What is savoring?
Savoring the past and future
A clear day in winter, when the sun warms you up better
than any blanket could. The drive home after the
celebration, when the sense of achievement finally hits
you. The moment when you sit down to a holiday dinner
with the whole family, the food prepared, ready to enjoy.
The sunset on the beach, fading from golden to blue
before your eyes.
Happiness isn’t only about having positive experiences;
it’s also about being able to notice them, to enjoy them,
to prolong them. Any of the experiences above could
pass by unappreciated. Savoring is the way to prevent
that.
“Time is less likely to fly when one is aware that one is
having fun, that is, when one is savoring,” write Fred B.
Bryant and Joseph Veroff in Savoring: A New Model of
Positive Experience.
Introduction to savoring
Bryant and Veroff define savoring as the capacity to
attend to, appreciate, and enhance the positive
experiences in your life. It’s the counterpart to coping,
which involves dealing with life’s negative experiences.
When we savor, we’re having positive feelings and we’re
aware of them. It’s not just the warmth of being around
friends; it’s the recognition of how special our connection
is. It’s looking around and delighting in their laughter,
feeling grateful for their presence, noticing how relaxed
and accepted we feel. So savoring is mindful, but it’s not
the same as mindfulness – instead of being aware of
whatever happens in the present, it involves deliberately
focusing on and retaining positive feelings.
That conscious awareness makes savoring a somewhat
complex process, yet even children in grades 5-8 report
being able to savor the past, present, and future. Bryant
and Veroff believe we fully gain the ability to savor in
adolescence.  of savoring, because it allows positive
4 types of savoring
The different types of savoring are as varied as our
emotions, but here are some of the most common:
 Luxuriating (positive emotion involved:
pleasure). When we think of savoring, we
often think of luxuriating: easing into a
warm hot tub and feeling our muscles
relax, taking that first bite of a flaky,
buttery croissant.
 Marveling (awe). Some experiences
inspire savoring by their very nature. A
mountain range that goes on for miles,
the quiet sacredness of an ancient
cathedral, a Van Gogh-like sunset: these
wonders urge us to stop and take notice.
 Basking (pride). When we enjoy the
warm glow of praise or reflect happily on
past achievements, we are basking. We
only reach a particular goal once, but we
can extend the gratifying feeling of
accomplishment with basking.
 Thanksgiving (gratitude). No, not the
holiday – in a state of thanksgiving, we’re
overwhelmed with gratitude and express
it outwardly. It can happen when
receiving a generous gift, like a loan
given in a time of need, or it can come
simply from reflecting on all the good in
our life.
The classic song “At Last,” sung by Etta James, is a
musical expression of savoring a loved one. She finally
sees the blue skies; life is like “a song” and “heaven.”
Even the slow, lingering pace of the vocals suggests a
desire to extend the joy and pleasure of a long-awaited
outcome:
In addition to savoring the present, we can also savor
the past and the future. Savoring the past is
called reminiscing;  savoring the future is
called anticipating.
We might reminisce when alone, daydreaming of a
distant past that brings a quiet smile to our lips. But
reminiscing often involves sharing stories with others,
like telling our children about our childhood or telling
friends about how we met our partner.
One study asked 180 college students and alumni about
how they reminisced. Researchers found that they were
more likely to reminisce when feeling sad vs. feeling
happy – reminiscence is actually a way to jolt us out of
an unpleasant present and into a positive past. Many of
the participants also used mementos to recall the past,
like old photos or music. The most successful
reminiscers were the ones who didn’t use props but
instead took a mental voyage into the past, imagining
what happened in detail.
In addition to looking backward, we can anticipate and
savor a happy future. We might picture our plans coming
to fruition, dream of love and riches, or indulge in
fantasies that may never come to pass. Anticipation
requires imagination, and the more detailed our
imagination, the stronger our savoring. Perhaps for that
reason, people report that they are least skilled at
savoring the future vs. savoring the past or present.
10 things that encourage savoring
Savoring can be deliberate, but it also happens
spontaneously sometimes. Here are some of the
factors that encourage savoring:
The context:
 We’re focused. Distraction is the enemy
experiences and positive feelings to pass
us by. The urge to eat, sleep, check
email, or do anything other than what
we’re doing will take attention away from
the present.
 We just finished something stressful. If
we’ve just finished a stressful hour, day,
or month, whatever happens next – even
just a quiet evening watching a movie –
may seem all the more wonderful in
comparison. Some people actually delay
pleasures until stressful work is over so
they can enjoy them more.
 Other people are around. Not only can
we savor our relationships with other
people, but savoring
something with other people is powerful.
They can point out positive things to
notice – look at that beautiful building!  –
and their savoring can be contagious.
Sharing a positive experience together
then builds the bond between people.
The type of event:
 A longer event. The more time the
experience takes, the more chance we
have to savor.
 A complex event. The more stimuli we
have to process, the longer we will be
enthralled by an experience. For
example, setting foot for the first time in
an Indian food market – bursting with
sights, sounds, and smells – may
encourage savoring. The first New Year’s
after having a baby is also pleasantly
complex, full of rich memories and
poignant anticipation.
  An uncertain event. An uncertain event
– receiving a mysterious bouquet of
flowers, watching an incomprehensible
meteor shower – can elicit more intense
savoring. Because there is something
unknown about the experience, our
brains seem to attach to it and search for
its meaning. As a result, we’re more
focused and our emotions are more
powerful.
 A bittersweet event. Perhaps more than
anything else, events that will happen
rarely or never again inspire savoring –
think birthdays, holidays, having a baby.
Us:
 Our personality. People who are more
mindful, and people who enjoy novelty,
effort, and uncertainty, may be prone to
savoring.
 Our gender. Women tend to report being
more capable of savoring, perhaps
because they’re more emotionally aware.
 Our income. Interestingly, people who
are wealthier seem to be less able to
savor.
How Mindfulness Can Make You A Better Manager
 
My wife spent a good amount of time yesterday listening
to Jon Kabat-Zinn on videos giving lectures on
mindfulness, so I listened to some of them too. I liked
them. I hadn't heard of Dr. Kabat-Zinn (a professor and
leading teacher of mindfulness and stress reduction),
though I had heard of mindfulness.
Truth be told I didn't know much about mindfulness
(defined by Wikipedia as the psychological process of
bringing one's attention to experiences occurring in the
present moment, and having its roots in Buddhist
traditions). But I'd thought about the term a lot related to
management without being fully aware of its precise
meanings and origins.
My general impression was that, whatever it meant, we
needed more of it in management. A lot more.
For what it's worth, I don't believe I heard the word
mentioned once in my 24 years in Fortune 500
management. Nor did I ever hear it while I was getting
an MBA.
For what its worth, we tend to have a certain skepticism
in management to anything that's hard to show pretty
darn quick ROI on.
Though I did notice there seems to be some growing use
of mindfulness in business, as Jeanne Meister wrote an
enlightening "future of work" article on how companies
including Aetna, Intel and Google, among others, were
starting to integrate mindfulness into their leadership
practices.
Positive implications for management  creativity? Research has found that a short period of
This seems to me a really good thing. Anything that
makes managers more carefully and thoughtfully attuned
to those around them, including the employees they
manage, should have positive implications for their
management. It only stands to reason: The more you
understand, the better you can manage and motivate.
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With national employee engagement levels consistently
mired around the 30% level, this suggests 70% of
employees aren't emotionally committed to their
companies. In short, not a ringing endorsement, in the
aggregate, of management effectiveness.
I've long been intuitively sympathetic to what may be
called introspective approaches to people-management.
I wrote a whole book on this general concept called The
Type B Manager, advocating a quieter, calmer, more
reflective managerial approach... without fully realizing
my thinking was sort of a second cousin to mindfulness.
This is a big subject that deserves (and I hope to
provide) additional treatment in the future, but now for
this blog here are three qualities I'd consider
foundational attributes of mindful management.
Self-awareness. I've said it before at different
times and in different places, and I'll say it again: Without
a reasonable degree of self-awareness, you can't be a
highly effective manager.  Without some awareness of
how you're coming across to others and how they
perceive you, it's hard to thoughtfully exercise authority
over the long term. Without an accurate idea of how your
employees are responding to you, you'll always be (avid
fly fisherman speaking here) a trout swimming upstream.
Meaning against the current.
Empathy. Studies have shown that empathy (the ability
to understand and share the feelings of another) is a
critical driver of successful management -- and that only
40% of "frontline leaders" are "proficient or strong in
empathy." This stat doesn't surprise me -- if anything,
maybe sounds a little high. People are usually selected
for management more for reasons of authority than
empathy. Though as noted earlier, the ability to
understand employees (what their issues are, what
motivates them and what doesn't) is no doubt part of
managerial success.
Patience.  Amid the chronic deadlines and stress of the
working world, employees appreciate working for
managers who are patient, as opposed to say, those
who are short-tempered. Why wouldn't they? This I can
say with confidence: A management coaching style that
patiently supports an employee when he or she needs
help will 9 times out of 10 (at least) be better received
than a traditional command-and-control style focused
more on authority than assistance.
None of this should be hugely surprising.
Management is after all the practice of accomplishing
work through others. How we treat those others is a key
element in this workplace equation.
How to Use Mindfulness to Increase Your Team’s
Creativity
There’s a fundamental contradiction when organizations
ask employees to maintain a fast pace of work and be
creative. What often happens in hectic workplaces is that
employees resort to autopilot or habitual ways of working.
When they don’t have the time or space to incubate novel
and clever ideas, they may miss out on opportunities to
reframe a problem and see new possibilities for potential
solutions.
How do you help your team develop their
mindfulness training can have a positive impact on
creative output. To explore this idea further, we conducted
a study with a midsize U.S.-based real estate firm to
examine whether a mindfulness training program could
influence a team’s creativity.
In our study, we split up a team of 10 people into a
meditating group and a control group. To start, we gave
all 10 people a creative task: to brainstorm as many
unusual uses for a brick as they could think of. Then we
administered a 10-minute mindfulness exercise and
afterward asked them to continue brainstorming the
creative task. We found that seven out of 10 people
increased the number of creative ideas they had in
only 10 minutes. This experiment corroborates previous
studies and went a step further to see how the team as a
whole was affected by a weekly mindfulness intervention
and training. With this same group of people over the
course of five weeks, we administered a group creative
task and found that the meditating group identified double
the number of creative ideas as the control group. The
group process was noticeably different, where the
meditating group was 121% more able to build on the
ideas of others. When we create group dynamics that are
in flow, where one person’s idea spurs another person’s,
the idea develops to a point that it wouldn’t have on its
own.
With mindfulness techniques we have an opportunity to
strengthen the creativity of our work teams. We know that
mind training can nurture key areas in the creative
process. The burgeoning research suggests that people
who practice mindfulness have more cognitive flexibility,
are able to see beyond what they’ve already done,
and are better at solving problems requiring insight. This
facilitates what creativity experts refer to as the incubation
and insight stages of the creative process. Mindfulness
requires time and attention, or nonconceptual awareness,
where a person does not get stuck thinking about ideas
they have had in the past and observes everything as if
they are seeing it for the first time, which contributes to
turning off the autopilot driving thoughts and actions.
The research indicates that people are open to more-
original ideas after just a brief meditation practice. And
when we apply this to a team of people, we begin to
magnify this effect.
Both the research mentioned above and our own
research suggests that to foster a culture of innovation,
leaders need to give greater attention to their employees’
mindsets and consider championing mindfulness
practices throughout their organizations. By cultivating
milieus where employees are encouraged to be creative,
they’re able to move past a mere focus on organizational
efficiencies and to develop ways of working and thinking
that haven’t been seen before.
Companies such as Google and Aetna offer corporate-
based mindfulness programs to strengthen their
employees’ emotional intelligence and well-being. Other
firms are following suit to either develop their own
mindfulness programs or hire a consulting firm to help
integrate mindfulness into their cultures.
What else can companies do to develop mindful teams
and cultures? Here are some steps they can take:
Connect mindfulness to corporate values.  Many big-name companies, such as Google and Aetna,
Demonstrate a deliberate intention to develop a mindful
culture by linking the mindfulness benefits to the
organization’s stated values. For example, if “embrace
and drive change” is a value, as it is at Zappos, highlight
how mindfulness practice facilitates greater awareness of
cognitive and emotional reactions to change. Through this
awareness employees can become cognizant of their fear
of the unknown, see more objectively, and react less
habitually to create greater opportunity for change.
Create corporate-based mindfulness programs. Train
employees in mindfulness practices and in how to apply
the benefits to daily life. For instance, ask employees to
consider: (1) which habits support efficiency and which
habits get in the way of considering something new, and
(2) how the creative process works and what
methods can integrate that process into the workplace.
Supplement in-house leadership development
programs.  Offer a condensed version of the corporate-
based mindfulness program during routine leadership
training sessions.
Allow for mindful moments. Offer opportunities for
employees to slow down, to incubate, and to see with
fresh eyes. In meetings, for example, kick off with a brief
settling-in period. Offer people the opportunity to become
fully present to the agenda at hand. By taking a deep
breath, invite employees to leave past concerns and
future worries aside until the meeting is over. This
contributes to developing an attentive mindset.
You can also provide quiet places in the office where
employees can meditate. We call these “wellness rooms.”
Provide the proper resources. Offer employees
resources for developing their creativity and mindfulness
practice: webinars, meditation aids, lunch and learns,
speaker series, retreats, and so on.
Organizations have an opportunity here. Simple
mindfulness practices can begin to shift their teams’ levels
of creativity and can be a necessary tool for addressing
the complexities of today’s workplaces.
When it comes to the modern search for mindfulness,
collective wisdom seems to say, “There’s an app for
that.” After all, apps abound for finding pet sitters,
booking vacation rentals and creating investment
portfolios. Why wouldn’t we expect to find inner peace
via our smartphones, as well?
With the proliferation of tools such as Calm, the
meditation app that topped App Store rankings last year,
everyone from Hollywood celebrities to ambitious
professionals seems to be swept up in the tech-enabled
mindfulness trend. Setting aside the fact that some apps
are more scientifically grounded than others, however,
an app-based mindfulness sort of misses the point:
While tech platforms certainly make meditative concepts
more widely accessible, they can also foster a
shallowness of practice. Without a holistic understanding
of what mindfulness means, practitioners will never
achieve the benefits -- personal or professional -- that
they seek.
Mindfulness in the workplace
Mindfulness is all about experiencing the present
moment. When you’re conscious of your thoughts
instead of letting them run amok, you can make
deliberate choices and refrain from impulsive and
potentially harmful statements. But, in my experience,
people can’t achieve mindfulness merely by practicing it
for a few minutes each day helped by an app. They must
return to the practice's principles again and again, and
that requires a substantial commitment.
have embraced mindfulness in recent years. The goal of
increasing creativity and well-being, both good for
employees’ health, is also good for corporate
productivity. It’s heartening that leading brands are
promoting what can be a life-enriching habit. But a
mindfulness approach can have limited effects if it
becomes half-hearted or inauthentic.
How to achieve group enlightenment
Studies show that mindful teams experience fewer
interpersonal conflicts and are more results-oriented
than their more reactive counterparts. A drop in conflict,
for example, enables managers to focus on high-priority
tasks instead of refereeing employee drama. By some
estimates, in fact, managers spend up to 40 percent of
their time addressing interpersonal conflict. Imagine
what they could achieve if they could reclaim even a
fraction of that wastage.
So, consider: Group yoga and meditation sessions could
cultivate mindfulness throughout your organization and
inspire colleagues to collaborate more effectively. When
people have the presence of mind to critique one
another’s output rather than their character, they’re more
likely to develop productive solutions.
Mindfulness could also help diverse colleagues at your
organization respect one another’s differences without
rushing to frustration or judgment. There’s a clear
financial benefit, as well. Aetna has seen productivity
increases worth $3,000 per employee after introducing
pre-meeting meditations and other mindfulness assumptions with reality. That awareness goes a long
offerings. way toward reducing unnecessary conflicts.
Again, though, mindfulness initiatives must be rooted in A recent study by University of British Columbia
authenticity. Companies that invite employees to engage researchers found that interpersonal conflict decreased
in meditation, yoga or other practices in this realm must when teams were more mindful at work. Team members
create environments that support genuine mindfulness. also were less likely to turn frustration with a task into
Here’s how your company can do that: personal conflict with a colleague. The reason:
Mindfulness allowed them to effectively detach and
1. Explain the why behind your company’s eliminate any strong emotions associated with that task.
mindfulness policies. Mindfulness can be incredibly powerful for building
Before every meeting, I center myself in my intentions conscientious teams who engage with one another (and
and in what my team and I are trying to achieve. Doing with clients) from a place of compassion and integrity.
so enables me to embody those values without having But, to be effective, it's something that must permeate a
labored discussions with colleagues about our goals. company's culture.
The concept of meditating to improve business
performance may seem alien at first. Leaders should
brief their teams on what mindfulness is and how it
corresponds to the company’s culture and long-term
ambitions.
Cultivating mindfulness takes time, so leaders should
offer employees support as they adjust to the new mode
of thinking. Explanation sessions and mindfulness-
centered activities are great opportunities to model the
types of interactions and attitudes desired within the
company.
In 2017, global consulting firm Accenture rolled out its
flagship Accenture Mindful Performance program, which
includes mindfulness training that emphasizes strategies
to improve attention and mental focus. To date, more
than 1,000 employees have participated in the program,
and 20 certified facilitators are available across the
company to help employees adapt the practice across
leadership and HR programs, team events and
webcasts. Overall, Accenture says the program has
increased focus, creativity and resilience while reducing
stress and distraction.

2. Give people the choice to opt out.

Forcing employees to adopt a mindfulness practice is a
bad idea. That only fosters resentment and stress -- the
exact effects mindfulness is supposed to reverse.
Companies should offer and promote meditative
activities on a voluntary basis. As long as employees
treat their co-workers with respect and thoughtfulness,
they can still be effective members of the organization.
For many people, seeing is believing, so participation in
mindfulness activities should always be open to all.
Those who shy away in the beginning may come around
when they see the positive effects meditation has on
their peers.
SAP, a German software company, provides employees
with a wide range of mindfulness activities, including
meditation micropractices, mindfulness challenges and
in-house meditations led by trained guides. 
As of this year, some 6,500 SAP employees had
participated in the company's two-day mindfulness
course, with another 5,500 on the waiting list. While
those numbers are impressive, it's likely that there were
skeptics in the group at the outset. Offering a variety of
mindfulness activities enables people to engage in the
ways that feel most comfortable to them.

3. Emphasize actions over intentions.

Too often, egos get in the way of meaningful
interactions. Mindfulness can help in this regard. I used
to become frustrated with a colleague who included me
only on certain email threads, and I assumed he was
trying to one-up me by excluding me from other
conversations. When I approached him about his
behavior, however, he had a rational explanation and no
ill will toward me.
Mindfulness prevents us from jumping to emotional
conclusions by enabling us to focus on another person’s
actions and our responses, rather than conflating our