Professor Michael West opens ‘Mindfulness in the Workplace’ series

Professor Michael West opens ‘Mindfulness in the Workplace’ series

Professor Michael West led the first of our 'Mindfulness in the Workplace' masterclasses on 24 March in Oxford, exploring how we can create cultures with common core values that are enacted rather than merely espoused, and how we can deal with the varied and complex challenges of running modern organisations.

In January a new series of masterclasses designed specifically to support teachers of mindfulness in the workplace was launched by the Oxford Mindfulness Centre and the Centre for Mindfulness Research and Practice, Bangor University.

The series consists of six core days which we consider essential for anyone introducing mindfulness in a workplace setting, as well as optional development days. The masterclasses can be booked individually, or as a series.

Professor Michael West led the first masterclass, ‘Nurturing Work Cultures for People and Performance‘, on 24 March. Michael is Senior Fellow in The King’s Fund, Professor of Organizational Psychology at Lancaster University Management School, and Emeritus Professor at Aston University, as well as the author or editor of 20 books, including The Psychology of Meditation: Research and Practice (2016). His areas of research interest are team and organisational innovation and effectiveness, particularly in relation to the organisation of health services.

In his masterclass Professor West explored how we can create cultures with common core values that are enacted rather than merely espoused. You can listen to him talk on developing leadership cultures that deliver compassionate care, including the role of core values such as compassion and kindness, in this video from the King’s Fund. You can also see him lead a short mindfulness exercise and talk about our capacity for self-awareness in his TEDx talk on releasing team creativity.

Participants who attend 5 or more of the core days in our Mindfulness in the Workplace masterclass series (and have already undertaken preliminary or Level 1 Mindfulness Teacher Training) will be issued with a ‘Certificate of Readiness to Teach in the Workplace’ and will later be eligible to apply for Workplace Teaching Compentency Assessment.

Full details of the masterclasses are available in this leaflet.

Read an earlier blog, Mindfulness in the workplace – is it effective and what are the challenges?, by Silke Rupprecht.