Which Swan is Yours? Fostering Individuals’ Resilience and Performance Through Mindfulness
1. Which Swan is Yours?
Fostering Individuals’ Resilience and Performance Through Mindfulness
Drs Jutta Tobias and Andrey Pavlov
The research is ongoing. 45 out of 57 Full-Time MBA students and 37 out of 99 MSc Finance students are currently participating in the programme.
Jutta Tobias, PhD, and Andrey Pavlov, PhD, Lecturers in Performance Management.
For more information, email jutta.tobias@cranfield.ac.uk
www.cranfield.ac.uk/som
The Phenomenon
Unexpected adversity – or “Black Swan” events (Taleb,
2007) – are becoming increasingly common in today’s
world. Some people bounce back in the face of
surprising extreme challenges, and may even benefit
from its silver lining (the “White Swan”), while others
give up and close down at the first sight of trouble.
The former type is what child psychologist Norman
Garmezy (1973) called “resilient”: capable of cognitively
evaluating conditions of significant challenge, stress, or
trauma in a way that enabled them to thrive, rather than
crumble.
The Insight
According to psychologist Carol Dweck (1999, 2008), a person’s Mindset
causally
affects persistence and resilience during stressful performance situations.
Dweck distinguishes two Mindsets:
1. A Fixed Mindset: Based on a belief that intelligence and achievement
are innate and cannot be changed.
2. A Flexible or Growth Mindset: Based on a belief that performance is
based on effort and persistence, and that learning itself may be more
important than achievement.
The Link with Mindfulness
Mindfulness is a cognitive style (Langer,
1999), concerned with our ability to pay
attention to the situation at hand in an open,
curious, and flexible way, before evaluating it.
Mindfulness may be operationally equivalent
to a Flexible or Growth Mindset: Looking at
any given situation in a learning oriented or
growth focused way instead of judging it
prematurely.
Rather than a fixed personality trait,
Mindfulness is a state that can be trained.
How can Mindfulness training foster Resilience and Performance?
In other words, what is in the black box between Mindfulness and an Individual’s Resilience?
• Quasi-experimental research study measuring the effect of a six-part professional Mindfulness training
programme on Cranfield SOM Masters students’ individual resilience and academic performance, as well as
several potential mediating factors (such as individual Mindset, self control, and psychological flexibility).
• Random assignment of volunteer participants into treatment vs. waitlist control group conditions.
• Mindfulness training is provided by a professional Mindfulness facilitator trained in the evidence-based
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) curriculum (Kabat-Zinn, 1994).
Mindfulness training
Performance
Resilience
Mindfulness Practice
Practicing Mindfulness is mental
exercise – akin to the physical exercise
many people engage in to build up
physical muscle and to keep their
bodies healthy.
Even brief Mindfulness training can
result in higher performance (Zeidan et
al., 2010; Hafenbrack et al., 2014).