as it flows and moves around the body. The brain itself takes a lot of energy to function well. That’s why as we get tired and run out of energy it gets harder to think clearly. It’s only 2 to 3 lbs in weight but uses a staggering 20% of all the glucose and oxygen that the body as a whole needs. As mentioned in, "hard wired to connect”...
read moreFrom tigers to contented cats
TweetAt the beginning of this month there was a brief and moderate amount of publicity in the UK for two books about a subject many of us, myself included, find difficult to contemplate - death. One was by an Australian palliative care nurse called Bonnie Ware, who wrote ‘The Top Five Regrets About Dying’. Ware observed many people nearing death who saw with complete clarity that, for example, they wished they had the courage to live a life that was true to themselves and not the one that others’ expected of them. The next bigge st...
read moreModern versions of a sabre-toothed tiger
TweetModern versions of a sabre-toothed tiger In the last blog: Our old-fashioned stress response, we discussed how our stress alerts can keep us in constant state of alert disproportionate to the situations we find ourselves in. This can lead to problems with our health and well-being. This time we are sharing a story taken from Anger Kills by Redford and Virginia Williams page 25. This is a very useful book on hostility—one of Redford Williams main subjects of research. The story charts what happens in a person’s body when they suffer...
read moreOur old-fashioned stress response
TweetFight or flight When we lived as hunter-gatherers in small tribes life was hard and much shorter than the average time we can hope to live for now. Tribes worked together to collect food, protect their young and defend their territory. From time to time a member of the tribe might face a life-threatening situation—like being chased by a sabre-toothed tiger. In order to meet the challenges of such an event their fight-or-flight mechanism would kick in preparing their body to stand and fight, or to run for their lives. We have just the...
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The Power of Gratitude
In this short, readable book the author John Kralik tells the story of how he turned his life around by focusing his attention on what he had of value in his life rather than on what was missing. In Kralik’s case that was no hypothetical shift—a middle-aged, overweight divorcé, estranged from his older children, on ...
Being and getting the job done
So how do we bring awareness into action and learn to ‘be’ at work—while still getting the job done? One of the biggest misunderstandings in our line of work is when people think that practicing techniques such as mindfulness and meditation can only happen in one’s personal time and if anyone tries it out at work ...
Book Review (Part 2) - The Emotional Life of Your Brain
(This is Part II for Part I please click here, book available from Amazon here) The core of Davidson’s book crystallises research as to how we uniquely react and respond to ‘life’s slings and arrows’. Individual response is unique mix across six dimensions — Resilience, Outlook, Social Intuition, Self Awareness, Sensitivity to Context, and Attention. We ...
Book Review (Part 1) - The Emotional Life of Your Brain
(This is Part I for Part II please click here) Some texts are perfect for particular needs of our time. For me The Emotional Life of Your Brain is one such book. It’s written by a pioneer in neuroscience Professor Richard Davidson and an award winning health & science correspondent Sharon Begley – who has a deft ...
The Kindness Formula
In the last blog we took a brief look at how it could change our working environment if we included ‘random acts of kindness’ as part of our daily routine. This time we will take this idea a bit further and introduce the idea of the Kindness Formula. The Kindness Formula goes like this: Make it a ...
Random acts of kindness
There is a very efficient tram system in Amsterdam where I live. The trams are clean, speedy and run on time. The other day I was slow to get up and ended up as the last one to get off the tram. There is a chip card system to get on and off the tram ...
Goldilocks and a well balanced, resilient brain
Just as the heart is part of a system that moves blood around the body, in a similar way the nervous system which includes the brain, is part of a structure that moves and responds to information as it flows and moves around the body. The brain itself takes a lot of energy to function well. ...
From tigers to contented cats
At the beginning of this month there was a brief and moderate amount of publicity in the UK for two books about a subject many of us, myself included, find difficult to contemplate - death. One was by an Australian palliative care nurse called Bonnie Ware, who wrote ‘The Top Five Regrets About Dying’. Ware ...
Modern versions of a sabre-toothed tiger
Modern versions of a sabre-toothed tiger In the last blog: Our old-fashioned stress response, we discussed how our stress alerts can keep us in constant state of alert disproportionate to the situations we find ourselves in. This can lead to problems with our health and well-being. This time we are sharing a story taken from Anger Kills by ...
Our old-fashioned stress response
Fight or flight When we lived as hunter-gatherers in small tribes life was hard and much shorter than the average time we can hope to live for now. Tribes worked together to collect food, protect their young and defend their territory. From time to time a member of the tribe might face a life-threatening situation—like being ...
Hard Wired to Connect
One of the aims of this blog is to share different voices and their experience of applying mindfulness, meditation and compassion in the workplace. This week I am very happy to introduce a blog from my friend and colleague Darran Trute. I hope you enjoy reading! The training offered by Awareness in Action, provides the vision ...
Four ways to stop work getting on top of you
Well-being for people at work is an important element of any Awareness in Action workshop. We go into the whole issue pretty thoroughly but to get people started we introduce these four simple ways of taking better care of themselves. 1.Changing your routine Routines can help us accomplish tasks quickly and efficiently but if we hang on ...
Being able to imagine yourself in the other person’s wheelchair
In the last couple of months, trouble with first one knee and then the other necessitated a period of needing airport assistance when I fly. It’s a delicate situation where it is possible to feel quite vulnerable, even exposed and it has been a real discovery to meet the people whose job it is to ...
Meeting Madness
We all know that meetings can be a challenge in so many different ways from trying to get a project idea approved, to simply surviving the boredom but they can also be an opportunity to apply some techniques of mindfulness, empathy and kindness. Getting started Some of the groups we work with in Awareness in Action have ...
My mood can become your problem
Recently I was doing a piece of work in a rural area of the south of France—very pleasant in some ways but in terms of communication and internet, frequently frustrating. After two interminable days of not even being able to use a dial-up system to retrieve email I turned, in some desperation, to an acquaintance ...
Is gritting your teeth really good for you?
On a recent return flight to Amsterdam from the UK I overheard a fellow-passenger giving a flight attendant a really bad time. It was hard to catch the full story from where I was sitting but it involved the passenger asking for hot water in a plastic, see-through cup. Apparently cups of this sort are ...
Happiness is not found on automatic pilot
People spend 46.9 percent of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they're doing, and this mind-wandering typically makes them unhappy. This the conclusion of recent research carried out by psychologists Professor Daniel Gilbert and Doctoral student Matthew Killingsworth of Harvard University.Killingsworth and Gilbert write, ‘A human mind is a wandering mind, and a ...
The power of not reacting
Luckily I like Schipol airport—my local airport and the main one for Amsterdam—because I find myself there quite often travelling for work. It’s light and airy, with plenty of good places to drink coffee. Recently I was waiting at the gate for my flight and had the opportunity to observe an incident that seemed to ...
Some mindfulness exercises for your working day
Many of you will be familiar with the wonderful work of Jon Kabat-Zinn and his Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction programmes. I recently came across an article by Saki F. Santorelli, one of the MBSR instructors at the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. The article is called, Mindfulness and Mastery in the Workplace. It ...
Exercising choice in your working life
If you did not need to earn a living, would you still want to do your job? Unless you are one of a fortunate minority of people who do their job because they absolutely love it, then your answer would probably be ‘no!’ Right from that point—the point where we have no option but to ...
A Little Kindness Goes A Long Way
It must be one of the most dreaded moments in life—the moment when the worry that there is something wrong with your car turns into a certainty and you have to head for the hard shoulder of the motorway and search for the nearest emergency phone. It happened to us last month on our way ...
The Golden Rule
Always treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself The Golden Rule (first formulated by Confucius 551-479 BCE) Are you sharing an office with someone who talks very loudly when they are on the phone. Or do you feel you do more than your fair share of washing up in the staff kitchen, because you ...
