Mindfulness Brings Clarity To Doing Business
INTERVIEW / MINDFULNESS
Writer: Ines Piątkowska
Photographs: Vilborg Einarsdottir
April 2022
We, the human species, are gifted with the most sufficient, smart, and beautiful tool. Our brain. A tool that allows us to create and solve all kinds of everything! Yet, we rely on it way too heavily. We tend to shut off and go straight into autopilot mode to avoid moments of stress, frustration, or anger - often calling it self-preservation. That’s our instinct, which, great as that might be, also removes our ability to truly experience the moment. To be mindful. In our personal lives, professional lives, at home and at work. As employees and as employers in a world where all norms of doing work or running a business have been greatly impacted by the past two pandemic years.
So, how do we apply mindfulness to business and what do we gain from doing so? Apparently, the rewards are plenty, as I learn when discussing the issue with Martin Stepek, a respected and authentic mindfulness teacher of 18 years, with decades prior of a successful business career.
But, before you start reading further, please take a deep breath in and a deep breath out. That’s one of the mindfulness exercises that you can do daily.
What is Mindfulness
“Mindfulness is really about being aware of what you're feeling at any time. Aware of what you're thinking at any time - and making sure that what you're thinking or feeling is actually helpful to you, and helpful to those around you,” says Martin Stepek, answering the key question of what mindfulness really is. He continues:
“Mindfulness helps you to see things clearly. To see that it’s heartening in yourself and see that it’s heartening in others, and that opens the door to more significant conversations about how we do it. What do we do? Why do we do it? Are there more effective ways and more uplifting ways of doing work? Of communicating? In our private environment and in our work and business environment”
“Most human beings are not naturally very mindful. They are normally very reactive. The amygdala, the automatic part of the brain, just clicks. You are in a meeting with someone, they say something, you say something back. You haven't stopped and reflected on it. You've just got an opinion. It comes out. Mostly that’s okay, but often it comes off as dismissive or antagonistic, and that maybe isn’t necessary,” says Stepek.
Martin Stepek made a mid-life decision to step out of the business environment where he had spent decades of a successful career and turn his passion and interest into a full time job.
For years Stepek has taught and written articles on mindfulness and has been regularly published e.g. in the Sunday Herald. JONAA readers are also well acquainted with his writings from our Mindfulness series.
“In a business setting, relationships are very important, just as in all walks of life, and trying to be constructive in your thinking and your communication is of great importance,” says Stepek. He mentions family businesses especially, a business form that is close to his heart.
Martin Stepek was born into a business-owning family founded by his parents in the early 1950s. His mother, the daughter of an Irish-Scots coal miner who died when the girl was only eight, ran the financial side in the early days. Stepek’s father, a Polish refugee who endured slave labour in the Soviet GULAG, repaired radios and later, televisions, then opened a chain of electrical retail shops and travel agencies. When the second generation entered the business it became one of Scotland’s Top 500 businesses, with 350 employees. Martin led the second decade of the company’s marketing strategy, recognised as the second most memorable advertising campaign of the decade.
Martin co-owned and was director of the business from 1987 to 2002. From1995 to 2001 he studied at Europe’s first executive education programme, specialising in family business as a form of ownership. In 2005 he co-founded the Scottish Family Business Association of which he remains CEO and in 2013 he received the UK Family Business Ambassador award in recognition of his services to the sector
Between 2014 and 2017 he was Director of Culture and Communications at the Glasgow- and Edinburgh-based law firm, Wright, Johnston and Mackenzie and then, mindfulness took over.
Treating people well is a choice
“What I found is that mindfulness helps, especially in a family business context, because those people that you're working with can be your brothers, your sisters, your parents, your children. You have a relationship with them outside of work and you had a relationship with them before you even started working. You have years of relationships where certain norms or certain expectations become habitual, you expect so-and-so to be slow and you inspect so-and-so to be brilliant and on-duty, you carry these stereotypes of each other, you carry these natural ways of communicating into business, but it's not helpful and it's not appropriate. That can get in the way of both the business success on a day-to-day basis, but also in the family harmony where people start to feel boxed in.”
Stepek continues, “My dad once told me something very stark. He said, „You can be very successful in business mistreating people. Treating people well is a choice.” And that's stuck with me for all my life. I think you can be successful without being decent, kind, and considerate. For most people, most of the time, if you're successful, kind, thoughtful, and considerate, everybody enjoys themselves better with the success. You're not succeeding at the cost of other people's happiness, you succeed, and everybody is benefiting from it at the same time.”
“Business is an interlocking system of the workforce. Whether the owners are part of the workforce or not, their clients, customers, suppliers, and then the wider community. What mindfulness does is allows you to try and see the whole picture. If you do X then does Y suffer? If you do Y, does X suffer? Can you do Z so that X and Y don’t suffer? This is a necessary way of thinking. There’s no easy answer.”
“It's not like all oil and gas companies can just say that climate change is the most important thing in the world all of a sudden and shut everything down. The clients and the shareholders would not be happy, and the shareholders are the ones who hold all control. We have examples in Scotland. The biggest single export is whisky. Whisky is all very tasty and enjoyable but it’s also a poison, which we know is toxic to the body. What most big whisky firms do is get involved in water supplies and non-alcoholic drinks, and nonalcoholic versions of whisky or gin. I believe the alcohol market is probably at its peak and will start declining because of public health concerns,” says Stepek, “but big changes need time.”
“You can’t just stop producing because it’s harmful to the body if it leaves 7000 people out of work. But what you can do, is start building other businesses that you can slowly transition to. ”
“These businesses, for their own future, have to move in that direction. If the consumers are cognizant of the inherent harms of the industries they contribute to, they will make different choices and that goes for the big oil and gas companies, the big tobacco companies. Mindfulness helps you do that,” says Martin, “and that is an important part of my work and teachings for the business community.”
Buddha understood business
“Mindfulness comes from Buddhism originally. Buddha, miles ahead of his time, 2500 years ago, talked about right livelihood. He talked about doing work, not just for yourself and not just for other people. He used the example of a butcher. He said that if a person is in a wrong livelihood because the livelihood takes life. Yet he understands that he needs to feed his family, he needs to have that job, and that's the trade he's got. What he should do in his spare time is do good, help save lives. He should try to balance it.”
“Just imagine,” says Stepek. “That's two and a half thousand years ago in northern India, in Nepal, and someone's thinking about it. The main focus is still from the perspective of that, if you have to do harmful things as part of your career, part of your work, then try and make it up by doing good. That to me is being mindful, and I think owners and leaders of businesses have that dilemma. To balance your life between everyday work and mindfulness helps you tread more carefully and more skillfully.”
“Almost nothing in life is completely good or completely bad. That is what you're trying to achieve, you're trying to get as close to the maximum good out of a particular situation. Everything has its pros, cons, ups, and downs, so it's not easy. But what is easy is to fall into habitual ways of working where you no longer care if you're causing harm because you're so fixated on doing things the way they've always been done.”
“In Scotland, we have North Sea oil as well. Some of the companies have been very slow to realise that they could do something good from where they stand. Other companies were years ahead of them. I think that means mindfulness is taking the steps back to see the whole picture and having a kind of purer, clearer vision of where you need to go all within the realms of reality checks.”
Mindfulness in a stressful work environment
“Regardless of the circumstance, you only ever have the present moment, so you can plan ahead. You can create strategies. But in terms of taking action, it's only now. The past is gone, nothing to be done with that but learn from it. The future comes later. This now is all you have, and there you’ll find something to work with,” says Stepek.
“But in this ‘now’, you might find yourself stressed. And, if you notice that you do feel that stress, you can stop to take a moment to ponder; what can I do about this stress?”
“At that moment, you can do mindful breathing. Just one breath in, one breath out. The breath in, you're thinking to yourself, you're feeling the fresh, clear air and it’s blowing away the stress. Breathing out is quiet and it's peaceful, which reduces your stress further and puts your mind in a better place. That's only 20 seconds of your day.”
“Regardless of circumstance, COVID or non-COVID, working from home or working from the office. Are you in the moment? Are you happy and working well at the moment? Are you blocked in some way? Hurt in some way? Can you do something about it? Yes, you can. You may not be able to do anything about the causes of stress or frustration. But what you can do is something about how you respond to that,” says Stepek.
“There is an amazing book: One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He was writing about being in the gulag. It’s a novella of a day in the gulag, but it’s this gruelling. You can imagine what it’s like. It’s not a cheesy, happy comic, but at the end, it says something along the lines of:
“So I reflected on this day and this had been a normal day. One could almost say a happy day.”
How astonishing the mind can be, to think that.”
“It's the same with Ivan Franko, a psychoanalyst before WW2 and a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz. He was mind-searching for a meaning and he wrote this book about how invaded people survived the camps. It was all a frame of mind. The ability to imagine a better world when yours isn't. To create in your mind a better version of reality? One that keeps you hopeful, that keeps you alive.”
“If people can do it under those circumstances then you can do it today. When you're stressed because you've got housework to do, the kids are asking you to do something and you're trying to get on with your work. It doesn't mean that it's not frustrating or difficult, but you can change how you respond to it,” says Martin. “That, to me, is the beautiful creativity of mindfulness. It can create almost anything. What matters is, how are you feeling? Because how you're feeling will not only affect you physically and mentally. It will also affect those around you mentally and sometimes physically as well. We have a responsibility to be in control of this and to nurture it in the right direction. That's a creative mind. It’s like an art,” says Stepek.
Mindfulness gives you clarity. JONAA@Vilborg Einarsdottir
Peace is a good state of mind for doing anything
“If you practice mindfulness for yourself, you'll be mindful in business. It is you who just needs to keep it going while you’re at work. The classic thing that is taught is a meditation on the breath. You sit down. Eyes closed. Notice the air flowing in, air flowing back out, which is clarifying the mind. It makes you very peaceful. That's a good state of mind to remain in. Peace is a good state of mind for doing anything. It's rational. It's logical. It's also more open-minded, and more compassionate. Not closed, cluttered, busy or anxious. The question then is, how do you maintain that through the day,” says Stepek and reveals his own routine.
“Well, take this morning. I wake up as everyone does. As soon as I am aware that I’m awake, I deliberately notice my head on the pillow. That's mindfulness practice, awareness of physical touch, head on the pillow. The pillow is comfortable, it's soft, it's supportive, and it feels good. So I place my mind deliberately on something that feels good. I then bring gratitude. I'm grateful that I am able to live, in a home, with a bed, a duvet and a pillow. That then brings compassion. There are millions of people who don't have such comforts in their life. I bring up a personal thing, which is that my dad and his mother and sisters all endured being in a labour camp, sleeping on wooden planks with no pillows,” says Stepek and adds “Some people are in such situations just now.”
“I'm deliberately bringing these things whilst my head is still on the pillow; Gratitude for having a good life and love, and compassion for those who don't have what I have. It’s like tuning my mind into the day ahead. That won't last for the rest of the day, but it's enough to give it a start,” says Stepek with a smile. “Then comes my green tea!”
“It’s the classic mindful thing. You feel the warmth of the mug and you enjoy it. You smell the green tea or your coffee and you enjoy it. But what mindfulness practice is: you try to see the bigger picture.” This makes me wonder what the bigger picture of green tea is.
Martin smiles at my comment. “My green tea came to me from farmers, farm labourers, truck drivers, truck driver assistants, and shipping staff on cargo boats. Port staff, truck drivers bringing it to grocery stores, staff placing it on the store shelves, and then someone at the cash register allowing me to buy it still. So from just smelling my green tea, I’m realizing the interconnection. And, since it's a fair trade green tea, I can bring to my mind that I'm not exploiting someone.”
“At this point in my morning routine, I am maybe 20, 30 minutes after my pillow exercise. And, I'm bringing in another exercise. Throughout the day I’m continuously trying to feed my mind better ways of thinking and feeling, trying to remember those little rituals and plot them through the day, like little outbursts of mindfulness. Then at the end of the day, the last thing I do is notice my head on the pillow. I'm grateful that I've got a pillow. I'm grateful I've had a whole day. Everything comes back to the pillow. It's such a lovely little circle, and it's all very simple. You don't need any equipment. You don't need to buy anything. You just need to be aware of your thoughts, what you are doing and stay in the now.”
“In Britain, for example, the political situation is kind of desperate. Sometimes you get so caught up in it that you think that everything's terrible but it’s actually not. I’ve got a pillow and a home. That’s the reality. The other stuff is just imagined fears and worries. There are some that you can do something about, but they're not the core of what's real. The core of what's real is me realizing that there is nothing wrong with my life at this moment. Everything is absolutely fine, this is a perfect moment. Each time, a mindful mind almost always comes to that conclusion. All the fears and anger are imaginary,” says Stepek.
In a business mindfulness can be of massive importance
“In a business context, it's the exact same. There are discussions about business, hard decisions to make. Different people have different visions of the next step forward. Something untoward happens all over the world, like COVID. That is best handled by people who are looking out for the best from each other and for each other, people who can think without prejudices, without exaggerated fears. That’s just about a clean, calm mind, says Matin and adds, “I think, in a business context, that's of massive importance.”
“Most businesses succeed. Once they start, if things get stable and they’re successful at any level, they succeed and fly. Probably based on one or two ideas. Mindfulness helps us to see the good ideas. Business success has also quite a lot to do with luck and timing. Good timing sometimes has to do with luck as well.”
“We have so many stories, so many films giving us the message that great business leaders are fantastically brilliant people who got it all right because they are so great. But many people are equally as great, they just haven't had the luck or the right timing. It's just the reality. Sometimes luck or timing helps you, and sometimes it gets in the way. It's helpful to know that because it keeps you modest and it keeps you humble about things. That helps you maintain a clear state of mind,” says Stepek.
Ticking off a box or doing it for real
“There are two reasons why people bring mindfulness into business. One is to tick off a box for the business to appear progressive, and then they tend to revert back to the old ways of working,” he continues.
“The other is doing it for real. They are interested in the well-being and the welfare of their employees, but also in making them as efficient as they can be. There are good reasons to utilize mindfulness in business.”
“One of the problems with mindfulness is that it’s a very personal experience. It doesn’t quite fit with the training course agenda. For example, if your company wants you to do a course on the latest IT specific program, they wouldn’t ask you if you wanted to do it. They would just say the entire department needs to go. With mindfulness that seems almost like an intrusion onto someone’s personal space because it’s about you and developing your own mind, your own thoughts, and feelings.”
Stepek continues. “There are mixed views as to whether a company should compel their staff to do mindfulness in a similar way they did about getting the COVID vaccines, or whether to leave it a voluntary decision, for people to choose. I've taught groups that are both; “I'm being told I have to go” and some are voluntary. That's fine, I think each organization has to work out which way to do that,” says Stepek.
“Essentially, it comes down to finding the right teacher for a mindfulness course. The problem with that is that 20 years ago, there were hardly any mindfulness teachers, and they almost all got taught in the space of years, rather than months or weeks or even days. Unlike now, when you can buy an online mindfulness course that lasts maybe seven, eight hours, and at the end of that get a diploma that says you can teach mindfulness,” says Stepek and adds, “this is not said to undermine others, it is simply a fact.”
“In my studies of Zen, one of the great phrases is: An expert's mind sees few options, a beginner’s mind sees all options. It also says that one should always keep a beginner’s mind, which I believe is fundamentally good thinking practice. One that I've done for 23 years. Of those, I’ve taught mindfulness for 18 years and yet, I still think of myself as genuinely a novice! But years of experience are important, especially when you start teaching mindfulness in a company. The group may be there because of the job and not their own personal interests and you’ve no idea what these individuals are dealing with in their personal lives.”
“So, before bringing mindfulness into a company there are two fundamental things to consider; finding the right quality of teacher, which may be the most important thing and one that will bring its own further steps. Secondly, I think it is very important that the leaders of the business undertake the course prior to their staff. Because if they’re not bought into it, then all the good courses that follow will maybe be enthusiastically received, but then three weeks later be forgotten about, like happens with so many training courses.”
Mindfulness makes business meetings more productive
“Nearly 20 years ago, I was the leader of the Scottish Green Party, a political party. We used to start each meeting with two minutes of silence with everyone's eyes closed. The idea of it was to try and get rid of all those thoughts and concerns leading up to the meeting, like what happened on the bus earlier or what you're going to do afterwards? Just clear the mind and make it calm and peaceful so that you can have a constructive, open conversation which is essential for good meetings. That really worked,” says Stepek and adds that he still does this with meetings that he has authority over or influence to do it. “It helps people get rid of any prejudices of the meeting or individuals that are present, expectations or prior fixed views. Just helps people calm down and clear their minds before the start of the conversation.”
“Another solution is walking meetings outside. When you have a walking meeting, people tend to be more open. They tend to see nature, which makes them feel relaxed, makes them feel closer to life. That then leads to a better conversation, a better discussion.”
“I have a meeting coming up soon at the country park. This is a guy who's the chief executive of a 350 employee company that cares for very vulnerable children. This was new to him when we started, but he loves it now. There is something about walking meetings in nature, one can unburden and explore. It somehow eases the conversation,” says Stepek.
As we further discuss mindfulness in business, I ask Martin about setting the ground to bring mindfulness into a workplace and then maintaining it on a functional and productive level. How does that best happen and is there a recipe all companies can follow?
“An important approach to bringing mindfulness to organizations is to, first of all, teach them the core. Which is that the mind, while amazing, is unreliable. Mindfulness, in its true sense, is developing your ability to manage the mind. Once you do that, then how do you maintain those skills and continue to build them? That depends on the nature of your work, the structures and the systems in place for your people.”
“Once the teaching is done, this is a separate conversation and ideally with the management and the core employees together to see what would work. Because what works for one company might not work for another because of timing or schedules,” says Martin and adds, “so the answer is no, there is no one recipe that fits all.”
“For example, in companies like KPMG or PWC or the big accountancy firms, most of their people are either just home-based or office-based, occasionally meeting clients. They've got lots of possibilities. At 11:00, press a button, at any time to do a short mindfulness practice. You can close your eyes at your desk and nobody's going to punish you.”
“But then there are other firms or organizations like distribution companies. Truck drivers. You can't ask a truck driver to pull over at 11:00, halfway down the motorway, to do a mindfulness exercise,” explains Stepek.
“You have to then try and tailor it to what would work best. Maybe for long-distance drivers, for example, you give them a free session and a reminder in the evening. Maybe make a different form of mindfulness exercise that helps soothe the tiredness and the physical parts of sitting in a car or a truck all day long,” says Stepek.
“You tailor it to the needs of the individual. But what remains in common is the focus. The gentle, clear focus that mindfulness asks of us.”
Then came the so-called McMindfulness
Martin agrees that mindfulness has gained attention, understanding and popularity in recent years and that may well contribute to the increasing demand for mindfulness in business.
“Looking back,” he says, “I feel that mindfulness had a bit of a false start. It became popular very quickly after neuroscientists started showing the results and benefits of the practice. Then commercial people came in, making something called McMindfulness. A shallow version of mindfulness. The serious parts of it are coming through because people have recognized the shallow bit".
“Although the practice of mindfulness is very ancient, its popularity is very recent to modern society because we've only been able to visually see images of the brain in the last 40 years, with the advance of MRI scans. Prior to that, it was a psychology that was trying to dictate how we should behave and why we behave the way we do. That was all based on case studies, listening to people and making theories that couldn't be proved because you couldn't see the brain in action,” says Stepek.
“If you think of all human activity, the best things that human beings have ever done and the worst things that human beings have ever done all came from the human mind. Everything is genetic. We know much more about how genes work, trying to work out which genes affect moods and feelings is very complicated and may never be understood fully enough to manipulate it. There may be a time when we can start to have genetic modifications to stop people from being violent or from being depressed. That's feasible. We have chemicals that help us decrease those things, but we may be able to change the actual structure so that doesn't happen. That's an amazing possibility, but of course, that can all be misused, abused and wrongly handed.
“If you want a good future, you have to really reflect well on what you think, say or do in this moment and in the next moment and then the next moment. You can see governments in many countries not doing that. Not thinking through the consequences, but instead, they have a vision of a perfect society and start saying everything needs to fit into that. They’re implementing things based on an ideology that hasn’t taken into account the realities of the people. They’re trying to force everyone into their view of what society should be. That never works and that’s the problem.”
Stepek continues. “Buddha taught; Can you help at the moment? Make things better? Just here and now. That way, the ripples can go out and change things. The idea of saying, “perfect society! Let’s all push the world to that! You’re not good enough, we don’t need people with left arms so chop off all of these arms!” The killing fields in Cambodia, just saying; “We don’t need all these professors etc., people should work in the land! Let’s get everyone out of the cities, and force them to work in the land!” But there’s not enough food out there, and they all die.”
“Chairman Mao had the idea that everybody should make metal to push an industrial revolution. Melt down all you have, and we’ll create something. But of course, the metal was of worse quality because the metal just came from anything: forks, knives, axes, things like that. Another time, they said the sparrows were eating too much of the seed that farmers were laying out, so they went out and killed all the sparrows. But what they didn’t know is that the sparrows were needed to spread the seeds and secure the future for all the grain. That happened because they weren’t dealing with now, they were dealing with some grand vision,” says Martin Stepek. “But with any issue, any decision, we always have to be in the moment and be mindful of what is now." ▢
JONAA©Vilborg Einarsdottir
Ines Piątkowska is a young journalist from Poland, born in Hamburg. Studying multimedia design in Denmark, she joined the JONAA editorial team after a successful internship with the company and has since then dedicated her time there to shine a spotlight on lesser-known environmental issues in the Arctic and North Atlantic. She’s a writer and graphic designer, with great ambitions within the international media industry.
