Look at the sharp rise in percentage of meditators
My inbox has been filling with requests from organizations all seeking the same thing -- to help their employees deal with the stress and anxiety.
This is what my clients are saying, very consistently:
"Our staff have been working so hard, they're stressed out and full of anxiety. They are burning out. We'd like to help our staff learn about mindfulness to help them cope."
The main observation I've had since 2020 is that the audiences I'm speaking to are not only aware of mindfulness, but many are practitioners.
The questions I get during talks are much more insightful these days, because only by practicing mindfulness do you start to understand it and can go deeper by having a dialogue about it.
Here is my data, as I always ask "Who already practices mindfulness meditation?" My estimate is that the chart below represents about 4,000+ people from 2013 to 2023.
What insightful employers are doing about mindfulness
In addition to employers arranging a one-time talk, there is some increase in the number of employers interested in having some type of ongoing mindfulness practice for staff. They know that mindfulness is a practice, not just an intellectual exercise or a interesting one-time presentation to listen to.
People need to practice, 'do the work' and incorporate mindfulness into their every day life in order to reap the benefits that are well-researched and appear in so many articles today.
What might be interesting is to know that many 'ongoing mindfulness programs' where employees gather to practice regularly together, are borne and operated in a grassroots fashion (not as a top-down, strategic initiative - there so much to say here but in short, when staff are leading a session there generally is trust and community built rather than it being a human resources initiative).
Often, eager employees obtain funding from their employer to get trained and certified to learn the practical and best practices approach to starting a program at work and how to become a skilled mindfulness facilitator. Employers can support eager employees by funding their training.
Warmly,
~Wendy Quan, Founder, The Calm Monkey