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I use this one on myself many days, often before a phone call I don't want to make. The trap in ACT's Choice Point isn't the obvious avoidance. Nobody needs help spotting that they're scrolling instead of working. It's the away moves that look like work. The extra round of research. The fifth revision. The meeting you schedule to discuss the thing instead of doing the thing. All of it feels responsible. All of it is motion in the wrong direction, and it can eat a career quiet

Faster Tasks. An Overloaded Mind. The report took half the time. The working day still ended late. Drafting is faster. Summaries arrive in seconds. Yet there is still another output to check, another prompt to refine, and another request waiting. Time saved can become room for more work. What the Numbers Reveal In a March 2026 analysis of its survey of workers in Japan, PERSOL Research and Consulting reported that only 25.4% of generative AI users said using it had saved them

Here's a pattern I've seen more than once in Tokyo. A company's well being numbers improve. Stress scores come down, EAP uptake is healthy, the dashboard is green. And within the year, two of the strongest people on the team resign. Nothing had warned anyone. Almost everything we measure in Japanese workplaces is designed to catch distress. Stress checks, absence data, counseling referrals. Those systems work, and they've improved enormously in the thirty years I've been here

Check out this 45 second video clip of me with the good people at Robert Half. Companies are sometimes hesitant to book wellness training—even it there is a clear connection to focus and productivity. The budget’s tight, the calendar’s tighter, and nobody wants to budget for time off the floor. So here’s thirty minutes, free. The MindBridge Mini Workshop is a live introduction to Full Engagement Training—the attention skills that sit underneath everything else your people do.

Thank you to everyone who joined us at the Robert Half Tokyo office for an insightful discussion on the future of employee wellbeing. We were honored to welcome Urara Kishimoto (Mars) as our keynote speaker and yours truly as our panelist, who shared valuable perspectives on building resilience, fostering engagement, and creating healthier workplace cultures that support both employee wellbeing and business performance. A big thank you to the attendees for contributing to a m

From October 1, every employer in Japan has a legal duty to protect staff from customer harassment at the workplace. No size exemption. It covers consumers and corporate clients — phone, SNS, face-to-face. This is big news. Most organizations will meet it with a policy document. Thats the floor, and its worth doing properly. But the Ministry's own survey found that among workers who had experienced "kasuhara", 35% did nothing at all. More than half of them said they didn't be

Most companies talk about "mental health" as something to manage or minimize. But there's a more useful skill hiding underneath that conversation: psychological flexibility (PF). It's not about eliminating stress or staying calm all the time. It's the ability to notice discomfort — pressure, uncertainty, hard feedback — and still act in line with what actually matters, instead of shutting down or reacting on autopilot. PF is at the root of most MindBridge Minute topics. Emplo

When did you last ask a new hire how they're really doing — in a conversation that wasn't a performance review? In Japan, employees in their twenties now report the highest rate of work-related mental health struggles of any age group. Double the 2014 rate. Source: "Young Japanese Employees Still Most at Risk," Nippon.com Onboarding covers systems. It rarely covers the weight of a first year. This post gives a simple yet effective way to address this. Contact me to learn mor

Your highest performer is the last person you'd worry about. That's the problem. Quiet burnout is being named as a defining workplace trend for 2026 — and the reason HR leaders are being told to watch for it is precisely that it doesn't look like anything. Deadlines still get met. Nobody complains. Meanwhile, presenteeism — people at their desks but working at a fraction of their capacity — is estimated to cost Japan's economy over $46 billion a year. That cost is already si

What an awesome time I and co-trainer Akey Hirano had flying down to Kumamoto and engaging with Standex (Sanyu) Electronics. We often point out that our Full Engagement Training (FET) is good for anyone at any level, and Standex took us up on this, putting forth a group of staff and management for the event. We discussed science-backed mindful processes that show up positively in the work place—and then we engaged in mindful exercises that incorporated the processes. We spent