Suchergebnisse

Individual mindfulness meditation is only one of several means to enhance mindfulness throughout the Armed Forces. Due to its self-help connotations, meditation by itself may be perceived as less universally appealing in the military, where dedication, service, and self-sacrifice are important values. Therefore, we recommend that the military should consider mindfulness as a 'team activity', training teams to systematically anticipate and respond unitedly to stressful situations by learning to be 'mindful as a team'. This means fostering a team culture in which every team member is encouraged to consistently notice the needs and reactions of others especially in the face of stress, and creating collaborative solutions to all aspects of demanding challenges, intellectual as well as emotional. This helps teams to become collectively responsible for consistent performance under pressure, leave no individual alone in their battle with their own thoughts and feelings when stressed, and thus benefit from every team members' full capacity to face complex threats collectively. In addition, we recommend that only formally trained psychotherapeutic counsellors should deliver individual-focused mindfulness meditation initiatives. Prolonged periods of quiet contemplation (eg. sitting in silence for 20 minutes or longer), common in 'traditional', individual-focused mindfulness meditation programmes such as Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) may unearth latent trauma in unexpected ways, and military populations could be particularly vulnerable in this regard.

Mindfulness has come to be considered an important approach to help individuals cultivate transformative capacity to free themselves from stress and suffering. However, the transformative potential of mindfulness extends beyond individual stress management. This study contributes to a broadening of the scope of contemplative science by integrating the prominent, individually focused mindfulness meditation literature with collective mindfulness scholarship. In so doing, it aims to illuminate an important context in which mindfulness interventions are increasingly prevalent: workplaces. Typically, the intended effect of workplace mindfulness training is to help workers manage stress better. Since mindfulness in organizations impacts individual and collective processes, the study blends the above literatures to create a cross-level "next-generation" Team Mindfulness Training (TMT) pilot. Its potential in helping individuals and teams to manage work stress better is investigated via a two-phase mixed-methods research study in high-stress military work populations, and compared to a conventional ("first-generation") 8-week mindfulness meditation program based on mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR). Results suggest that compared to the "first-generation" mindfulness program, TMT seems no less effective in raising individual stress management skills, and may hold more promise in generating collective capacity to manage stress and unexpected difficulty, linked to an apparent interdependence between collective and individual mindfulness capacity development. Based on these empirical results, the study contributes to theory in three important ways: first, it outlines how individual and collective mindfulness in workplaces may be interdependent. Second, it explains why "next-generation" workplace training interventions should apply a cross-level approach. And third, it illustrates how its transformative potential for people at work, individually as well as collectively, can be extended by moving beyond an ...