Cultural Shifts, Continuing On
You’ve done beautifully!
It’s time to celebrate your change and commit to following this through to its next phase.
Be pleased with yourself and each other.
Our leadership team commits to the following for 3 months:
1 meditation per day,
Dropping social media at work,
Building simple presence and awareness, through breath, relaxation, mantra and a smile,
Taking a break from speaking when angry,
1 monthly check in meetings.
Monthly Cultural Shift Meetings provide an opportunity to build solidarity within the changes that you’re experiencing. Make sure you know who’s scheduling them and how to keep them going when Kirsy is away.
Here’s a meditation to listen to as a team, prior to checking in on how things are going.
The Cultural Shift Meetings are a great place to practice what you’ve learned in this program. For instance,
Let yourself be a continual beginner at everything you’re learning here. Be gentle with yourself and each other.
How can you integrate “I Am Presence” while listening to others? When you breathe deeply and silently repeat “I Am Ease” or “I Am Peace” does it change how you feel?
Notice something wonderful about each person, perhaps have a couple of rounds of gratitude for each other to help build support.
When the energy within you or the group becomes stressful, take notice. See what happens when you relax your shoulders, smile or imagine roots growing from your feet. Let the stress turn into ease with your breath.
Try talking about a dilemma at work slowly, with awareness. Talk about how your nervous system responds. Are you able to stay at ease or does it cause your nerves to light up? Observing your responses can act as a tool of transformation.
Feedback Protocol:
Touch base on the protocol you’ve decided on for offering employee feedback. How’s it going? Do you need suggestions to help it become more impactful? Ask for input if you’d like it. Or, if you don’t currently need input, be kind and clear about that.
Remember to consistently notice how amazing the employees are doing. It’s easy to notice what needs betterment, it takes practice to notice their strengths.
It’s effective to sandwich constructive criticism with authentic compliments:)
Feel free to give our last session a listen if you are needing a little more support! xo
Integrating Awareness Into Workplace Culture
Once you start meditation and awareness practices, how do you ensure change will integrate into your workplace and transform the culture?
First and foremost, all of the leaders need to be on board and agree upon simple protocol change. What principles and practices do you commit to as a team, and how do you gently keep yourselves accountable?
Who on your team will take notes and create simple guidelines for the team to follow and check in with over time? It’s important to articulate what you commit to and why.
Example:
Our leadership team commits to the following for 3 months:
1 meditation per day
Dropping social media at work
Building simple presence and awareness, through breath, relaxation, mantra and a smile
Taking a break from speaking when angry
1 monthly check in meetings
The next tutorial walks you through basic practices to help build simple slow presence—even in a busy work environment. Write down your thoughts as you listen, so you start to assimilate the lesson as your own.
Another area to benefit from mutual understanding and agreement is protocol around problem solving. If we feel enthusiastic and confident while strategizing, our perception and availability to solution broadens. If we feel irritated, sad or insecure our perception shrinks.
Therefore it serves the team and workplace culture to create agreements around presence, emotions and problem solving. This can be as simple as a quick internal check in to see if you’re feeling good or bad, thus determining your next move.
Take notes on this one as well, that’ll help the information integrate:)
What core values are you building together within your work environment? The values need to be strong enough to emanate from each of you and to be embodied within all of the systems —from training, to strategy, to what you provide your customers.
These values can be simplified into attributes and integrated through “I Am” presence. It’s important to agree upon them as a base for team congruency.
Example attributes (named as a simple adjective):
I Am, We Are, Our place is…
Joy
Ease
Unique
Love
Clear
Care
Organized
Beautiful
Quality
Make sure whoever is taking notes for the team writes these down once agreed upon! :)
Presence, Perception, Feedback and Leadership Skills
Everyone wants to work in a joy filled easy work environment, right? We have ongoing opportunity to cultivate whatever atmosphere we want, in fact we are automatically doing this all the time. Building what I call an “I Am” presence brings this inherent power to the forefront.
Start a section in your notes or journal that lists attributes that you’d like to see more of in your work environment, then claim them as your own. This will naturally allow them to flow within and around you, they will become contagious.
Example:
I want to see more joy, ease, success, passion and accountability at work.
I Am Joy. I Am Ease. I Am Success. I Am Passion. I Am Accountability.
We are continuously proliferating what we’re feeling, we can choose what we feel in any moment by a simple “I Am” command:)
How can we best support ourselves and our team in growth and development? First and foremost, we can cultivate and environment of praise and support. This takes practice as we are subconsciously trained to notice what is “bad” about ourselves, each other and our work environment.
This journaling meditation walks you through a cycle of noticing what you admire, what are potential opportunities of growth and routes to create support. You’ll want to create an expandable list of these three topics, for you, your staff and the work environment.
This can be a shared document when working with a team.
Leadership Goals:
What shared goals do you have as leaders? Are you supporting yourself and each other in meeting these goals? Here are a list of some that we’ve been collecting during our time together, please add any more that you’d like.
To help build clarity, confidence and positivity in myself and others.
To listen patiently, with care and consideration.
To speak calmly, clearly, kindly and confidently.
To see problems clearly and be able to discover and implement sustainable solutions.
To make quality improvement and cultural goals together, with actionable plans and accountability structures.
To create an environment that naturally helps people increase their hunger for learning and improvement.
Letting Go of Insecurities and Problems
We magnetize and recreate what we focus on.
It’s easier to notice our insecurities and inadequacies rather than our strengths and expertise. As well, it’s much easier to focus on what’s going wrong at work and with coworkers, rather than what’s going right.
This said, what we appreciate appreciates.
This week’s meditations help you clear out insecurities, enact confidence, let go of problems at work, and learn to notice the gifts within others.
Practice:
Start to notice how confident you feel throughout your day. How do you move and speak when you feel sure of yourself, how do you move and speak when you’re feeling insecure?
Then press play to this meditation to help clear insecurities from your cells, where they’re stored until consciously released.
The following meditation is meant for the end of a busy, problem filled day. It walks you through letting go of your perception of difficulties and aligning with positivity — a critical step in building an environment that creates solution and advocacy.
Building Self Awareness and Clearing Out Old Emotions
Becoming a great leader is like growing a plant or raising a healthy child, it takes ongoing attention. If you’re hoping to lead with clarity and positivity, building self awareness, aligning your intentions with your actions, and clearing out old emotional energy are essential tools.
How much easier is it to talk and think about building self awareness, journaling and meditating than it is to actually do it?? This meditation uses breath and mantra and awareness of your thoughts in order to align your intentions with your actions — an essential step in becoming a strong leader.
We all carry residue from previous trials and tribulations in our lives. Unfortunately if we have unresolved sadness or anger it very much effects our perception of current situations. As a wise leader, it’s important to clear out old emotional energy from our bodies. This meditation guides you through a simple way of doing so.
Make sure to keep writing down your observations in your journal or a document on your device, before and after your meditations. Written words really help increase the efficiency of your transformation!
Committing to Change
Committing to a meditation practice is a lot easier said than done. Yet, it’s an important ingredient to create sustained changes within and around us. If we’re expecting change within a group, we all need to jump on board:)
Journaling works as an important tool on this transformative journey. In case this is new for you, here’s a list of prompting questions and a little meditation to help set the tone. You’ll want to be in a quiet space, with a pen and journal.
Prompting Questions:
What are your current transformative goals?
At work, what are you already doing fabulously and what areas could you use some improvement in?
What do you notice each time you meditate or when you integrate a new awareness practice into your life?
What traits do you value in leadership?
What changes are you witnessing in yourself and others?
As a leader, it’s important to be able to speak clearly, confidently and compassionately. But somewhere along, oftentimes in childhood, our voices becomes stifled, rigid or quieted. This meditation utilizes your imagination to help heal your voice. If you’re new to somatic healing, have an open mind when you press play to this. Practice presence and focus.
Reclaiming Our Power
In an ideal world, workplace culture would empower everyone within it. How do we build an environment that starts to facilitate this? Step one is to increase your own sense of power.
A primary and powerful step in reclaiming your power is through establishing ownership of your individual perceptions. If we all, as individuals, increase our self awareness the group dynamic starts to change automatically. Listen here for little tutorials and supplemental meditations to support you within this process.
We are only able to create change in how we think and feel if we first build self awareness. The following meditation helps you do so by slowing down, letting go of thoughts and noticing something wonderful :)
It’s easy to focus on what’s going wrong with a situation. But when we do, we increase the likelihood of more bad things happening. Building the energy of gratitude and appreciation is an important step to boost the likelihood of solution in any situation. The following meditation helps you do so..
After you meditate, take note on what you noticed before, during and afterwards. This acts as a tool to strengthen your intuition and self awareness.
Welcome. Take a deep breath and make yourself at home.
This blog is made to support you. Over the course of our time together, I’ll be filling it with meditations, tutorials and exercises to help you and the other leaders of The Tap Room.
Here’s our upcoming schedule:
3 January - 28 January — Each participant schedules a weekly, hour long audio-zoom session with me. We’ve reserved Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday at 4pm CET.
31 January - 14 February — We’ll schedule a total of 3, hour long group appointments, for all of the leaders, including Kirsy.
Within 48 hours of each week’s calls, I’ll email you new meditations and awareness exercises.
Please give the following meditation a try. After listening, please write some notes about your experience. We’ll go over them during our first session together.
In order to receive the most benefit from this program, It’s important that you are:
Open to receive support.
Ready to learn new ways of perceiving yourself, each other and your work environment.
Committed to coming to all of the sessions and practicing about 30 minutes per day of meditations or other provided exercises.
Have a journal or a section on your computer ready for taking notes.
Please answer the following questions so we can get things rolling. I’ll message you on WhatsApp about the timing of your first session. Thank you for being willing to try something new. I’m really looking forward to getting to know you!