It’s useful to know how to identify mindfulness skills at work if you’re investing time into developing mindfulness skills. Mindfulness skills develop career contentment — how to be happier at work. I’ll break down what three core mindfulness skills are and how to identify them in your work. 

 

 

 

If you studied every mindfulness system ever developed, you’ll notice that there are three core skills they develop; concentration, sensory clarity, and equanimity. 

To be truly mindful you can concentrate on what you consider to be relevant at a given, be aware of sensations at any moment, and you could allow those sensations to happen without a push and pull. When combined together, these three skills help you to experience stress relief, fulfillment, self-understanding, expression, and connection. These are the five areas of career contentment. 

Concentration 

Concentration is the ability to focus on what you want to focus on when you want to focus on it. The actual object or task does not matter, as long as it’s something you want to concentrate on.

Some people come to mindfulness with highly developed concentration skills. Mindfulness is not the only way to develop concentration — if you have a job where concentration is important to the safety of others, you likely already have it. What’s great, is that your existing concentration skills could be used to deepen experiences using mindfulness. 

On the other side, it may be that low concentration is affecting your work. If you are easily pulled away from internal or external distractions, or you’re not able to see or notice details, update your concentration skills.

Low concentration at work usually results in feeling insecure about your work or being too surface. It prevents you from promotions, recognition, and most importantly, feeling good about your work. 

Mindfulness training, like the exercises in SET ONE, train you to systematically develop concentration skills. 

How to assess if you have concentration skills at work

It’s worth making a note about how long you can focus before you do mindfulness training. If you didn’t do that, you can look for these signs you have increased concentration at work

• You’re able to focus on tasks for longer periods
• You notice details quicker and with less effort
• Tasks feel more enjoyable, even if the task itself didn’t change (because concentration is inherently pleasable to do)
• The insights and connections you make have more depth, you go past the obvious
• You spend less time mulling over things you don’t want to mull over — you can drop your attention to where you want it to be

Sensory clarity 

The second mindfulness skill is sensory clarity. Sensory clarity is when you’re more aware of sensations. These sensations happen in your see, hear, or feel space.  Shinzen Young describes it well, “Sensory clarity: the ability to untangle the strands of experience – what’s visual, what’s auditory, what’s somatic, what’s inner, what’s outer, and so forth.”

Shinzen Young interview: stress, equanimity, & sensory clarity

If you have low sensory clarity, you may not even be aware of what is happening in real-time. This happens with people who are prone to overthinking or needing to be over-prepared. So, if you find yourself overwhelmed by all the things you need to do (or think you need to do), you’re likely experiencing stress. 

Sensory clarity allows you to track and break apart those overwhelming pieces. So, instead of feeling like, “I can’t handle this,” “There is too much to do,” “Nobody values my work and effort.” You break the sensory events into what part is see, what part is hear, and what part is feel. This provides relief. 

How to assess if you have sensory clarity skills at work

People with high sensory clarity often report: 

• Being able to break up sensory experiences into their parts
• Notice more details in conversations, especially detecting the unsaid
• Experiencing work in hyper-colour — little things that others ignore are seen and appreciated
• Carrying less stress because experiences don’t stick with them as long
• Being less likely to hold themselves back from doing work they love and advocating for themselves

 

Equanimity 

The third mindfulness skill is equanimity. Equanimity is the skill of not being pulled or pushed by sensory experiences. It’s not that people with equanimity don’t have sensory experiences, they definitely do. The difference is their relationship to the experience and giving themselves almost radial permission to feel it all — without being pulled in. 

Someone with low equanimity usually pushes away any critical or uncomfortable feelings or emotions. Instead of letting things come up, they distract themselves with something else — this could be focusing on a work project or signing up for a new course.  Or, someone with low equanimity will allow themselves to be influenced by the content of the sight, sound, or feeling. For example, someone with low equanimity might have thought “Noone will ever hire me.”  Instead of allowing that thought to exist, breaking it apart (using sensory clarity), and letting it pass, they’ll cling to it. The simple thought causes them into remembering all the times they were rejected in the past. Or, to think about their bleak future without employment. 

Whereas, someone with high equanimity might have the same thought, “Noone will ever hire me.” They’ll notice where they feel if they are hearing it in their inner-talk space or if they are seeing an image. They’ll break into its part and let it go. It’s just a blip. Just a thought that doesn’t; affect their image or behaviours. 

Equanimity frees up inner energy. All the time you spent not being equanimous can be freed up for expression, connection or personal mastery on the job. Often high equanimity is linked to higher expressions of self, people with more equanimity are more likely to speak up and behave appropriately, and are often inspirational. It’s like nothing holds them back from expressing their best self. 

How to assess if you have equanimity skills at work

People with high equanimity often report: 

• Feeling happy and light
• Feeling happy even if their situation is not ideal
• Less held back by internal talk or images 

 

How to build mindfulness skills

If you assessed your mindfulness and the practice you have is working for you, amazing.

If you’re looking for a systematic way of developing and deepening these skills, I recommend starting out with this the See, hear, feel practice. Here is a beginner’s class on it: Nurturing Career Contentment Free Class. If you’d like to learn additional techniques or get private coaching, a great start is the SET ONE program. You can always message me too to see what the best way is for you.