Skills for life
Skills for life
GETTING STARTED
Welcome to the Mindfulness at Work training program by Focusrite. We appreciate and are grateful for your choice to join us on this transformative journey to mindfulness. Please click on the Introduction Video first.
Imagine this – We live in an era where even the smallest gadget comes with an operating manual. But we are born with the most complex gadget—the brain—without a guide. And our thoughts, a product of our brain, are like a runaway train, rushing from one issue to another with no idea how to control it. But did you know : Mere thoughts drive our bodies to engage in trillions of intricate chemical reactions per second, producing over a hundred hormones that influence vital functions like breathing, emotions, learning and more. We navigate through our daily lives with little understanding of how our thoughts impact our minds and bodies, and of course, our entire lives.
Understanding how our brain works can put us in control of our thoughts, moods, and health – steering us away from the ‘autopilot’ mode our minds tend to fall into. This training aims to give you a profound understanding of our brains at work, its impact on your body and mind, and how mindfulness serves as a powerful tool to unwire the ‘autopilot’ driven mind.
Over four modules, we will understand how your brain deals with thoughts, emotions and experiences, as well as their profound effect at a physiological level. We will also explore how you can take your life from an ‘Autopilot mode’, where you have no control of your destination, to one where it is more in tune with your dreams, goals and ideals – making a considerable difference in your personal and workplace life.
While this training may seem brief for such a life-changing practice, this program is your starting point on a journey that could bring in profound transformation. Meditation and Mindfulness has different types and degrees of effects on people, so please read this article before we continue:
8 Changes to My Life After Just 4 Weeks of Meditation
It will give you a great idea of what you can expect from the next few months, and probably motivate you to stay on track.
Training
This program is broken into 4 Modules. Each Module is focused on developing certain essential aspects of your mind and skills. The recommended time to finish each module is within 3 weeks considering your busy work schedules, except Module 4, which can take 6-8 weeks. You will be your best judge, when you believe you have fully understood and practiced the lesson of that module, you are welcome to move to the next one.
Module 1: Understand the effects of thoughts, emotions and stress on your body and mind. Explore the role Mindfulness plays in developing inner assets to manage stress. Develop Awareness via formal & informal practices.
Think of your mind like a football field with too many players. It would be impossible to even find the goal, let alone score one. This modules training brings awareness to the fact that your field is cluttered – and the potential reasons behind it.
Module 2: Understanding the brain and attention, and importance of mindful presence. Formal & informal practices to increase present moment awareness and acceptance. Going back to the football analogy, this module helps you increase your awareness on the cluttered field more broadly and place your attention and become aware on the unwanted people and prepare to declutter the field.
Module 3: Nurturing beneficial practices: Gratitude and Compassion, understanding how gratitude rewires the brain. Back to football, this is like having cleared the field, you now focus on developing skills needed to succeed.
Module 4: Mindfulness at workplace. Developing Emotional Intelligence. Applying Mindful techniques you have learnt to work place; Mindful listening, communicating and empathy. Back to the football analogy, this is like learning to scoring goals after your have honed your skills.
Before you begin…
Something brought you here to this course. You may have signed up because you heard that Mindfulness is a good tool to reduce stresses and worries and improve concentration. You may hope for some effective ways of dealing with stress or worry, improve concentration, an increase in the ability to be fully present in the moment and fully engaged in life, or improve your productivity and happiness at work. Or maybe you just signed up for the program out of sheer curiosity because you heard that Mindfulness has benefits. What is it that you hope will happen as a result of following this program?
Capturing the reasons why you are doing this program at the very beginning will help you clarify your goals and provide you the motivation to stay with the course every day.
The Getting Started worksheet will help you answer this question and will create the foundation for your practice over the next few months. Please download complete the worksheet now.
Take your time in doing this and fill it after due reflection. This is especially important because one may find it challenging to begin a meditation practice on their own and you will greatly increase your odds of staying with this course if you are clear about your goals and also commit to when and where you will do the practices and do your best to stick with it. That will give you the best chance to succeed, the benefits of training your mind is really worth your focus for the next few weeks or months.
Frequently Asked Questions
Please take some time to look at the FAQ Page where the most common questions and concerns about the course and the practices are addressed. If you have any more questions or clarifications, please send a mail to team@focusrite.online and we will answer you as soon as we can.
Creating a Manual
We suggest that you keep a binder with materials from the course for reference and review. By the time the course is over, if you print the instructions for each module as well each of the documents listed under “Reading” for that module, you will have created your own Mindfulness training manual. Or you can save them to your hard disk and refer to it whenever you want.
Videos and Reading
For each module of the course, under Videos, are a set of presentations related to that modules material. Some materials are external links respecting the work of some of the best minds in this field. Under Reading are articles, works of some of the masters in Mindfulness and neuroscience. If you are so inclined, you may also want to keep a “Mindfulness Journal” to write your impressions in a more free-form manner than just the worksheets and practice sheets allow.
Plan to spend about enough time for the videos and readings. Many people choose a specific day of the week and specific time to watch the videos and do the reading at one sitting (for example, Sunday at 7pm). You can, of course, spread the readings and videos out depending on your comfort. The readings and the videos in the “Supplementary materials” section are entirely optional, but it is recommended that you watch the 3 videos in the Suggested Videos/Readings at the bottom of this page before you start this training. They introduce you to the benefits to body and mind Mindfulness brings in.
Daily Practice
Your Formal Practice will take about 15 minutes during Module 1 for each session, and for this Module the sessions are short since you are a beginner. For rest of the 3 modules, the practice sessions are 30 minutes each. Each module may introduce a new practice for which you can find the audio. These are typically short and have to be done in addition to the main meditation program. In each module, you will print or download a Formal Practice sheet which you will use to log at least six formal practices before going on to the next module.
In addition, there is Informal Practice each day, which will help you integrate the learnings and practices into your daily life. Unlike the formal practice, you don’t have to schedule the Informal Practice; it’s simply having an intention to bring a special awareness into some of the activities that you already do on a daily basis. At the end of each day, you will log your informal practice, using that module’s Informal Practice sheet as a guide. Although the Informal Practice may look less important than the formal practice, it is through the Informal Practice that you will see and realise the concrete and natural benefits of Mindfulness.
Time Commitment
The daily practices plus the videos and readings average less than one hour a day. The videos and readings can be done all at once at the beginning of a module or you can spread them out at your convenience. Developing mindfulness requires your commitment to diligently practice both the formal and informal practices 6 days a week, 7th day being optional. You are retraining your mind and the benefits of doing this can remain for the rest of your life.
Your unwavering commitment to bring in positive changes in your life is critical to your success and ultimately, to the success of this program.
Suggested Videos/Readings
Once you have completed the “Getting Started” sheet, please click the “Training” tab above to begin your training.