Why pushing "mindfulness" and "growth mindset" in the workplace is fundamentally inappropriate
The nonprofit sector is known for its compassion-centred mandates and noble, public-serving visions. People who work in nonprofit often cite "shared values" as a motivation for staying with organizations, often passing on higher pay in the private sector because their personal values come with a deep desire to "have an impact". Anyone who's worked in nonprofit knows "passion" comprises the fumes most organizations run on, even while salaries stagnate and work hours erode into personal time.
Among comparative sectors, nonprofit tends to lead in embracing wellness concepts, usually alongside strategies for Indigenous reconciliation and decolonization. Plenty of other business sectors carry similar values, but because altruism is such a prominent aspect of nonprofit culture, those organizations dedicate a higher ratio of resources to themes of social justice, equity and inclusivity.
In my experience, and through countless conversations with colleagues working in nonprofit, themes of "wellness" exist everywhere in these spaces. Over the past decade two themes have emerged potently: "mindfulness" and "growth mindset".
I can tell you right now, if I never hear either of those terms again it'd be too damn soon. They've always given me the ick. A deep sense of wrongness, like a fresh-baked cake wafting the faintest smell of shit. But in a workplace, how to possibly critique either of them, when doing so can so be easily be framed as the opposite of their meaning? It always felt like a trap to me, and now that I have the time and distance to consider it more carefully, the more I realize how truly, fully, completely colonized these workplaces are. They are leveraging the language of decolonization and wellness for the express purpose of boosting outcomes.
My first "aha!" moment came a few weeks ago when I happened across this paper titled, "Buddhism as method: Spirituality as a counterforce to neoliberalism in psychotherapy". I'm not a Buddhist, and I really don't know much about it beyond what I've picked up peripherally from Alan Watts lectures, curiosity about nearby monasteries, and a first date with a guy (very white) who, between listing every asset he owned, identified as a Buddhist and felt strongly that I should "check it out". I generally understand Eastern spiritual philosophy to be a diverse range of practices pulling from Indigenous teachings, centred on inner enlightenment, freedom from materiality, and universal oneness. Unfortunately for the first date guy, a white guy preoccupied with material assets evangelizing about Buddhism was just too much for me to process. There was no second date.
Anyway back to the paper...
Written by Min-Woo Kang, a researcher from South Korea who both grew up with and practices Buddhism, the paper opens with this absolute banger of an abstract:
Buddhist practices such as mindfulness have been decontextualised and misrepresented, often skewed to align with commercial interests under neoliberal ideologies. In response, this article explores spiritual wisdom within Buddhism, underscoring the inherently relative, conditioned, and impermanent nature of reality. It begins by introducing a decolonial analytical framework, Buddhism as method, to critically evaluate psychological research and practice. Through this lens, the article examines how current mental health practice may inadvertently perpetuate social injustice within a neoliberal context. Additionally, it advocates for spiritual engagement within the profession, emphasising the transformative power of personal spiritual growth in driving meaningful social justice advocacy. By engaging more deeply with socially engaged forms of spirituality, this article identifies areas for improvement in psychological research and practice while underscoring the vital role of personal spiritual growth in advancing social justice.
(emphasis mine)
The paper goes on,
Buddhist practices such as meditation and mindfulness have been secularised and psychologised through a psychological lens, often reduced to stress management techniques tailored for individual work environments ... This form of ‘neoliberal mindfulness’ strips the practice of its broader spiritual and ethical dimensions, turning it into a tool that may potentially diminish individuals’ capacity to challenge or resist their socioeconomic conditions
often reduced to stress management techniques tailored for individual work environments ...
That about summarizes the nonprofit sector's grasp of "mindfulness".
For bleeding hearts like ours, nothing matters more than feeling like you're helping. And because barely staying afloat takes up so much time, having a job that shares your values can feel like killing two birds with one stone – "I get paid to care, and I'm helping!". If you don't have time to engage in activism outside of working hours, at least you're making an impact and fighting the good fight everyday from your desk!
Nonprofit organizations scuttle around the capitalist beast as it heaves recklessly through our environments and economies. The relationship is a sort of cleaning symbiosis, a mutually beneficial system between two species, like gobies on a shark. When the shark goes after another creature and makes a terrible bloody mess, the gobies excitedly snap into action, developing top-level messages and 5-year strategies addressing how they're going to clean those messes up, scheduling Teams meetings and sharing powerpoints about how much closer they are to cleaning up the past few decades' worth of messes, and publicizing charming, heartwarming stories, like the moray eel whose quadrant of coral was destroyed by sharks fighting over a carcass, but whose resilience, tenacity, and experience with Org™ resulted in the incredible honour of getting a job on a construction site working for a shark developer. The moray eel proudly wears a "Build Back Better" t-shirt while posing with a CEO shark for photos – photos the lead gobies lose their shit over and plaster all over their marketing channels, email campaigns, and annual reports in hopes the donor sharks will feel so good about the moray eel not only not being dead, but paying shark taxes(!!), fingers crossed the sharks will increase their annual donations by 2%, maybe even 3%! The gobies have lots of important work to do.
Does it ever occur to the gobies to stop the sharks? Uhm, hell no?! Not unless they want to get eaten!?
Maybe I'm not being fair. Some gobies start their work truly believing they'll be able to convince the sharks to be more careful (not to stop entirely of course, because what would the gobies do then??). Some of the gobies even challenge the sharks directly, demanding to know why they have to eat everything in the first place. The sharks eat those gobies, of course.
The next day when the eaten goby coworkers don't show up to work, an all-staff message from goby HR confirms their goby friend will not be returning. And if a goby asks why, they're promptly put on a performance improvement plan for not being mindful enough. Eventually, a new goby takes the eaten goby's place, and they all carry on doing the very good and noble work of cleaning up after the sharks.
Occasionally, a stupid little goby realizes how utterly fucked this all is, and asks the lead gobies questions like, does it have to be like this? Why are we participating in this system? Why is everything so broken all the time? The goby leaders listen patiently and compassionately. They tell the stupid little goby they see real potential in them, then they assign a leadership course that will help the stupid little goby learn about the most important concepts in the world of shark cleaning: mindfulness and having a growth mindset.
The stupid little goby starts moving through the world with a sense of vertigo. As it dutifully cleans up after the sharks day after day, the cognitive dissonance required by the work starts to break their gelatin brain. The further they begin to stray from the dutiful goby school, the more aware they become of the devastation the sharks are creating. And they soon learn the sharks are planning even more devastation! In response to this, the lead gobies frantically create more five-year plans while more and more moray eels and every other kind of marine creature gets eaten or left ruined by the sharks.
Let's exit the goby-shark analogy now. I hope I didn't lose you.
Many nonprofit workers are basically the working poor "but with great benefits!". Access to benefits keeps them tethered to the sector, and everyone gets a therapist! You get a therapist! You get a therapist! YOU get a therapist!!
Back to Min-Woo Kang's paper,
...current psychological research and practice...[tends] to reflect rigid, individualistic, and outcome-driven paradigms. Consequently, the field may unintentionally reinforce systemic inequalities and social injustices by aligning with neoliberal ideologies that prioritise productivity, autonomy, and measurable outcomes over relational and contextual understanding.
Reading this I think about all the Indigenous engagement programs run by nonprofits that require quarterly impact reports in order to maintain funding...
Now let's talk about "growth mindset".
The earliest and most widely recognized reference for the term "growth mindset" is from the website SimplyPutPsych.co.uk (oooh dear) with all caps black text reading "THE SCIENCE BEHIND CAROL DWECK’S GROWTH MINDSET: UNDERSTANDING THE KEY TO PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL SUCCESS". I'm not going to link to the website because jesus h christ. Monetized philosophies are obviously the most reliable guides towards personal successes, right???
Like oh my GOD. Hold that up next to Kang's paper and oh my GODDDD. It's like a crystallization of the maniacal, productivity-is-king obsession of the neoliberal paradigm. What is more colonized than monetizing wellness?? The answer is none. None is more colonized.
And to really drive the point home, here is a real screenshot from a nonprofit "All Staff" workplace Teams message:
I know some workplaces that love the growth mindset concept, it's in aaaaall the culture messaging. And they live it so fully that, despite the fact that I built a successful market farm from nothing then lost my coparent but managed to carry my kids and keep them hopeful and curious and now we're thriving and living a cute and fun life designed around flowers and beaches and community, oh and I did it all single – despite that fact – I've been told by nonprofit leaders probably more than a dozen times that I "don't have a growth mindset". And boy is that a problem for someone with "so much potential" like me! Why are you throwing your path to leadership away?
Now, defenders of "growth mindset" might wisely point out that I'm simplifying this revolutionary concept, and to be fair I am leaving out the entire other half of this business philosophy, the context of which, without it, we can't presume to understand such a complex, disruptive revelation.
You see, there's "growth mindset", which is the belief that you can get smarter if you try really hard, and then there's "fixed mindset", which is the opposite of that, ie: the belief you can't get smarter.
"These findings highlighted a crucial insight: the way we think about our abilities can directly impact how we perform. "
That's it. Plus a whole book that says all of that in hundreds of different ways, plus seminars, workshops, etc etc etc.
Friends, I can't. What is this? What are we doing?
I need to organize this rage in my mind. This deep exasperation. This exhaustion borne from years of being gaslit by a system literally designed to make us crazy.
A workplace that asks its employees to embrace "mindfulness" and "growth mindsets" is not pointing anyone towards personal growth, they are pointing them towards compliance. The very transactional nature of the employer-employee relationship negates possibilities for significant personal exploration and growth within a workplace, magnified by the fact that most of these workplaces offer no meaningful paths to career growth. The doublespeak of "embrace a growth mindset, but stay where you are"... I really don't understand what they expect.
Nevermind the fact that nonprofits are considered the most "progressive" sector yet we can't have open conversations about Gaza, rising fascism, data trafficking, surveillance, populist brain rot... hell we can't even talk about our own salaries! We have to monitor ourselves online lest we get disciplined or fired, and if you fucking dare do other income-generating work during your work hours, if you fucking DARE...
But as an employee, if those restrictions make you uncomfortable, that's on you and your "fixed mindset". Look at everyone else, why don't you? They're all being mindful and are excited to try new things, they never complain about their workloads or random task assignments outside of their role descriptions and pay grades, and they never criticize chaotic project management. They're happy to go above and beyond every time, because they care about our community more than themselves, and that's real teamwork you know? That's family. That's culture. We take care of each other. Now, let's all go around the circle and each say three things we're most grateful for about our jobs.
AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
I'm okay.
And I guess this impossible system isn't really my workplace's fault. They're all good people and they're all legitimately trying (there are some parts of that I argue with myself over, but nevertheless). Maybe it isn't even the nonprofit sector's fault. They're just dutiful schools of optimistic gobies cleaning up after the sharks. It's the sharks who need to be stopped.
(Not real sharks of course. I love real sharks and they are nothing like the capitalists I've depicted here.)
To end this on a positive note, today I just so happened to come across a nonprofit doing work I'm actually super excited about, relating to mental health, psychology and psychiatry: Mad In America,
[Our] mission is to serve as a catalyst for rethinking psychiatric care in the United States (and abroad). We believe that the current drug-based paradigm of care has failed our society, and that scientific research, as well as the lived experience of those who have been diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, calls for profound change.
We recognize that the conventional Western classification systems of mental and physical health conditions are based on flawed science shaped by reductionist, hierarchical, and profit-driven ideologies.
What first pulled me in was their article Doing Harm, The Human Cost of Turning Mourning Into a Disorder, like good lord finally. After navigating deep grief while also getting familiarized with a brand new job in a city I didn't want to be in with two deeply depressed tweens at the time, guess who was "the problem" in that scenario? But I really shouldn't complain, what with company policy allowing for three whole bereavement days and all.
Can we finally talk about how rigid and colonized the North American mental health paradigm actually is, and how that trickles into employer "wellness" programs, and how long it's been upholding the very system that's been making us so, so sick?
Back to Mad In America, every headline is wildly intriguing to me, these are just a few:
- In Defense of Instability in Mental Health Recovery
- The Gentrification of Social Work: Why a “Political Mental Health” Must be Public
- We Must Stop the ADHD Prescribing Cascade, Not Perpetuate It
- How Mental Health Ideology Perpetuates a War on Emotions
So much level-headed, science-based research on mental health, so much empirical evidence of the destructiveness of current systems, so many excellent policy resources! So many "lived experiences, peer specialists, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, program managers, journalists, attorneys, and more" exploring "issues related to this goal of “remaking psychiatry.”"!
And no monetized ideas! But hold up, if no one is buying the ideas are they even worth anything??? You're telling me NO best selling books came out of this groundbreaking research?? You're telling me not a single thought leader on LinkedIn is talking about it?? Uh, OKAAAY...
Like honestly can we see it now? How far away workplace "wellness" is from real wellness? Because it's really far.
Real wellness is a living wage. A real living wage, not the wage made up by statisticians using poorly gathered data.
Real wellness is three, maximum four-day workweeks, giving people plenty of time to pursue interests and participate in community.
Real wellness is good quality universal public health care. Not being tethered to a company's benefits.
Real wellness is climate justice and having the energy to take climate action.
And real wellness is a universal basic income. Why is every nonprofit involved in policy-influence not jumping all over UBI... ??
Too bad I have such a fixed mindset though. Oh well! Guess I'll just sit here and wait for Monday to start.