Mindiac: Mindfulness for the Sustainability Professional
Executive Summary
4/26/19

Kaylin Ayotte & Isabel Burdge

In recent years, contemplative discourse has guided fields as diverse as psychology,
medicine, and spiritual practice. With sustainability’s emergence as a caring profession, we
believe mindfulness can contribute to the conversation. Exercises that develop skills such as
active listening, preventative self-care, and self-awareness are explored through the five facets of
mindfulness: non-reactivity, observing, acting with awareness, describing, and non-judging of
experience (Baer, Smith, Hopkins, Krietmeyer, & Toney, 2006). Thus, we have created an online
publication called Mindiac that utilizes the five facets of mindfulness to help sustainability
professionals develop and refine intangible skills that will help them solve sustainability
problems. Through interviews, framework identification, research, and online publishing
software, fifteen articles on mindfulness were created. The six-part publication will equip
sustainability professionals with tools to navigate complex situations in applied settings. The
publication can be accessed using this link: https://joom.ag/G9fa
The success of sustainability professionals is mainly measured by the real-world change
they enact (Brundiers, Wiek, 2017). This success depends heavily on developing professional
skills like active listening, empathy, self-compassion, self-care, self-awareness, and battling
burnout (Brundiers, Wiek, 2017). Although academic settings excel in providing content
knowledge and methodological expertise, academia is not proficient in guiding students in the
acquisition of these skill sets. Therefore, students are often thrown into learning these skills
through volunteering, internships, or employment opportunities. While all are valuable
experiences, these opportunities are insufficient in providing self-guided practices to sharpen
skills, reflection, peer mentoring, and evidence-supported practices (Brundiers, Wiek, 2017).
Plus, while many enter the field because that want to make a positive impact, they often find
themselves overwhelmed while tackling sustainability challenges. They experience mental and
emotional distress because of the urgency, complexity, and interconnectedness inherent in
sustainability issues (Brundiers, Wiek, 2017). Mindiac focuses on enhancing inner sustainability
through mindfulness, which emphasizes beneficial elements for the social pillar of sustainability.
Exercises included in the publication like active listening and empathy foster increased social
abilities. The same intangible skills learned through mindfulness also enhance productivity in the
workplace. Through improved self and emotional awareness, preventative self-care, and
observation, mindfulness practitioners learn skill sets that help with negotiation, effective
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communication, handling high workloads, and improve self-confidence in decision making
abilities. A study by Slutsky, Chin, Raye, and Creswell (2018) found that employees who
participated in a six-week mindfulness training seminar displayed higher levels of focus, conflict
resolution, job satisfaction, rational thinking, and emotional resilience when compared with
employees who only participated in a half day mindfulness seminar. Simply put, happy,
productive workers are better for the company, individual, and economy as a whole. Although
mindfulness training has a focus on internal sustainability, environmental attitudes and behaviors
are brought to the forefront when internal awareness of values are discovered. A study by
Ericson, Kjønstad, and Barstad (2014) suggests that, “Well-being, empathy, and awareness of
values can in turn lead to more sustainable behaviors.” Assuming our intentions align with
environmental stewardship, mindfulness can improve the individual’s impact on the
environment. Hence, providing a publication with the tools and resources needed to work on a
diverse range of skill sets is necessary for success in the sustainability field.
Initially, we developed and administered a survey to gauge the interest in and general
knowledge about sustainability among millennials. Our stakeholders are our readers, but as the
project progressed, our audience shifted from millennials to sustainability professionals.
However, parts of the data collected is still relevant. The survey group showed a preference for
online articles versus printed articles, with 68.7% of millennials rarely reading printed magazines
and 66.3% reading articles online regularly. As a result, we changed the format of our
publication to be online. Respondents were familiar with present awareness (the observation
facet) as an aspect of mindfulness, but were not inclusive of the other four facets: non-reactivity,
non-judgmentalism, acting on autopilot, and describing and labeling with words. The publication
aims to provide our audience with a more complete picture of mindfulness. Only 14.5% of
respondents were not interested in reading a mindfulness magazine, so we expect the publication
to be well received. As independent project managers, we did not work with a direct partner.
However, the survey provided us with valuable information about what our readers know about
mindfulness, that they are interested in reading about mindfulness in an online publication, and
that they desire to incorporate sustainability into their lives further.
We created our own tool to help us defend specific connections between facets and skills
using psychological data, formal mechanisms, and exercises that improve those mechanisms. We
start with the facets, which we learned from the Baer et. al (2006) framework. Then, we identify
the mechanisms behind each facet using a paper from Hölzel et. al (2011). Next, using crosschecked psychological data research, we addressed how each mechanism affected specific areas
of the brain. Then, we researched self-guided mindfulness exercises that impacted the associated
brain area. Finally, we connected the exercises to skills they directly improve using the
Brundiers-Wiek (2017) framework and evidence supporting the exercises. Additionally, the
exercises were a useful tool in bringing the psychological concepts to life. The key intervention
points in the publication are the practices, so the tool we created to formulate arguments
supporting those practices was significant.
The scope of this project was creating a publication, and did not include measuring
outcomes. Our key benchmarks for the publication included: evidence based interventions,
engaging content, credible and diverse perspectives from experts, and a storytelling dynamic.
These benchmarks resulted in a mindfulness toolkit for sustainability professionals. After reading
the publication, a sustainability professional will be informed about mindfulness, why it matters,
and how the practice impacts brain function. With consistent practice, the exercises provided

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within the publication will enhance the five skills (active listening, self-compassion, empathy,
preventative self-care, self-awareness) – elevating the sustainability professional’s performance.
The next steps would be to test the effectiveness of the project. The publication features pop-up
rating screens that encourage readers to provide feedback on the content. Analysis of the inpublication responses would be a first step in evaluating the success of the publication. We
envision outcomes to be measured by focus groups on user experience, effectiveness of content,
barriers of implementation, and validation of intervention points.

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