Staying Present In Your Professional Environment

Amidst an increasingly interconnected world, getting distracted at work is easy–after all, you have the Internet right at your fingertips, and your phone nearby as well. Which is why today we’re focusing on helping you to stay present in your professional environment, to focus on the here and now rather than what’s happening on the news or on social media. Instead, concentrate on the here and now. Practice mindfulness. And to do just that, you’ll need to practice gratitude and humility along the way. Doing so will allow you to feel more grounded, and calmer, will increase your positivity within the workplace and beyond. The experts we’ve turned to below offer up surefire ways to make sure that you are staying present in any professional environment.

We love this suggestion and thorough explanation from Shamash Alidina at Mindful: “Feel Gratitude. Humans have a ‘negativity bias.’ Essentially, this means that you’re much more likely to focus and dwell on something that’s gone wrong than on things that have gone well. Behaving in this way every day means that you ultimately adopt an excessively negative and unbalanced way of thinking. Gratitude is the antidote. Plenty of evidence suggests that actively practicing gratitude makes you feel better and has a positive impact on your creativity, health, working relationships, and quality of work. Gratitude makes being at both work and home more positive experiences. If you feel like you’re stuck in a job you don’t enjoy, the first step is to practice gratitude. What’s going well in your job? Maybe you’re grateful for the money? Even though it may be less than you’d like, you probably prefer it to having no salary at all. You may not like your manager, but maybe you’re friends with a couple of colleagues? You hate the office politics, but they give you insight into what you don’t like in a job, so in the future you know what to look for…Being mindful of what’s going well at work helps to improve your resilience. Rather than allowing your mind to spiral into anxiety or dip into low moods as you brood over all the aspects of the job you don’t like, you can feed your mind with thoughts of gratitude to raise your well-being…People hire positive people, not those who just complain about what’s going wrong. Use gratitude to neutralize your brain’s natural negativity bias.” Positivity is key! Thinking positively will help produce a positive output, as your brain will be wired towards seeing opportunities where others might find challenges. Even amidst difficult situations, there are silver linings to be found. Identifying those positive elements will help you better identify your unique workplace strengths and figure out how to apply those both to your current positions and roles that you wish to grow into at your organization. So make sure to practice gratitude. 

Next up is a method from Shannon Houde at Thrive Global that pairs perfectly with our previous, highlighted tip: “Be humble. Take a few minutes to think about the people who have helped you: parents, guardians, teachers, employers. Be willing to work hard, but not only for yourself or your company. Work hard for the people you influence and the people who have influenced you. You’ll be a better leader and coworker when you deflate your ego and congratulate your team and even your boss.” Make sure that you’re acknowledging the successes of others as much as you recognize your own, personal wins. Practicing humility will allow you to better connect with the entirety of your workplace community, employers and co-workers alike. This will also allow you to better glimpse the inner workings of the whole of your organization, and to better understand how your role fits into the big picture. Your leadership qualities are sure to shine through, as well as your work ethic. Ensure that both your words and your actions reflect a sense of workplace humility to enable your professional strengths to come to the forefront. 

And in order for those professional strengths to shine, you’ll need to remain present in your professional context rather than dwelling on past negativity or fears about the future. Instead of wishing for what could be, remember to practice gratitude for what it is that you already have. And you’ve had a lot of successes along the way–elsewise you wouldn’t be in your current position. Make sure to balance out celebrations of your own accomplishments with acknowledging the wins of others within your workplace community. This combination of approaches will help you navigate any professional challenges that come your way, and tackle your career obstacles head-on. Join us again tomorrow as we return to close out the week with our Feel Good Friday: Present edition.

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