Mindfulness and resilience

Mindfulness

There is now an enormous amount of evidence for the effectiveness of mindfulness for improving focus, concentration, decision making and self-management. It can also help increase emotional intelligence which in turn helps build our motivation, empathy and social skills, all of which are key to both team work and leadership capability.

Mindfulness has become mainstream in recent years but its practice goes back over 2000 years. It is incredibly simple as a concept: it involves paying attention to the present moment, on purpose and without judgement. Neuroscience is now helping us understand how this practice can deliver such powerful results by actually changing our brains. Specifically some of the impacts of the practice are to:

• Reduce the amygdala, which is effectively the often overactive smoke alarm at the centre of the brain's fight/flight threat system
• Increase grey matter in the hippocampus, associated with learning and memory
• Thicken the pre-frontal cortex which is the most recently evolved part of our brain, responsible for executive functions and considered judgements
• Reduce cortical thinning due to ageing in pre-frontal areas
• Increase activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, which is responsible for self-regulation and so both helps focus and reduces the overactivity of the fight/flight system.
• Increase activity in left-frontal regions associated with lifting mood

Overall, the practice increases our ability to take a step back from our thoughts and feelings, enabling us to take a more considered, observational standpoint from which we can choose how to respond to a situation, rather than automatically reacting to it.

These trainings can be delivered in 5 or 8 week courses for groups of up to 20. The commitment required of delegates is one hour, one day a week for the duration of the course, plus some home practice for which the materials are provided.

Resilience

This half day course provides an introduction to psychology and neuroscience to help delegates understand and build resilience. It is both informative and practical and includes:

• Defining and redefining stress and stress management
• Identifying and playing to strengths
• Exploring values and intrinsic motivation as self-support
• Understanding basic brain systems and how they can determine our reactions and interactions
• How mindfulness can help change our reactive brains 

This training is also very well suited to being delivered in three separate, one hour modules which can fit into a "lunch and learn" format.  

Both of these programmes are delivered in-house and are further tailored to your specific requirements so please do contact me for further details.