Financial Mindfulness
Financial mindfulness, effectively managing an individual’s financial life, offers hope for those seeking better financial management practices. By wisely investing, spending money, and controlling emotions, financially mindful individuals pave the way for a more harmonious relationship with money matters. This impacts the alignment of wants and needs and promises a future free from severe long-term adverse social and psychological outcomes.
Mindfulness cultivates compassion, openness, generosity, and kindness, contributes to intrinsic and other-oriented values, and curbs materialistic and hedonistic values. Mindfulness also relates to basic psychological needs, including autonomy, relatedness, and competence, and negatively correlates with impulsiveness. Because of these characteristics, mindfulness promotes healthy, rational behavior and reduces suffering derived from cravings. Individuals with high mindfulness are less materialistic than those with low mindfulness.
Can Mindfulness Help You Make More Ethical/Responsible Decisions?
Research shows mindfulness encourages self-transcendent values and reduces materialistic goals, such as greedy monetary attitudes. Mindfulness training can develop ethical decision-making skills by increasing awareness of potential issues linked to consumption. Mindfulness-trained consumers are more likely to purchase in moral and ethical ways. Moreover, at the organizational level, mindfulness training helps organizations gain competitive advantage, develop employees’ ethical mindsets, and enhance positive images of companies’ green equity and corporate social responsibility (CSR), ultimately leading to sustainable innovations and growth.
Mindfulness and Meaningful Work
People, in general, and millennials, are more concerned with meaningful work than earning money. This value shift creates generational gaps between older and younger generations. Although pay is still a consideration for most people, it must be more relevant. People are driven more by intrinsic rewards and types of work. Consequently, investing in mindfulness training could be connected to young generations’ emerging search for meaning. Companies should aim to balance the intrinsic drivers of motivation with mindfulness training programs in their human resource policies.
Mindfulness promotes ethical beliefs directly and indirectly by reducing avaricious monetary attitudes. It prevents people from falling into temptation and becoming unethical. Within the short-term duration after mindfulness training (within one year), mindfulness, directly and indirectly, enhances consumer ethical beliefs. However, the power of lower avaricious monetary attitudes to enhance consumer ethical beliefs diminishes in the long term.
Caution: It’s Not a Once and Done Thing
Sustaining the benefits of mindfulness requires continuous practice. While some studies suggest that the benefits of mindfulness training may endure up to a year, it's important to remember that mindfulness is not a one-time initiative. Continuous practice is essential to see long-term benefits. This commitment to regular practice is a testament to the dedication required for the full realization of mindfulness benefits.
