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Compassionate Leadership seems to be an emerging leadership paradigm. Whether this in terms of leading ourselves more effectively with self awareness practises like mindfulness increasingly entering the corporate world, or leading others more empathically or even expressing itself as having a more ethical business objectives.

For instance if we take the later point first.  Ray C. Anderson, CEO of the carpeting giant Interface, Inc. became known as 'the greenest CEO in America.'  But this awakening happened after his 60th Birthday after decades of leading a multinational company in a more conventional manner.

I never gave one thought to what we were doing to the earth.... I realized that I was a plunderer and it was not a legacy I wanted to leave behind.

His subsequent vision was for a zero footprint business i.e. a business that had no net negative impact on planet earth - in his words "to cause no harm".  He called this approach 'mount sustainability' and it stemmed from his desire to see business exist for a greater purpose than just profit.

“Those who think business exists to make a profit, I suggest they think again. Business makes a profit to exist. Surely it must exist for some higher, nobler purpose than that” Ray Anderson, founder of Interface Inc.. More at Business Makes Profits to exist

It's important not to confuse a compassionate leadership approach with a motivation to just increase profit, or make people work harder or smarter- its transformative power and richness would then be prostituted to some lower aim. However, in this day and age its only sensible to highlight the profound common business sense it makes for leaders perhaps ill at ease with talking, mentioning or embodying a compassionate leadership approach at work.

A study initiated by Johnson & Johnson with the Ethics Resource Center in Washington, D.C., determined that businesses that adopt a written commitment to social responsibility, and act on that commitment, reap more profits than companies that don't.' Literally. Kristin Tillquist. Capitalizing on Kindness: Why 21st Century Professionals Need to Be Nice (p. 18).

Compassionate leadership recognises how we feel - as not some soft skill, but crucial to how well we work and not as some nice abstract concept.

In a study astonishingly large in scope, when Gallup asked ten million employees around the world if they could agree or disagree with the following statement: “My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person,” those who agreed were found to be more productive, contributed more to profits, and were significantly more likely to stay with their company long-term. (Achor, Shawn (2011-09-30). The Happiness Advantage p. 189)

In some cases compassionate leadership is becoming explicit - or being interpreted that way. I found it interesting that in blog item businessinsider.com its opening paragraph attributed to Richard Branson says this:

Richard Branson says that delegation and compassion are the keys to running his $18-billion-revenue Virgin empire.

Read More

Can we bring more meaning to our lives and help change the world at the same time? ....It is time to turn capitalism upside down - to shift our values, to switch from a profit focus to caring for people, communities and the planet. His book is available here

Neuroleadership is an emerging field of study focused on bringing neuroscientific knowledge into the areas of leadership development, management training, change management, education, consulting and coaching. Read More

The eminent neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran would compare the revolutionary discovery (of mirror neurons) to the discovery of Jim Watson’s and Francis Crick’s double helix. “I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology,” he said. (Keysers, Christian (2011-06-06). The Empathic Brain (p. 13)).

When you use compassionate communication in your conversations, something quite surprising occurs: both your brain and the brain of the person you're talking to begin to align themselves with each other. This special bond is a phenomenon referred to as "neural resonance," and in this enhanced state of mutual attunement, two people can accomplish remarkable things together. Why? Because it eliminates the natural defensiveness that normally exists when people casually converse....More at 6 Exercises To Strengthen Compassionate Leadership | Fast ...

Some aspects of this approach already seem to be part of Google's approach to personal Growth - a programme sweetly called 'Search Inside Yourself' and recently released in a Chade-Mengs book of the same name.

Personal growth pioneer Chade-Meng Tan first designed Search Inside Yourself as a popular course at Google intended to transform the work and lives of the best and brightest behind one of the most innovative, successful, and profitable businesses in the world… Meng has distilled emotional intelligence into a set of practical and proven tools and skills that anyone can learn and develop. More at Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving ...

Historically speaking perhaps we'll see that one key forerunner for this shift at least scientifically was a commitment made by one neuroscientist Richard Davidson in 1992.  Richard Davidson has subsquently been acknowledged by Time magazine as one of the 100 people who shape our world in 2006.

A neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dr. Richard Davidson made a commitment to the Dalai Lama in 1992 to help get meditation and compassion onto the scientific map by studying the way they affect the brain. At that time, a word like compassion would not appear in the index of a respectable textbook. Now, there are results that make it a serious subject of inquiry. He said we live at a very propitious time in the history of science for the following reasons:

• Scientists are putting the brain back into biomedicine, studying the pathway back to the mind. We can study the way psycho-social factors affect the brain, and thus the mind....
• Epigenetics is causing a revolution in nuclear biology. Gene regulation — when genes are or are not expressed — can be affected by the environment, including training. There are extraordinary new methods to look at epigenetic changes. (Wikipedia on Epigenetics: the study of heritable changes in gene expression caused by mechanisms other than changes in the underlying DNA sequence).
• Neurally inspired behavioral interventions are proving to be the best ways to change the brain in specific and localized ways. Compared to them, drugs are blunt instruments.
• Scientists are putting the brain back into biomedicine, studying the pathway back to the mind. We can study the way psycho-social factors affect the brain, and thus the mind....More at Positive Psychology News Daily

In any event it is an interesting time to be working with organisations - and how best we can shape their development to meet todays challenges.

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It was a unique summer day for Scotland: the sun was shining and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky! It also happened to be the day of the Edinburgh marathon, and the promenade was packed with people waiting to cheer the runners on. I arrived just as the first runners appeared, and immediately spectators began applauding the athletes and shouting out words of encouragement. Some people in the watching crowd were obviously waiting for runners they knew, but most of the spectators were cheering for all of them. The runners in turn beamed smiles of appreciation back at the crowd, some waving or saying thanks. Teams of athletes wore t-shirts to represent the charity they were raising money for, and out on the main road cars and buses honked their horns in solidarity.

Of course, perhaps the good weather meant there were more people watching the marathon than might otherwise have been the case, but support for the runners did not stop with applauding the front-runners.  Wave after wave of runners came, in their hundreds if not thousands, from prime athletes to regular Joes and Janes, and of many different nationalities, and still the encouragement and good feeling continued.

Such was the strength of this, for me, unexpected and moving moment of shared humanity, warmth and kindness I wondered why on earth we cannot behave like this more often. It is beyond the scope of this blog to attempt to answer such a question. However, as Maureen’s blogs have pointed out recently, we can all begin to make the world a better place and benefit ourselves by taking responsibility for developing our own kindness and gratitude.

I haven’t always found such things easy.  Twenty years ago, one of my first bosses in nursing advised me against applying for a team leader’s position, saying that I was not a natural team player and I would ‘rub people up’ the wrong way! I was too strongly-opinionated, too maverick and at times too distant to colleagues. Although I was shocked by this appraisal, deep-down I knew he was right. It didn’t stop me applying for the job, which I eventually got; in fact I was more determined to get it to prove my boss wrong. In the years that followed I have learned (sometimes the hard way) how to be a team player- but I did and still do need to make a conscious and sustained effort to do so.

One of the techniques I find helpful comes from a Japanese approach called ‘Naikan’. The term literally means ‘looking inside’ and draws on principles from Japanese Pure Land Buddhism. If you are interested in it, Gregg Krech has written an excellent guide called “Naikan: Gratitude, Grace, and the Japanese Art of Self-Reflection”.

In Naikan we are asked to reflect on three main questions in order:

1. What care and support have I received from others?
2. What care and support have I given to others?
3. What troubles and difficulties have I caused others?

One of the things I like about this practice is its flexibility. We can take these questions and examine any set of relationships we have, from pets to families to colleagues to partners. We can even examine our relationships to objects! This might sound strange, but I believe this could be a way of appreciating what we might have and making it last longer rather than reinforcing the strange modern notion of easily disposable goods which inevitably end up in landfills. We can also use the question to reflect on specific periods of time, for example one day, or a week, or for the duration of a relationship. And of course we can do this practice in the morning, reflecting for example on yesterday, at the end of the day, or at the week-end.

Another thing I love about this practice is that it is deceptively simple. In Naikan, we spend a period of time on each question in turn and simply list anything that comes to mind as we do so. This is not supposed to be an intellectual exercise; we are trying to see reality as it is and therefore we do not shy away from the troubles we might have caused others when it comes to that question.

We are also not looking for ‘big’ things when we do the practice. So, for example, when it comes to the care and support we have received or given, that might amount to a cup of tea or coffee, or being listened to, the bus driver stopping to let you on, or you letting another car come into the lane you are in ahead of you. With a practice like this you can of course go on to tackle some of the bigger events or significant relationships in your life once you feel ready to do so. But for me one of its key benefits is that, even when we are maybe feeling a bit down or disconnected from others, if we pause and think about it, there are usually things to feel grateful for. And trust me; this practice works!  From having perceived a colleague as an unhelpful grouch I have come to realise that they do contribute well – or that it is me who is the grouch. I have also reflected on how much housework my youngest step-daughter does as compared to how much I had previously convinced myself she didn’t do.

Not only can reflections like the ones offered in Naikan increase your sense of gratitude, just as importantly they can help us feel more connected with others. And whether we live in a quiet or busy place, in a family home or on our own, whether we see ourselves as outgoing or introverted, being connected is something that is surely good for us all.

Love,

Gavin.

My favourite story concerns Scott, the guy who serves the author in his local Starbucks. Not only does Scott remember how Kralik likes his coffee but he greets him everyday by name in a genuine and friendly way. When Kralik delivers his thank you note, Scott assumes it is a complaint letter and is momentarily dismayed only to be delighted on realizing his has received appreciation and gratitude instead.

It made me more aware of how I interact with the ‘routine’ people in my life—cab drivers, waitresses, shop assistants—all the people it can be so easy to glaze over while my attention is focused elsewhere. Just because we are paid to do a job, or offer a service it does not mean that we no longer need to feel appreciated for what we do. Like Kralik, I also quickly saw how much better I feel in taking the time to properly acknowledge the services I receive.

In her book, The How of Happiness, Sonja Lyubomirsky details research her department of psychology in the University of California has carried out on the power of gratitude. Subjects are required to keep a ‘gratitude’ journal every Sunday for six weeks in which they record five things that they could feel grateful for during the previous week. Their levels of happiness and well-being were found to have increased as a result.

At work it is all too easy to take our colleagues for granted, or to feel unappreciated ourselves. Lyubomirsky points out that, among other things, gratitude helps us appreciate what we have rather than yearn for what we do not have and so increases our sense of self-worth and self-esteem. When we see how much we have to be grateful for it increases our confidence and helps us to unlearn the habit of over-focusing on our weaknesses and failures. So, a work team that is able to share appreciation for each other’s work and gratitude for each individual’s contribution has to be a healthier, stronger and more effective operating force. Take a look at Kralik’s book if you need convincing.

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 they’ll either get laughed at, or fired for time-wasting! Nothing could be further from the truth. These techniques can be integrated into a working day without taking out time from essential tasks and will actually add to our focus, productivity, ability to think creatively and well-being.  Companies such as Google, Starbucks, IBM, Apple and Yahoo run in-house programmes for their staff and mindfulness and meditation is now widely taught and practiced in schools, hospitals, prisons and among a variety of professional disciplines.

Consider this quotation from Daniel Goleman, the architect of Emotional Intelligence:

I think there is a very large amount of conversion data on meditation across all brands and all varieties. There is a generic benefit, largely because it helps people get into a parasympathetic nervous system state, which is restorative as the body's recuperative mode, as opposed to the sympathetic nervous system, which gets us into the stress-arousal system. I think that if you are a daily meditator, you let your body get into a way of being that it can reconstitute itself instead of being driven over the edge by constant stress arousal.

The highlighted section is mine. I wanted to draw attention to this aspect of meditation as an anti-dote to burn-out. Stress is an increasingly large factor for working people in Japan, the US and western Europe costing large amounts of money on lost working days, and medical care. Here Goleman is talking about the positive effects of the body but the mind benefits if anything, even more through the regular practice of meditation.

Here is a quotation from an article by Colin Allen published in Psychology Today 1 April 2003:

Neuroscientists have found that meditators shift their brain activity to different areas of the cortex - brain waves in the stress-prone right frontal cortex move to the calmer left frontal cortex. This mental shift decreases the negative effects of stress, mild depression and anxiety. There is also less activity in the amygdala, where the brain processes fear.

So meditation works on the source of stress as well as its manifestation in the body. Which employer would not want that for their staff? A work team that can incorporate meditation practice into their working day is going to be less stressed and more productive because of it.

One simple idea is to initiate short sessions of sitting meditation at the beginning and end of all meetings. Instead of time spent shuffling papers and catching up on gossip, a few moments of silence will allow people to arrive at the meeting and bring their attention to what they are about to do. How often does a meeting take time to get going while everyone is trying to pull their attention from their own agenda to focus on the group agenda? Mediation provides a simple way to bring everyone together and help them become present to what needs to be done. In the same way, at the end of a meeting a few moments of sitting will help provide closure in an atmosphere of harmony and give a pause before the next set of tasks.

On an individual level there are many times in any working day when you can take a couple of moments to bring your attention back to your breath and re-focus your attention. Take an extra few moments in the cloakroom, walk from one work area to another a little more slowly, choose to drink your coffee by yourself—you’ll be able to think of lots of opportunities in your working day. The trick is to make use of them, to remember to make a few spare moments into time for meditation and not to just let the time float by. No-one need ever know you are taking time for meditation.

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 have a mix of these styles which means we could easily bounce back from a setback (resilience domain) but not very good at reading the body language of others (social intuition domain).

These domains are not fixed but are able to be altered through particular methods.

The key difference between these defined domains and some kind of self help manual is that they are related to underlying identifiable brain systems and can be altered through mental and environmental changes.

Resilience is how slowly or quickly we recover from adversity, stressful change, setbacks or emotional challenges. The speed of recovery is related to the number and strength of connections between an area above the left eye (called the left prefrontal cortex) and a part of the brain called the amgdala.  Too few connections between these two areas and amygdala activation, which provides a negative valence to the experience, isn’t dampened down – we then find it difficult to turn off the provoked negative emotion.   Healthy, resilient people also exhibit a higher left to right ratio in brain activity above the eyes.  Techniques shown to improve resilience include mindfulness meditation as it boosts activation of the area above the left eye, the wellbeing side, which consequently causes fewer signals to reach the amygdala.  It also reduces activity in the emotionally negative area above the right side.  Conversely we can also rebound too quickly, especially in relation to the emotions of others – and can therefore lack empathy.  This was the first time I had heard the connection between too much resilience and being ‘walled off’ from others emotions, it’s an interesting connection isn’t it? Equally there are practises you can do here if you find yourself too resilient and hence walled off.  Here, for example, you can practise a technique called Tonglen (taking on and transforming the suffering of others based on the movement of the breath), cultivating loving kindness or reframing the situation.

Outlook: Until very recently the focus of medical science has been on our problems, using this as a prompt to treat disease for instance.  This approach then spilled over into emotions with a focus on anxiety and depression. Positive emotions like, happiness, contentment, eagerness and virtuous qualities of mind – love and kindness for instance have, until recently, been largely ignored because they weren’t classified as problems – which is understandable but also a little crazy. This bias is fortunately shifting and rightly so. Cultivating positive qualities in the workplace is critical, as rigorous studies find that they broaden the mind, enhance creativity, focus and increase perseverance – key skills necessary to create adaptive organisations able to meet challenges of today’s modern working environment.    If we feel unable to sustain positive feelings then Davidson shows how we can help move our outlook dimension.  This is possible because positive feeling arises in one part of the brain (nucleas accumbens) but is then captured and encouraged again by the area above the left eye.  Without this activity the joy evaporates quickly.  Journaling positive experiences, expressing gratitude regularly, delaying gratification, mindfulness or compassion meditation all lead to increases in positive outlook.  Try it and see for yourself.  Conversely too much positivity or LPFC activation, can lead to individuals finding it hard to delay gratification or neglecting genuine threats.  Here we can place our attention on threats on the environment – increasing the negative valence of experience.

Social intuition is how good we are at picking up social cues, facial expressions and body language.  The fusiform gyrus activates when people perceive an object they are expert in – so a car lover looking at a Rolls Royce for instance.  As humans beings are social creatures this means it is highly active when we see the faces of others.  This is especially true when we look into other people’s eyes which convey important social cues like boredom, trust or surprise etc. Social intuition obviously has a key role to play in communication and team work.  It is also improved through mindfulness meditation, including mindfully placing your attention on social signals during interactions or with direct training via compassion meditation. If we are hypersensitive to social intuition hence start to lose our own sense of healthy self, we can intentionally move our awareness away from social cues.

Self awareness is how well we perceive our own thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations.  These provide important signals of our own internal emotions and state of mind.  It is also crucial for empathy as our body maps the feelings and intentions of others onto our own internal body representation through a brain region called the insula.  If there is a lack of self awareness – we could be easily suffering from excessive stress or even an amygdala hijack (using Daniel Golemans term) and the rational thinking part of the brain shut downs and we don’t even notice it. Self awareness can be improved again through mindfulness or compassion exercises.  Hyperfocused self awareness can be improved also through mindfulness but also reframing or CBT.

Sensitivity to context: Is how good we are at both noticing social cues and context we find ourselves in, and how well we can align appropriate emotional responses and behaviours to this context. The hippocampus is crucial for this.  If in the safe environment of home we are still overcome with anxiety or behave in a way that is suitable for our social life but not in a meeting – this may be an indication of the ‘tuned out’ end of this spectrum of this ‘sensitivity to context’.   Conversely we may find we alter our behaviour to fit every different context to a point where we lose our genuine self and this would mean we are at the too ‘Tuned in’ end of the spectrum. Though there is limited research in this area, Davidson suggest that we can work this is domain by bringing anxiety provoking situations onto the mindfulness of the breath.

Attention underlies all the other emotional styles and provides the ability to work and transform them. It is how clear and undistracted our focus is, how well we are able to tune in and selectively notice details and tune out situational, environmental, cognitive and emotional distracters. When we are unfocused or hyper-focused we can make careless mistakes, have trouble organising activities, or it can even be expressed as cutting into conversations or fidgeting.  A lack of attention also leads to an inability to stop impulses, like talking excessively or not being able to prevent stimuli distracting and captivating you attention.  When we have good selective attention a clear pattern of electrical activity occurs. Brain waves ‘phase lock’ and become synchronised with the external stimulus – a signature of focused attention.  This synchronisation is easily registerable against other background oscillations, but only when the mind is calm and not constantly distracted - phase locking is much poorer in people with ADHD for example. Not missing information and social cues is an important benefit of attention but we can also invest too much of our attentional resources in detecting certain items which causes us to miss the appearance of a target piece of information a moment later – this is called attentional blink, our attention drops out for a moment.  This blink is larger if the target of our attention has an emotional charge to it.  Strengthening connections between the area above our eyes and other brain regions improves selective attention and reduces attentional blink.

We can train the mind and retrain our attention to gather it in a calm abiding manner without too much excitement. We become present, aware and spacious to tasks and each other. This relates to the top of the PFC/catecholamine performance curve - the best application in applying our attention (see previous post here).  This is possible through again through the mental technology of mindfulness meditation. Richard Davison sums this up “Mindfulness meditation transforms the neural underpinnings of attention ….. it helps reduce background chatter and focus on selected information”.

As you can see many of the exercises that are helpful in working with the domains are contemplative in nature.  This is because, as stated in the previous post, we can use our mind to rewire our brain (sometimes called self directed neuroplasticity) – and some of the most effective methods for this is by intentionally transforming the mind.  What is held in attention 'Turbo Charges' neuroplasticity - to borrow a phrase from Rick Hanson.

This is a rich vein of research - forging a new scientific discipline called contemplative neuroscience - which I am sure will grow exponentially over the next few years.

You can easily see the impact of the Mind and Life conferences influencing Davidson's work and this book - with the practical helpful outcomes it provides and will continue to provide into the future.  Mind and life conference is a dialogue between economists, philosophers, neuroscientists and the Dalai Lama with the aim of mutually developing a deeper understanding of reality and how such exchange can benefit humanity and the world.

An indication of your emotional style is available here.

I found this book really inspiring and I highly recommend it.

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(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 skill at making such books light on the eye and easy to digest. I must admit to Davidson being a bit of a hero of mine, both because of this pioneering work (in 2006, he was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine ) but also because of his humanity which really shines throughout this read.  The book is both a summation of 35 years neuroscience research as well as a tantalising glimpse into how such research, as it becomes more broadly known, will have a profound impact across a huge range of disciplines and into society and our working lives. To say we are at the cusp of some fundamental societal changes is, I feel, a bit of an understatement.

Even with breakthrough books on emotional intelligence by Daniel Goleman, emotions are still very much peripheral in organisations.  Workplace culture (with rare exceptions) seems to be stuck in a time warp that mirrors an old 1970s cognitive psychologists perspective– that they offer no value in themselves, the best they do is  just interrupt us so that we can direct our attention to what is really important.  Its a bit absurd really and yet.... when’s the last time emotions were spoken about in your workplace for instance?  The emotional tapestry at work seems almost binary, dissolving down to just whether we feel stressed or not, nothing more - relegated to a point of insignificance, viewed as getting in the way of the real business and doing what is important, if they are mentioned at work at all.

Emotions at work?  Get real.

But this will and must change.  As Professor Davidson notes “Emotions, far from being the neurological fluff that mainstream science once believed them to be, are central to the functions of the brain and to the life of the mind”.  Feeling permeates everything – even to the level of affecting how we see.  Davidson who pioneered affective neuroscience (emotions and the brain) has shown there is no clear dividing line between emotions and cognition.

And if you still think emotions don’t matter at work then I’d ask you to consider this study. Gallup asked 10 million employees around the world if they could agree or disagree with the following statement: "my supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person," those who agreed with this statement were more productive, contributed more to profits, and were significantly more likely to stay with the company long-term. If we don’t acknowledge emotions at work and its impact, its equivalent to making critical business decisions whilst knowing we have an incomplete picture. How many poor leadership decisions are made whilst minds are being distorted by negative emotions, unable to see the situation clearly? Or the team meetings we've all seen disintegrate as destructive emotions captivate the mood of the workspace and sap the energy of the room?

For many of us this will be common sense, yet common sense isn't necessarily common action.  A glance at the average business plan would show this gap.

The core of Davidson’s book crystallises research how we ourselves uniquely react and respond to ‘life’s slings and arrows’.  Individual response is a unique mix across six dimensions — Resilience, Outlook, Social Intuition, Self Awareness, Sensitivity to Context, and Attention.  The key difference between these defined domains and some kind of self help manual is that they are related to underlying identifiable brain systems.  So there is a particular brain signature for a resilient brain compared to one that finds it difficult to shake off an argument with a co-worker or to recover from a loss for instance. These insights into specific brain patterns provide a blueprint of what areas we can target to improve or alter our own unique emotional style.

This transformation is possible because our brain changes its structure and function in relationship to experience – called neuroplasticity, with the mechanisms of neuroplasticity the most important idea in neuroscience in the last decade. A crucial point to note here is that the brain changes both in relationship to external events, the environment and the inner landscape of our minds – our thoughts and emotions.  For instance, the same brain changes occur in individuals who learn to play a 4 key tune on a piano, compared to those who just imagine they learn to play this same tune - a purely mental event.

This is worth repeating.

Mentally rehearsing an activity or positive qualities of mind also changes the brain.  Directing our attention, or cultivating qualities of the mind acts back on the brain itself.  Sometimes this is referred to as self directed neuroplasticity. We can exercise choice with our mind to work and transform unhelpful habits that are thrown up by the brain.  Through this process, just like we can slowly increase what we can bench press as we exercise, mental workouts can alter our own unique mix of emotional styles.  Aspects we therefore considered as fixed traits, things like resilience, positive outlook, empathy or even happiness are consequently skills that can be developed, learnt and improved.   This is why mental or contemplative practises play such a pivotal role in being able to change our emotional style.

The Kindness Formula goes like this:

Make it a habit to do at least three kinds things every day:

• one for yourself
• one for someone you know
• one for a stranger

Having a formula helps us to make kindness a habit and to think more deeply about how we wish to express it. If you find doing three every day too much to begin with, then spread them over a week and build up as the habit gets stronger.

Kindness for yourself

In an earlier blog we looked at ways to take better care of ourselves at work. These included taking exercise, seeing friends more frequently and changing our routine from time to time. These are all effective ways of being kind to oneself. Often we overlook this part—it is so easy to forget to pay attention to taking real care of ourselves as we hurry through our day, trying to fulfil our responsibilities. When we get over-tired and stressed it is much harder to show kindness to anyone at all and so we can see kindness for ourselves as an investment that will help others also. One of the very best ways to show kindness to oneself is to make time each day to practice meditation. Even a five minutes session every morning can help to set us up with a little more space and quietness with which to face the day.

Kindness for someone you know

Ironically it can be the people closest to us that feel it most acutely when we are stressed, or in a hurry. Perhaps it might be a nice idea to surprise the family by doing something unexpected such as bringing everyone morning tea in bed, or making pancakes for tea. Just as it helps us to change routine, it will help the family also.

Making an unexpected phone call to a friend who lives at a distance could help to lift their day. Sending a thank-you note people who had you to dinner, or sending flowers to celebrate an exam result will all bring happiness both to you and to the people who are receiving them.

None of the actions need to be big, or unusual but it takes a moment of being aware to remember how doing a small act of kindness can have big positive effect.

Kindness for a stranger

Spotting a parking meter that is about to expire and dropping in a few coins to save the driver a ticket is a great way to do something kind for a stranger. Next time you buy a take-away coffee try paying for the drink the person behind you is buying. At a Starbucks in the US they once had this happen for more than nine straight hours—each person passing on the gift they received themselves.

Something I like to do in the supermarket—when I have to grapple to the back of a shelf to get at a packet, or tin then I pull forward the next one so the person coming after me can see that there is still one left and they don’t have to struggle to get it out.

Simple things like opening doors for people, standing aside to let them pass, offering them to go ahead of you in a queue are easy to do and can change someone’s day.

If you feel like trying out the Kindness Formula then do post and let us know what your tried and how it turned out. We could compile a list for what works best.

This small act of kindness sent me on my way with a light heart and an upbeat feeling. It lifted my whole day and when I remember it now I want to smile.

Research is showing that kindness is not only good for the person who receives it but for the person who offers it and even for people who may have nothing to do with either party but simply see kindness being done! In all cases people report feeling happier and more well in themselves. Kindness has a positive contagious effect.

This seems to be important news for the workplace where it is so easy to feel a bit pressured, or to have tensions between people. Imagine if everyone went into work with the goal of trying to perform a few random acts of kindness in the day—it could change the whole atmosphere of the working environment.

What sort of things could these random acts of kindness be?

Here’s a few ideas to think about.

• When you make a drink for yourself, offer one to someone else as well
• Bring in cakes to share
• Bring flowers to decorate the workspace
• Remember to greet your colleagues on arrival and smile at them from time to time during the day
• Cover for a colleague who needs to arrive late, or leave early
• Make time to listen to a colleague who has news to share
• Do the washing up
• Invite someone to eat lunch with you

Please post any thoughts you’ve had yourself—we’d love to hear from you.

We have a natural capacity for kindness but it is so easy in the rough and tumble of the working day for it to get buried under stress and hurry. It is worth taking the time to consciously remember to be kind and help it become a habit that spreads throughout your workplace. Remember—everyone will benefit.

The brain itself takes a lot of energy to function well.  That’s why as we get tired and run out of energy it gets harder to think clearly.  It’s only 2 to 3 lbs in weight but uses a staggering 20% of all the glucose and oxygen that the body as a whole needs.

As mentioned in, "hard wired to connect” , the brain includes tiny switches called neurons which fire like spark plugs in a car.  There’s about 800 billion of them at the last best count.  Each individual neuron or switch is directly connected to approximately 5,000 others – like having 5,000 other neurons on speed dial.   These 5,000 neurons are connected to another 5,000 and so on, like a chain of connectivity throughout the brain. Because neurons are connected in this way, they are only ever a few hops away from any other neuron in the whole brain.

Despite the following fact...

The potential number of possible connections that this setup provides is - and bear in mind we are talking about your brain right now -greater than all the measured elementary particles in the entire known universe.

So how do neurons speed dial and therefore communicate with each other and why is this important in terms of how well we work?

Imagine a couple of islands separated by some water.  Each island has its own stranded inhabitant who communicates with the other islander by placing messenger bottles in the water and then waits for them to wash up on his neighbours’ shores.

In a similar way the neurons ‘talk’ to each other by sending little packets of chemical ‘bottles’ across tiny gaps that separate them from their neighbours.  They move across these gaps in the tiniest fractions of a second. These chemicals either encourage or discourage neighbouring neurons to fire.   The fancy name for these chemical bottles is a neurotransmitter and the gap or body of water is called a synapse.

Understanding what happens when we have too much or too little of these chemical bottles provides a big insight in how retraining attention and regulating emotions through mindfulness, meditation and compassion is crucial to being well at work and working effectively in teams.

Just behind the forehead is where our thoughts are drawn and erased – it’s called the pre-frontal cortex (PFC).  It’s responsible for many crucial things we need including:

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Unfortunately this area right behind the forehead is extremely sensitive to two main messenger bottles.  Too few or too many of certain types of bottles basically causes this area to close down.  The relationship between these chemical bottles and its performance is so connected that you can see the effect in a simple diagram.

Patricia Goldman-Rakic found if two particular bottles or neurotransmitters, called dopamine and norepinephrine were eliminated it was as though this part of the brain was physically removed.   This  is shown on the very left side of the picture, as we are fatigued, tired, disinterested or bored.

In the opposite way, too much of these neurochemicals (moving to the far right side of the picture) and the connections become dysfunctional, networks start disconnecting and firing shuts down altogether.  This is what happens when we are chronically stressed or in moments of threat when massive amounts of norepinephrine and dopamine are released.

In each case at either end we have a PFC shut-down.  The area we need to work well to perform well at work turns off.

A Goldilocks zone

There is, however, an optimum level.  We need just the right amount of stress (eustress) and arousal – this is the middle of the picture, the top of the curve.

In general norepinephrine strengthens the circuits related to what we want to be alert or pay attention to. Dopamine keeps out distraction, it increases when we feel motivated, consequently guiding where we keep our focus. Dopamine is also essential to learning as it’s related to being open minded and curious.

So, for  optimal performance of this part of brain we need  a balance of alertness (norepinephrine) and interest (dopamine) whilst we are relaxed.

Alert, present and relaxed.  Mindful, aware and spacious.

This area also works best when we are spaciously with one task at a time.  This might be counter-intuitive especially in our cultural environment which readily encourages and celebrates its opposite.

Multi-tasking.

Unfortunately we don’t multi-task we ‘task switch’.  We may task switch quickly, very quickly in fact, but in terms of the prefrontal cortex we switch attention between tasks.

This actually leads to what Linda Stone calls “continuous partial attention”.  We are never able to bring our full resources to anything before we switch over to something else.    This rapid task switching also causes an increasing stress response – we move toward the right of the curve.

One study also found “that employees spent an average of 11 minutes on a project before being distracted (and) after an interruption….. (taking) 25 minutes to return to the original task, if they do at all” (Your Brain at Work, David Rock) it becomes clear that managing attention, arousal and distraction levels is critical to working well.

And as Maureen mentioned in the post "Happiness is not found on automatic pilot" a recent Harvard study by Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, found that people’s minds wandered 47 per cent of the time during an average day and that this wandering leads to increasing unhappiness.

So it’s a lose/lose situation. We don’t bring all of our resources because we constantly task switch, due to lack of applied attention and this mind wandering is driven by a lack of applied attention and all this actually causes us unhappiness.

By retraining attention through practising mindfulness, meditation and compassion we become increasingly present, un-distracted to the tasks and world at hand.  This process also regulates these two neurochemicals.  Mindfulness, meditation and compassion activate the body’s relaxation response, reducing the amount of these neurotransmitters if we are stressed –therefore moving us from right to the left of the curve.  But equally as the techniques involve a mindful, wakeful, curious, undistracted view of the present - it moves us from left to right in the picture.

We are alert yet relaxed, spaciously present to our tasks, work team and environment.

This is the sweet spot for this area of the brain and the sweet spot for working well.

The second book was by a French psychologist, Marie de Hennezel, called ‘Seize the day: how the dying teach us to live’. Amongst other things, de Hennezel writes about the importance of learning to embrace joy and all the small pleasures of the here-and-now.

I don’t know about you, but I often find it hard to think about my own mortality or the death of a loved one. It frightens and saddens me - and my instinct in the past has been pull away from the subject as quickly as possible.  I am also aware, however, that I do throw myself into work project after work project, and ‘stopping to smell the roses’ and appreciate the small pleasures in life often seems to take second place to that hurly-burly of constant doing. And that is despite now years of mindfulness practice.

Thankfully, help has arrived via one of those projects. I work as a mental health nurse and am currently studying the clinical applications of mindfulness on a course with a Scottish university. One of the approaches we have considered is ‘Acceptance and Commitment Therapy’ or ‘ACT’, developed relatively recently by Steven Hayes and colleagues. Within ACT, one of the many techniques on offer is to think not so much of immediate death but to imagine you are now aged seventy or eighty and reviewing your life so far.

At this point, it is important to note that ACT is also not concerned so much with goals as values. Values are both the way we wish to go about things and the consequences we desire from that in our lives. They include what kind of partner, parent, sibling, friend and colleague we wish to be, and therefore are intimately related to the quality of relationships we wish to have with others. Once we have determined what our values are we might then set concrete goals in order to live in ways which support our values more closely.

This theory has been inspiring for me in everyday life. Perhaps naturally enough, I want to be a loving, kind parent and partner, but knowing that those values do not always make their way into my everyday behaviour, I recently considered what I could do differently.  One thing stood out immediately: how to return home from work at the end of each day and actually be with my family. This may seem silly, but it can be hard to make the transition from sometimes frantic work activity to home life; on the one hand, I can be tired, grouchy and hungry, but on the other hand on a kind of ‘high’ from all that rushing about. And, taking inspiration from Maureen’s blog on 8^th February, occasionally I can even return home as if I was some kind of sabre-toothed tigre, prowling about being bossy and making demands of my family.

Rather than rush straight to the kitchen and start making tea, or demanding to know why the kitchen was a mess yet again, and therefore was going to get in the way of making tea, I began to pause mindfully, find and look everybody in the eye, say hello, and enquire about their day.

In my home that means joining a teenage step-daughter for a few minutes as she watches TV at the end of another hard day at school rather than shouting hello; stopping to pet our jet-black kitten, Zac, rather than stepping over him in the hallway; and pausing to check-in properly with my partner rather than launching straight into domestic chores. Re-connecting in this way means that whatever happens for the rest of our evening together, it is a more genuinely shared and loving process. Without it we can feel like we sometimes arrive home from our different worlds and stay separate- or at least, we might not be able to let go of the busyness in our heads and rest well. Simultaneously, arriving home mindfully seems to automatically give rise to appreciation, of both small pleasures and the opportunity to have the time that I do with loved ones. Life is, after all, impermanent.