The article is contributed by Marut Bhardwaj – Country Head, Potential Project.
Compassion is the willingness to improve the lives of others around you.
Rather than merely providing the bare necessities to keep employees happy and productive so that the company can make more money, a compassionate leader wants to help them thrive. In addition to having a long-term vision, compassionate leadership requires wisdom in directing the organization towards a human way of working and taking necessary initiatives to guarantee employee well-being in the present moment.
Traditional business KPIs are no longer enough in an era of increasing healthcare awareness. India’s working-age population is rapidly approaching 500 million people. Each of these workers will expect that their employer will cover the majority of the costs of their own and their families’ medical care. What was formerly considered a nice-to-have perk by certain companies is now considered a must-have.
Since good healthcare is employees’ need, giving appropriate attention to employees’ physical and mental health, therefore, is a big part of compassionate leadership. Especially in this era, where yet another wave of the pandemic has clocked in, leaders have a critical role in helping their employees navigate the turbulence of COVID-19.
The importance of employee healthcare for organizations
Your employees’ health and well-being is not just helpful to them; it generates an efficient and productive working environment that benefits your organisation at large.
Health-related absenteeism and rising healthcare expenditures provide a persistent problem to companies. Employers in the United States, where health benefits are prevalent, pay $575 billion a year in health care expenditures due to poor employee health. Employee absenteeism, chronic ailments that limit production and workers’ compensation are all contributors to this expense.
To be clear, these absences are not solely a result of disease. Poor physical and mental health can lead to a host of problems, including high levels of stress and burnout, as well as a lack of motivation and enthusiasm on the part of employees. In 2019, the World Health Organization predicted that between 2012 and 2030, mental health disorders in India will cost the country a whopping $1.03 trillion in economic losses.
Thus, employee health and productivity are linked: Healthier minds and bodies lead to greater levels of optimism, originality, and drive. Care for your workers means:
Employees who feel cared for and valued
Increased motivation and fulfilment in the work place
What measures can leaders take to improve employee health
After the outbreak of the pandemic, many leaders have started including additional advantages at the workplace, such as primary healthcare, regular testing and wellness programmes. Leaders have realised that small changes can go a long way toward making the workplace a healthy and uplifting place to work. Here are some more measures they can employ in pursuit of the same goal:
Encouraging your staff to participate in health and wellness initiatives.
All facets of an employee’s health are considered in an integrated wellness programme, which can include PTO, focus workshops, yoga sessions. These programmes encompass physical, mental, as well as emotional health of the employees. Providing annual employee health screening tests to make your employees aware of underlying health issues and help them avoid larger health problems in the future is also a part of these initiatives.
Such initiatives can lead to an 80% enhancement in organisational performance if done correctly. Though these initiatives may appear more complex to integrate into the workplace, the expense of unhealthy personnel is ultimately a greater problem.
Build a culture of health
Encourage your employees to exercise on a regular basis. Motivate them to join jogging clubs, gain access to gyms and other facilities, or just make little daily decisions that benefit their health, such as taking the stairs instead of the elevator.
Provide enough room for your employees to breathe and be present. Access to natural light, comfortable office seats, and ergonomic workstations all help to keep your staff engaged and healthy.
Leaders must create a work environment that promotes mental health through compassionate leadership, frequent breaks, one-on-one conversations, and other such measures.
Incorporate mindfulness into your wellness programmes
When it comes to a more comprehensive approach to your company’s employee health programme, mindfulness is a good place to begin.
Despite the fact that mindfulness isn’t difficult to develop or practise, it might be tough for novices to know where to begin. An ideal starting point is a company-sponsored course in mindfulness, meditation, or yoga.
It is possible to practise mindfulness in any setting, including a cubicle, a desk, or even a conference room. Leaders can also engage workers by including some mindfulness exercises into their next meeting or outing or directing them into some easy breathing exercises or yoga positions at the end or beginning of a meeting to help them focus.
Conclusion
It’s common for firms and organisations to be unsure of how to identify and cultivate a compassionate leadership style and workplace culture. By focusing on their employees’ most basic need – good health – they can kickstart the transformation to a compassionate workplace.
This article is contributed by Ms. Deepti Sehgal, Founder, Svarasya.
When you start the journey of entrepreneurship, apart from having all the knowledge related to business, one also needs some other things as well, mental peace is amongst one of them, through which difficult decision can be made. One needs to have that while embarking on this journey. To understand and achieve that one needs to learn about spirituality.
Steve Jobs, a visionary and the co-founder and CEO of Apple Inc. is seen as an ideal in the entrepreneurial world. However, more than Steve’s entrepreneurial journey, his love, and the quest for spirituality seek a bigger share of attention. The world knows how deeply he was inspired by the ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’ by Paramahansa Yogananda, so much so, that his last message for the world stated ‘Actualize Yourself‘!’ Steve Jobs is a perfect example of bringing in the power of spirituality and intuition in the business for indomitable success. In this article, we will learn about how spirituality can help in your entrepreneurial journey. So, let’s get started.
Spirituality & Entrepreneurship
Most often behind a successful business, there is a vision so great and powerful, to manifest the non-existent and unseen in the physical world. The vision and courage of a visionary to build a successful business is often a journey of manifestation of one’s own beliefs and unshakable trust in something that has the power to manifest.
The subtle energy or that spiritual angle in a successful business is often overlooked in the midst of tangible parameters that define the success of a business. However, spirituality makes its presence felt in form of a fabric of intuition or a strong belief or a vision or a strong value system of the visionary knitted in a successful business model, which is an inherently deep-rooted aspect of one’s spiritual connection. Thus, spirituality and entrepreneurship often are two sides of the same coin with entrepreneurship leading the game and spirituality backing it with a subtle force to manifest.
On the material front, entrepreneurship can be a turbulent journey of success and failure, learnings and experiences and of personal growth, teaching bigger lessons of life. While sailing through the journey of entrepreneurship, the visionary must possess certain virtues to sustain the unpredictable and turbulent twists and turns of entrepreneurship. During critical times, taking mindful decisions while looking at the bigger picture need certain virtues that need to be developed. which reflects the inner strength of the visionary. Having a spiritual mindset and developing virtues like keeping calm, being patient, believing in self, going by intuition, listening to the heart, visualizing the outcomes of permutations and combinations of different scenarios, are a few traits that have, time and again proven true for many businesses during those times of critical decision making that may have the power to change the course of how a business manifests to its highest potential.
Thus, the journey of entrepreneurship is also a journey of getting to know oneself, one’s own strength, to be able to lean back on inner resources and to make the most of that subtle energy that each one of us possesses. For a mindful entrepreneur, most of such virtues are developed along the entrepreneurial journey, yet having some tools for inner transformation may completely redefine the entrepreneurial experience of a visionary.
Spiritual Traits to Apply in a Business
As already mentioned above, both spiritualism and business are two sides of the same coin. It is needed to build up the business of your dream. So, some of the spiritual traits one can apply are:
Trusting Intuition
The courage to build an empire may be driven at the back by the inherent power of intuition and belief in something that has the power to manifest. Those who have the potential, but lack the courage to manifest may have a dormant intuition and may fear taking chances. However, to progress, it is important to get out of the comfort zone, and trust in one’s own abilities and some confidence. Success, be it personal or on the business front, is always a phenomenon driven from a space of inner vision, thus trusting intuition can be a strong guiding force behind the growth of a successful business.
Having an Intention
The power of intuition can be mapped with a practical approach to manifestation by setting a clear intention. The intention could be synonymous with goal-setting in most cases. Small steps lead to greater results, small intentions, and achieving the goal-oriented milestones are a sure-shot way to keep progressing in any business. When an intention is fuelled with an un-doubtful trust factor, mystically things fall in place when the efforts put in are just right to manifest an intention into a tangible result.
Having Compassion and Empathy
A successful business is nothing more than the collective energy of a group of people coming together and having a role in manifesting the unseen. Thus, at the back of any business is tremendous human power that grows with a sense of compassion and empathy towards each other. Like the undisrupted and one-directional flow of droplets of water in a flowing river, the collective positive energies flowing in one direction do manifest into something phenomenal, that’s the universal law. Virtues of compassion and empathy knitted as value systems of any business model, create a web of positive energy that shows in the success of a business.
Observing One’s Thoughts
The mind can create a hell out of heaven, or a heaven out of hell. Observing the flow of thoughts and incorporating certain mind-managing tools that provide an outlet of unwanted thoughts can keep the mind free of unwanted fluctuations. Everyone knows how critical those times of decision-making can be, and the right frame of mind is all that one may need in the spur of the moment to change the course of how a business operates. It is now being proven in research, how spiritual tools such as journaling, meditation, sense of gratitude have the power to bring a shift in, how the neuroscience of an individual operates. Thoughts are energy, and wherever the attention goes the energy flows. Thus, working on letting the energy flow in the right direction may demand mindfully using mind tools to manage thoughts.
Observing the Clues
Most conscious and aware entrepreneurs are driven by the clues that the universe may be projecting in its own small ways in a particular situation. This subtle trait of trusting and believing in universal messages can sometimes be just the right thing one needs to do. Believing in the bigger power operating to make things work is still an unexplained yet much-existing mystic phenomenon that many entrepreneurs abide by, and this connection is only felt when one is deeply connected with one’s inner potential.
Conclusion
All these spiritual values and ethics will help in increasing your interest, profit, and even productivity of your business. It is not just about wanting to follow it, because it brings out profit for the business but it also provides mental peace at the end of the day.
FAQ
Is Spirituality in Workplace Appropriate for Business?
It is one of the most effective tools to handle any kind of stress-related issues and any problems faced by the business.
What is A Spiritual Entrepreneur?
Spiritual entrepreneurs are those who want to serve and uplift others while doing their own job.
How can Spirituality Help an Entrepreneur Succeed?
Spirituality helps the entrepreneur to achieve great leadership qualities and become a better leader.
Imagine a night before an important exam, when it’s all hasty, you just can’t see yourself focusing on a single task. You tend to ponder from one page to another book and what you just lost was concentration. Or, you just got some free time to read an article and wait, What! Here’s a mail from your boss. It is quite difficult to concentrate when so much is happening around, but to make something happen you need to keep your power concentrated on a single work.
“The digital generation considers constant interruptions normal and these days we expect to multitask, which spreads concentration very thin and can be counterproductive.” – Harriet Griffey, journalist, and author of The Art of Concentration
Concentration is the second name to Meditation.
Concentration refers to the mental effort you direct toward whatever you’re working on or learning at the moment. It’s sometimes confused with attention span, but attention span refers to the length of time you can concentrate on something. There are many psychological facts involving concentration and some are quite astonishing, for instance, one said that concentration helps your subconscious mind be much more powerful than you think. i mean isn’t it amazing, when you already know how much powerful your subconscious mind is.
Factors Affecting Concentration
Attention span and concentration vary for a number reason and some reasons are natural and unavoidable but when it comes to distractions, this is what can be controlled.
Factors affecting concentration
When people age, they tend to forget things more readily, and decreased concentration can accompany memory loss.
Head or Brain injuries, such as a concussion can affect concentration.
Stress, anxiety, and frustration are sort of distraction when you’re trying to concentrate on things that are more important than anything else; because that’s what makes us more anxious.
If that sounds familiar, keep reading to learn more about research-backed methods to help improve your concentration. We’ll also go over some conditions that can affect concentration and steps to take if trying to increase concentration on your own just doesn’t seem to help.
how to get your brain to focus
5 Secret Tips To Concentrate Effectively
1. Get Your Game On
Brain games may not be a type of game that can improve your concentration, but according to research, playing video games could help boost your concentration. The reason behind it is that an hour of gaming help improves your Visual Selective Attention (VSA).
VSA, basically, refers to your ability to concentrate on a specific task while ignoring distractions around you. Although the study covered small aspects, so these findings can’t be conclusive and, encouraging masses for gaming is sheer nonsense. So, study authors are still researching and exploring how video games can help increase brain activity and boost concentration.
This review had several limitations, including the fact that the studies focused on widely varying topics, including video game addiction and the possible effects of violent video games.
Although playing certain types of games can help you get better at concentrating. Try:
sudoku
crossword puzzles
chess
jigsaw puzzles
word searches or scrambles
memory games
2. Improve Sleep
Lack of sleep makes you more frustrated and can affect your concentration. Sleep deprivation can easily disrupt concentration, not to mention other cognitive functions, such as memory and attention. Although a day or two of sleepless nights can’t show you serious consequences if it’s continuing in a row, then that’s a problem.
Being too tired can even show, slowing down of your reflexes and affect your ability to drive or do other daily tasks. Getting 7 to 8 hours of sleep can be a tough job when there’s a demanding schedule, health issues, or lots of travel and, other factors sometimes make it difficult to get enough sleep.
But improving sleeping habits may show you wonders. A few quick tips:
Turn off the TV and put away screens an hour before bed.
Keep your room at a comfortable but cool temperature.
Wind down before bed with soft music, a warm bath, or a book.
Go to bed and get up around the same time each day, even on weekends.
Exercise regularly, but try to avoid a heavy workout just before bed.
3. Take A Break And Listen Music
Take a break, and have a KitKat. I don’t know how much this ad makes an impact on you, but it covers two aspects and both improves your concentration. First, the idea of taking a break might seem counterintuitive, but experts say it really works. Second, the chocolate (KitKat) also has some amount of caffeine into it, which improves your power to focus on things.
When you feel your concentration is dropping, take a short mental break, and that break doesn’t mean you’ll keep banging yourself onto the phone. But just take a small nap or lie down with your closed eyes. Refresh yourself with a cool drink or nutritious snack, take a quick walk, or go outside and get some sun. And then, after getting back to work, you’ll be surprised when you feel more focused, motivated, or even creative. Breaks can help boost these functions and more.
Turning on music while working or studying may help increase concentration. The type of music you listen to can make a difference. Experts generally agree with classical music, particularly baroque classical music or nature sounds are good choices to help increase your focus.
4. Meditate In Nature
Meditation and mindfulness practices can offer multiple benefits. Improved concentration is only one of these. If you want to boost your concentration naturally, try to get outside every day, even for just 15 to 20 minutes. Sitting in your garden or backyard can also help. Any natural environment has benefits.
meditate in nature
Succulents make great choices for low-maintenance plants if you don’t have a green thumb. Although a child doesn’t know how to meditate, children can benefit from natural environments very much. The study hoped to determine how lifelong exposure to trees and greenery at home or in the neighbourhood might affect attention in children.
5. Vary Your Diet And Try Supplements
Always be specific on the food you eat because it can affect cognitive functions like concentration and memory. Avoiding processed foods, too much sugar, and very greasy or fatty foods. To boost concentration, try eating more of the following:
fatty fish
eggs (white and yolk both)
blueberries
spinach
Milk
Oats or Porridge
vary our diet and try supplements
There’s no need to include caffeine in your diet if you prefer to avoid it, but research does suggest caffeine can benefit your attention and focus. If you feel your concentration starting to drop, consider a cup of coffee or green tea.
Staying hydrated is a catalyst for improving your concentration. Even mild dehydration can make it harder to focus or remember information. Always aim for routine breakfasts with fiber and protein-rich meals.
Some supplements may help promote better concentration and improved brain function. But always check it with your health care provider before taking any supplements, especially if you’re a person with allergies.
The following supplements may help promote increased concentration and overall brain health:
The above tips may sound less effective when it comes to exercise because increased concentration is among the many benefits of regular exercise. There are some listed exercises whose special focus is on to increase your concentration power in a day or two.
Sit in a comfortable chair and see how still you can keep. This is not as easy as it seems. You will have to center your attention on sitting still. Watch and see that you are not making any involuntary muscular movements.
Exercise 2: Fix Gaze on Fingers
Sit in a chair with your head up and your chin out, shoulders back. Raise your right arm until it is on the level with your shoulder, pointing to your right. Look around, with the head only, and fix your gaze on your fingers, and keep the arm perfectly still for one minute. Do the same exercise with your left arm.
Exercise 3: Fix Eyes on Outstretched Glass
Fill a small glass full of water, and grasp it by the fingers; put the arm directly in front of you. Now fix the eyes upon the glass and try to keep the arm so steady that no movement will be noticeable. Do this first for one moment and then increase it to five. Do the exercise with the first one arm and then the other.
Exercise 4: Concentrate on Opening and Closing Fists
Move your chair up to a table, placing your hands upon it, clenching the fists, keeping the back of the hand on the table, the thumb doubled over the fingers. Now fix your gaze upon the fist for a while, then gradually extend the thumb, keeping your whole attention fixed upon the act, just as if it was a matter of great importance.
Exercise 5: Concentration Increases the Sense of Smell
When you take a walk or drive in the country, or pass a flower garden, concentrate on the odor of flowers and plants. See how many different kinds you can detect. Then choose one particular kind and try to sense only this. You will find that this strongly intensifies the sense of smell. This differentiation requires, however, a peculiarly attentive attitude.
Exercise 6: Concentration on the Within
Lie down and thoroughly relax your muscles. Concentrate on the beating of your heart. Do not pay any attention to anything else.
Exercise 7: Concentrating on Sleep
What is known as the water method is, although very simple, very effective in inducing sleep. Put a full glass of clear water on a table in your sleeping room. Sit in a chair beside the table and gaze into the glass of water and think how calm it is. Then picture yourself getting into just as calm a state.
Exercise 8: Practice Talking Before a Mirror
Make two marks on your mirror on a level with your eyes, and think of them as two human eyes looking into yours. Your eyes will probably blink a little at first. Do not move your head, but stand erect. Concentrate all your thoughts on keeping your head perfectly still.
Exercise 9: The Eastern Way of Concentrating
Sit in a chair with a high back in an upright position. Press one finger against the right nostril. Now take a long, deep breath, drawing the breath in gently as you count to ten; then expel the breath through the right nostril as you count to ten.
Exercise 10: Controlling Desires
Desire, which is one of the hardest forces to control, will furnish you with excellent exercises in concentration. It seems natural to want to tell others what you know; but, by learning to control these desires, you can wonderfully strengthen your powers of concentration.
Mindfulness
Some ways to improve concentration may work well, while others may not seem to do much for you. Consider giving a range of approaches a try to see what helps. What’s more, these tips are unlikely to decrease concentration or cause other harm, so you know that concentration helps increase your memory
Jeenal Jain
