Frazzled

I enjoyed meeting Ruby at her recent evening with The Marketing Society to launch #marketing4change and being asked to read and review her book in this post gave me an opportunity to extend the experience and continue to savour the taste of it.

Ruby begins with a dramatically understated account of how her parents escaped Austria in ‘a bit of a rush’.

The book that follows is personal and conversational. It combines Ruby’s witty style with candid accounts of her own inner life, well-evidenced analysis (Ruby completed a Masters at the University of Oxford to make sure to get this right) of how our brains function and how and why we experience stress, along with a practical introduction to the art of mindfulness to counter its effects.

At the centre of the book is a 6-week course of exercises that can be performed each day to directly experience the present moment to its full potential. As Ruby explains, ‘It’s not about paying attention to something outside, but about being able to focus inside, being able to stand back and watch your thoughts without the usual commentary on them’. Each passing week of this mindfulness programme supports readers in experiencing such presence to a progressively greater degree. The impact of the exercises on our lives can be profound. As Ruby concludes, ‘How we pay attention shapes the structure of our brains’.

The book no doubt has a lot to offer anyone whose mental health may be impacted by stress or depression. But I would argue it also serves the broader reader who is primarily interested in enhancing their mental health and ability to regulate their own mind and responses to changing circumstances however they assess their current mental state. Ruby herself suggests re-branding Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy as ‘Mind Fitness’ to sound ‘less vegetarian’.

And what of its additional relevance to anyone in marketing?

One of the great things about marketing is that almost anything can serve as research and few topics can be more useful and interesting to marketers than how to better understand humans. The best way to understand others may often begin with truly understanding ourselves. Ruby’s book opens the door to practical introspection and provides a practical route to better observing, understanding and regulating our own mental responses in any situation.

Pass the book around amongst colleagues and the result could also be a more productive workplace (albeit perhaps after an initial drop in apparent productivity while everyone discovers the benefits of this kind of ‘research’).

For people who’d like to read more, Ruby’s next book, appositely entitled “How to be human: a manual’, and written with a neuroscientist and a monk, comes out in January.

For people who’d like to hear about mindfulness, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and their use in addressing depression, Profession Mark Williams who taught Ruby and is mentioned repeatedly in the book has created a podcast series with his colleagues at the University of Oxford called ‘The New Psychology of Depression’.

And for anyone who’d like to try a different angle on using the tools of psychotherapy to better understand ourselves and others, I recommend Vincent Deary’s wonderful book ‘How we are’, published by Penguin.

By Paul Skinner, founder of Pimp My Cause and the Agency of the Future, and author of ‘Collaborative Advantage: How collaboration beats competition as a strategy for success’.