Building Resilient Teams through Vedic Meditation

In the pit lane of a race track, a nimble pit crew waits calmly to perform specialized tasks in the blink of an eye. Their racer pulls in, burning precious seconds of race time for a necessary tire change, refuel, and rapid adjustments. The team springs into action, performing a swift dance of well-practiced tasks in a small space, collaborating without ever getting in each other’s way.

This art of elegant, effective team collaboration is a recipe for success in any organization. But unlike the pit crew for a race car, teams of employees don’t have to focus on immaculate performance for 3 minutes. They have to show consistent effectiveness over months and years. They face myriad tasks and obstacles that may test the limits of their capacity.

Without team resilience, an organization can’t function smoothly and its employees’ productivity will slowly deteriorate. Resilience isn’t a matter of each person having the right personality to balance the others, or making sure each person gets enough sleep. It’s possible to build resilient teams through training and supportive habits.

In this article, we’ll cover how Vedic Meditation can serve as a powerful resilience training tool and daily habit to support each individual.

We’ll also cover the 7 C’s of team resilience in an organization.  We’ll go over how Vedic Meditation supports all 7 and provide a comprehensive solution to developing resilience no matter the team size or type.

Stress and Adaptability

In the Vedic Worldview, we talk about our resilience to stress in terms of adaptation energy. Adaptation energy allows us to respond to changes in expectation with creativity and adaptability, rather than reacting or shutting down. The more adaptation energy we have, the more resilient we are to stress.

When you’ve seen someone ‘snap’ and break down from a seemingly small stressor, that is the signal of low adaptation energy and high stress. Conversely, those people who can respond to stressful events with calm and resourcefulness have enough adaptation energy at their disposal.

We build adaptation energy through sleeping, resting, and various forms of rejuvenation such as family time or creative time. Sleep builds the most adaptation energy into our day, but often, the amount of adaptation energy we can build while sleeping is not enough to meet a full day of demands. As we meet demands and accumulate stress in the body, we often take on more stress than our nightly rest can release.

Vedic Meditation builds our adaptation energy in an exponential way by releasing stress from the body in every session. The degree which we can remove stress from the body is the degree to which we can be adaptable.

Vedic Meditators build great adaptability and resilience as they consistently release more stress than they can accumulate on a normal day. This makes Vedic Meditation an excellent habit for employees to build adaptability by releasing stress in two twenty-minute sessions every day.

Vedic Meditation and Resilience

As we look at the 7 C’s of team resilience, you’ll see how Vedic Meditation can easily build resilience without the need for lengthy classes, wellness apps, or repetitive resilience team-building activities that draw productivity out of the work day.

The 7 C’s of Team Resilience

The “7 C’s of Resilience” is a framework developed by Dr. Kenneth Ginsburg, a pediatrician specializing in adolescent medicine and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He created this framework to help people, particularly young people, develop and strengthen their resilience skills in the face of challenges and adversity.

In his 2014 book on the subject, “Building Resilience in Children and Teens: Giving Kids Roots and Wings,” Dr. Ginsburg extensively discusses the principles and applications of this framework based on his clinical experience and research. Dr. Ginsburg identified the need for such a framework through his work with adolescents, recognizing the importance of building resilience as a protective factor against various mental health issues and risky behaviors.

The 7 C’s of resilience are:

1. Competence
2. Confidence
3. Connection
4. Character
5. Contribution
6. Coping
7. Control

The framework made a cultural resurgence in terms of employee wellbeing during Covid, when resilience was highly relevant in maintaining productivity in a challenging time.

According to data from Udemy for Business, resilience was the top soft skill employees sought after during the pandemic. Interest in the topic rose by 194% in early 2021.

With many more employees working from home and economic changes, the interest hasn’t slowed. Organizations now realize that more than being a ‘nice to have,’ team resilience training is an essential investment to maintain employee engagement, increase openness to change and adaptiveness to adversity, and better avoid illness, burnout, and conflict.

We’ve adapted the 7 C’s of resilience and created a similar framework of our own. They align with the original list but are tailored for team resilience. Let’s look at how Vedic Meditation plays into these similar core capacities and how you can build a resilient team .

1. Culture

Resilient teams operate within a positive environment of open communication, shared values, and a shared vision that keeps them moving toward common goals. In a culture where questions are welcome and feedback is met with responsibility, a team can feel supported and driven forward on their personal and collective growth journey.

Great teams have history together and trust each other to do their best in their specialty. This means that when unexpected circumstances or problems arise, the affinity and culture in the team as a whole can overcome any strain on the individual relationships.

Vedic Meditation can help to build culture through the shared experience of a common practice. With the endorsement of a wellness practice like meditation, the employees will feel more valued and a culture of appreciation and self-care will develop alongside its productivity.

In Vedic Meditation, practitioners transcend thought to experience pure Being through the use of a specially assigned mantra. In this field of Being, the differences between individuals dissolve, leaving the experience of unity and Totality in their place.

No matter each person’s title, skill level, or seniority in a position, sharing a common experience of transcendence brings a sustainable empathy and sense of unity among the members of a team.

2. Competence

For a team to be resilient to high demands or stressful periods, there must be a level of competence to solve problems and fulfill on projects without unnecessary mistakes or lag. Competence can come from experience, specialization, training, or protocols for dealing with various situations and needs.

With Vedic Meditation, competence can come from adaptability and creativity instead of knowledge or experience. The regular meditator has far more resourcefulness and creativity to devote to solving problems and finding the information they need.

With less stress bogging down their ability to adapt and be resourceful, they can rely on the competence of each persons’ specialty, ask questions, and move nimbly together toward common goals.

3. Connections

Relationships are a strong motivator in each of our lives – often, we’re more motivated to accomplish tasks well for others we care about than for ourselves alone. This is why resilient teams have strong working relationships with each other. Everyone is seen as a valued individual rather than as a title or position, and conflict is met with patience and care for the relationship rather than with competition or condescension.

Vedic Meditation builds empathy and connection by removing the stress that puts us in survival mode.

When we’re stressed, we’re more reactive to others and tend to operate more in our own interests, too bogged down by stress to consider the interests of others. As we release stress through meditation and transcend thought into pure Being, we recognize the connection between ourselves and others.

Stress and fatigue cause divide, where meditation and stress release make room for empathy and teamwork. As the idea that we’re all in competition fades, we lean into the joy of helping each other and collaboration arises naturally.

4. Commitment

Commitment is the glue that holds a team together and keeps everyone on track toward a common goal.

Part of commitment is having a clear vision and clearly defined tasks for each person, and part of it is the desire to show up for each other and believe in the value of the work. Committed team members show respect and loyalty to each other, and are willing to put effort into good work.

If a team member needs help, they are willing to take the time to help them, and if a team member needs protection from harm, the whole team will band together to protect each other. Committed teams keep their promises and do their best, keeping each others’ needs in mind while pursuing common goals.

Vedic Meditation helps to build commitment into teams by clearing the stress away that distracts us from the bigger picture of others’ needs. When the mind is clear and rested, it isn’t as common to work against the interests of others. We see the mutual benefit of loyalty and integrity, and don’t feel the same scarcity that stress produces.

5. Communication

Communication is essential to any team’s functioning, and may be the most important test of resilience on this list. Resilient teams share expectations, needs, timelines, and questions with each other readily and constructively, and give feedback that makes everyone better.

Communication is the source of the culture of the team and the effectiveness of its production. Team members need to be well-informed about what is happening in the workplace and encourage dialogue to keep ideas and projects moving forward. The willingness to set boundaries and realistic timelines around what each person can accomplish is one of the best ways to avoid overwhelm and burnout, and all of that happens through good communication.

Stress gets in the way of communication like too-dark sunglasses. Stress brings out reactivity, triggerable actions, and narrows our vision to see only our worries and little solutions.

When team members are regularly meditating and releasing that stress, communication becomes easier. There is more confidence among team members to share what is really going on with them, to ask for help, and to report problems as they see them.

A rested physiology means an individual will be much more open to listening to others, patient with communication, and affirming in their delivery even when the message is difficult. Rather than feeling like they are demanded of all the time, the knowledge that every day they will be able to take a break in the afternoon and release stress for twenty minutes is a great builder of resilience in communication.

6. Coordination

Resilient teams must be synchronized in their efforts across the departments and specializations. Individual goals must align with the team’s goals and the organization’s goals. Coordination also includes the ability to resolve conflict so that everyone can stay in sync.

Stress is a great divider, and it is division that stops coordination.

Since Vedic Meditation releases stress, coordination comes easily and the patience to resolve conflict is more natural. Without the stress creating static and distraction in our minds, thinking is more orderly. Chaotic situations don’t seem as intimidating, and it is easier to put systems and processes in place to streamline the team effort. Coordination is a natural individual and collective extension of Vedic Meditation.

7. Consideration

Resilient teams consider each others’ personal and professional needs, operating more as a unit than as a group of independently-operating individuals. Appreciation, encouragement, and gratitude is a natural expression of support among team members that keeps everyones’ spirits up while tasks are completed.

Vedic Meditation brings each person in contact with the Unified Field of Being, or Bliss. With such deep rest and a moment of universality incorporated into each day, practitioners feel more connected to other people and more empathetic to their interests.

Vedic Meditation builds a sense of fulfillment emanating from the inside, so that rather than bringing our needs and lack to work, we bring our fulfillment wherever we go and we become a contribution. Knowing that collaboration will bring greater success in the long term than individual gains in the short term, consideration is a natural result.

How to Learn Vedic Meditation

To bring Vedic Meditation into your team and learn how to build a resilient team, email susan@meditatewithsusan.com.

We’ll schedule a discovery call to talk through your needs, and arrange a Learn to Meditate course on-site in your city to teach your employees or team the technique.

Once each person receives a mantra and learns how to practice Vedic Meditation, they will have the practice for life and can enjoy greater resilience consistently each day.