Human resource professionals and CEOs utilise a broad array of techniques to improve productivity in the workplace these days. A lot of them involve team work, motivation and working on key psychological traits like emotional intelligence. Many exercises and techniques have evolved over the years in this hotly studied field with dozens of new courses, workshops and evaluations springing up all the time, but the one that is particularly coming to the fore currently is perhaps the most ancient and least predicted of all; mediation.

There are many images people carry in their mind about meditation techniques in action. One imagines sitting alone in a specially prepared room at home or in a temple, class or centre. Meditating with your work colleagues as part of a regular working routine is not, however, the typical image that springs to mind for most people. Yet, this is exactly what goes on at Idea Village – a company in Jersey, USA. Like a growing number of firms around the world, they leave their desks, sit in a group and meditate together twice a week.

The most interesting part is that after doing this for a just under year they discovered that their productivity actually soared. “Sales have increased by about 50 percent over last year, and we seem to get about four or five times the number of products presented to us that we did last year,” says the firm’s CEO, Mr Andy Khubani. “I don’t know if this can all be attributed to meditation, but I definitely think it has helped.”

There is no doubt, as anyone who has spent time practising one of any number of meditation techniques will attest, that meditation helps focus the mind. There is a lot of chatter going on in the brain all the time, to the extent that it can easily get in the way of clear and focused thinking. The value of meditation is that it creates space around the chatter. That does not mean that it allows you to silence thought – far from it – good meditation is not about fighting against thought, but about observing it. Whatever meditation techniques are used, it enables you to create a small distance between yourself and your thoughts and facilitate a gradually deepening realisation that you are not your thoughts alone. The true power of meditation is that it effectively unlocks the mind from its self created cycles. Now, what could be more productive than that?

Dr Russell Razzaque is a practicing psychiatrist based in London, England. He earned his medical degree from the University of London, he is a member of the UK Royal College of Psychiatrists and in 2009, after several years of development, he launched Sileotherapy ‘ a stillness based online self help program teaching people to go beyond thought and realise their true potential. Source