Can Mindfulness Help You Become a Top Biller?

The US marines train with it, the Wolverine swears by it, and multinationals like IKEA and NIKE incorporate it into their employee engagement schemes.

It’s been proven to reduce stress, improve clarity of thought, boost productivity, lengthen attention spans, and regulate strong emotions. It makes you happier, calmer, and a better listener.

And as strange as it may sound, mindfulness is a recruiter’s best friend.

So what is mindfulness- and how will it help recruiters become top billers?

Mindfulness is being focussed on the present moment, without allowing distraction or strong emotion to hijack your concentration. Sounds deceptively simple, doesn’t it.

You might think that you already are ‘in the moment’ – after all, you’re living it, aren’t you? However, the average person has up to 80,000 thoughts a day, and spends up to 70% of their waking hours lost in thought.

Still think you’re in control of your mind?

Great recruiters are in control of their minds, and the results show in their billing numbers. Mediocre billers, meanwhile, are often at the mercy of their ‘monkey minds’- on some days, work goes great; on other days they’re riddled by self-doubt, stress, or easily distracted.

Mindfulness brings a consistency to your professional performance because it gives you the tools to find calm clarity, no matter what’s going on around you.

How mindfulness drives billing success

Mindfulness delivers mental clarity.

By concentrating only on the present moment, rather than allowing your mind to be swept up in mental narratives about what has already happened or what may happen in future, you’ll notice a new clarity of thought, and you’ll find that solutions to problems and innovative ideas come more easily to you.

It makes you a better detective.

Our ‘monkey minds’ are generally so obsessed with our own story, that we often miss really important clues about what’s going on around us. Perhaps you’ll miss that the candidate just contradicted their CV, the client looks disengaged during the pitch, or you jump in mid-meeting to say something that was actually covered 5 minutes ago and you didn’t notice. These are all consequences of not focussing on the moment and allowing your brain to skip around like a child after drinking too much red cordial.

Practicing mindfulness wins friends and influences people.

When you learn to devote all of your energy to the actual conversation at hand, the clients and candidates know you’re concentrating fully on them, and this translates to better client satisfaction and increased influence over candidate decisions.  You’ll also notice that you become much better at relating to others at networking events, because you’re not so caught up in your own message, and your own fears.

It gives you better judgement.

Often when someone is speaking, our brains get the initial gist of what they’re saying and then fills in the blanks, or starts impatiently thinking about what we’re going to say next. Mindfulness requires that you actively listen to the person, suspending judgement until they’re finished, which means you actually get a much better understanding of what they’re saying, rather than your brain’s half-baked interpretation!

It minimises self-criticism.

Being a recruiter is tough at times, with a lot of pressure and rejection built into the job.  Because mindfulness allows you to notice your emotions and calmly disengage from them before they spin into a doom spiral of negativity or worry, you’ll find that practicing mindfulness turns down the volume on the negative self-talk and allows you to get on with your job with calm confidence.

Mindfulness stops you from reacting without thinking

Mindfulness allows us to create a space of mental calmness between the stimulus and your response.  Our reactive ‘fight or flight’ reactions are there to protect us from harm: it’s the same survival instinct that has us running away from a sabre tooth tiger or fighting a rival tribe. The problem is that our brains can’t tell the difference between the threat posed by sabre tooth tiger, and the threat posed by a client getting angry at us.

For example, imagine a tricky client rings you angry about the candidate you placed with them not working out, and they’re threatening changing to another recruiter. You’re stressed, and your default reaction is to jump in, interrupt the client and defend yourself to the last. What you then have is two people operating in a state of high emotion—a scenario which rarely leads to a win-win situation.

Mindfulness allows you to immediately notice your stress response with a more detached interest, and put into motion techniques that will calm your body and mind down off its high state of alert, so you can arrive at a positive solution.

It makes you more productive.

A Harvard study showed that employees who practice mindfulness gained over an hour of productivity a week. How many calls can you make in an hour? Would you spend that hour building your talent pipeline? All of these steps translate to higher billing numbers. As this TED talk reveals, your brain in a positive state is 31% more productive than when negative, neutral or stressed.

How to be mindful at work

1. Notice your emotions.

Are you breathing more shallowly? Is your heart pounding?  Do you feel the heat of anger or embarrassment rising in your face? Has your brain gone blank under pressure? The very act of noticing will bring you into the moment and remind you to take steps to calm yourself.

2. Breathe.

Learn to take three deep breaths at stages throughout your day. Clear your mind and concentrate only on the inhale and exhale to bring yourself into the moment.  If you’re experiencing a strong stress reaction, you can actually force your body back into the parasympathetic nervous state (rest and digest) by following the 4-7-8 breathing technique for 2 minutes.

3. Concentrate fully on the person speaking.

When your brain starts to pipe in with a reaction, don’t let it overtake you, allow the person to finish. If the person pauses, don’t jump in straight away—you’ll often get the ‘real stuff’ if you let them continue and fill the silence.

4. Notice the world around you.

We’re so caught up in our mental narrative that we rarely actually notice what’s around us. Use your senses- the sights, the smells, the noises. Doing this a few times throughout the day will bring you firmly back into the moment.

5. Acknowledge your negative thoughts.

Make a tally of every single negative thought you have for one day- about yourself, clients, candidates, even your partner not doing the dishes. Chances are you’ll be astonished at the results, and this is the first step in noticing your own unhelpful thought patterns.

6. Practice gratefulness.

Yes, this one tends to cause a few eye rolls, but the act of writing down three things you’re grateful about each day causes you to be more mindful of the ‘good stuff’ in life. Watch this hilarious TED talk to find out more.

7. Meditate.

You don’t have to meditate to be mindful, but meditating for just 10 minutes a day is like taking your mindfulness practice to the metaphorical gym. There are a lot of apps like the wildly popular Headspace to get you started, while the sceptics among you might want to download the 10% Happier app, whose tagline is ‘Meditation for Fidgety Sceptics’, and was founded by an American newsreader who found meditation after having a panic attack on air in front of millions of viewers.

Still unconvinced and think mindfulness doesn’t sit well with your scepticism? Read this.

There’s a lot to learn (and unlearn) to become mindful. But starting today, you can be mindful where it matters and achieve billing success.