I recently received a suggestion from LinkedIn to answer the question: “Here’s how you can enhance skill acquisition through mindfulness in various industries and professions.” I found this to be an interesting topic to discuss on my blog, as it highlights that mindfulness is much more than what many people wrongly assume: meditation and relaxation.
Research has consistently shown that the practice of mindfulness helps improve focus and attention. This happens because it allows you to notice, accept, and let go of unhelpful evaluations or limiting ideas, which creates a more conducive environment for learning, assessing situations, and making decisions.
Therefore, enhancing skill acquisition through mindfulness is, of course, a good approach across various industries and professions. However, it’s crucial to understand that for mindfulness to flourish within us, it needs to be integrated into our daily lives.
How Mindfulness Supports Skill Development
Mindfulness involves practicing presence in everyday activities, not just during meditation sessions. This presence should be embedded with certain qualities such as non-judgment, patience, beginner’s mind, trust, non-striving, acceptance, and letting go, among others. Then we need to ensure that we transfer these abilities from personal wellbeing to other areas such as social interaction or work.
What to Keep in Mind When Practising Mindfulness
Now, a helpful point to consider is that our desire to acquire skills to succeed in our jobs can be counterproductive when attempting to learn mindfulness. Reflect on the famous paradox of ‘not thinking about a pink elephant’: the more you try to avoid it, the more it dominates your thoughts.
When training our mindfulness muscle, it is important to approach it with gentleness and with the openness to try different ways or techniques as if they were small experiments that allow us to understand what works best for each of us.
Also, bear in mind that participating in a weekend or 8-week mindfulness course does not guarantee mastery. To give us a good chance of attaining so as I mentioned before, the development of mindfulness requires daily practice and experimentation.
Now to finish, while it may seem demanding, in my experience (and what I hear from my clients), when approached with the right intention this process is quite enjoyable and rewarding. And although it appears to consume time initially, you will eventually find that your newly acquired mindfulness skill frees up time as you become more efficient in other areas of life.
In summary, mindfulness can definitively and significantly enhance skill acquisition, but success depends on ongoing practice and integration into everyday life.
I hope you found this useful!
Bring Mindfulness to Your Team
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Olga-Lucía from EQness
Dr Olga-Lucía Gamboa — PhD, MPsych
Cognitive neuroscientist, psychotherapist and certified mindfulness teacher with over 15 years of experience in brain research. Founder of EQness, where she helps individuals and organisations enhance wellbeing through science.