Are you mind full or mindful?

Mindful: it's the awareness that arises by paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.  ~Jon Kabat-Zinn

I've written about mindfulness before, but I read a blog this week that I thought provided a very relevant example of the importance of learning to be mindful.  This came from Chip Cutter, editor at LinkedIn, who wrote a blog post entitled, "A Harvard Economist’s Surprisingly Simple Productivity Secret."  The economist is Sendhil Mullainathan and this was his experience.

Mullainathan's own productivity breakthrough came when he dropped his cell phone in a toilet. 

That night, he went to dinner with friends, and found he had a surprisingly fun time. His friends didn't get more interesting. The food wasn't better than usual. What changed was that he didn't have his phone. 

That meant he couldn't receive potentially bothersome emails or text messages before or during the meal. "My bandwidth for those two hours was focused on the thing I wanted to be focused on," he says. 

Since then, he's made other changes. He no longer receives work email on his phone. Before a meeting, he tries not to get to check email, so he's focused on the discussion ahead. 

And he's come to a realization. 

"All those times that I thought I was using my time well -- 'Hey, I've got five minutes, let me check my email' -- I was actually using my bandwidth badly."

We all have a limited amount of mental bandwidth and we all try to stretch that bandwidth as much as possible.  In other words, we're using every ounce of our mental energy to be mind full.  What Mullainathan discovered is that we're actually more productive when we are mindful.  Chip Cutter said, "A lack of time isn't the issue; a lack of focus is."

Several months ago I was facilitating meetings with an executive team and I noticed that one of the VP's was frequently closing his eyes.  For a while I thought he was dosing, which surprised me because this was a small group of eight or nine so falling asleep was not going to go unnoticed.  Then later this VP said that he closes his eyes because he's trying to really think, or I would say, be mindful.  Even though part of what he oversees in the organization is IT, he's one of the few VP's who does not sit down at the meeting and immediately flip open his iPad (which is not a mindful practice).  When I step back and look at this VP's overall personality and behavior, he's probably one of the most focused and mindful people I know.  He's mindful; and his department is one of the most efficient and productive in the organization.

Janice Marturano, founder and executive director of the Institute for Mindful Leadership says, "Our minds can become distracted by the urgent at the expense of the important and we can become so preoccupied with yesterday and tomorrow that we are no longer able to excel at leading in the present."

So I'll ask again, are you mind full or mindful?