Mind Time: How ten mindful minutes can enhance your work, health and happiness. Michael Chaskalson

you’re doing and you begin to exercise some choice. You can ease your jaw, relax your shoulders, at least to some extent, and you can stand there and be with the discomfort of the moment knowing that it won’t last for more than a few minutes. Perhaps you recognise that this is part of the price you pay for living in such a vibrant city with so many great opportunities.

      Meta-awareness involves waking up to what’s going on with us – with our thoughts, our feelings, our body sensations and impulses – in each moment. When we have that awareness, then we can choose what we do next. When we don’t have it, we’re stuck in the rut of our familiar, habitual reactions.

      When Allowing, Inquiry and Meta-awareness come together, in any combination, they open up a space in which we’re able to respond, rather than react, to whatever situation we find ourselves in. Remember, AIM is all about choiceful response rather than choiceless reaction.

      AIM lets you sit at that table with your family much more resourcefully. You see what’s going on in a much richer way. That lets you make choices. You can choose to intervene in a skilful, caring way if that seems possible. Or you can choose not to if the opportunity isn’t there. But whatever you do or don’t do, your response comes from a sensitive, kindly and informed choice. AIM is the exact opposite of the unconscious reaction that keeps family dynamics like this endlessly spinning.

      It’s important to realise, though, that AIM is not the same as being dispassionate. Just because we don’t get caught up in the familiar patterns of reactivity playing out around us doesn’t mean we don’t feel for what’s going on. It doesn’t mean we don’t care, and it doesn’t make us somehow inert. Quite the opposite. AIM allows us to engage more resourcefully – to act – or not act – with care, kindness and interest, as seems most appropriate. We can respond creatively to what we find, or we can mindlessly react to whatever shows up.

      By developing your AIM you can increase your ability to respond creatively. That can make a powerful difference to your life and the lives of those around you.

      Learning to AIM doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll have more friends, make more money or save the planet – although you never know. But it will make one crucial difference: it will give you more choice. As your ability to choose develops, so you will find that you can begin to act in a more careful and informed way. That will lead to a happier you. In the case of that family gathering, it lets you have a much more productive influence on the people you care about, rather than just putting your head down and losing yourself in watching the drama being acted out around the table – or getting into the script and adding your own unhelpful spin to the reactive dynamic.

      In short, you become wiser and kinder.

      The important point is that we can all allow and inquire to some extent already. We all have some capacity for meta-awareness. But you can’t simply decide to increase these as if that will come about simply because you want it. You’ve got to do things to train your mind to get better at these activities. There are simple exercises you can do to increase your AIM. That is what the Mind Time practices are all about.

      This book and the Mind Time practices help you to AIM better. Our confidence in the practices comes from our work over many years, including a three-year study into the effects that the practices had on an individual’s ability to AIM by using allowing, inquiry and meta-awareness. The findings were published as a report and a series of articles in the Harvard Business Review. (For more about our research see the box below and the section at the end of the book.)

      10 MINUTES OF MIND TIME EACH DAY WILL CHANGE YOUR MIND

      AIM is a form of mindfulness, which refers to the ability to choose to be aware, in the present moment, of your experience and how it relates to the situation you find yourself in, and to hold that awareness in a compassionate and careful manner. The fundamental building blocks of mindfulness, as we see it, are allowing, inquiry and meta-awareness.

      THE 10-MINUTE RULE

      The individuals in our research study wished to improve how they performed – as parents, friends and work colleagues. Here are some examples of issues they wanted help with. Which of these resonate with you?

       ‘I want to be a better parent and enjoy my time with my children more’

       ‘I want to be more resilient – better able to cope with work pressure’

       ‘I want to feel like I have more space and time to do other things besides work’

       ‘I want to feel less anxious – and just be in a better mood more of the time’

       ‘I want to sleep better’

       ‘I want to get the most out of my team and help them develop’

       ‘I want to be able to deal with my difficult neighbour/relative/boss better’

       ‘I want to be able to be the best friend and relative I can be’

      What we discovered was really interesting.

      The people who undertook the training showed some improvements in mindfulness and resilience. But the more Mind Time they put in each day, the more significant change occurred across a variety of areas.

      As practice times went up, so too did improvements in resilience, collaboration, agility, perspective taking, aspects of empathy and mindfulness. Their levels of personal distress reduced. They reported an increased capacity for self-awareness and self-management, especially around their ability to regulate emotions, see alternative perspectives and ‘reframe’ potentially difficult or stressful situations both at home and at work.

      They also reported enhanced sleep, reduced stress levels and improved work–life balance, as well as increased confidence in the face of difficult situations.

      But how much Mind Time was ‘enough’? We observed a simple rule at work.

      Those people who had done, on average, 10 minutes or more per day over the eight-week period experienced significantly greater improvements in their levels of mindfulness and resilience than those who practised less than that.

      Increasing your AIM can change your mind and change your life. Our research, and experience of teaching thousands of people over many years shows that you can increase your AIM by practising some simple techniques. But, as so often in life, the benefits come with practising these techniques on a regular basis. Just like learning a musical instrument, it turns out that changing our minds takes practice. Daily practice. That’s good news, because it is achievable. And the even better news is that we know how much time we need to devote to that practice to make a real difference.

      On our research programmes we found that with less than 10 minutes a day, there is some change, but not much. But at 10 minutes or more per day, changes really start to kick in. This is an important finding.

      Think about it. Just 10 minutes – and you begin to change your mind.

      To put this into perspective, let’s do the maths.

      If you’re currently getting the UK average of around 6.8 hours’ sleep a day (as opposed to the 7.7 hours on average that most of us think we need), that means you’re awake for 17.2 hours each day.1 That’s 1,032 minutes. Ten minutes of Mind Time per day therefore represents less than 1 per cent of your waking hours.

      Just under 1 per cent of your time given over to Mind Time and using AIM can significantly improve your life. Moreover, we know from our own experience and from what people tell us, the better you become at working with AIM the more that will improve the lives of those around you too.

      Here’s another point. The more practice that participants in our research project did, the more they changed. But significant change started at 10 minutes. If they did less, they didn’t get much change. So we encourage you to get going and to do at least