ARTICLE: Mindfulness in the Age of Complexity; an interview with Ellen Langer

Do you manage people? This article 'Mindfulness in the Age of Complexity' in the Harvard Business Review is an Ellen Langer, touches on some powerful ideas. 

The full article is here: https://hbr.org/2014/03/mindfulness-in-the-age-of-complexity

And to hook you in, here's the start of the article copied from HBR: 
"Over nearly four decades, Ellen Langer’s research on mindfulness has greatly influenced thinking across a range of fields, from behavioral economics to positive psychology. It reveals that by paying attention to what’s going on around us, instead of operating on auto-pilot, we can reduce stress, unlock creativity, and boost performance. Her “counterclockwise” experiments, for example, demonstrated that elderly men could improve their health by simply acting as if it were 20 years earlier. In this interview with senior editor Alison Beard, Langer applies her thinking to leadership and management in an age of increasing chaos.

HBR: Let’s start with the basics. What, exactly, is mindfulness? How do you define it?

Langer: Mindfulness is the process of actively noticing new things. When you do that, it puts you in the present. It makes you more sensitive to context and perspective. It’s the essence of engagement. And it’s energy-begetting, not energy-consuming. The mistake most people make is to assume it’s stressful and exhausting—all this thinking. But what’s stressful is all the mindless negative evaluations we make and the worry that we’ll find problems and not be able to solve them.

We all seek stability. We want to hold things still, thinking that if we do, we can control them. But since everything is always changing, that doesn’t work. Actually, it causes you to lose control."

Read the full article!