Six Ways Meditation Can Help Your Business
Meditation is becoming more mainstream as the benefits it provides continue to appear on people's radars. The impressive list of benefits meditation provides attracted so many people to it. Even some of the most prominent enterprises around have used it as part of their wellness programs in hopes of helping their employees improve their wellness. It helps that meditation is quite easily accessible and doesn’t require people to buy special equipment.
Of course, not everyone is eager to pick up the practice of meditation. Some people still associate meditation with monks chanting in temples or individuals who have given up their luxuries to contemplate life in secluded areas. While that is true to some extent, in today’s modern world, meditation is being practiced by people from all walks of life. Regardless of background, men and women are learning meditation to improve their reactions to life’s challenges. As a matter of fact, meditation is capable of helping improve your business as well.
While it may seem a bit skeptical, meditation can be used as a tool to improve your business. The landscape of the business world has shifted in ways most people were not expected as of late. It has caused many people to become confused, stressed, anxious, and disillusioned with the current business environment. Operating under these non-productive states of mind typically leads to mindless reactions that not only fail to meet long-term business expectations but can even endanger the existence of a company.
With meditation, remote employees can remain focused and present. They will be able to better see through the chaos in the industry and permit you to make better decisions. Taking the time to improve the inner self through meditation helps your remote team respond to events with more perception and intelligibility. That eventually leads to your remote team delivering some top-quality business results over time.
1. Boosts focus and productivity
Remote employees need to constantly be plugged into the internet to conduct their daily tasks. As excellent as the internet is, it does come with a double edge sword. The internet contributes to our attempts our lack of focusing on a task. When someone is surrounded by stimuli and interruptions 24/7, it becomes easier to get distracted, causing any work that calls for complete attention to triple the time and effort it requires. One of the first things meditation teaches a person is a common task of focusing only on your breath. Meditation helps you notice when the mind starts to wander and teaches you how to bring your focus back to your breathing.
As you improve your focus on breathing, it helps improve the way you guide your brain to remain focused on other tasks, such as working on an important project. Whenever you do become distracted and start thinking about something else, you will realize what’s happening and gently set yourself back on the right track, and focus on finishing the task at hand. That leads to far better productivity and an increased rate of successful job completion.
2. Reduces stress and burnout
The business world is filled with all sorts of stimulation that can lead to stress and burnout. Of course, remote working has managed to provide several benefits that have caused it to become an increasingly popular option among many people. As great as the benefits are, there are still some issues that remote employees need to deal with daily. For instance, if they are working at home because they are taking care of their children or ill family members. Managing their life and work can become challenging. That leads to them becoming stressed and overworked, which eventually leads to them experiencing burnout.
Furthermore, unmanaged stress has been shown to cause people to become sick more often and accelerate aging. Several studies have dictated that prolonged stress can contribute to high blood pressure, heart disease, stomach ulcers, autoimmune disease, anxiety, depression, insomnia, obesity, cancer, and chronic fatigue.
Meditation can help your body release these stresses and reverse the effects of your flight or fight instincts, which is an ancient response to having to run away from received danger or take it head-on. The flight or fight response is supposed to be a short-term protection mechanism that causes our body to speed up our heart rate, increase blood sugar, suppress the immune system, minimize insulin product, pump out stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol, and diminish the blood supply of our digestive system.
All of these reactions occur so that the human body can concentrate on running away as fast as possible or remain in combat. However, very few people are facing these types of threats anymore, and many of them live in this fight or flight situation. That generates stress in response to terrible traffic, criticism from a coworker, or a disagreement with someone.
Frequent meditation helps relieve the accumulated stress and nurtures a state of result alertness. There are plenty of studies showing that meditation can relieve stress and promote inner peace. For instance, the Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine Journal published a study showing that full-time workers who spent a couple of hours each day practicing mindfulness meditation showed a significant decrease in job stress, anxiety, and depression.
One of the many reasons why it’s grown into popularity is due to how successful meditation is in helping people relieve stress. It allows people to let go of excess thoughts and increase awareness. As meditation is practiced, the practitioner will see people and events like they are.
3. Handle self-doubt
Working remotely can cause employees to constantly push themselves past their limits. The idea that they are not contributing to the team starts to plague their minds, causing them to overwork themselves. Most remote employees will begin to fear that they are going to be fired for not contributing enough to the team and cause them to worry too much. That eventually leads to them doubting themselves and their position on the team.
The inner critic can eventually start to group louder and persistent in an attempt to protect the individual from their failures. Without meditation practices, a person can fool themselves into believing those negative views continually plaguing their mind. Practicing mindfulness offers your remote model an entirely new way of handling thoughts by helping them discover that the opinions are authentic but not necessarily factual. That helps them disconnect themselves from self-doubt that would otherwise get in the way of them finishing their work and achieving their goals.
4. Better communication
Meditation helps the practitioner clear their mind more seamlessly. It prevents them from having their minds constantly plagued by useless thoughts that could potentially impact the way they communicate with others. Clear, effective communication between remote managers and employees is essential to running a successful remote business. Unfortunately, most organizations tend to struggle with communication among their employees or business leaders.
Meditation is supposed to help clear thoughts that would otherwise get in the way of communication and clear intention to others. Having clear communication with your employees is a result of the clarity and focus granted by practicing meditation, which improves collaboration among employees.
5. Increases patients and tolerance
Meditation requires a person to remain silent for an extended amount of time. The practice as you learn how to block out the sounds and environment surrounding you. Doing so, even for a couple of minutes, will cause a significant impact on process time when someone says something that would usually cause you to react in an impolite manner.
If your employees ever come across something that could cause them to become overly upset, they can use these meditation techniques to take a step back, breathe, and choose how to respond to it without flying into a rage-induced fit. Learning something like this is significantly beneficial when it comes to remote working and interpersonal relationships. It helps your remote employees process the negative aspects of their lives and handle them more calmly.
Furthermore, the process of becoming aware of when your mind wanders but not judging it is a common principle of meditation. That can assist you with practicing how to release judgment about other things you pick up on, such as what other people say and do throughout the day.
6. Boosts employee loyalty
An organization that provides its employees with meditation as part of their remote worker wellness program shows they care about its remote employees and will acquire the loyalty of workers at every level. That results in less personal turnover and boosts employee retention. If loyal employees are less likely to look somewhere else for a job, that means your organization retains their talent for a more extended period. Loyal employees also tend to consider the success of the company is directly related to their personal success. That leads to them working harder to achieve the company's overall goals.
Conclusion
Businesses these days need all the tools at their disposal to ensure their organization runs smoothly. If they are not treating their remote employees well, they will leave the company and join another. Introducing them to meditation will cause a large enough impact that should improve the overall productivity and quality of work overtime. Take these reasons we have listed here seriously and start practicing meditation.