".... a set of tools, grounded in pratical wisdom that can change people and organisations. Highly recommended"
David Rand Director, MicroMentor, The Aspen Institute
We aim to bring the best of our intelligence and skills to our job but are largely unaware of the extent to which our attention is turned outwards into our activity and away from a realistic observation of our own choices and behaviour. In the absence of this level of self-awareness our thoughts and emotions tend to define how we view what is going on around us and how we deal with the people we work with. We develop a habitual way of dealing with our situation, which limits our potential and constrains how we use our minds.
"Nothing is good or bad, thinking makes it so"
William Shakespeare
The basis of Awareness in Action approach is to examine and question these habitual responses and to introduce a means of transforming how we work with our mind by training it to be peaceful, compassionate and clear-seeing.
"[At work, people may see] little variation in how to do their tasks, but they still have other kinds of choices in terms of their attitudes, how they interact with their co-workers, whether they utilize certain inner qualities or spiritual strengths to change their attitudes at work ..." The Dalai Lama and Howard Cutler, The Art of Happiness at Work
Peaceful Mind
We train in peaceful mind through becoming familiar with techniques of mindfulness and meditation, which enable us to develop self-awareness, and stability thus calming the mind and making it easier to work with.
Mindfulness is..........an openhearted, moment-to-moment, non-judgemental awareness...
Meditation is...... getting in touch with who we are
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 The Power of GratitudeIn this short, readable book the author John Kralik tells the story of how he turned his life around by focusing his attention on what he had of value in his life rather than on what was missing. In Kralik’s case that was no hypothetical shift—a middle-aged, overweight divorcé, estranged from his older children, on ...  Being and getting the job doneSo how do we bring awareness into action and learn to ‘be’ at work—while still getting the job done?
One of the biggest misunderstandings in our line of work is when people think that practicing techniques such as mindfulness and meditation can only happen in one’s personal time and if anyone tries it out at work ...  Book Review (Part 2) - The Emotional Life of Your Brain(This is Part II for Part I please click here, book available from Amazon here)
The core of Davidson’s book crystallises research as to how we uniquely react and respond to ‘life’s slings and arrows’. Individual response is unique mix across six dimensions — Resilience, Outlook, Social Intuition, Self Awareness, Sensitivity to Context, and Attention. We ... Book Review (Part 1) - The Emotional Life of Your Brain
(This is Part I for Part II please click here)
Some texts are perfect for particular needs of our time. For me The Emotional Life of Your Brain is one such book. It’s written by a pioneer in neuroscience Professor Richard Davidson and an award winning health & science correspondent Sharon Begley – who has a deft ...  The Kindness FormulaIn the last blog we took a brief look at how it could change our working environment if we included ‘random acts of kindness’ as part of our daily routine. This time we will take this idea a bit further and introduce the idea of the Kindness Formula.
The Kindness Formula goes like this:
Make it a ...  Random acts of kindnessThere is a very efficient tram system in Amsterdam where I live. The trams are clean, speedy and run on time. The other day I was slow to get up and ended up as the last one to get off the tram. There is a chip card system to get on and off the tram ...  Goldilocks and a well balanced, resilient brainJust as the heart is part of a system that moves blood around the body, in a similar way the nervous system which includes the brain, is part of a structure that moves and responds to information as it flows and moves around the body.
The brain itself takes a lot of energy to function well. ...  From tigers to contented catsAt the beginning of this month there was a brief and moderate amount of publicity in the UK for two books about a subject many of us, myself included, find difficult to contemplate - death. One was by an Australian palliative care nurse called Bonnie Ware, who wrote ‘The Top Five Regrets About Dying’. Ware ...  Modern versions of a sabre-toothed tigerModern versions of a sabre-toothed tiger
In the last blog: Our old-fashioned stress response, we discussed how our stress alerts can keep us in constant state of alert disproportionate to the situations we find ourselves in. This can lead to problems with our health and well-being.
This time we are sharing a story taken from Anger Kills by ...  Our old-fashioned stress responseFight or flight
When we lived as hunter-gatherers in small tribes life was hard and much shorter than the average time we can hope to live for now. Tribes worked together to collect food, protect their young and defend their territory. From time to time a member of the tribe might face a life-threatening situation—like being ...  Hard Wired to ConnectOne of the aims of this blog is to share different voices and their experience of applying mindfulness, meditation and compassion in the workplace. This week I am very happy to introduce a blog from my friend and colleague Darran Trute. I hope you enjoy reading!
The training offered by Awareness in Action, provides the vision ...  Four ways to stop work getting on top of youWell-being for people at work is an important element of any Awareness in Action workshop. We go into the whole issue pretty thoroughly but to get people started we introduce these four simple ways of taking better care of themselves.
1.Changing your routine
Routines can help us accomplish tasks quickly and efficiently but if we hang on ...  Being able to imagine yourself in the other person’s wheelchairIn the last couple of months, trouble with first one knee and then the other necessitated a period of needing airport assistance when I fly. It’s a delicate situation where it is possible to feel quite vulnerable, even exposed and it has been a real discovery to meet the people whose job it is to ...  Meeting MadnessWe all know that meetings can be a challenge in so many different ways from trying to get a project idea approved, to simply surviving the boredom but they can also be an opportunity to apply some techniques of mindfulness, empathy and kindness.
Getting started
Some of the groups we work with in Awareness in Action have ...  My mood can become your problemRecently I was doing a piece of work in a rural area of the south of France—very pleasant in some ways but in terms of communication and internet, frequently frustrating. After two interminable days of not even being able to use a dial-up system to retrieve email I turned, in some desperation, to an acquaintance ...  Is gritting your teeth really good for you?On a recent return flight to Amsterdam from the UK I overheard a fellow-passenger giving a flight attendant a really bad time. It was hard to catch the full story from where I was sitting but it involved the passenger asking for hot water in a plastic, see-through cup. Apparently cups of this sort are ...  Happiness is not found on automatic pilotPeople spend 46.9 percent of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they're doing, and this mind-wandering typically makes them unhappy.
This the conclusion of recent research carried out by psychologists Professor Daniel Gilbert and Doctoral student Matthew Killingsworth of Harvard University.Killingsworth and Gilbert write, ‘A human mind is a wandering mind, and a ...  The power of not reactingLuckily I like Schipol airport—my local airport and the main one for Amsterdam—because I find myself there quite often travelling for work. It’s light and airy, with plenty of good places to drink coffee. Recently I was waiting at the gate for my flight and had the opportunity to observe an incident that seemed to ...  Some mindfulness exercises for your working dayMany of you will be familiar with the wonderful work of Jon Kabat-Zinn and his Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction programmes. I recently came across an article by Saki F. Santorelli, one of the MBSR instructors at the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. The article is called, Mindfulness and Mastery in the Workplace. It ...  Exercising choice in your working lifeIf you did not need to earn a living, would you still want to do your job? Unless you are one of a fortunate minority of people who do their job because they absolutely love it, then your answer would probably be ‘no!’ Right from that point—the point where we have no option but to ...  A Little Kindness Goes A Long WayIt must be one of the most dreaded moments in life—the moment when the worry that there is something wrong with your car turns into a certainty and you have to head for the hard shoulder of the motorway and search for the nearest emergency phone. It happened to us last month on our way ...  The Golden RuleAlways treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself
The Golden Rule (first formulated by Confucius 551-479 BCE)
Are you sharing an office with someone who talks very loudly when they are on the phone. Or do you feel you do more than your fair share of washing up in the staff kitchen, because you ...
Compassionate Mind
We train in compassionate mind through working with a series of techniques to develop empathy, equanimity, kindness and compassion. This leads to an improvement in communication and social skills, and the ability to work well in a team.
"A good head and a good heart are a formidable combination" Nelson Mandela
Clear Seeing Mind
We train in clear-seeing mind through coaching in working with change and interdependence, enabling us to work with situations as they are, rather than as we wish them to be.
"All life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly."
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it is tied to everything else in the universe.”
John Muir
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