David Butcher: Another way of thinking about mindfulness and being positively aware is that we're training our minds to be more effective - it's a bit like going to the gym for our minds.
At the end of May, PP’s Jonathan Stapleton completed the mindfulness experience programme for pension professionals run by David Butcher.
In this interview, Butcher – a pensions veteran who has been in the industry for more than 50 years, most recently, before his retirement, as a trustee – explores the skillset of mindfulness; its link with mental health and general wellbeing; and how improving mindfulness and awareness can also improve both personal productivity and the effectiveness of entire trustee boards.
To find out more about Butcher's coaching and learn more about his business, Positively Aware, visit: positivelyaware.co.uk
Jonathan Stapleton: What is mindfulness and what is its purpose?
David Butcher: Let me start by talking for a moment about awareness and then answer your question about mindfulness... Awareness is a state of being aware of both the internal - that's our thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations – and the external, which is other people and our environment. Awareness is a skillset. Mindfulness, which is also a skillset, is what enables us to develop and sustain awareness, specifically by paying attention in the present moment without judgement. Put simply, awareness is the goal. Mindfulness is the path. With mindfulness and with meditation, what we're learning how to do is to develop our awareness by learning how to observe our thoughts, feelings and sensations; learning how to separate them and learning how to understand their connections. The benefit of all of that is that this all helps us to improve our mental effectiveness and our performance, both in our personal lives and professionally.
Jonathan Stapleton: You mentioned awareness, what do you think being positively aware means?
David Butcher: Another way of thinking about mindfulness and being positively aware is that we're training our minds to be more effective - it's a bit like going to the gym for our minds. And the benefit of all of that is that we develop a more positive sense of awareness and that really translates into three specific benefits.
Firstly, we develop sharper clarity and a laser focus through more proactive mind management – in a way it's a bit like having a new internal operating system for our minds. The result of that is that we improve our productivity, so that's the first really positive impact.
The second is greater resilience, and we learn greater resilience by dealing head-on with difficult and negative thoughts and emotions; we learn how to manage stress and anxiety and any kind of negativity. The result of that is that we significantly improve our mental health and wellbeing.
The third part of being positively aware is what I would describe as a kind of an enhanced sense of awareness, because after we've developed our self-awareness and our awareness of others, we go on to understand what awareness of awareness itself looks like – in other words being aware of being aware. We develop that skill by learning how to observe our minds and to step back from our minds, and that gives us the opportunity to really achieve our full potential – this is what the psychologist Maslow called self-actualisation – and in the process we experience a deeper and more enduring feeling of peace and wellbeing.
Jonathan Stapleton: You talk a lot about mindfulness being the way in which we can improve awareness. How can we develop the awareness skillset? Is that through the practice of meditation?
David Butcher: Yes and mindfulness is a broad term that captures quite a lot of different skills, one of which is meditation and we basically use meditation as the main way of developing our awareness. In meditation we learn how to step back a bit and observe what's going in our minds – knowing what we're thinking when we're thinking it, knowing what we are feeling when we are feeling it. We learn how to separate out thoughts and feelings, because they tend to be attached to each other. And we also learn how to understand the connections between thoughts and feeling and physical sensations. There's a huge amount of behavioural psychology and neuroscience on this, all of which shows that mindfulness and meditation in particular is the principal skill that helps us develop this magical thing called awareness.
Jonathan Stapleton: You've spoken a little about how mindfulness can improve the mental health and wellbeing of individuals. Is there a strong link between mindfulness and improving mental health and general wellbeing?
David Butcher: There is, yes, and there's a lot of research, case studies and clinical trials that show that those people who practise mindfulness regularly have significant improvements in their mental health and wellbeing. We're talking about managing stress and anxiety, we're talking about managing the situations where people start to feel overwhelmed by what's going on in their minds. But, yes, the research shows that there's a direct and positive impact on mental health and wellbeing generally coming from the practise of mindfulness.
I think it is very important to remember that we do have a real challenge, particularly in the workplace, and there's data from a number of different organisations showing how the UK performs very badly in terms of the level of stress and anxiety in the workplace. There was a study done last year that looked at the degree of stress and anxiety in the workplace in 71 different countries and the UK was ranked 70th out of 71 – in other words the UK was almost the worst performing country in terms of the levels of stress and anxiety in the workplace. A significant proportion of the group analysed is the younger generation - the millennials and the Gen Z'ers - and we still probably haven't seen the full extent of the mental health and wellbeing challenges, post-pandemic, among that cohort.
Jonathan Stapleton: Another challenge the UK has is the productivity challenge. You mentioned mindfulness might be able to help there as well.
David Butcher: Definitely, yes, and there's some fascinating research into the issue of focus from Harvard University which shows how well we all focus on the task at hand and what our concentration levels are like. This research revealed that, for almost 50% of our time, we are not focused on the task at hand. So, there's the source of the productivity challenge – for almost half of our time we're not actually focused on the task in hand because we're experiencing a range of distractions, both external distractions and also internal distractions, because we are not managing our minds as effectively as we might do. Mindfulness has been shown to be able to improve quite significantly that degree and quality of focus so if we can get mindfulness to improve that figure of almost 50% figure by just 10%, then that's going to have a direct and very positive impact on productivity.
Jonathan Stapleton: To what extent do you think that everyone needs mindfulness? Can this sort of benefit everyone, even successful professionals in the pensions industry?
David Butcher: Yes. My view is that everyone can benefit from learning this skill of mindfulness. Looking at the people I've coached so far, this includes directors, trustees, chief executives (CEOs) – so even people fairly advanced in their careers can still benefit from learning this skillset in terms of learning how to improve their problem-solving skills and the quality of their decision making and so on. But I also believe that we should be teaching mindfulness in schools – for me there's a natural programme here for our kids, which is teaching them how to manage their minds and, alongside that, teaching them how to manage money.
Jonathan Stapleton: Moving on to the pensions industry specifically, how do you think mindfulness can help those in the pension space?
David Butcher: Well, I think there are four broad areas where mindfulness can help. First of all, mindfulness can help all the employees of any organisation both from a mental health and wellbeing perspective and also a productivity and improving the bottom line perspective.
I think, secondly, there's a role for mindfulness in helping to develop the next generation of leaders into the next C-suite members and the next CEOs, by improving their self-awareness, their cognitive diversity, teaching them how to show more humility, more vulnerability, more compassion and so on.
There are then the current leaders, and I think helping them to improve their levels of self-awareness, their interactions with others and their leadership style, all of that can be significantly helped by mindfulness.
I think the final group that can be helped by mindfulness is boards and helping boards of trustees, any boards, to improve their effectiveness, their decision-making processes and skills. And again, there's some very good research from Harvard that shows that, when it comes to boards if you look at boards that have been assessed as having low self-awareness compared to those that have been assessed as having high self-awareness, the high self-awareness boards perform twice as effectively as the low self- awareness boards when it comes to things like communications, relationship management and, most importantly, decision making.
Jonathan Stapleton: Can you go into a bit more detail about how mindfulness can improve board effectiveness? Does every single member of the board need some mindfulness training or is that something that might be focused more on the chair?
David Butcher: For mindfulness to be effective for a board, it does need the whole board, including the chair, to be coached. And I would emphasise that, because mindfulness is a skillset, if you really want to get the full benefits from mindfulness, you do need to be taught. You know, you can't learn all this stuff from an app or any other sort of generic course out there.
In terms of how boards can be helped, everything really does start with self-awareness and developing that self-awareness, which as you know is simply one part of emotional intelligence.
It's worth emphasising at this point that there's a lot of research showing how mindfulness can improve emotional intelligence overall. And it's also worth emphasising in this context that a lot of people think that emotional intelligence and self-awareness is something that you're either born with or not, but of course all of the behavioural science shows that's not correct – emotional intelligence, including self-awareness, is a skillset so can be taught and it can be developed. And mindfulness is the proven way to develop emotional intelligence.
But going back to how it can improve trustee effectiveness, just giving you some examples, there's very interesting research that shows how boards who have been trained in mindfulness actually do get better at making decisions. If you look at the decision-making process, what the research shows is those people who have been practising mindfulness are actually much better at framing the decision effectively and identifying if any decision-making opportunities are being missed. The other thing is that, because mindfulness improves self-awareness, it means that people who are practising mindfulness are much better at understanding their own cognitive biases, which is a key behavioural factor that comes into board decision making and when you when you think that there are 166 different cognitive biases, this is quite a significant issue - much greater awareness of those biases makes us better decision makers.
Jonathan Stapleton: Moving on to your own business as a mindfulness coach and mentor, what options do you offer the pensions industry?
David Butcher: I offer, first of all, one-to-one coaching. I offer the same coaching to groups, the optimum maximum number being 12. This involves gathering individuals together from different organisations, often including very senior people such as non-executive directors, CEOs and trustees. I also offer mindfulness coaching for boards of trustees. I'm working with one at the moment, showing them how to improve the quality of their decisions. I do all of that face-to-face, but I can also offer mindfulness coaching online for companies. And I can offer a slimmer version of my premium content with a focus on productivity and return on investment or with a focus on mental health and wellbeing. And I also offer my services in terms of speaking, so I'm often speaking at company's own conferences or on strategy away days and so on.
Jonathan Stapleton: You mentioned that you've been busy coaching individuals in both groups and one-to-one sessions. What's the feedback been so far?
David Butcher: The feedback has been really excellent, far better than I anticipated. It's clear that I've been helping individuals to manage their minds much more effectively, to not be so stressed, to not feel overwhelmed, to learn how to better respond to situations rather than to react immediately driven by emotion. It's clear that people are saying that they feel much more aware of what's going on in their minds, they feel their emotional intelligence has been improved and being positively aware, in the way that I referred to earlier on, is helping people to just generally feel better, to feel that they are a bit more in control of their minds, that they feel a sense of inner confidence and strength, even a feeling of being imperturbable. So very positive feedback so far.
Jonathan Stapleton: What insights about mindfulness would you like our audience to take away from this interview?
David Butcher: I think to really be clear that we're talking about a range of skillsets here. You know, emotional intelligence and self-awareness are skillsets. Awareness and being positively aware are skillsets. Mindfulness and meditation are skillsets. Even wellbeing, which I think is greatly misunderstood in the pensions industry, is also a skillset - wellbeing is very holistic and it's been demonstrated by various behavioural psychologists to be a skillset and, guess what, it's a skill that is developed by mindfulness. So I think this idea of skillsets is what to take away. And you know awareness is the foundation of all of this, which is why I'm now focusing on what it means to be positively aware, and how that benefits you in terms of physical benefits, emotional benefits and also cognitive benefits.
