When a young account manager for a management consulting firm approached Toronto career coach Barbara Symmons for advice, she spotted his problem immediately.

“He was frustrated because he had recently brought in one of the largest accounts the company had ever landed, but he hadn’t been awarded the promotion he felt should be coming his way,” Ms. Symmons recalls. “In fact, despite his talent for bringing in lucrative accounts, he’d been told that he would probably never get the promotion he both coveted and felt he deserved.”

When he met with superiors to ask what had gone wrong, he got an earful: He wasn’t the only person responsible for the new account – co-workers had laid the groundwork. His bosses also pointed out his habit of always taking the lead but then behaving undemocratically, as well as his aggressive manner toward colleagues, which had a way of shutting people down. In short, he wasn’t a team player.

Ms. Symmons wasn’t surprised when results from a personality assessment she administered confirmed her suspicion: Her client topped the charts on competitiveness.

Tough times may be bringing out the competitive streak in workers fearing for their jobs. Many are working longer and harder, hoping they can prove themselves more indispensable than the person in the next cubicle.

When striving to do your best brings bigger accomplishments, competitiveness can provide an edge. But it can also produce nasty behaviour: hoarding resources, being overly aggressive, taking credit for others’ work and self-promotion at others’ expense.

That’s the kind of competitiveness that can work against you, the experts warn.

It’s the difference between what career expert Barbara Moses calls good and bad competitiveness. “In this kind of market, good competitiveness spurs people on to work that much harder. The motivation is excellence, working for the team – and being competitive in a healthy way can serve you well,” she says.

“It’s when you want to look after only your own interests that it turns into bad competitiveness,” adds Dr. Moses, a Globe and Mail columnist and the author of What Next? Find the Work That’s Right for You.

It’s the “the me-versus-we phenomenon,” Ms. Symmons says. “When competitiveness becomes your goal, you lose focus of the real goal – doing your job to the best of your ability – and you are out of alignment with both your own work and the company you are working for.”

An all-me attitude can produce short-term results, but “no matter how good you are at what you do, that kind of attitude will eventually get noticed,” and backfire, she says.

Competitive people are easy to spot because they “have a desire to win at any cost,” says Tom Fletcher, an industrial and organizational psychologist in Bloomington, Ill., who says the competitive label is often misapplied to people who are achievement-oriented.

The ones who actually should wear it, his research has found, are motivated by beating others above all else. They tend to be “less friendly, less moral, less cheerful, less sympathetic and less dutiful.”

“Highly competitive people can lose sight of everything except other people’s performance, and this can keep them from doing a first-rate job,” adds Robert Helmreich, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. He has studied achievement and found the most successful people were actually the least competitive.

In one study of business people, conducted with colleague J. T. Spence, he found those who made the most money scored low on a scale of competitiveness; those who ranked high in dedication to their work and mastery of their tasks earned the highest salaries.

This is because, he says, they spend the majority of their time and energy striving to learn and improve, and give little thought to whether they are doing better, or worse, than colleagues.

In the long run, someone trying to outperform others instead of being co-operative will be more likely to deliver mediocre performance because the person seeks “easy wins” rather than working hard to do his or her best, Dr. Fletcher says.

Another reason being too competitive can work against you, says Alfie Kohn, author of No Contest: The Case Against Competition, is that it cuts you off from other people. In a competitive workplace environment, he has found the sharing of ideas, expertise or support is not encouraged, and this undermines everyone’s productivity.

So what can you do if you’re using competitiveness to your own disadvantage?

Take a look at your motives and “decide if your behaviour is directed toward winning or succeeding,” Dr. Fletcher says. “Winning involves besting another individual without regard to real performance standards, whereas succeeding means seeking a set standard and accomplishing the goals regarding that standard.”

You can also curb your competitive streak by going out of your way to try to help others – what might seem the antithesis of competing. Mentoring a colleague, collaborating with a perceived rival or giving credit for an idea to a co-worker are all ways to look, and feel, less competitive, he says.

As for Ms. Symmons’ client, the first step she took to help him understand how his competitiveness had cost him his promotion was to show him how he undermined his long-term career goals by wanting to ‘win’ in every situation.

Because she believes that competitive behaviour can be a result of low self-esteem, Ms. Symmons also tried to help her client raise his self-confidence and practise mindfulness to stop what she calls the “wound-up worrying.”

At his old job, the damage was done and she urged him to start fresh somewhere else.

He did and, even though it meant a pay cut and starting lower on the ladder, bringing a less competitive attitude to work is paying off, she says.

As he spends less time and energy worrying about beating co-workers and more on working with them, he finds that co-operativeness begets co-operativeness.

He’s already won one promotion in the few months he’s been there.

“It’s like night and day when I see him now,” Ms. Symmons says, “He is happier, healthier and more successful, and it’s all because he stopped being too competitive.”

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Dates: Monday, January 11, 2010
Time: 5:30- 6:30p.m.
Location: 49 St. Clair Avenue West, Suite 404
Details: 6 x 1 hour sessions, includes all materials and excellent instruction, one follow up class, ongoing support
Class Size: Small classes, maximum 8
Fee: $250 plus GST

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Studies show that out of 28 professions, lawyers are most likely to burn out.

Stress is linked to high blood pressure, chronic migraines, heart disease, depression, and anxiety among other health problems.

There are effective ways to master stress, however, and a growing number of lawyers are responding to this endemic health hazard by enrolling in stress management courses that feature meditation.

Ray Lopez, director of the Lawyer Assistance Program for the New York State Bar Association, is a strong advocate of using meditation to deal with stress.

“When you slow down for a short time on a regular basis, you reduce stress, which is helpful both physically and mentally. When people are stressed, they may think they can do a lot, but they’re limited — they’re impaired. That’s what lawyers have to realize. If you don’t take care of your health, you’re going to be undone.” Lopez wrote in a New York Law Journal article.

Harvard and others join lawyer meditation movement
A number of leading American law schools, including Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley, are now offering meditation courses to their students in an effort to provide budding lawyers with tools to fight the stress they will face in their careers.

Retired California judge Ron Greenberg is also among the advocates of meditation for law students, lawyers, and judges. He gives presentations throughout the United States on topics such as “The benefits of meditation and how it can play a role in the student’s success in law school and beyond.”

He also stresses the connection between meditation and mediation and how each influences the other.

In a May 2006 Legal Times article, Greenberg’s colleague, Charles Halpern of UC Berkley, said, “meditation helps judges achieve empathy.”

In an SFGate.com article titled “Zen and the Art of Lawyering,” Professor Leonard Riskin of the University of Missouri at Columbia School of Law said: “I believe that mindfulness can help mediators and other dispute resolution professionals feel better, get more satisfaction out of the work, and do a better job for their clients.”

Riskin’s work has had a snowball effect since the Harvard Negotiation Law Review published his article, “The Contemplative Lawyer: On the Potential Contributions of Mindfulness Meditation to Law Students, Lawyers and Their Clients.”

The article resulted in several prestigious law firms in Boston, including Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr LLP, offering on-site courses in mindfulness meditation.

Long Island lawyer Arnie Hertz meditates 15 to 60 minutes every day. He says it reduces and effectively channels the emotionally charged feelings his clients feel for their adversaries.

“Rather than being a gladiator for someone’s heightened emotions, there’s a more effective way of lawyering: Help your client get centered, and get them to look at their long-term life interests away from the immediate problem they’re facing,” he told SFGate.com.

Stress, health, addiction, and lawyers
Lawyers are always switched on. They require almost superhuman energy to stay focused and on their game. Nothing short of utmost dedication to the firm and the client is expected of the practising lawyer.

Stress creates cortisol, which ramps up the heart rate and blood pressure. If stress is chronic, and the body is in an almost constant “hyper” state, the health of the individual declines.

High blood pressure, chronic migraines, heart disease, depression, anxiety, and other health problems then make their unwelcome appearances.

Some lawyers deal with stress by self-medicating, drinking too much, or using drugs. Some drink too much coffee or smoke too many cigarettes. These activities mask the problem and compound it with addiction.

Legal Business recently published a survey which concluded that throughout the United Kingdom, alcohol abuse was “endemic” and the use of hard drugs such as cocaine was “becoming more prevalent, particularly in big city law firms.”

The same survey said cocaine abuse is common on the job and law partners even admit to using it with their clients in basement poker games.

Lawyers particularly vulnerable to stress
Lawyers are natural-born perfectionists and this is where the problem begins. If the practice of one’s vocation requires perfection there is a lot of opportunity for disappointment because perfection is impossible.

Lawyers work on billable hours, so each minute is important, and many litigators are overloaded with work. Firms push their lawyers to accrue as many hours as possible in their day, resulting in crushing 14-hour marathon workdays.

Lawyers are also encouraged to compete with their colleagues to get more clients. This further increases stress levels.

The result is an exhausting treadmill that many find difficult to stay on without some form of relief — relief that may in fact compound the problem.

Lawyers by their nature are required to be skeptical and tend to view the world negatively. Also, they are required to be competitive and ruthless in court. If they cannot learn to mitigate the effects of — and sometimes turn off — these professional mindsets and attitudes, they risk the danger of illness, or worse.

In his book Stress Management for Lawyers: How to Increase Personal and Professional Satisfaction in the Law, Dr. Amiram Elwork provides the following statistics:
• 80% of lawyers report high stress in general
• 90% report stress increasing yearly
• 20 to 55% are dissatisfied with their work
• 37% are chronically depressed, with symptoms such as loss of appetite, lethargy and sleep disorders
• 25% experience chronic loneliness
• 40 to 75% of disciplinary actions are against lawyers who are chemically dependent or mentally ill
• Lawyers as a group experience more than average suicides among professionals, and 11% report having experienced suicidal ideation one or two times per month in the past year
• 20 to 30% of lawyers experience alcohol or drug abuse problems.

Elwork points out that most relationship, marriage, and friendship problems result from limited time availability and the effects of anxiety or depression. He adds that many lawyers take their work attitude, demeanor, and language home, where it does not fit.

He observes that even medium levels of chronic stress are harmful to effectiveness in meeting deadlines, detecting problems, and creating solutions.

Can meditation help a lawyer become a better litigator?
David Pfalzgraf of the Buffalo, N.Y., law firm Renda Pares & Pfalzgraf attests to the benefits of meditation. He told the National Law Journal, “Four of our firm’s seven lawyers take part in weekly meditation sessions.”

He also said his firm’s productivity has increased dramatically since the practice of meditation was introduced five years ago.

Lawyers who practise meditation report they have more energy and stamina, thereby improving their personal performance in court. Meditation helps lower blood pressure, increases focus, and helps practitioners see the world differently.

Linda Lazarus is a Washington, D.C., mediation lawyer who teaches group meditation. She started the D.C. Area Contemplative Law Group, which consists of 40 to 50 lawyers who meet monthly to help themselves find balance in their lives.

Lazarus told Legal Times, “You meditate because it makes you better. You change habitually negative behaviors. You stop negative habits and develop positive ones.”

Chi Kung meditation for lawyers
For more than 15 years, I have practised and taught Chi Kung meditation, an ancient Chinese form of controlled body movement, breathing, and mental concentration techniques. Like the Buddhist-inspired “mindfulness meditation” and other major contemplative traditions, Chi Kung emphasizes being in the moment by clearing the mind of thoughts.

Chi Kung meditation enables you to reside more frequently in the present moment, without aversion, commentary, or judgment. It frees you to observe life without “getting caught in the commentary.”

I have seen many of my students and others transform their personal and professional lives through Chi Kung. Virtually every regular practitioner reports a reduction in stress, improved sleep, enhanced energy and focus, and reduced blood pressure.

Doctors in China use it daily. However, in order to convince more Western doctors and others of Chi Kung’s clear medical and general health benefits, more Western-style scientific studies now need to be done and widely publicized. But these are beginning to appear.

Canadian lawyers might want to consider law professor Halpern’s words. He teaches Chi Kung to lawyers and judges, and says: “Developing a meditative perspective helps us practise law. It helps us be more creative and more open to new solutions.”

Law firms in Canada should consider setting up Chi Kung and other types of meditation programs in-house for the bottom-line benefits alone. Who knows what a healthier, more focused, and energetic law firm might achieve, with fewer burnouts, reduced absenteeism and turnover, and greater peace of mind among its competitive advantages?

Craig Cormack of Rising Tao Integrative Health is a Chi Kung meditation master, senior Tai Chi instructor, and registered Chinese massotherapist based in Montreal. He is a consultant at the McGill University Sports Medicine Clinic and president of l’Association de massage chinois Tuina du Québec. Contact him at www.risingtao.ca

New Series of Classes Begins
Dates: Monday, September 14 – October 26, 2009
Time: 5:30- 6:30p.m.
Location: 49 St. Clair Avenue West, Suite 404
Details: 6 x 1 hour sessions, includes all materials and excellent instruction, one follow up class, ongoing support
Class Size: Small classes, maximum 8
Fee: $250 plus GST

Register here

There are already so many things you’re forced to do at work. Drink subpar coffee as a break from mundane chores. Come up with creative ways to cut costs. And now your boss wants you to meditate?

Meditation has been gaining a slow and steady fan base in financial and professional environments as a way to combat the ravaging physical and psychological impacts of stress.

Maria Gonzalez is the founder and president of Argonauta Strategic Alliances Consulting, a company that integrates mindfulness meditation with the development of business strategy and strategic alliances. When she started meditating 17 years ago, she found that it made her far more effective at work. “You could be calm when everyone else wasn’t, and you could concentrate,” she says. “That meant you could do things much more quickly.”

Ms. Gonzalez offers one-on-one coaching and group sessions, and her business credentials — including teaching stints at McGill University and articles published in The McKinsey Quarterly — help quell concerns about flakiness. Because mindfulness meditation teaches the practitioner to focus on the moment, students often find that they are more calm, more efficient, able to listen more effectively and able to dismiss distractions, casual slights and irritations.

She says that the recent economic flux has increased interest in her practices. “People are really stressed and not knowing where this is going,” she says. “The people I’ve been working with, like the investment bankers who have been meditating for the last few years, are responding really differently.”

Students of Ms. Gonzalez’s practices are happy to offer testimonials about how the incorporation of meditative practices has improved their lives and allowed them to eliminate personal and professional clutter. Lesley Parrott, a consultant and keynote speaker, says that since she began meditating two years ago things have become more clear, calm and directed. “When I start something, I can finish it,” she says. “One’s own energy is so much more under control. You very quickly learn that it can get you into a really nice space [and] it’s like another sense kicks in.”

Barbara Symmons, a psychotherapist and life coach who has been meditating for more than a decade, put her first mindfulness meditation class together five years ago for a group of female managers at the Ministry of Natural Resources in Peterborough, Ont., who were feeling the stress of their work environment. “They were trained as scientists and they had to manage men who liked huntin’, fishin’ and shootin’,” Ms. Symmons says. The group responded quickly to the practice; blood pressures dropped and sleeping habits improved.

Practising mindfulness meditation doesn’t require much in the way of paraphernalia. Ms. Gonzalez simply introduces students to formal practice, the 10 minutes a day of deliberate meditation that can be done at your desk, on a treadmill or lying on your floor at home. It’s a relaxation of the body that encourages the mind to follow.

Ms. Symmons says that the classic introduction to mindfulness meditation is to hand a student a raisin and have her smell it, touch it, put it in her mouth and then wait a whole minute before swallowing it. “That is a visceral, concrete demonstration of slowing down,” she says.

Gradually, the process becomes instinctual and encompassing, and students find that they’re able to apply it when sitting in a meeting or interviewing for a job. Ms. Symmons is currently coaching a senior partner in a law firm who is hoping to accomplish some degree of work-life balance.

“When she’s at work, she’s at work; when she’s at home, she’s at home; and when she’s on the streetcar in between, she’s meditating,” she says. “We can’t change the law firm and we can’t change the demands that are put on her and we can’t change her family situation, but we can help her to manage it better,” she says.

“It’s really just about doing what you’re doing more effectively,” Ms. Gonzalez says. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re a surgeon or a journalist or a businessperson or a student.”

© 2008 The National Post Company. All rights reserved.

Licia Donadonibus
Age: 40
Occupation: business analysis and training, Sage Software
Termination: December, 2008

It’s been quite a wild ride. I’d been with the company for seven years. Having trained most of the clients, I thought I was fairly valuable, but I guess no one’s immune to downsizing.

I was informed Dec. 2 and was let go on Dec. 9. My boss IM’ed me and asked me to step into his office for a second. My spidey senses were up and I knew that it wasn’t all kosher. There were a lot of closed-door meetings. But I can’t take it personally – it’s the bottom line.

The feeling is one of witnessing a crash. It really didn’t sink in until three or four days later. I thought I was the only one on the team until I realized that it was a bunch of other people, including my manager. We all went and had a lovely lunch. I had two glasses of wine and walked it off before I drove home. I worked out the week, so I had somewhere to go the next day. Some people didn’t and I think it was much harder for them to just be told that their stuff would be ready to pick up in a box.

I did panic: ‘Oh my God, I need a plan!’ I was waking up in the middle of the night and thinking about the MasterCard I have to pay off. But the advantage to times like these is that everyone’s in the same boat.

Barbara [Symmons, a career coach,] was the first person, after my partner, that I called. I asked about my options. I think that was key to maintaining some kind of equilibrium rather than going off the deep end. We put together a plan and she gave me suggestions for books and references. And one of the best things she said to me was not to do anything for the next week because I wasn’t in dire straights. Instead, I hit the gym every day in order to eat up that anxiety.

I loved my job. I had a real personal relationship with these clients. They would say, ‘hey, how’s your dog doing?’ [But] I had been thinking about making a change. In the back of my head, I always thought of myself as an artist. I had started to take classes again and get back into the community as a portrait painter, which is what I wanted to do.

Now, with the downsizing, I’m talking to a number of potential clients about consulting and I want to run it so that I have one day a week to myself for painting. I found studio space. My sister-in-law, who happens to work in the financial sector, has a lot of contacts and she’s been mentioning that I do commissioned portraits and I’ve already got two lined up. I’ve been talking about this for a while, so I feel like it’s the universe giving me a big open door, saying, ‘put your money where your mouth is.’

The patients are sitting still, their eyes closed, meditating, on the floor of a group therapy room at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto.

It is the fifth week of an eight-week training course in mindfulness meditation for people recovering from depression.

Their goal is to treat any troubling thoughts or emotions with the same detachment with which they monitor the breath flowing in and out of their bodies.

Mindfulness-based psychotherapy is growing rapidly in popularity, and these patients are part of a $2.5-million clinical trial to assess whether it can prevent relapses as effectively as antidepressant medications.

Zindel Segal, a psychologist at CAMH, is a pioneer in the field of assessing the value of mindfulness meditation as a treatment for mental illness.

He is also studying how it physically changes the brain in ways that may be helpful to people recovering from depression or anxiety disorders.

“Depression and anxiety disorders tend to have a chronic, unremitting course,” Dr. Segal says.

“So prevention of relapse is as important as lifting patients out of an acute episode.”

Mindfulness meditation builds on the teachings of a fifth-century BC Indian prince later known as Buddha. It involves sitting still, with eyes closed, relaxing, and taking note of bodily sensations; the pressure of the floor on your foot, your tummy rising as you breathe. When a person’s attention wanders, they are instructed to redirect it back to their breathing.

Once people can do this, Dr. Segal says, they can turn their attention to a troubling thought – an ugly breakup of a romantic relationship, for example. The idea is to endure and accept difficult emotions without trying to change them, to view passing thoughts as an impartial observer.

“It helps you step back from automatic reactions built into emotions for evolutionary reasons,” he says. “Fright, alarm, rejection are experiences that can come over us very quickly.”

Pausing at these moments can be helpful for people with a history of depression, he says. They can label and observe emotions rather than automatically reacting.

But there are not a lot of studies that show mindfulness training works as a treatment for mental illness.

The clinical trial now under way is being funded by the National Institutes of Health in the United States and involves 177 patients in Toronto and Hamilton. They have all been successfully treated with antidepressants.

Patients in one group are still on their medication. In the second group, people who have been weaned off antidepressants are getting a placebo. In the third, patients are no longer taking medication but have undergone eight weeks of mindfulness training.

The clinicians following the patients don’t know which group they are in. Dr. Segal should have preliminary results in 18 months.

In one mindfulness session, taped as part of the experiment’s protocol, a female therapist explains to a group of patients the idea that they could accept troubling or difficult thoughts in the same way parents can love their children despite their sometimes challenging or even outrageous behaviour.

The patients get comfortable on the floor, and she guides them to pay attention to their breathing. She tells them not to banish any thoughts, but to accept them for what they are.

Afterward, one patient says she found the process less intense than the week before.

But another patient, fighting back tears, says she found the session difficult. She says she feels bad about fidgeting and not paying attention.

“I was bothered by pain, and physically uncomfortable.”

Dr. Segal knows it isn’t easy. He tries to practise meditation himself every morning, and says many doctors find they can guide patients more easily if they have personal experience.

The patients in the trial are also asked to meditate every day at home, and are given CDs to help them.

Dr. Segal, who holds the Morgan Firestone Chair in Psychotherapy at the University of Toronto, became interested in mindfulness meditation in the early 1990s, after University of Massachusetts biologist Jon Kabat-Zinn found that it helped patients with chronic pain.

At the time, Dr. Segal was investigating how psychological treatments such as cognitive behavioural therapy work in patients with depression.

Cognitive behavioural therapy is talk-based therapy that teaches participants new ways of thinking and behaving to overcome negative thought patterns and manage their symptoms.

Studies have shown it can prevent relapses as well as antidepressants can, and Dr. Segal and other scientists have found it can lead to physical changes in the brain.

He thought a version of CBT based on mindfulness meditation might offer patients an advantage, but was worried about being dismissed by his colleagues as being on the fringe of science.

“We didn’t call it mindfulness. We called it attention control training,” he says.

That was a decade ago, and since then he and other researchers have made intriguing discoveries about mindfulness meditation. Richard Davidson, an American neuroscientist, has done brain scans of Tibetan monks and found they have more activity in their left prefrontal lobes, an indication of positive emotions and good mood.

Dr. Segal wants to know how it changes the brains of people with mood disorders. “To them, returning to normal moods is an important goal.”

He and colleague Adam Anderson, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, recently reported the preliminary results of a study done at St. Joseph’s Health Centre in Toronto.

It involved two groups of patients suffering from depression, anxiety or chronic pain. One group had taken eight weeks of mindfulness training.

The patients watched and reflected on scenes from sad movies, such as Terms of Endearment, while a functional magnetic resonance imager took a picture of their brains.

While all the patients reported feeling sad after watching the tear-jerker scenes, the brains of those who had undergone mindfulness training responded differently.

The training seemed to quiet parts of the brain that respond to negative emotion with rumination and self-judgment, but to activate another region that integrates information about heart rate, posture and movement.

“There was more of a balance,” Dr. Segal says.