I am a recovering perfectionist with a knack for turning ideas into action. For a long time, I thought this was the secret to my success. It wasn’t. The real shift came when I learned how to pursue excellence every day in my personal and professional life without losing myself in the process. Or, as Zen-master Jon Kabat-Zinn says, “You cannot stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.”

About ten years ago, I hit a breaking point and knew I had to find a better path. That moment led me to mindfulness and meditation, not as a trend but as a research-backed practice. Today it’s as essential to my routine as sleep or brushing my teeth.

And I’m not alone. More organizations are seeing the evidence and realizing that many of their employees could benefit from a mindfulness practice.

To explore this further, I asked my friend and teacher Dorsey Standish some questions about workplace mindfulness to help those who are curious about establishing a practice. Dorsey and I connected because we have a lot in common. A mechanical engineer turned cognitive neuroscientist, Dorsey translates the latest brain science into practical tools to manage stress and optimize focus. She is also a keynote speaker and the co-founder of Mastermind, a brain health and performance company serving leaders and organizations such as Toyota, American Airlines and Staples.

What are the benefits of cultivating a mindfulness practice at work?

Mindfulness isn’t just a wellness perk. It’s a performance tool.

Even a single mindfulness practice can reduce stress and improve focus in the moment. But here’s what most people don’t know: consistent practice over time changes the brain. It strengthens the connection between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, helping people regulate emotional reactivity and stay clear-headed under pressure.

It also improves traits like working memory, attention and decision-making quality — exactly what leaders and teams need to perform at their best.

There’s even research showing mindfulness can shift your perception of time. People who practice regularly report feeling like they have more of it. The old saying holds: if you don’t have five minutes to pause, that’s a sign you need 15.

What do you wish all leaders and teams knew about slowing down through mindfulness?

Mindfulness is a superpower that most high performers resist. We’ve been conditioned to equate speed with productivity, but the nervous system doesn’t work that way. When we’re constantly running, we stop processing deeply. We stop listening. We miss nuance and we make more mistakes.

We are human beings, not human doings. The strongest leaders I’ve worked with have learned that pausing and getting curious is a critical emotional intelligence skill that they practice and model for their teams.

Why is going fast not always better?

I see this all the time: people moving fast, staying busy, and still feeling behind. The pace seems efficient, but it almost always backfires, causing errors, poor decisions and relationship strain. Then you spend more time fixing those mistakes than you would have spent by moving intentionally in the first place.

Go slow to go fast. It’s not just a saying; it’s how the brain performs at its best.

How does slowing down help you speed up your productivity?

The brain wasn’t designed to multitask. It was designed to focus.

Research from Stanford University shows that task-switching can reduce productivity by up to 40%. People who constantly juggle multiple streams of information struggle more with attention, recall and mental flexibility. “Single-tasking” (focusing on one thing at a time) leads to greater productivity and effectiveness. One focused hour consistently outperforms three fragmented ones.

In practice, this can be simple:

Block your calendar for at least 30 minutes of deep work, even on your heaviest meeting days. During your focus blocks, turn off your phone and mute notifications. Put on noise-canceling headphones. These aren’t just productivity hacks — they’re signals to your brain that it’s time to focus, and your brain responds accordingly.

This practice of single-tasking is actually an informal mindfulness exercise. Every time you bring your attention back to one thing — one conversation, one document, one problem — you’re cultivating mindful presence and focus. That compounds over time.

What does this look like in a team setting?

The best part about slowing down is that it doesn’t require a lot of time. Small moments, practiced consistently, build real change in how you show up. Here are a few favorites of the high-performing teams I work with:

Start your meeting with silence. Open with 60 seconds to pause before diving in. Let people arrive mentally, not just physically. It sounds small, but it changes the quality of what follows.
Begin with the end in mind. Before any meeting or work block, name what success looks like. Clear expectations and focus areas reduce cognitive load and free up energy for the actual work.
Check in before you get to work. Pause to ask how someone is and really listen before jumping into the agenda. Relational connection is a key part of team cohesion and performance.
Celebrate the humans behind the jobs. Take a few moments at the start of team meetings to recognize milestones, share stories and see your colleagues as whole people. Teams I work with do everything from a monthly birthday lunch to starting their monthly meeting with kudos for each other.
Bookend your day with intention. Spend two minutes in the morning to slow down and set your priorities. Then take two minutes at the end of the day to close out and plan for tomorrow. This structure reduces decision fatigue and creates forward momentum.

What do you wish more organizations understood about mindfulness and meditation in the workplace?

Your brain is your primary performance tool. If a professional athlete didn’t train their body regularly, you would think they were crazy! In knowledge work, an employee’s best asset is their mind, but not enough people are training their brains with intention to be the best they can be in the workplace and in life.

Mindfulness and meditation support sustainable performance, well-being and the kind of leadership people want to follow. And just like a training regimen for the body, it works best when it’s consistent. Mindfulness and its benefits are trainable. And it doesn’t take as long as you think.

What are your top tips for meditating at work to boost your performance?

You don’t need a long, formal meditation practice to start feeling the benefits. Small moments of mindfulness, consistently applied, are enough. Here are the ones I teach most often:

Breathe deeply. When we are stressed or distracted, we tend to take shallow, hurried breaths, which keeps the stress response running. Slow, deep breaths into the lower belly activate the vagus nerve, signaling safety to the brain and shifting you out of reactive mode. The next time you notice yourself getting frazzled in the workplace, try three-part breathing: breathe into the belly, then the ribs, and then the chest; release the breath from the chest, ribs, and belly.
Do one thing at a time. While far from commonplace in the digital age, dedicating all your focus to one task at a time is the most efficient, enjoyable mode for your brain. Even 30 minutes of protected focus time can meaningfully shift the quality of your output. The brain thrives on depth, not breadth.
Listen. When we’re overloaded, we stop hearing people. Real listening — staying present, keeping open body language, genuinely trying to understand rather than fix — is one of the highest-leverage things a leader can do. Mindful listening builds trust, reduces misalignment and makes people feel seen.
Practice positivity. The brain evolved with a negativity bias, meaning it’s wired to cling to negative experiences and discount positive ones. That was useful for survival, but it’s less useful in a performance review or a team debrief. Practice pausing to appreciate small moments during day, like laughing with a coworker, tasting a warm mug of coffee or making progress on a tough problem. Over time, these small moments of gratitude add up to bring a more balanced perspective to your work, leadership and life.
S.T.O.P. This is one of my favorite tools to teach high performers because it works everywhere — in a tense meeting, before a hard conversation, in the middle of a deadline spiral. The moment you notice stress becomes a moment of awareness. Instead of fighting against stress or strong emotions, S.T.O.P.:
- Stop what you’re doing
- Take a few deep breaths
- Observe your experience (thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations)
- Proceed with intention — choose your next action rather than reacting to the moment.

I wholeheartedly endorse all the suggestions above. I do my best work when I’m focused, connected and intentional — not when I’m rushing. Mindfulness hasn’t slowed me down — it’s allowed me to produce a better work product. We’d love to hear how you’ve created a mindfulness practice for yourself or in your organization.

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