After several years of meditating every day, reading countless mindfulness books and watching hours and hours of the world's greatest teachers I began to feel that I had a sense of not just what was working really well for me, but what might work in the workplace. As a full time IBMer since 1992, I knew that the best workplace to prove this in would be my own.
Along with a few colleagues, I was already regularly holding Monday morning mindfulness sessions, a free-to-all 15min Webex that anyone could join (anonymously if they liked). These sessions were very popular and involved your host guiding you through a short meditation practice to kickstart your week.
Alongside this, my presentations on mindfulness continued - at different department meetings initially, then onto main stage events and European growth days for IBM's various business units. I had the pleasure of presenting to colleagues in different parts of the business, from the deeply technical people in IBM's Winchester laboratory to sales teams, newly hired graduates, HR groups, marketing and senior leadership teams. Whilst I tailored my presentations to make them most appropriate for each audience, the underlying principles and sentiment remained constant. I also often presented to people who hadn't elected to listen to a talk on mindfulness. This is an interesting challenge. I found out fairly quickly that my presentations went down best with any audience if they went along the lines of 'Hi, I'm Steve and I'm here to talk about mindfulness. I appreciate this might not be a topic for everyone so I'm not here to tell you that you should start meditating, or even to ask you to believe anything I say today, but if you're interested I'd love to share my personal journey with you of how I went from major cynic to regular meditator. I'd love to share some true stories with you and explain how mindfulness is fundamentally transforming my life for the better'.
At this time I also realised that whilst there were pockets of IBMers from literally all over the globe quietly and diligently sharing their mindfulness practice with others, we were lacking an event that brought us all together. So in 2017 I created, organised and hosted IBM's first ever 'Mindfulness@IBM' global summit. With no advertising other than word of mouth, this online event attracted an audience of hundreds of people a day from over 30 countries. It spanned the entire week. Each day I lined up a new guest to interview who would provide insight and wisdom during our 60 or 120 minute livestream. I interviewed IBM executives as well as mindfulness authors, teachers and leaders from around the world. It was a great success, forging a stronger bond between the community as well as reaching a wider audience of interested colleagues.
In 2018 when I hosted our second global summit attendees increased to over 1,000 people a day from over 40 countries. IBMers are encouraged to track their continual learning and development via an initiative called 'Think40'. I calculated that in just one week my Mindfulness@IBM summit had delivered the following training globally:
We now had a thriving mindfulness community that had been built from the bottom up, and there were many great things happening, not just in the UK where I was based, but the world over. Yet I still felt there was one major thing missing.
It wasn't just me that felt that. After many presentations people would ask me 'That was really interesting.... but what next? Where do I go from here?'. Of course I could recommend books, apps, and other forms of self-study. I could recommend regular practice groups or drop-in sessions. But what I really wanted to say to them was 'Oh I'm so glad you asked. We have this fantastic mindfulness course from the University of Oxford. It's been taught in our Houses of Parliament, to students at the University and throughout workplaces in London and beyond. It's deeply rooted in science but beautifully secular and mainstream, we offer it to IBMers, would you like to enrol?'. So this became my mission.
I started to research the best places in the UK to train to teach mindfulness. Quite quickly I'd narrowed my selection down to a list of one, the University of Oxford's Mindfulness Centre. Recognised globally as a centre of competence for its teaching of various mindfulness programmes, I made it my intention to immerse myself in what they had to offer and to learn from some of the very best mindfulness teachers in the world. It would also fulfil a lifelong dream of being able to tell people the deliberately vague white lie that that I had indeed 'studied at Oxford University'.
My initial teacher training followed the MBCT pathway. Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) is a clinically (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) approved mindfulness course that has been proven to be particularly effective for people suffering repeated episodes of serious depression. After a year or so studying MBCT I felt that whilst this was undoubtedly powerful it probably wasn't the best fit for me. I felt I would be better suited to focusing on the teaching of mindfulness specifically in the workplace. There was where my experience lay and where I felt I could teach this with the authenticity it warranted.
And so began more regular visits to the incredible St Hugh's College, Oxford (above), for masterclasses on the various principles of teaching mindfulness in the workplace. The series involved the following classes which covered the varying topics and specialities one needs to fully understand in order to deliver this training in a non-clinical setting:
Nurturing Workplace Cultures for People and Performance
Positioning Mindfulness in the Workplace
Teaching Methods for Mindfulness in the Workplace
Embedding Mindfulness in the Workplace
Mindfulness for Leaders
Probably my most enjoyable training at St Hugh's was spending an additional weekend with the great Chris Cullen. Chris runs the programmes of mindfulness courses & classes in UK Parliament and is just the most insightful & engaging teacher. You can't help but listen to him intently when he talks, his softly spoken delivery is eloquent and powerful, his words resonate deeply with something inside of you. Even at Oxford, rarely had I met a teacher who so embodied mindfulness that I just 'felt it' as he taught. What made him stand out for me so particularly was that I sensed he had the humility, experience and straightforwardness that a great teacher requires. There was a lack of ego, an empathy. There was a willingness to pass on all he knew to better those he was teaching. He had a flow that was palpable. Put simply he embodied mindfulness.
I spent that weekend on campus with people from all over the world, meeting folks from Singapore, Canada, Portugal, Poland and even Australia (yes someone had flown in for this and a subsequent week-long summer school course.... and I thought that my 5 hour return journey was making an effort!). As I sat listening to Chris teach us the best practices for imparting the 'Finding Peace in a Frantic World' curriculum I felt like I was in the right place. Although this was hard work I wasn't swimming against the tide. The hard work and extra curricular reading that I was doing on top of my day job didn't feel onerous or even like work at all. I returned to IBM with renewed vigour and conviction.
After almost three decades in a company you get to know it really well. I'd worked with thousands of different people over the years, from apprentices to C-suite executives. My work with clients had given me experience of a wide variety of industries, from banking and advertising to healthcare, retail, aviation and government. I had a strong sense that this course would really be a great fit for not just for IBM but for many of our clients, but as the saying goes you can 'only eat an elephant one bite at a time' so I stayed focused on IBM. I emailed Sharon Hadley, CEO at the Oxford Mindfulness Centre.
Sharon and I had got to know each other over the years, but we'd never talked about a partnership between IBM and the University of Oxford's Mindfulness Centre. During our first Zoom call I reassured her of my intention to either 'do this properly or not at all'. We discussed what a partnership might look like and after Sharon told me she'd be willing to consider partnering with us I reached out to a Senior HR Leader at IBM. Sallyanne Oettinger and I had met a few months prior to this initial Zoom call. As an executive with responsibilities for resilience and wellbeing she was keen to explore how IBM could implement a world-class mindfulness programme and had heard my name. She was curious to see what my opinion was.
I said to Sallyanne that in my opinion IBM was doing some great things when it came to mindfulness but there was one thing missing. We had some wonderful keynote speakers, great guided sessions, an active community and an annual global summit, we had a thriving grass roots movement that was steadily attracting more members. However in my opinion we didn't have a structured 8-week course that could literally change people's lives (and I don't use that expression lightly). What we needed to offer our staff, I thought, was Finding Peace in a Frantic World. Having the direct experience of this course as a student and a trained teacher, I felt that this ticked all of our boxes.
I explained to Sallyanne that the course, which follows the book of the same name, had already been tried and tested elsewhere. It offers students the chance to come together to learn, in manageable chunks, the art of meditation, the science of mindfulness and the power of regular practise. It forms a safe community. As the weeks progress a camaraderie and bond starts to forge (even during live-virtual classes). By the end of the 8 weeks participants have had enough training and practise to know experientially what mindfulness means to them. Therein lies its beauty, a chance to try this stuff 'properly' and see what affect it has on your life. Forget the theory, amazing science and best-selling books for a moment, this is chance for you to simply find out if it works for you or not.
A little about the course...
Students on the course purchase the book and prior to week 1 read the first four chapters. These give a gentle, understandable introduction to mindfulness and are written in such mainstream language that you can't help but comprehend them. There's no affiliation to religion, and you're not asked to 'trust in' or 'believe' anything. There's no philosophising, just an invitation for you to not just understand the concepts, but to really try this and see what's true for you.
Each live-virtual (or face-to-face) lesson is made up of 90 mins of teaching, discussion, reflection and practise. There's space to breathe, to take this at your own pace and to observe the fascinating and often profound changes that take place. You are your 'own laboratory' and there's an encouragement to try not compare yourself either with how the rest of the class seem to be doing or with your idea of how much progress you think you should've made by now. This course is for you. At your own pace. No strict milestones to be met here.
Every week builds gently and sustainably on the previous weeks, inviting you to try an array of meditation and mindfulness practices. By week 7 you will have practised meditating while sitting, lying down or moving. Whilst washing the dishes or putting the rubbish out. You'll have practised portable meditations that can be done anywhere at any time, and you'l have explored new ways of working with the difficult thoughts and emotions that will inevitably arise in our lives from time to time. Contrary to popular opinion, mindfulness isn't anaesthetising yourself to life or cocooning yourself in an artificial blissful bubble. Nor is it about positively thinking your way out of everything or pretending that a Pollyanna state is real for you.
You'll come to realise that practising mindfulness and the rest of your day don't have to be two separate things. With practise they can start to merge, beautifully and seamlessly. You'll realise more deeply that we are what we practice and that we're always practising something. You'll start to gently 'weave your mindfulness parachute' and feel more resilient. You'll practise when you're not so challenged by life, so that when that 4am anxiety comes knocking you'll know how to deal with it skilfully and return to sleep.
You might realise more fundamentally that you only have your mind, that it's the basis of everything you experience. You may sense that it is 'you' in each moment and so to understand it more deeply might literally be the most important thing you ever learn to do. It is certainly the most important thing I've ever learned in my life.
Sallyanne was excited at the sound of this course and asked that I introduce her to Sharon. Very soon there was talk of a partnership between the Oxford Mindfulness Centre and IBM, but what would that look like and how would it work?
We started out with the intention that whilst we wanted to partner and collaborate with Oxford, we also wanted to ultimately become more self-sufficient when it came to teaching mindfulness at IBM. We therefore set about drawing up a series of objectives:
Initially using Oxford Mindfulness Centre's trainers, in parallel we wanted to nominate one or more experienced mindfulness practitioners at IBM to follow the OMC's teacher training pathway to become certified to teach Finding Peace in Frantic World. Offering this training 'in house' whilst guided by the OMC was something we were keen to explore
Our aim was to make this training available to any IBMer globally who wanted it
We also wanted to work with the OMC to offer an introductory mindfulness course for young people (https://www.oxfordmindfulness.org/news/the-university-of-oxford-mindfulness-centre-partners-with-ibm/)
What were the results?
Of course the million dollar question was would it work as I expected. There was only way to find out and in May 2020 I invited a group of interested colleagues to enrol in our first ever Finding Peace in a Frantic World course. Piloting this in the midst of a global pandemic and unprecedented global stress was not what I had planned, but maybe a backdrop of COVID-19 would provide us with a wonderful opportunity?
Click here to see the results of this pilot and subsequent courses, along with some testimonials...
Comments