Pensions and mindfulness: improving outcomes and value for members

When I talk to people about mindfulness, people often stop me and ask me what mindfulness is. Does it involve meditation? Does it involve some form of chanting or ritual? Is it a form of yoga? My answer is that mindfulness has many different facets, but fundamentally it is a quality we all have. Mindfulness is about improving our mental effectiveness. In a nutshell, it is like going to the gym for our minds.

How did I arrive at this view of mindfulness and pensions?

My personal journey involved losing my first wife to cancer, my Dad to Parkinson’s, my mum to Alzheimers, and becoming estranged from my daughter. The consequence of all this emotional trauma was suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) for three years.

Mindfulness was a life saver — I really don’t know what I’d have done without it. It enabled me to fully heal from my chronic fatigue mentally, emotionally and physically. Specifically, it:

• improved my emotional intelligence, my self-awareness, my empathy and my compassion;

• sharpened my focus, my clarity of thought, my ability to think laterally, and my problem solving ability;

• strengthened my resilience and improved my ability to manage stress. It taught me how to stop pushing myself to be a perfectionist.

Without mindfulness, I would not have become the fiduciary I am today. 

What is the connection between pensions and mindfulness?

Let me start with self-awareness. Put simply, self-awareness is understanding who we are and how we are different from others.

We are now developing our equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) policies. The challenge is that our members are extremely diverse and have diverse retirement goals, but trustees and others in the pensions industry are much less diverse. For a start we are all in the pensions industry!  So, developing self-awareness in the workplace is crucial to developing inclusion and diversity of thought.

Unfortunately, the reality is, as Erich Dierdorff and Robert Rubin said, “we are not very self-aware, especially at work” (Harvard Business Review 2015). And it is this lack of self-awareness that impacts our effectiveness. The research that Dierdorff and Rubin conducted clearly showed that teams and boards that are highly self-aware are twice as effective at decision making, strategic thinking and connecting with customers as teams and boards that have low self-awareness. That is something all organisations need to take on board.

Improving our self-awareness will therefore be key to the successful development of our EDI strategies, and more parochially the success of our organisations. And we need mindfulness to boost our self-awareness. Self-awareness is an integral part of mindfulness so the more we practice mindfulness the more we increase our self-awareness.

What about diversity of thought?

Diversity of thought (or cognitive diversity) is the ability to create as many different solutions to problems before arriving at the best one. This creates the opportunity to collaborate through inclusion to make better decisions about outcomes and come up with innovative solutions.

In order to benefit from diversity of thought, we all need to develop our thought processes beyond ourselves, to be openly curious and to address any blind spots like biases that might obstruct cognitive diversity. So, diversity of thought starts with self-awareness.

The link is clear: mindfulness boosts self-awareness and diversity of thought so the successful development and implementation of EDI will depend on mindfulness.

Mindfulness and improving outcomes

I believe that we need mindfulness to improve our effectiveness not just with EDI but with all aspects of delivering the best possible outcomes and value for members.

Whether we are using cognitive diversity to better assess our members diverse needs and attitudes, assessing value for members or providing wellbeing programmes that embrace that diversity by being more holistic, mindfulness is crucial to help us reach better quality decisions. Mindfulness can improve focus for members, their employers, providers and their executives and boards, for intermediaries, advisers, regulators and trade bodies.

I have been a fiduciary in pensions for over 40 years. I have practised mindfulness for over 40 years. It is time to put pensions and mindfulness together to improve outcomes and value for members.

David Butcher is an independent trustee and is founder of Mindful Pensions