How insight meditation can help you at the workplace

Mindfulness at work

After Twitter founder Jack Dorsey completed his third ten-day silent meditation retreat, he said it “continues to be the toughest and best thing I do for myself."

Jack Dorsey is amongst a growing group of CEOs, authors, political leaders who practise Vipassana meditation.

Many of these people are always short on time. So what prompts them to take ten days off and attend a meditation retreat?

Meditation techniques

Most meditation techniques can be categorised into two types — calming and insight meditation.

Calming meditation refers to exercises that promote tranquillity, relaxation and a peaceful state of mind. Calming meditation has the overall benefit of alleviating conditions like stress, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression. Some common forms of calming meditation are walking meditation, breath meditation, mantra meditation, tai chi etc.

Insight meditation is largely practised with the aim of transforming your mind or attitude. Instead of focusing on external influences, insight meditation channels your attention inwards.

Insight meditation can help you gain a few important soft skills that are not taught in business schools.

Empathy

Being able to understand how others feel and tune into their emotional state helps us become more effective communicators, and therefore more effective leaders.

Research published in Nature in 2018 showed that insight meditation produced neural changes, particularly between the prefrontal and insular cortex. This strengthened connection increases our capacity to comprehend other points of view.

Sachin Ganorkar, Senior Manager at a leading hospital chain, says his meditation practise helped him remain “equanimous, emotionally aware and empathetic” while looking after patients and hospital management.

“One of the key skills that managers of today need to hone is empathy. I find that when it comes to dealing with team members, a little empathy goes a long way, as people are more motivated and empowered to do their jobs, which in turn helps them be much more productive," he says.

Emotional self-control

Practising insight meditation also helps us control our immediate reactions. It weakens neural connections to the amygdala — where primal reactions such as fear and anger are triggered. At the same time, it also strengthens the neural connection of the prefrontal cortex where logic and rational thought reside. Strengthening these connections allows for more thoughtful responses as a leader — an invaluable tool that is hard to teach.

Conflict management

Resolving a conflict effectively requires the ability to find common ground and understand different points of view. This is made possible when we approach a conflict with an insightful approach.

“In a leadership role, there are several times when you need to deal with situations where you may have to have hard conversations, mediate a conflict, lead the team through changes or overcome unforeseen obstacles," says Lekharaj Sharma, the senior director engineering at a multinational software development company.

He says practising insight meditation has given him an “internal guide” on dealing with challenging situations at work.

“Meditation practice improves emotional self-control, self-awareness and empathy. It helps us develop the ability to acknowledge that we have our own biases, emotions and sense of distorted perspective. This opens the door to ownership and acceptance of responsibility. Once we are aware of our emotions and bias, we can prevent them from affecting our decisions or actions, while being more sensitive to a different point of view,” he says.

Emotional intelligence

Before we can understand other people’s feelings, we first have to fathom our own emotions. Having emotional intelligence is critical for leaders who want to be successful, says Dr Sai Subramaniam, a Healthcare Data Analytics consultant. “After all, who is more likely to succeed — a leader who rants and raves at his team when they are under stress, or a leader who stays in control, and calmly assesses the situation?”

Dr Subramaniam says insight meditation helped him explore the “landscape of my inner world and greatly enhanced my ability to understand others too."

Metacognition

Metacognition is the ability to take a step back in a stressful situation and observe your thoughts, feelings, impressions, and impulses before you act. Insight meditation gives you that pause gap between stimulus and response, allowing you the freedom to choose, and resist your automatic impulse.

As the psychiatrist, philosopher and author Victor Frankl said, "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."

Lekhraj says his meditation practice has allowed him to look at challenging situations like a true observer “without getting carried away with charged up emotions that usually cloud our minds.”

With that clear mind, one is more likely to find an effective solution rather than make a reactive, impulsive decision.

(The author is the MD of one of India's oldest fixture building companies. He is also a practitioner of insight meditation.)