09 Oct Executive coaching, meditation and happiness
At The Happiness Institute we’ve been promoting the benefits of living in, and enjoying the moment for quite a while now and our activities in this domain frequenly involve a form of applied meditation. There’s no doubt that regular meditation contributes to happiness and, interestingly, to productivity in the workplace via improvements in calm, concentration and decision making.
The following article (click here) shows that we’re not the only ones making connections between executive coaching, meditation, happiness and performance in the workplace.
Bosses turn to monks for breath of life
German monasteries are reinventing themselves as spiritual retreats for stressed managersNicola Smith
ONE of the first things Bernd Heise noticed was the silence.
“On the way there we left a lively town for the motorway, which then turned into a smaller road, through dark trees and it became more and more lonely until the road opened out into a river valley with a monastery in it,” said the 42-year-old business-development manager with Volkswagen.
“Then we entered the monastery, had a cup of tea and went to our rooms, which were very spartan – just a bed, chair and wardrobe, no electronic devices – and we had to hand in our mobile phones as we entered. Being used to permanent access to communication tools, it was a very strange feeling.”
Heise, and 15 of his fellow executives, were participants in a new management trend taking hold in Germany, where companies are shifting from traditional team-building exercises such as paintballing to a more meditative form of stress therapy – enrolling their senior staff at spiritual retreats in monasteries.
To read the full article click on the link above.