People spend most of their lives on autopilot. Ninety percent of our responses are automatic. Unconscious scripts guide our actions like brushing our teeth, eating breakfast, or driving to work. Mental behaviours—such as judgements, attributions, and assumptions—are guided in much the same way.
Automatisation frees up our limited mental capacity; routine responses become habits, enabling us to focus our attention on new or more complex experiences.
However, mindlessness has downfalls:
Failure to adapt
While automatisation works well in familiar, stable settings, it is problematic in new or changing environments. When circumstances change, past behavioural and mental scripts might no longer fit. When our responses are driven by past routines, we cannot adapt to new experiences or challenges.
Stereotypes
Stereotyping is an automatic mental process. We are often unaware of how and when stereotypes are influencing our responses. Stereotypes can be problematic in our social relations.
Cultural scripts
We share many of our automatic responses with members of our own culture. We habituate behaviours and mental responses that help us to fit in and succeed in our cultural setting. These become our cultural scripts. Our automatic response as we follow these scripts is a form of mindlessness.
Keeping it real: mindfulness
Mindfulness is the opposite of mindlessness. Mindfulness involves de-automatisation: the halting of spontaneous and unconscious patterns of interpretation and response.
Mindfulness has four characteristics:
1. Awareness
Awareness is conscious knowledge of our internal and external experiences. It is about being alert, present, and alive in the moment. It involves all the senses: visual, auditory, gustatory, tactile, cognitive, and emotional.
2. Regulation of attention
This involves the intentional focusing of attention on one thing for a long period of time, and being able to shift attention.
3. Orientation to the present moment
This is about noticing the here-and-now rather than focusing on the past or the future.
4. Non–judgemental acceptance
This is when we allow internal and external experiences to take place naturally, without trying to change, control, or avoid them.
Mindfulness and Cultural Intelligence
Cultural Intelligence is the capability to manage cultural diversity.
Individuals with high Cultural Intelligence (CQ) display four critical competencies:
CQ Drive is a willingness to work with diverse others.
CQ Knowledge is an understanding of culture and cultural differences.
CQ Strategy is the ability to flex mentally and take alternative perspectives.
CQ Action is the ability to flex verbal and nonverbal behaviour.
Mindfulness develops Cultural Intelligence by enhancing our ability to:
Detect cultural cues
Mindfulness makes us more attuned to our external environment. In a mindful state, we are better able to notice subtleties, changes, and patterns in behaviour. This helps us to discern between universal, cultural, and idiosyncratic (personality) aspects of behaviour.
Understand others
Mindfulness acts as a bridge between our knowledge of cultural differences and our responses to them. It helps us to apply our broad awareness of culture to understand unique cultural settings. We are better able to recognise the influence of cultural scripts on our own and others’ thoughts and behaviours. This helps us to make culturally relevant attributions and better predict the behaviour of others.
Reduce bias
When we know that culture is influencing an exchange, we are less likely to label partners as deviant or incompetent. This counters ethnocentrism and reduces stereotyping, prejudice, and other forms of bias.
Accept new ideas
Mindfulness increases our openness to new ideas. This drives innovation and creativity.
Build trust and rapport
Mindfulness increases our capacity to take alternative perspectives. This helps us empathise with others, improving the quality of our social relations.
Mindfulness encourages us to reflect on our thoughts, emotions, and behaviours. It helps us to see how our cultural filter is influencing our responses. This awareness helps us to manage our responses.
Mindfulness helps us overcome avoidance tendencies. It encourages us to approach diverse others with interest, curiosity, and acceptance rather than reactive emotions such as fear, disgust, or frustration.
Self-learn
Mindfulness increases our awareness of knowledge gaps or areas of confusion in our exchanges. This encourages us to seek information and skills to improve our performance.
Persist
Mindfulness encourages us to focus on and sustain attention to a task when we are faced with distractions. It supports goal-directed behaviour, even in the face of stress or complexity.
Maintain a positive psychological state
Mindful workers have higher levels of resilience and well-being, lower levels of stress, less illness-related absenteeism, and greater work satisfaction and engagement. Mindfulness buffers the stress of diverse exchanges and international travel.
Adapt
Traditional management models are backwards looking. They assume that by studying the past we are better able to manage the present and the future. But today’s leadership problems are novel, dynamic, and unpredictable. Leaders need to make sense of new and changing circumstances and adapt to them.
Mindful leaders attend to the environment through a perceptual filter that is not tarnished with preconceptions. They are better able to transcend past scripts and engage in creative problem-solving.