David Gelles believes that good things happen to those who live in the here and now.
His book, Mindful Work: How Meditation Is Changing Business From the Inside Out, shows how mainstream businesses are changing their attitudes about mindfulness at work.
Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, General Mills, Green Mountain Coffee, Facebook and a slew of other companies have created programs to build mindful practices to the betterment of employees and their companies.
“There’s example after example of how individual leaders — be they CEOs, the founders of companies, executives in the middle management ranks or even people on factory floors — are finding ways to incorporate meditation and mindfulness into their daily work routines with positive effects,” says Gelles, 36, a business reporter for The New York Times.
Gelles will visit Dallas next week, speaking at the Center for BrainHealth at the University of Texas at Dallas. Meditation in the workplace is such a hot topic that if you want to hear him, you’ll have to do it from an auxiliary viewing room because the main auditorium is sold out.
For more information about the center’s month long lecture series, “The Brain: An Owner’s Guide,” go to goo.gl/RHwwUl.
So what the heck is mindful meditation?
“It’s really the practice of learning how to be right here, right now in an accepting way with whatever is happening, rather than letting our thoughts carry us away,” Gelles says. “How often does our mind hijack what we’re doing? You might be at your daughter’s ballet recital and instead you’re thinking about next week’s column.”
My daughter’s a little beyond pink tutus, but I appreciate the point.
You can’t learn meditation overnight. It takes mental training and constant practice, he says. But it’s not nearly as offbeat as it might sound.
“Mindful meditation does not ask you to fold your legs into the lotus position. It does not ask that you sit with your head facing the wall. And it does not ask that you say ‘om’ or chant a mantra,” he says.
More power to you, though, if these methods heighten your awareness.
What it does require is for you to slow down, take a breath and tune out distractions.
“This isn’t some foreign, woo-woo, New Age philosophy,” he says. “This is rigorously and scientifically tested, practical and accessible. And there are stories and research to back it up.”
His introduction
Gelles got into meditation his freshman year at Boston University.
“I had been looking for answers to life’s big questions, and I’d been coming up short for all of my teenage years,” Gelles recalls. “Then I saw a brief book about mindfulness meditation, and it suggested a practical way to get off this hamster wheel — that there was a way to reclaim control of my own attention and my own presence.”
He studied abroad in India his junior year, where he lived in monasteries and went on meditation retreats.
And he became an ardent devotee. Now he uses corporate examples to spread the mindfulness gospel.
“The lessons I learned in India are applicable every day, whether I’m at home with my family or at work at The New York Times,” he says. “What I learned in India was the value of being as fully present as you can as often as you can; of doing what you are doing fully rather than showing up and letting your mind be somewhere else. And the value of being kind and compassionate to yourself and others. All universal lessons.”
For his book, published last March, Gelles traveled across the country studying companies that use mindfulness and meditation as tools to help their workers become less stressed, more focused, healthier and more compassionate. That, in turn, creates friendlier, more productive workplaces.
Many initiatives in his book started out as grass-roots efforts with little guidance. Now there is a cottage industry of companies that bring mindfulness and meditation training into the workplace.
“Google has a program called Search Inside Yourself,” he says. “And now there’s a group that’s bringing Google’s training to other companies. Aetna worked with eMindful, which does mindfulness training for companies.”
Aetna is his favorite case study.
The mammoth health insurance company started its initiative shortly after Mark Bertolini became CEO in 2011.
Bertolini had learned the power of unconventional alternative therapies while he was dealing with intense pain from a near-death skiing accident in 2004 that prescription drugs didn’t alleviate.
He wanted to see if alternative tools could reduce stress throughout the insurer.
To get his chief medical officer on board, Bertolini offered to test the program at Aetna’s Hartford, Conn., headquarters before rolling it out to thousands of employees nationwide. The test was conducted in partnership with the integrative medicine program at Duke University, which studies alternative treatments.
Three weeks later
After three weeks, they looked at the data — both anecdotal and biometric measurements.
Not surprisingly, people liked getting to take an hour away from their desks to relax, stretch and contemplate. But they also said they were more engaged, better listeners and sleeping more soundly.
It worked biometrically, too.
Aetna measured heart rate variability and cortisol levels, two key indicators of physical stress. Both went down.
The national rollout of free yoga and mindfulness was on.
In reviewing Aetna’s financial performance for 2012, Bertolini and his chief financial officer discovered that health care costs per employee fell 7.3 percent — to the tune of about $9 million total.
“The only thing they were doing differently in their health and wellness program was to introduce mindfulness and meditation,” Gelles says.
The highlight of Gelles’ career so far was his exclusive jailhouse interview in 2011 of mega-swindler Bernie Madoff, when Gelles was a reporter for the Financial Times. It’s hard to top that, he says.
But I figure Madoff probably needs self-awareness as much as anyone.
“I don’t know if that’s how he’s spending his time,” Gelles says. “But should he choose to, I would encourage him to.”
Title: Business reporter for The New York Times
Age: 36
Grew up: San Francisco Bay Area
Resides: New York City
Education: Bachelor’s degree in philosophy, Boston University, 2002; master’s in journalism, University of California, Berkeley, 2008
From: The Dallas Morning News