Mindfulness boosts resilience, health and wellbeing, and helps us be more creative and able to embrace change and uncertainty, said Liz Hall.
Practising mindfulness helps us develop our attentional control, become more attuned to others, regulate our emotions, generate positive emotions and reframe/reappraise positively. It decreases cortisol, helps activate the parasympathetic nervous system, calming the autonomic nervous system, boosts the immune system, and improves a range of medical and psychological conditions, she said, sharing conclusions from a literature review, and interviews with around 50 coaches, coaching clients, neuroscientists and mindfulness experts.
Mindfulness also helps us embrace change and uncertainty, and be more creative, by supporting us, for example, to move to an ‘approach’ rather than an ‘avoidance’ state, staying with ‘not knowing’ and ‘letting go,’ being more open to possibility, suspending judgment/evaluation and ‘getting ourselves out of the way,’ she said.
Meanwhile, reasons why coaches use mindfulness with clients include helping them become more self-aware and calmer, suggests preliminary findings from the Mindfulness in Coaching survey carried out by Hall.
Seventy per cent of 156 coaches responding to the online survey said they used mindfulness to help clients become more self-aware; 59 per cent to help them be calmer/less anxious, and 55 per cent to manage stress, and be more centred. Coaches practise mindfulness themselves to help them ‘live more in the moment’ (74 per cent) and become more self-aware’
(73 per cent), according to the survey. Seventy-six per cent had no concerns about using mindfulness with clients, while 18 per cent agreed with the statement: “The client will think I’m ‘woolly/fluffy/unprofessional’.”
Hall will publish more survey findings in a forthcoming issue of Coaching at Work and in her book, Mindful Coaching, due out next April.
She presented some of her research at the 2nd European Mentoring and Coaching Research conference at Sheffield Hallam University on 3-4 July. Session participants engaged in a lively discussion about being and doing in mindfulness and coaching.
Coaching at Work, Volume 7, Issue 5