A 2010 study of 2,250 adults by two Harvard University psychologists found that people’s minds wander an astounding 47 per cent of the time. It concluded that “a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.”
Wandering minds also compromise the quality of people’s work. “High-quality attention is the productive basis for knowledge workers, and we do very little to cultivate that essential resource,” says Jeremy Hunter, a professor at the Peter F. Drucker School of Management in Los Angeles. Hunter is one of the leading teachers of mindfulness in the workplace, with clients like Toyota, Bank of America and Starbucks. “As a society, we have fundamentally ignored the value of attention.
“Mindfulness is a simple practice to cultivate attention,” he adds. “It teaches us to skilfully manage the forces that exist inside all of us. Mindfulness raises awareness of what’s going on inside of you, so you can better deal with what’s going on outside you. It’s the education we never got.”
With practice, we change the neural pathways in our brain. Scientists used to think our brains became hard-wired early in life. Now we know our brains change and develop all our lives in response to how we think, a phenomenon called neuroplasticity.
Hunter says business is still at an early stage in recognizing the value of attention and mindfulness training. However, “the conversation is different now than it was 10 years ago. Then, it was not a foregone conclusion that managing yourself was important. Today, people are more open and heads readily nod.” He adds that “it took about 60 years for the West to optimize industrial work. After that we had enormous productivity gains. We’re about 40 years into a widespread knowledge economy.”
Hunter asserts that mindfulness can provide the foundation for both huge productivity gains for employers and a more socially responsible form of capitalism.