Mindfulness and Performance at Cranfield: What are we doing and what do we know

Over the last year, I’ve introduced several hundred executives and postgraduate students to the concept of mindfulness, our capacity to pay attention to the present situation with the intention to remain open, curious, and flexible before judging the situation.

The response to these introductory mindfulness sessions has been overwhelmingly positive.

It seems that mindfulness is increasingly topical – and it appears to hit a nerve among many of us constantly trying to keep up with the increasing amount of information we need to process every day, the multiple demands we’re responding to (mostly simultaneously), and our ever-diminishing capability to focus and rely on what our gut instinct is telling us. (It tells me “slow down, sit still” quite often, though I do not always listen).

The momentum that this teaching activity has generated has led to an experimental mindfulness training programme that Andrey Pavlov and I are conducting with our current students, in conjunction with our collaborator Per Norrgren from inmindsight.co.uk.

Watch this space for what we are finding!

We are also organising an international “Mindfulness at Work” conference on 23rd September 2014 in collaboration with Juliet Adams of mindfulnet.org.

For Cranfield Praxis, Per Norrgren and I are co-facilitating a half-day Mindfulness event on 25th March 2014, as well as a two-day personal development workshop on Mindfulness for Higher Performance, to be run on 10-11th June 2014.

And finally, I’ve just uploaded a fact sheet on “Mindfulness and Performance” that I use for my teaching.

Enjoy and let me know what you think!

Jutta