Mindfulness For Resilience With Lindsay Benjamin Of Intel

Hi,

My name is Lindsay Benjamin and I work for Intel Corporation.

I also run our mindfulness program here called Awake at Intel.

Intel is a proud member of the Mindful Workplace Alliance and happy to be supporting the October Mindfulness Challenge.

We're now in week four of the challenge and the topic is resilience.

What is resilience?

Let's start with the definition of resilience as the ability of a person to adapt to changing circumstances at work or in life and to bounce back from those challenges.

Everyone has an emotional baseline.

We can think about resilience as one's ability to return quickly to their emotional baseline when dealing with adversity.

Stress and adversity are a natural part of life for everyone.

The practice of mindfulness gives us an opportunity for choice when dealing with difficult situations.

When something happens that we don't like,

We may notice that we are ruminating or obsessing about it for hours or days after the stressful event.

That act of noticing,

That is mindfulness.

We flex our mindfulness muscle when we first notice that we're stuck in an obsessive thought pattern and then when we take a deep breath in and a deep breath out and relax and consciously choose to let go.

Mindfulness practice gives us the opportunity to take a step back and not overly identify with stressful situations.

Hopefully,

It can also help us create some space so that we can make conscious choices about how we show up and engage in difficult or stressful situations.

In 2015,

An international study of employee health revealed a huge rise in depression,

Stress,

And anxiety,

Each rising at an alarming rate.

What might be causing this?

Work for many people is the number one source of stress in their lives.

In a study conducted by the IBM Institute for Business Value,

A survey of over 5,

000 business executives from 21 industries in over 70 countries reported that the scope,

Scale,

And speed of their businesses were increasing at an accelerated rate,

Especially as the competitive landscape becomes increasingly disrupted by technology and radically different business models.

Typically,

We feel most stressed when we are vulnerable.

For example,

When we take a big emotional or professional risk or maybe when we're dealing with a lot of uncertainty.

Certainly when we're dealing with a lot of change like changing jobs or changing companies or when we simply feel overwhelmed or unappreciated and disconnected from management.

World renowned neuroscientist Richard Davidson has found evidence that mindfulness meditation does increase resilience and the more mindfulness meditation you practice,

The more resilient your brain becomes.

The emotional response that follows a stressful event can whip up a lot of negative stories about yourself or others that goes on and on,

Way beyond the point of being useful or analytical.

Negative self-talk continues to proliferate anxiety,

Negative thoughts,

And bad moods.

Mindfulness practice wakes us up from this rumination.

Maybe we notice it in our body first,

Then we notice maybe we have some tightness in our muscles,

A clenching in the belly,

Or shortness of breath.

When we notice that signal from our body that something doesn't feel quite right,

We can then scan our physical body,

Scan our emotional body,

Our thoughts and our feelings,

And notice where we are stuck and see if we can then loosen the mental grip by intentionally breathing deeply and choosing to let go.

If practiced regularly,

Research shows that this creates changes in your brain so that you're more resilient to future stressful events.

Mindfulness practice can help employees cope with difficult challenges,

And I'd like to offer three key ways employees can build resilience during their day.

The first is to be optimistic.

Use your mindful awareness to shift your attention from negative rumination to more positive thoughts.

Hope and optimism are a choice.

Try to avoid seeing stressful events or challenges as insurmountable.

You can't change the fact that stressful events happen,

But you can learn to change your response to them.

Secondly,

Be decisive.

If you find yourself in a difficult situation,

Make a decision and take action rather than hoping that things will someday get better.

If you're not good at this,

Read about different ways to improve this skill or ask a trusted friend for help.

Making decisions puts us in the driver's seat and helps us avoid feeling like the victim of difficult situations.

And finally,

Accept that change is a part of living.

Accept things to change and adversity to occur rather than imagining that things will always be a certain way.

Change is an inevitable part of life.

Your goal should be to manage yourself through change in a healthy and effective manner.

When it comes to resilience,

Flexibility is the name of the game.

Discovering ways to adapt to changes in life helps you become more resilient.

Mindfulness meditation is a powerful skill to help you thrive amidst challenging circumstances.

Let's go ahead now and dive into a meditation that will help us build this skill.

So let's start by finding a comfortable seated position and sitting up nice and tall through the spine and taking a deep inhale in and squeezing the shoulders up to the ears.

And then exhale out through the mouth.

Let the shoulders relax.

Let's do that again.

Inhale,

Squeeze the shoulders up.

Exhale,

Relax the shoulders down.

Let's let the breath come naturally now in through the nose and out through the nose.

And as you're ready,

You can let your eyes fall closed and let your hands find a comfortable position in your lap.

As you exhale,

Start to soften through the forehead and allow the eyebrows to relax.

Let all the muscles around the eyes soften.

The cheeks,

Let the jaw hang loose.

Soften and relax down through the back of the neck and in the shoulders.

And soften in the chest.

And soften and relax in the heart itself.

Let the belly become soft.

Just allowing your body to completely relax.

Allowing your body to be fully supported by the chair or the floor.

We're gonna stay here with the flow of the breath for a couple more moments.

Simply allow the mind to focus.

Stay with the breath.

Feeling the sensation of the body breathing.

And we're gonna take one more deep inhale in,

Filling the lungs up.

And then exhale through the mouth.

And we're gonna soften that focus and let go of the focus on the breath.

Just allow our consciousness to expand.

Moving into this open awareness.

Softening the brain.

Just allowing ourselves to hold this open,

Spacious awareness.

And if you notice your mind wandering off and getting caught up in thought,

You can just gently bring your focus back to the breath.

Take a deep inhale in and an exhale.

And then soften and relax back into this open,

Spacious awareness.

And while we're here,

I'd like to invite you to gently bring to mind any particular difficult situation that you may have recently been dealing with.

Is there some particular situation or circumstance in your life at work that you notice you've been getting stuck on?

And we just wanna gently bring that into our awareness without starting to think about it.

And just noticing as we bring that situation into the mind's eye,

Do we notice any particular physical sensations associated with it?

We feel a tightness maybe in our shoulders or belly.

Do we notice that along with it comes some stories,

Some thoughts,

Or some emotions?

And in this place of this open,

Spacious awareness,

We're just looking at the situation objectively.

We're gonna consciously soften and relax our grip on it.

We're gonna see if we can consciously let go of the gripping,

If we can soften the sensations in the body that are associated with it.

We wanna resist any temptation to get caught up in thinking.

And instead,

We're just allowing ourselves to be and to look and to see how this particular situation might be impacting us.

We're gonna see if we can soften,

Soften our relationship to it.

And as we sit and soften,

We allow,

We just allow things to be and just notice how we're getting caught up and see if we can just soften that connection.

And now,

Let's take a nice deep inhale in again,

All the way filling the lungs.

And a deep exhale out through the mouth.

Let's soften again and relax and let go of that visualization,

Let go of that situation and just come back into that open,

Spacious awareness.

Just allow the body to be filled with breath.

Letting the breath to sweep out any lingering thoughts or sensations associated with that difficult situation.

And just letting each breath come in fully and just noticing what it feels like in the body to be filled with this open,

Spacious awareness.

And maybe gently bringing a little smile to your lips.

Kindly thank yourself for showing up and doing the practice.

I hope that you can bring this open,

Spacious awareness into the rest of your day.

As you're ready,

As you inhale,

You can start to wiggle your fingers and toes.

And gently arise from meditation.

Thank you for joining me.

Have a great day.