Business Events Africa — April 2024

Reclaim balance by design

The meetings and event world is fast-paced most of the time, but mindfulness may help many event professionals to move through the storm with calmness, presence, and focus.

By Glenton De Kock, chief executive officer of SAACI

Abrief, mindful pause can reduce burnout and increase satisfaction. As this article is penned, we are in the week of the first holiday break – Easter – and, while many will be busy with meetings and events or travelling, we must make our own ‘extremes’ of health, happiness, and harmony.

Living in an environment of extreme intensity, demands and deadlines is often unavoidable — it’s the world we live in today.

By being intentional about protection, boundaries, resilience, and designing equilibrium, we can prevent extremes from making us extremely overwhelmed.

Don’t leave your work-life balance to chance. Be proactive about structuring your routines, rituals, and lifestyle practices that create pockets of calm and normalcy within the dimensions of intensity.

A simple, Most Valuable Priorities (MVP) review at a quiet moment, mid-way through the event day, brings mindful awareness to identifying and re-focusing your efforts. Let go of anything extraneous that doesn’t provide value. An area that may be beneficial to our clients, staff, and ourselves is to ‘build mindful moments’, incorporating short grounding activities like guided breathing, meditation moments, or mindfulness tips to the event program itself. This promotes mindfulness for attendees too.

One activity that is slowly gaining momentum is to move mindfully. Most venues allow for mindfully walking between meeting rooms or doing purposeful, deep breathing exercises while moving equipment, bringing awareness to your physical motions and movements.

In an industry where conversations are continuous, practicing mindful listening when communicating with clients, vendors, staff, etc., is an area that will allow us to slow down and listen without letting our minds wander. Being fully present and attentive reduces mistakes and shows those you work with that they have your full attention.

As event professionals, we can practice mindfulness in several ways to assist us in staying focused and grounded during the planning and execution of events which at times has the potential to be chaotic and stressful.

In doing so, we can safeguard our precious sanity.