Does your mind keep wandering? Do you find it hard to concentrate? Do you get easily stressed or confused? In all of these cases, you would benefit from becoming more mindful, more present in the moment. Combining the essence of spiritual practice with ideas from neuroscience and practical experience gained in the workplace serves to highlight the benefits of mindfulness.
Do you feel part of the world around you? Do you feel that you are a human being like everybody else? Or do you feel isolated, separate? There are certainly times when I feel very much on my own, that no-one understands me. But then, eventually, it will dawn on me that I’m probably just as guilty of not understanding . . . and that I could, actually, make a bit more of an effort to understand.
This means that, as a service provider, be it as a teacher, the designer of a smart-phone App or as a baker of bread, we need to ensure that the product or service we offer will satisfy our customers’ needs. This is QA: Quality Assurance.
Last night I watched the recent excellent BBC production of Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie. Not only a brilliant film, but thought provoking. The innocence of an English upbringing between the wars. What a contrast to today: youngsters starting school aged 4 to 5 these days are more worldly-wise, more aware of many facets of human life (good and bad) than I was after I’d finished college at 21!
That powerful 1999 film East is East was shown on UK TV the other day: I’ve just watched it. Stunned. Timely. Timely because I’m in the throes of developing my approach to Emotional Intelligence (EI) and this painful story of deep cultural clashes highlights many of the issues prevalent in describing and improving our EI: our ability (or not) to relate to others at a deep and meaningful level.
“Be Alert . .. Britain needs lerts!” I was reminded of this the other day whilst seeking the advice of my local computer shop: faced with a new PC I was re-installing all my favourite programs and, in downloading the Firefox browser had inadvertently also downloaded some ad-ware: persistent pop-up ads.
When life throws all sorts of traumas and challenges at you (which it seems to have been doing a lot over the last few years), do you often think, as I do, that “I know nothing” . . . or struggle to make sense of, well, anything and everything?