I Used These 14 ‘Mindfulness In Work’ Tips To Get Promoted And Paid More

We all want to do well in our careers. Whether this is working for someone else, or working for yourself, it sometimes feels like the harder you work the less seems to get accomplished.

In fact, research shows that 83% of Americans suffer stress levels that negatively impact their work and health.

Fortunately, continued research into mindfulness in work shows a number of benefits that help you become more productive and successful, and improve the general quality of your life.

So in this post, I’ll share with you the 14 mindfulness in the workplace tips that I have tried and tested that have helped me double my salary in the last two years, while improving my job satisfaction, and it could do the same for you.

What is mindfulness?

At the heart of mindfulness is the ability to pay attention to the present moment. Mindfulness isn’t just about being fully present when you meditate, it’s about consciously being aware when your mind is wandering and bringing your attention back to the task at hand.

An untrained mind will default to ruminating about the past and thinking (and worrying) about future events. And it’s a common misconception that you should clear your mind. Mindfulness is about being aware of what you are currently doing and observing everything that is happening without judgment. As the famous Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh put it:

“The essential thing is not to let any feeling or thought arise without recognizing it in mindfulness, like a palace guard who is aware of every face that passes through the front corridor.”

– The Miracle of mindfulness

You can read more about the benefits of mindfulness here.

How to practice mindfulness in the workplace

1. Practice mindfulness before you even get to work

If there is one thing that you take away from this post, it’s this: Mindful meditation after you wake up. My exact routine nearly every morning includes at least 10 minutes of mindful meditation practice.

I am a hybrid worker, so I am fortunate to have both the experience of working from home and working in the office. This is what a typical morning looks like for me:

• Wake up at the same time whether I’m working from home or the office (This is great for your sleep pattern
• Shower (you can do this mindfully by keeping your attention on the act of showering – but to be honest, I only do this occasionally if I am anxious about the day ahead)
• Brush my teeth with mindfulness. This is something I try to do each day. I used to watch the news on my phone, but I’ve swapped this out to be as tech-free as I can in the mornings – and it’s made a difference. All you do is focus your attention on the brush against your teeth, and if your mind wanders, just bring your attention back to your brushing.
• Mindful meditation. After brushing my teeth, if I am working from home, I sit on my trusty meditation cushion and set a silent timer on my watch for at least 10 minutes (usually about 15). On days when I have big projects, it can be tough, but it’s worth it. If I do go into the office, I actually meditate on the train. Most people think I am napping on the way to work, I don’t suggest sitting in a full lotus with your hands in a prayer position, especially on London underground.
• Make coffee mindfully. If I work from home, this is my favorite part of the day. When I was promoted to my previous job, I treated myself to a barista-style coffee machine (The Breville Barista Pro, and I love it! Check the price on Amazon here). Logging on from home takes a little while – so I spend this time focusing on making my coffee, enjoying the sound of the milk frothing, the smell and the taste of the coffee, and the feel of the mug in my hand. It always puts me in a good and centered frame of mind doing this. If it’s an office day, I try to drink my first coffee mindfully.

Related: How Being Mindful While Making Coffee Can Change Your Life

The more you can do to be mindful in the morning sets you up to be mindful throughout the day.

2. Pick the one thing you need to do with mindfulness

There’s research to show that in business productivity, you can only really effectively work on 1 to 3 tasks with a strong focus, and we have a maximum window of four hours to work on important tasks. So pick one task to do mindfully.

Even on a busy day pick when you have lots of different tasks popping up like daisies, pick one thing – even if it’s just writing an email – to practice mindfulness.

3. Respond mindfully not react mindlessly

On some days you might need the skills of a Zen master to halt the rage you feel when things don’t seem to be going your way, but mindfulness can help. Being emotional in the workplace usually leads to poor decisions and friction with colleagues.

So before you become hijacked by your emotions, try to S.T.O.P.

If you are experiencing a particularly stressful moment, try the following:

• Stop. Take a momentary pause, no matter what you’re doing, and step away.
• Take a deep breath. Focus on where you feel your breath and do this until you bring your mind to the present moment.
• Observe. Just notice what is happening, whether it’s good or bad, internal or external. Just notice it.
• Proceed. Giving yourself a pause should give you the opportunity to calm your nerves, center your mind, and return back to your task with a more productive mind.

4. Use mindful walking at every opportunity

Being mindful at work can be something that you want to keep to yourself. My covert superpower is mindful walking. Mindful walking is exactly what it sounds like, being mindful about walking. That means noticing what you feel with each step, focusing solely on those sensations, and if your mind wanders, bringing it back to sensations of your body as you walk.

Mindful walking does have to be a long intense walk, I usually do it either by walking to the tea station at work or refilling my water bottle. A minute’s walk is usually enough to give your mind that pause and reset you need.

5. Focus on one thing at a time

Only 2.5% of people can actually multi-task. So unless you are one of these magical beings, research has shown that doing one thing at a time is more productive than trying to ‘multi-task’. Mindfulness in the workplace has a lot of similarities with business productivity tips, and when we only focus on one task we are more mindful and more productive.

6. Have lunch and a break on your lunch break

One study found that 82% of workers in the UK skip taking lunch, while another study found that 20% eat at their desks and 13% seldom take a lunch break at all. Office lunch breaks can sometimes become sudo-meetings with some food. So make an effort to enjoy your lunch, giving your full awareness to eating. That means putting away your phone, not thinking about what you have to do when you get back to your desk, and just focusing on your mental health.

7. Find short opportunities to be mindful

Don’t have to close your eyes and meditate in the middle of your workplace to be mindful. Mindfulness in the workplace is all about finding those opportunities to focus and be present.

Being mindful at work doesn’t have prolonged or complicated, any opportunity you can find to focus on the moment and practice being in the present can help you create a more focused mind.

8. Set a silent reminder

The moment my day starts, I set a silent alarm for 2 hours. You should be taking breaks more often, but I’ve found this to be the most consistent time to remind me to stop and take a break. The break is usually a couple of deep breaths and an opportunity to check in with how I am feeling.

Don’t have a smartwatch, then set an alert in your outlook calendar. Part of mindfulness training is improving your awareness of yourself and your surrounding throughout the day. To avoid becoming overwhelmed, the brain will only focus its attention on a particular area. In the workplace, this is usually what you’re working on, so setting a reminder is a good way to bring awareness to how your body and mind are feeling.

9. Mindfully work slower to get more done

It sounds counterintuitive, but many of us are busy, either so we feel more valued as a member of the team, or so we feel like our work is validated to ourselves. But studies show that people who take time to slow down and even occasionally stop are generally more productive.

So try to be more self-aware when your stress levels spike and instead of speeding up to get more work done, instead slow down or even stop.

Something that would make me ‘busy’ first thing was all the communication channels. In my day-to-day work we use, MS Outlook for emails, MS Teams for chats with certain departments, Slack for other departments in the organization, and then several Whatsapp groups for social messages.

I would try to answer everything urgently at the same time, but since I’ve started to use mindfulness in the workplace, I spend thirty minutes in the morning, just organizing the messages; deleting spam and things that don’t need my attention, marking ones I need to respond today, and marking those that can be done when I have time. It sounds like a general productivity best practice, but when done mindfully you’re not frustrated by the continued notifications coming in during that time.

10. See stress as a signal, not a state

If you’ve ever been on a diet and tried to convince yourself that eating a rice cake is actually a delicious eclair, then you’re already familiar with the practice of mindfully changing your perception.

A study of 30,000 people at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, found participants that who didn’t perceive stress as bad would actually live longer!

One of the suggested exercises was to recognize when you are feeling stressed, and instead of seeing it as a negative emotion, see it as a positive sign that it’s time for you to stop and try some mindfulness exercises.

11. Practice gratitude

If you find yourself being a glass-half-empty kind of person, don’t worry, it’s natural.

Evolution has meant that our brain has a ‘negative bias‘, so we are more likely to think about what’s gone wrong and be critical of everything we do.

Being in a job that you don’t enjoy can make that worse and create a destructive cycle where the more you hate and complain about your job, the fewer opportunities you create to make things better. The antidote to negative thought is gratitude.

Instead of hating your job, recognize and be grateful that you have a job. Perhaps you have a terrible manager, then maybe be grateful that you have good relationships with some of your colleagues. The mindfulness practice of gratitude.

I have to credit my wife for helping and supporting me with this practice. Each day we start by sharing three things we are grateful for. Training your brain to recognize what’s going well in your life gives you a positive mindset, and employers are more likely to employ people with a positive mindset.

12. Accept things without judgment

Acceptance is one of the fundamentals of mindfulness and it works on different levels. The first is the acceptance of situations.

When we get angry or frustrated about something, it’s because we’re comparing what we expected or wanted to happen to what has actually happened. But being angry or frustrated doesn’t help the situation, especially in the workplace.

Acceptance doesn’t mean being passive. In fact, being angry and denying what has happened leads to less actually being done. Once we expect what has happened, you can calmly move things forward.

The second type of acceptance is self-acceptance. Being aware of both what you’re good at and what you need to work on, stops exhausting self-criticism and helps you work towards a better you.

13. Be friends with fear

The one thing that had the largest impact on my career was overcoming my fear of failure. I spent years watching people equally as good as me and sometimes less get promoted. The thing holding me back was my fear that I would fail. How could I get a promotion when I wasn’t even applying for jobs?

The more you practice mindfulness, the better you become at being the observer of your thoughts. Your brain starts to notice these thoughts and rationally understand them.

Another tip is to write down on a page something that’s on your mind and then on two columns write down on one side what you’re afraid of, and on the other side what would life look like if everything went perfectly.

If you need more help, try my ‘Dealing With Dread’ guided meditation.

14. See things with a beginner’s mind

The last on the list is something I believe has always been part of my skill set. At school, it frustrated the hell out of my teachers, and in my early career, it frustrated my peers why I just didn’t do things like everything else.

Mindfulness in the workplace has helped me realize that asking “why?” about everything, as if it’s the first time you’ve seen it, is something that is desperately needed in many organizations.

Two years ago I write a ‘beginner’s guide’ for my organization, what my lead thought was a guide for beginners was actually an attempt to look at processes with a beginner’s mind.

While I wrote the guide, I was asking the most experienced of the team two questions: why do we do this, and do they think there’s a better way?

In most cases, the ‘why’ we did things was usually because ‘that’s how they were told to do it’ and how things had always been.

When you’re fully present, you start to see things with a fresh perspective that you probably wouldn’t have noticed before.

Some tips to help with mindfulness in the workplace

• There’s a growing popularity of mindfulness at work, check if your organization has a mindfulness program, or maybe if there are any employee-led mindfulness groups.
• If there aren’t any mindfulness programs see if anyone would be interested in joining mindfulness meditation breaks.

The takeaway

Mindfulness at work is a great way to reduce stress, become better at being focused, and ultimately improve your performance. And it makes you feel better too. Whether you’re management or an employee any of these practices can give you the tools you need to succeed in the workplace.

Do you have any other suggestions? Let me know in the comments.