A Hu­man Re­source pro­fes­sion­al with more than 20 years’ cor­po­rate ex­pe­ri­ence, Make­da Mcken­zie is now a com­mit­ted mind­ful­ness prac­ti­tion­er, coach and ad­vo­cate. She found­ed her com­pa­ny, the Caribbean Mind­ful­ness In­sti­tute, in 2017 to pro­mote mind­ful­ness and med­i­ta­tion as an ef­fec­tive, safe, and sci­ence-backed means of re­duc­ing the ef­fects of chron­ic stress in our work­places, schools and com­mu­ni­ties.

Make­da re­ceived her mind­ful­ness-based stress re­duc­tion (MB­SR) teacher-train­ing from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, San Diego, School of Med­i­cine (UCSD). The UCSD is wide­ly con­sid­ered to be among the pre­em­i­nent thought and re­search lead­ers in the field of Mind­ful­ness Stud­ies. Make­da has gone on to com­plete fur­ther for­mal in­ter­na­tion­al qual­i­fi­ca­tions in mind­ful­ness, hap­pi­ness and well­be­ing, and work­place Psy­chol­o­gy. She now pro­vides work­place train­ing and pub­lic work­shops on mind­ful­ness and med­i­ta­tion to help peo­ple beat stress and feel their best.

Here is what she told We Mag in an in­ter­view:

What was the biggest chal­lenge you had to over­come and how did you deal with it?

Even though mind­ful­ness class­es are of­fered in work­places, schools, hos­pi­tals and clin­ics all over the world and the sta­ple of many For­tune 500 com­pa­nies like Nike, Ya­hoo!, Ap­ple, and Google, not hav­ing a com­pa­ny lo­cal­ly, or even re­gion­al­ly, to mod­el my­self against meant that the learn­ing curve was steep and I faced high-lev­els of un­cer­tain­ty with vir­tu­al­ly every de­ci­sion. That’s when hav­ing the re­silience, self-com­pas­sion and growth-mind­set that mind­ful­ness cul­ti­vates, came in handy. It has giv­en me the free­dom to learn, grow, make mis­takes and keep go­ing in spite of chal­lenges. My mantra has been “take a breath (or two, or three) and keep it mov­ing”.

Tell us some­thing about you that peo­ple may not know.

I’ve avoid­ed pub­lic speak­ing pret­ty much all of my life, so it’s iron­ic that it’s ba­si­cal­ly my job now. When I start­ed my busi­ness, I knew I want­ed to reach peo­ple where they most of­ten face the high­est lev­els of stress – the work­place – but I didn’t stop to think this would mean I would have to present in front of groups of some­times hun­dreds of peo­ple. Be­ing so pas­sion­ate about the sub­ject mat­ter helps – it’s easy to talk about some­thing you love. And my own per­son­al mind­ful­ness prac­tice as a whole has helped a lot too – it has taught me how to breathe through my anx­ious mo­ments, and to not be­lieve every­thing I think.

What are you most grate­ful for?

With­out a doubt, it’s my fam­i­ly. They have been a huge in­flu­ence and source of sup­port for me both per­son­al­ly and pro­fes­sion­al­ly and they’re my favourite peo­ple in the world.

What is some­thing you know for sure that you wish the rest of us knew?

Stress is no joke. We kind of ca­su­al­ly throw around the term “I’m so stressed out”, and think it’s some­thing we can put off deal­ing with un­til an­oth­er day, but over time stress has a sneaky way of build­ing up in our bod­ies and lim­it­ing our phys­i­cal, emo­tion­al, and men­tal well­be­ing. We need to start pri­ori­tis­ing our men­tal fit­ness in the same way we pri­ori­tise our phys­i­cal fit­ness. “Con­stant­ly feel­ing stressed out and over­whelmed doesn’t have to be our “new-nor­mal”. There are sim­ple lifestyle tweaks you can take to start feel­ing bet­ter now, and time and time again, prac­tic­ing mind­ful­ness has been sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly proven to be one of them. It is a sim­ple skill that can po­ten­tial­ly be life chang­ing, and over 30 years of neu­ro-sci­en­tif­ic re­search has shown that reg­u­lar mind­ful­ness prac­tice can re­duce the ef­fects of stress by chang­ing the shape and func­tion­ing of the brain for the bet­ter.

Do you have an ad­di­tion­al point you would like to make?

Peo­ple tell me all the time about all the big ways and lit­tle ways my class­es have changed their per­son­al lives and work ex­pe­ri­ences. I am so glad I per­se­vered with my busi­ness even though at times the way for­ward isn’t al­ways clear. It proves that you don’t have to be per­fect, or have all the an­swers, to make a dif­fer­ence. If you’re won­der­ing what you have to of­fer the world, start by pay­ing at­ten­tion to what brings you joy, what makes your heart sing, and do more of that...and share it with oth­ers if you can.