Mindfulness in the Workplace

Our mission at Brighton Jones is to help our clients, colleagues, and community members live richer lives. This is a mission statement that we take very seriously. It drives our business decisions as we challenge ourselves to live it more fully each day.

Recently, we have been finding more and more research that suggests many of the components of living a richer life, such as resilience, contentment, joy, gratefulness, kindness and compassion, are actually skills.^[1]

As renowned neuroscientist Richie Davidson put it recently, “Well-being is fundamentally no different than learning to play the cello.”^_[2] We think this is an extraordinarily powerful proposition and it suggests to us there are ways to systematically learn and develop the skills that will help us to live richer lives and ultimately teach those skills to others. An initiative we currently have underway is designed to lay the foundation for doing precisely this.

Through our Mindfulness-based Emotional and Social Intelligence (MESI) initiative, our organization is exploring the scientific, business and personal cases for what we believe are three critical richer life skills – mindfulness, emotional intelligence, and social intelligence. To date, we have had a number of presentations from individuals with experience leading similar initiatives at Google, Intel, Facebook, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Starbucks.^[3]

Now, we are endeavoring to get all of our 95 team members “MESI Certified” by completing an eight-week course designed to teach the fundamentals of these skills and provide exposure to evidence-based practices that develop them further.

Keep your eyes peeled for future updates on this effort. We not only plan to share our progress; we intend to expand this initiative to include members of the Brighton Jones community, as well.

[1] Here are a couple of excellent resources for exploring this research:  Great Good Science Center at UC Berkeley (www.greatergood.berkeley.edu) and The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at the Stanford School of Medicine (https://ccare.stanford.edu/)

[2] See Richie Davidson’s presentation on the Four Constituents of Well-Being here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeBpsiFQiTI

[3] Our partners for this were Wisdoms Labs (www.wisdomlabs.com) and Awake at Work Institute (www.awakeatworkinstitute.com)