How mindfulness coaching works

“Performance review in 1 hour”.

The electronic reminder on your phone is hardly necessary.

You’ve been thinking about this meeting for the past week: imagining a colourful collection of scenarios ranging from promotion to immediate dismissal.

As the moment draws near you experience the familiar trio of sweaty palms, chest tightness and break-dancing butterflies.

You knew this would happen.

And this time you’re ready.

After completing six weeks of mindfulness coaching you have a collection of tools and strategies tailor-made for situations just like this.

Drawing on those tools you take a 10-minute walk to help burn off adrenaline, guiding your attention into your body, the breath and the senses. And you bring warm awareness and acceptance to difficult thoughts and emotions as they arise.

The strategies don’t make the anxiety magically disappear, but as you walk through the door to your boss’s office you know that, whatever happens, you’re going to be ok.

In the end the performance review is nowhere near as bad as you feared and, with the help of those mindfulness strategies, you’re able to engage with your boss in a clear and constructive way.

You come out feeling that the whole thing was a positive experience, both in terms of the review itself and the increased confidence you gained in your ability to deal with similar situations in the future.

You walk out into the sunshine and exhale, taking a moment to appreciate how far you’ve come.

Mindfulness at Work

This type of scenario comes up in my coaching and mindfulness education work all the time, and it encapsulates the key benefits of mindfulness coaching and why it works.

Mindfulness coaching helps people to learn the tools, practices and practical wisdom of mindfulness, and to apply these in their lives. This helps us to achieve our goals, tackle problems and challenges in constructive ways, and to build a foundation of calm confidence as we move through life.

There is a growing body of evidence that this type coaching is highly effective in terms of client outcomes.

A series of studies have examined the impact of Mindfulness-based coaching on a variety of groups, including health care professionals, employees, adults from the community, and university students [1].

They found that these interventions can have beneficial effects on psychological functioning and wellbeing in healthy adults, including reduced psychological distress, negative emotions, and stress and burnout symptoms, and improved general relaxation, positive emotions, satisfaction with life, and interpersonal functioning [2] [3] [4].

This builds on the broader base of evidence demonstrating the effectiveness of mindfulness training in general, which features a vast array of studies showing that the tools, strategies and practices of mindfulness are not simply personal traits but can be learned. [5] [6] [7]

But how does this actually work?

Let’s come back to the performance review scenario for a second.

We’re all born with a human mind and human emotions right? And in difficult and stressful situations (like a performance review) they tend to have a field day.

The limbic system kicks into gear, releasing an impressive cocktail of stress-related hormones, and the mind starts anticipating potential threats and problems, while simultaneously trying to “fix” and “solve” them.

There’s nothing wrong with us if we respond in this way – we’re just being human. But it does create an extra layer of difficulty that is unhelpful.

Fortunately, that extra layer of difficulty is something we can work with mindfully.

When we’re practicing mindfulness, we notice the thoughts and emotions that arise in difficult situations and, rather than getting caught up in them, we step back and view our experience with compassionate awareness.

From this place we can choose to respond to what’s happening in a helpful and constructive way rather than a “knee-jerk” reaction that reflects unconscious, habitual patterns, and beliefs.

So, when you come to that mindfulness training session a few days before your performance review you and your coach identify the thoughts and emotions that are associated with that experience, and come up with some tailor-made strategies to help you work with them.

One of the strategies will probably almost certainly look like this:

Notice the experience: “What’s going on for me in this moment?”

Name the experience: “Aha, ok, there’s lots of ‘worry thoughts’, and some tightness in the chest and shallow breathing”.

Respond with compassionate awareness: “Well, I can’t make this performance review disappear, but I can use my Mindfulness to help me get through this. Let’s go for a walk, use the breath and the senses to step back from the worry thoughts, and bring some kind acceptance to the sensations in the body.”

These and other mindfulness education strategies and practices can be applied and drawn upon in myriad other ways to make our lives better.

As a mindfulness coach it’s my job to help you learn these strategies and to apply them in helpful ways in your life.

When our sessions eventually come to an end you will have a collection of adaptable mindfulness tools and the ability to apply them in any situation that life throws at you.

This will be part of a broader foundation of mental and emotional fitness and wellbeing that permeates into your life.

You see, mindfulness isn’t just a set of tools and strategies that you apply to the different aspects of your life, it’s a particular way of being in the world.

As we practice mindfulness, both during our daily activities and in meditation, we cultivate a lasting state of calm, clear, present-moment awareness that permeates every aspect of our lives, from our ability to focus at work through to our most important relationships.

This helps us to be more resilient amidst life’s slings and arrows, and to more fully appreciate the golden experiences of life as they arise.

As a mindfulness coach and trainer, it’s a privilege to share this “mindful way” with others and to watch them thrive.

1) Virgili, M. (2013). Mindfulness-based coaching: Conceptualisation, supporting evidence and emerging applications. International Coaching Psychology Review, 8(2), 40–57.

2) Chiesa, A. & serretti, A. (2009). mindfulness-based stress reduction for stress management in healthy people: A review and meta-analysis. Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 15(5), 593–600

3) Eberth, J. & sedlmeier, p. (2012). the effects of mindfulness meditation: A meta-analysis. Mindfulness, 3, 174–189.

4) Flaxman, p.e. & bond, F.W. (2006). Acceptance and commitment therapy in the workplace. in r.A. baer (ed.), Mindfulness-based treatment approaches: Clinician’s guide to evidence base and applications (pp.377–402). san Diego, CA: elsevier.

5) Bartlett, L., Martin, A., Neil, A. L., Memish, K., Otahal, P., Kilpatrick, M., & Sanderson, K. (2019). A systematic review and meta-analysis of workplace mindfulness training randomized controlled trials. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 24(1), 108–126. https://doi.org/10.1037/ocp0000146

6) Johnson, K.R., Park, S. and Chaudhuri, S. (2020), "Mindfulness training in the workplace: exploring its scope and outcomes", European Journal of Training and Development, Vol. 44 No. 4/5, pp. 341-354. https://doi.org/10.1108/EJTD-09-2019-0156

7) Valley, M. A., & Stallones, L. (2017). Effect of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Training on Health Care Worker Safety: A Randomized Waitlist Controlled Trial. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 59(10), 935–941. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48501423