Inspired Project Teams

Audio: Practice Mindfulness [Time - 22:10, File Size - 20.8 MB]

[Acknowledgement:  The main inspiration for this post comes from various interviews and articles featuring Jon Kabat-Zinn, Professor of Medicine Emeritus and founding director of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.  Kabat-Zinn started his career as a scientist at MIT and it is with this scientific perspective (along with his clinical research to support many of his positions) that he shares his thoughts on the power of mindfulness. He teaches mindfulness meditation as a technique to help people cope with stress, anxiety, pain and illness. You can check out the links below for more about Jon and his work.]

In this post I hope to convince you of the power of mindfulness — the practice of bringing your full awareness into the present moment. This is very different from that “kinda sorta” awareness that you have while you are attending a meeting, firing off a text message, and eating lunch all at the same time. And it is different from the awareness you experience within a conversation while you are trying to stifle clever or fearful or angry or resentful thoughts that are clamoring for your attention. And it is different from the awareness you experience when sitting alone at your desk, working to solve a problem while thoughts of past difficulties and future fears challenge your concentration. Instead, it is a cleaner, simpler kind of awareness. It is simply being fully present, with all your attention. It is, in the words of Jon Kabat-Zinn, “paying attention, on purpose, to the present moment, without judgment.” This is mindfulness.

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Announcement: Below are links to the final four of 12 Inspired Project Teams posts to be made available in MP3 (audio podcast) versions. Now all 12 of my previous online text posts are available as audios.

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Audio:  Embrace the Work Itself [Time - 4:08, File Size - 3.8 MB]

Projects are the most goal-oriented of human endeavors. And if you spend most of your life working on projects, as so many of our project team members do, you can develop an uneasy, ever-present sense that you are never really finished. There’s a continual nagging feeling that you’ve not completed your work because the next goal is endlessly popping up in front of you, demanding your attention.

So where’s the joy in the work itself? What about the intrinsic value of our chosen profession? The beauty and fascination of the field itself? What about the practice of our profession?

Consider this from George Leonard’s Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment (my  bold added for emphasis):

“Goals and contingencies… are important. But they exist in the future and the past, beyond the pale of the sensory realm. Practice, the path of mastery, exists only in the present. You can see it, hear it, smell it, feel it. To love the plateau is to love the eternal now, to enjoy the inevitable spurts of progress and the fruits of accomplishment, then serenely to accept the new plateau that waits just beyond them. To love the plateau is to love what is most essential and enduring…”

Greer’s Challenges…

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Audio:  Today… Be Here, Now [Time - 5:10, File Size - 4.8 MB]

“Never confuse yourself by visions of an entire lifetime at once…remember that it is not the weight of the future or the past that is pressing upon you, but ever that of the present alone… the passing minute is every man’s equal possession, but what has once gone by is not ours.” – Marcus Aurelius in Meditations

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So… Is your project team living in the now? Or are they torturing themselves by ruminating over past difficulties or imagining future troubles?

Greer’s Challenges…

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