Dr. Rich Fernandez on Training Attention, Awareness, and Compassion at Work
The work I'm describing falls into three broad categories: attention-training, awareness training, and compassion. Each one holds quite a bit under its surface. For any single category you might find somewhere between half a dozen and a dozen distinct exercises or practices that feed into it.
I should add something, because anyone listening to this might think, "That sounds familiar, there's nothing new here." You'd be right. These practices go back at least 1,500 years, and they roughly approximate things that show up in Eastern traditions, whether Buddhist or Taoist or others, in very similar form. Take the idea of attention, awareness or insight, and compassion. In the Buddhist world those map closely onto shamatha, which is concentration practice, vipassana, which is insight practice, and metta, a kindness or loving-kindness exercise rooted in compassion.
What we've really done is take some of these old practices, this timeless body of wisdom and compassion work, and pair it with neuroscience. It turns out those practices light up different parts of the brain, and you can watch that happen on a scan. We actually show people brain scans of which regions activate during these kinds of exercises. Then, and this is the part that matters most, we have people do the exercises. They try them on at a very experiential level, and also at an interactive one, so they can talk with each other and with us as instructors about what the experience is actually like.
Erik asked where I thought all of this was headed, whether it might one day be something everyone does.
Yes, absolutely. To stay with the theme of this conference, the future of work, I believe mindfulness, resilience, and well-being will become norms in the workplace, or at the very least norms any workplace ought to be reaching for. Here's why. You can't get effective performance, you can't keep an engaged workforce, you can't build a strong culture, unless you're attending to the whole person and to these basic parts of what it means to show up each day inside these high-intensity, high-pressure, hyper-connected environments. Ignore that, withhold the support people need to move through those conditions well, and what you'll get instead is burnout, turnover, and all the costs that ride along with stress and anxiety.