5 Ways Meditation Can Benefit Businesses
In order to remain competitive in today’s market, successful companies need:
To possess a clear vision of their goals
Inspiration to be innovative in their approach to supplying products and services
Leadership to guide individuals towards success
Teamwork to enable employees to keep up in today’s global marketplace
The practice of meditation helps to make all of this possible. The Harvard Business School along with INSEAD—Europe’s leading business school—have concluded from their research that the two most effective business tools for twenty-first century executives are meditation and intuition. The benefits of meditation in the workplace are cumulative; they build on one another, starting with the individual and from there, positively impacting the performance of the business as a whole.
The Individual’s Role
The success of any business begins with the individual because innovation and inspiration are born at the individual level. The potential for greatness is inside each person that realizes there are infinite possibilities all around them, and that their creativity is limitless. Unfortunately, most individuals find that their potential is seriously limited by stress, which can:
Block creativity, inspiration, and mental clarity
Damage relationships with others, which in turn negatively impacts teamwork
Cause insomnia, which leads to a decrease in new thinking, inspiration, and innovation
Cause anxiety, which can make it difficult to work on a team that requires patience and collaboration
Cause individuals to doubt their true talents, which can lead to limiting thoughts and inhibit drive and passion
Meditation in the Workplace
Meditation has been around for thousands of years, and has survived all this time because it works. My passion for bringing meditation to the workplace stems from the time I spent in the workplace and suffered the negative effects of stress almost every day of my working life. Not only was I unproductive and difficult to work with, I also felt tired and irritable most the time. I was sick quite often, and whatever creativity I possessed was nowhere to be found. There was no clarity or peace in my personal life, which led to none in my working life.
Today, I consider myself a ‘stress survivor,’ thanks to my meditation practice. As living proof, I know meditation can benefit any individual or business in limitless ways. Here are the top five benefits I feel meditation brings to the business world:
Clarity and Focus
Every time we encounter an obstacle to fulfilling our goals, we face stress. It’s been documented that most people find themselves facing a “fight or flight” decision an average of 12 times each day. The state of “fight or flight” is an acute stress response that can adversely affect digestion, heart rate, respiratory rate, and the general effectiveness of the immune system. If employees are busy simply trying to survive, their minds will become hazy in all that they do.
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