Hello and welcome to Working It.
I’m Bethan Staton, deputy editor for the FT’s work and careers section, standing in for Isabel Berwick.
Today I am seeing the world in slightly brighter colours, after spending the weekend at my first meditation retreat 🧘🏻♀️. It was much as you’d expect: a big house with beautiful grounds, total silence, and many hours of sitting on a cushion, observing the rise and fall of my perceptions with 50 other people.
My mind was meant to be empty. But I confess I spent at least some of the time thinking about what mindfulness means for our working lives.
The idea is now a bit of a buzzword, part of a bigger focus on wellbeing. Whether with staff subscriptions to meditation apps, Amazon’s “AmaZen” meditation booth for employees or insight retreats for leadership, recent years have seen an uptick in interest in mindfulness.
This month, my colleagues have explored the dark side of intensive meditation in the FT’s investigative podcast The Retreat. But what about the relationship of mindfulness efforts to our everyday work experiences? Are ancient wisdom and office wellbeing really such natural bedfellows?
More on this below as well as this week’s recommended reads, the latest Working It podcast and a surprisingly good audio book.
Money and mindfulness
To find out more I popped into the London Meditation Project. It operates out of a magic-seeming spot just opposite Liverpool Street Station, where City workers have swapped the trading floor for a still mind (in a sackcloth-lined bedouin tent, no less) for nearly 20 years.
Teacher Catherine Powell says most come stressed from office pressures. They leave calmer, with a “fuller awareness of their thinking”.
The number of meditators at the centre fell after WFH became commonplace, Catherine reports. But attendees of a lunchtime session tell me their practice has helped them go from “depressed, anxious and unable to cope” to able to “deal with anything”, including thinking with “clarity and kindness” for colleagues they previously found intolerable 😶.
It sounds great, but I can’t help feeling cynical. Getting burned-out workers to seek inner equanimity, rather than challenging punishing work conditions, seems to me to let bad employers (and wider systems!) off the hook. Or to paraphrase Gallup’s Managing Director Jeremie K Brecheisen, it is like offering someone an ice pack while continuing to punch them in the face.
I’m not alone. In his book McMindfulness, Ronald Purser argues a multi-billion dollar industry has commodified meditation. Isn’t it missing the point to use these ancient insight practices, based on selfless, non-materialist wisdom, for self-improvement and productivity?
Buddhist abbot Roshi Joan Halifax, who founded the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, thinks about this a lot — and is also sceptical of “mindfulness washing”. Narrow, profit-oriented interests exact a real cost on human wellbeing, she tells me, and training the mind to service them better does nobody any good. Or more memorably: military leaders could very effectively employ meditation to make soldiers more lethal snipers, but that would profoundly misunderstand its purpose.
That’s only part of the story, however. Joan — to my slight surprise — is actually pretty relaxed about meditation being applied to less-than-pure ends (although presumably not contract killing).
It’s obvious to her that benefits such as reduced stress, improved concentration and more compassion should be enjoyed by as many people as possible. And insight is valuable whatever way you come at it.
Notable examples include the Search Inside Yourself programmes, which spun out of Google and apply mindfulness to leadership and business challenges as well as for government and nonprofit workers. At work, Joan says, it’s about our ability to “understand that our relationships with our colleagues, our peers, our direct reports, have to be characterised by care and stability”.
This generosity prompted me to reflect. This weekend, as I often unsuccessfully tried to focus on nothing but my breathing, I did notice that many of my unbidden thoughts were somewhat critical. I’ve often viewed my tendency to find inconsistencies and flaws as valuable journalistic cynicism. But from the serenity of lotus pose they looked less useful — and I saw the value in nurturing positives, rather than picking at problems.
If one of the main benefits of meditation is compassion and generosity, after all, then perhaps it would be a start to extend a little of that to corporate mindfulness too.
Have you had a transformative meditation experience? Has it improved your focus — or inspired you to ditch the grind? Or do you think we should be more mindful about mindfulness? Email me at bethan.staton@ft.com.
This week on the Working It podcast
This week on Working It we’re cracking open the conversations we need to have about grief, bereavement, loss — and all the things that humans normally find it very hard to talk about. Especially when they affect us at work. What role do managers have in supporting staff who are going through a profound loss in their personal lives? And what happens when external experts come in to guide teams through collective grief? This often happens when a leader has died suddenly.
I talk to Gabriella Braun, a specialist workplace consultant with expertise in dealing with grief at work — and that can include other sorts of grief — for example, for the death of an organisation. And Andy Langford from Cruse Bereavement Support gives some best practice ideas for managers wanting to help staff (or themselves). Isabel Berwick
Five top stories from the world of work
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Erik Brynjolfsson: ‘This could be the best decade in history — or the worst’: This interview on artificial intelligence ranges across many issues, but there is a lot to chew on for those interested in work, jobs and productivity. Readers will feel more informed, if not necessarily less concerned.
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Elon Musk’s record $55bn Tesla pay package voided by US judge: Today’s Musk news is the story that keeps on giving: come for the incomprehensible payout, stay for superstar CEO drama and dreams of life on Mars.
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Birth rates are falling in the Nordics. Are family friendly policies no longer enough? One curious puzzle at the heart of falling fertility rates is that interventions such as better childcare or parental leave don’t seem to make a huge difference, as Finnish demographer Anna Rotkirch explains here.
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‘I work in a frustration factory’: how to make workplaces run better: Is friction a good thing? This interview with management experts at Stanford University considers ways to make work more efficient — but also whether there are times when more streamlined systems are not so good after all.
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Bank of America warns return to office laggards with ‘letters of education’: Tensions over how often we can work from home haven’t gone away. Employment experts say return to office enforcement action from BoA is likely to be copied by other banks.
One more thing . . .
I’ve decided this year to listen to more audiobooks — a great way to get in non-fiction on the way to work. Right now, I’m listening to Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, a through-the-looking-glass journey into the author’s experience of being chronically mistaken for Naomi Wolf, author of feminist classic The Beauty Myth, who has since found notoriety for anti-vax conspiracy theories online.
Honestly, I was doubtful the concept could make an entire book, but it has everything. Sucked into a mirror world of “Other Naomi”, Klein is forced to contemplate it from an unsettlingly intimate perspective. Her resulting explorations range from right-wing radicalisation to personal branding to state authoritarianism, with analysis looking in, as well as out.
It’s a madcap, thought-provoking adventure, which has given me a taste for the uncanny world of doppelganger writing. I’m looking forward to following it with Deborah Levy’s novel August Blue, another title published last year about double lives.
A word from the Working It community
Last week’s newsletter about “wintering” — taking time out to rest and reflect, especially in the winter months — went a little bit viral (thank you, Google search) and sparked several readers to share their own experiences, writes Isabel Berwick. This was my favourite, a fantastic personal account from Harsha Harjani:
“I loved reading your piece today on wintering. What a wonderful way to describe that period of time we all need to reset our careers, rethink or just rest.
“I wanted to share my story. I’ve been in the communications profession for about 20-plus years, most of it in Hong Kong. I decided that work/life balance and the culture in that city just wasn’t for me anymore and I decided to move countries. I am a British citizen so moving to the UK was a no-brainer. I bought myself a one-way ticket to the UK, rented a place in London, and began a job search.
“I ended up in various roles which just did not fit, and in between I had a year of so-called ‘unemployment’, but how much I grew into myself in that year. Yes it might have felt painful to be rejected . . . but I had all that time to grow, to take long walks, to get to know myself, my blind spots, my limiting beliefs, my habitual responses to situations . . . it allowed me time to literally rewire my brain . . . and I not only then found a job I love, but also found love in a partner and we are now married with a baby. That ‘wintering’ period is what helped new sprouts to grow.”
Read the full article here