Getting Started with Mindfulness Leadership (Level 1)
A Science based Approach to Mindful Leadership
1-day Seminar (Friday) taught by Reiner Kraft, PhD
Next Event: Q3 2020 TBD
If you are an experienced leader, or just starting on becoming one, this one-day seminar is designed to introduce you to a science-based approach of mindful leadership.
Come join us and spend the day surrounded by nature and like-minded leaders, just outside of Berlin in Spreewald.
Get Ready to Transform!
You will learn how you can use the 7 Pillars of Mindful Leadership as a framework to develop a system for your personal growth.
This introductory seminar will start on a journey to transform your leadership mindset, increase your level of consciousness, give you clarity on your essential values, mission, and practical ideas so you can immediately apply them to your organization.
Your organization will experience measurable benefits in the form of improved collaboration and team heath, higher-quality decisions, increased productivity, and an overall happier work place.
I have purposely capped the seminar at 12 participants so as to ensure a highly interactive and collaborative environment. With this small group, we will be more able to maintain focus and obtain the necessary depth to get the most out of our time together.
Over the course of the workshop, you will get to know the other Mindful Leaders, with whom you can form valuable connections to mastermind and exchange ideas in the future. Together we are embarking on an exciting journey to help you craft and execute your mission.
Contact me to secure your Space now for the next upcoming Event
Experience a Day Full of Deep Connection and Learning
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Arrival & Breakfast (8:30 a.m.)
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A healthy breakfast upon arrival
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Introduction of the Mindful Leaders
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Getting Started (9:00 a.m.)
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Brief overview of the seminar, goals, and intention
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Recap: Benefits of applying mindful leadership in your organization and becoming a Mindful Leader
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Introduction: The 7 Pillars of Mindful Leadership as a guiding framework for your personal and leadership growth
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Overview: A scientific and data-driven approach toward mindful leadership
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Pillar 1: Mindset Shift (9:45 a.m.)
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Motivation: Mindset shift - Why do we care?
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Understanding the basics of brain, mind, and consciousness
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An introduction to some core teachings in The Power of Now (Eckhart Tolle), and how they impact your workplace and effectiveness
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Shifting your mindset:
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Moving from the limitations of your ego to experience the world as consciousness
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Striving for unity
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Exercises: Experience you as consciousness
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Ideas, suggestions, and resources to support your gradual mindset shift
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Reflect on 2 or 3 action items
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Pillar 1: Consciousness Growth (11:00 a.m.)
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Motivation: Why this should be the fundamental driver of personal growth
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Building up your "intuition muscle"
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Increasing awareness for synchronistic events
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Ideas to measure your level of consciousness (LOC)
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Exercise: What is your LOC?
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Tools & Techniques:
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Some practical mindfulness exercises to increase your present awareness that can be integrated into your daily routine with minimal effort
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Learning the Spaciousness Meditation—A simple and effective method to train your mind and connect with your consciousness
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The Muse meditation headband—A data-driven approach for measuring your meditation progress
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Developing a systematic plan to increase your LOC
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Reflect on 2 or 3 action items
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Break for Lunch (12:15 p.m.)
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Pillar 2: Clean Up and Upgrade the Mind (1:00 p.m.)
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Practice: "Spaciousness Meditation"
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Motivation: Make your hidden and unconscious patterns visible
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Getting to know your personality (map of your ego) and developing a better self reflection:
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Learn about your personality’s strengths and weaknesses (behavioral and reactive patterns, likes, dislikes, abilities, habits, relationships) to minimize your blind spots
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Systematically incorporating feedback from others
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Being totally honest with yourself
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Reprogramming your false beliefs: Introduction to a simple and effective tool for continuous inquiry
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Exercise: Reprogram one false belief
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Overview of other tools and methods
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Tips for integrating continuous inquiry into your daily routine
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How to measure your status and progress
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Reflect on 2 or 3 action items
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Pillar 3: Toward Conscious Decisions (2:15 p.m.)
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Motivation: Why conscious decisions matter?
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Becoming aware of your unconscious reactive thought patterns, also referred to as your “pain body”
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Understanding the negative impact on your health
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How to identify the pain body in others and in you
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Learn a simple and effective tool to dissolve the pain body and break your old reactive patterns
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Know the common tricks of your ego to engage with the pain body and how to prevent them
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Exercise: Transforming your reactive patterns into conscious decisions
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How to measure your status and progress
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Reflect on 2 or 3 action items
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Break for Coffee (3:00 p.m.)
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Pillar 5: Clarity on Purpose (3:15 p.m.)
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Motivation: Why are you here?
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A simple process to identify your essential values
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How to craft your personal mission
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Validate the alignment of your mission with your essential values
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Exercise:
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Defining your 6–8 most essential values
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A draft of your personal mission
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Reflect on 2 or 3 action items
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Pillar 6: New Leadership (4:15 p.m.)
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Motivation: Transform your leadership
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A brief overview of the 12 Mindfulness Leadership Principles
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Lessons learned on how to apply those leadership principles to organizations
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How to make these new principles coexist with other leadership principles
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Breakout sessions for applying mindful leadership to your organization.
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How to measure your status and progress
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Reflect on 2 or 3 action items
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Pillar 7: New Workplace (5:30 p.m.)
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Motivation: Toward a conscious business; i.e., building an organization based on principles of clear purpose, ownership, sound values, authenticity, and sustained long-term value generation
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Generating the necessary focus in your work
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Purpose
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Values
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Mastery
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Autonomy
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Team Health
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How to measure status and progress
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Reflect on 2 or 3 action items
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Putting it all together (6:00 p.m.):
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Recap: How to build a powerful system for rapid leadership and personal growth; becoming a Mindful Leader using the 7 Pillars of Mindful Leadership
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Q & A
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Share your mission
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Conclusion
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Dinner (6:30 p.m.) with the Mindful Leaders
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Reiner Kraft, PhD
I have more than fifteen years of experience leading high-impact technological organizations both large and small.
Furthermore, I have applied Mindful Leadership concepts to large organizations (such as Yahoo and Zalando), as well as startups (e.g. Yunar), providing me valuable insights and practical, hands-on experience.
In short, I"ll teach you Mindful Leadership from the view-point of a leader.
Learn more about my story ...
Contact me to secure your Space now for the next upcoming Event
Morning - Focusing on Mindset Shift and Consciousness Growth
As you might be new to the topic of mindfulness, you will first learn about the basics of mindfulness and what had been achieved in applying it to the business world.
While working as a technology leader in the Silicon Valley, California, companies were recognizing the benefits of mindfulness programs to reduce employee stress. Proven programs such as mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) had been rolled out and became widely available between 2012 and 2015, later making their way to Europe.
We will learn to understand the impact of mindfulness on organizations and how to apply it, analyzing case studies of tech giants, such as SAP and Google. Overall there is a confirmed positive ROI on mindfulness applied to the workplace, leading to an explosion in the number of mindfulness programs available. Mindfulness became a billion-dollar industry and is growing fast.
Investing in these mindful leadership techniques can provide several benefits for you as a leader, bringing your leadership capabilities to the next level.
To make it easy for you to benefit from mindful leadership quickly, I have carefully designed and organized this one-day seminar to jump-start your knowledge on the topic and speed up the learning process.
A Science based Approach to Mindful Leadership
The approach to mindful leadership I'm teaching is built on science. That means every step has a solid methodology to evaluate the current status (baseline), introduce rapid experimentation, and measure progress.
There are now myriad resources, coaching programs, books, and local meet-ups on mindfulness available, but few focus on the needs of mindful leadership by integrating a science-based and data-driven approach.
If we can't measure something properly, it will be hard to justify that it is worth investing in. Obviously, some topics like consciousness growth are not easy measure. From a practical standpoint, we need to get creative and identify supporting drivers and proxies that are good enough for approximation.
As a scientist, I spent much of my time in the past years figuring out systematic ways to measure the personal impact of mindful leadership (e.g., stress resilience), but also its effect on organizations (e.g., team health).
For each of the seven pillars there are indeed good ways to measure a baseline and progress, as described below.
The 7 Pillars of Becoming a Mindful Leader
It is helpful to categorize different aspects and dimensions of Mindful Leadership. For this reason, I have compiled the 7 Pillars of Mindful Leadership.
I will introduce you to this framework, and explain how it can guide your growth toward becoming a Mindful Leader.
Your leadership style is unique. With the introduced framework and a data-driven approach, you can easily try out new things, see how they fit in your leadership toolbox, and evaluate the impact. If something works well, you keep it; if not, toss it quickly.
You can make systematic progress in each of the seven pillars in parallel. During the seminar, you will identify and write down two or three action items to focus on in the coming weeks and months to fuel your growth toward becoming a Mindful Leader. In addition, the actions you take will have an immediate impact to your leadership effectiveness, and on your teams and organization as well.
Pillar 1: Consciousness Growth & Mindset Shift
You will learn the differences between your brain, mind, and consciousness. A solid understanding of this is crucial and serves as a foundation for your personal growth.
Many years ago, I was inspired by Eckhart Tolle’s best-selling book The Power of Now. I will provide a brief introduction to some of his core teachings and explain they impact the workplace, your effectiveness as a leader, and your consciousness growth.
Shifting your mindset away from the egoic mind to experiencing the world as consciousness is the foundation for becoming a Mindful Leader.
Once you experience the connectedness of all beings on all levels (e.g., in your family, at your workplace, in your community and country, and in the world), you will realize the importance of collaboration and striving for unity, and worry less about competition. This alone will have a major impact on your leadership style and workplace.
This sounds all good theoretically, but we will do some simple exercises for to actually experience yourself as consciousness.
Experience is always the preferred way compared to knowing.
The simple and fun exercises in this seminar will allow you not only to experience consciousness, but also to "stretch" or move it in space and time. These exercises are designed to gradually introduce a mindset shift within you, if you continue to practice them on a regular basis.
I will also provide more ideas and suggestions to support your gradual mindset shift. This typically does not happen overnight and is a lifelong, but rewarding, process. (Of course, there are exceptions, and some persons experience a radical mindset shift quickly.)
The seminar will provide you with the necessary toolset to incubate and positively influence the process of your mindset shift. You just need to be ready and open to exploring the suggested ideas.
Have you ever started a diet with the goal to lose some weight, or put down an ambitious New Year’s resolution, and then after a few days or weeks given up on it? You probably attributed this to lack of will power, got frustrated, and then forgot about it. You felt like a loser and negative emotions flared, resulting in more devastating behavior (e.g., eating junk food). This is sometimes called the yo-yo effect. Instead of losing weight, you have actually gained weight. And the negative feedback cycle continues.
In truth, these kinds of setbacks are usually attributed to a lack of conscious decisions and a low level of present awareness.
For most of us, the mind is running on autopilot, and research shows that at least 95 percent of your decisions are made without you knowing about it.
Only when your level of consciousness rises, will you be able to overwrite these unconscious behaviors with conscious decisions. This should be your most important and foundational driver for personal growth.
"When your level of consciousness grows, your emotional intelligence (EI) and level of intuition also grows."
Gradually you will gain these new "superpowers":
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Increased Intuition: Great to have for complex and difficult decisions, knowing what to do and improving the quality of your decisions
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Empathy: Becoming more sensitive and aware of others’ feelings, enabling better active listening, increased trust and respect from others, stress reduction, openness, and greater teamwork
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Compassion: Enables you to better understand yourself and others, improve your health by strengthening your immune system, normalize your blood pressure, reduce stress, and even extend your life
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Gratitude: Opens the door to more relationships and improves physical and psychological health, sleep, and self-esteem
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Forgiveness: Helps remove negative energy charges in your mind, which results in improved mental health, healthier relationships, less stress and anxiety, a stronger immune system, and improved heart health
If you’ve read recent books about leadership or attended other leadership seminars, then you know that each of these new "superpowers" will elevate your effectiveness as a leader. This opens up new opportunities in your life. I will point out how to look out for synchronicities (unexpected coincidental occurrence of events that seem related but are not explained by conventional mechanisms of causality) and how to take advantage of them.
We can track your progress in this area by measuring your level of consciousness (LOC). Luckily, LOC can actually be approximated using intuition, and there is a plethora of literature on this topic. There are different scales of varying complexity that some people use. However, none of them have worked for me, which is why I’ve devised a simple, five-level LOC growth scale with key traits described for each level. This way you can approximate your level of consciousness. We will try this out in an exercise.
There is also no shortage of tools and techniques to grow your LOC. I’ve compiled some practical mindfulness exercises that can be integrated into your daily routine with minimum effort to increase your present awareness.
In particular, I will introduce you to a simple but profound formal meditation technique called Spaciousness Meditation. If done as a daily routine, this technique will gradually build up the "muscle of your mind" and elevate your level of consciousness. It is quite effective and can bring down your brain waves to alpha state (8–12 Hz) within a few minutes. As the mind typically needs time to settle, I recommend 20-minute meditation practices in the early morning, as well in the evening (but not before 2 hours prior to bedtime). Spaciousness Meditation can also be used in longer sessions of up to 1–2 hours to tune into your intuition and bring out deep insights. I will teach you the specifics in detail during this lesson and suggest how you can integrate it into your weekly routine.
To help explain how you can measure your progress, I’ll discuss the Muse meditation headband and share some key findings from my experience using it for more than a year.
Afterward we will go through some ideas on developing a systematic plan to increase your LOC and create a training routine to making mindfulness and consciousness growth a daily habit.
At the end of this lesson, you will reflect a few minutes and determine the two or three most relevant action items to focus on in the coming weeks and months to make progress toward your ongoing commitment to consciousness growth. Those action items will become part of your larger plan created during this seminar.
Afternoon: Upgrading Your Mind, Clarifying your Purpose in Leadership & the Workplace
Pillar 2: Cleanup and Upgrade the Mind
As your level of consciousness grows, you become more aware of the limiting false beliefs and thoughts holding you back.
TThis pillar directly builds on the pillars 1 and 2. The higher your present awareness, the easier it will be to identify and address the faulty programming in your mind.
The motivation is to become aware of all your blind spots over time. After all, you can only change what you are able to see.
For this I will teach you how to compile your own personality map—a map of your ego—through self-reflection and by systematically incorporating feedback from others.
Especially in the beginning, obtaining feedback from others is quite helpful, as you may not be totally honest with yourself during self-reflection.
This personality map will grow over time, and contains all your behavioral & reactive patterns, likes, dislikes, abilities, habits, and relationships.
At any point you may decide a certain belief is no longer helpful for your current situation.
Seeing the mind as a bio-computer, you can simply erase certain behaviors that no longer serve you well and replace them with more appropriate helpful behaviors.
I will teach you a simplified and effective method for continuous inquiry.
In an exercise you will identify one of those old behaviours or false beliefs, and reprogram it using the method you've learned.
There are other tools and methods out there that can aid the clean-up and upgrade process as well. Some involve neuro-feedback and forms of rapid hypnotherapy. For those, I will provide a short overview.
Next, I will provide you tips on how to integrate continuous inquiry into your daily life. Of course, we would like to measure progress here as well. We will discuss various metrics that can be used to track your status and progress over time.
At the end of this lesson you will reflect a few minutes and determine the two or three most relevant action items to focus on in the coming weeks and months to make progress toward your ongoing commitment of cleaning and upgrading your mind. Those action items will become part of your larger plan developed during this seminar.
Pillar 3: Toward Conscious Decisions
I mentioned earlier that most of us run on autopilot for 95 percent of a typical day, driven by our subconscious minds.
Our motivation is to increase the number of conscious decisions you make so you become fully in charge of your life.
Here, pillar 4 builds on pillars 1–3.
In pillar 3, we built a personality map of our minds, which included certain traits and behaviors. But in this pillar, we want to look more specifically at your reactive patterns as they happen throughout your day. (Some of them may even wake you up in the middle of the night and keep you from falling back to sleep.)
Eckhart Tolle’s provides a helpful theoretical framework of the “pain body,” an energy field of stale and negative emotions, which we will study and explore.
Every person has a pain body, which can be seen as a cunning entity that takes over your decisions, leaving you powerless. This pain body typically is dormant but can be easily triggered in situations by others or specific events. Have you heard about the saying, “She knew how to push my buttons?” The pain body is what comes alive when the buttons are pushed.
If the pain body becomes active, it leads to automated reactive behavior patterns. Those patterns are negative in nature (e.g., anger, frustration, hate, aggression) and may fuel the pain body of surrounding persons (if not already present).
I will teach you to understand the negative impact of the pain body on your health and the health of others, as it can lead to very stressful situations.
We will investigate how to identify the pain body in others and in you, exploring strategies to dissolve the pain body and break your old reactive patterns.
The main teaching will be a simple but profound method to handle any situation with ease and break your reactive patterns once and for all.
I will also discuss how your ego can trick you to engage with the pain body and how to prevent that from happening.
We will then do a role-playing exercise to better understand pain body triggers, along with examples on how to apply the proposed method for dissolving the pain body.
Finally, I will go over metrics to measure status of your pain body, as well as its size and triggering latency.
At the end of this lesson, you will reflect for a few minutes and determine the two or three most relevant action items to focus on in the coming weeks and months to make progress toward your ongoing commitment to making conscious decisions. Those action items will become part of the larger plan you develop during this seminar.
Pillar 4: Cultivating your “forgotten” Qualities
With "forgotten" qualities I refer to qualities that you have always had, but that are potentially dormant in you or you didn't know that you actually have them. As your consciousness level is rising, these qualities emerge and bubble up. However, they need to be cultivated and trained to become fully effective.
I'm referring to the following qualities:
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Appreciation
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Gratitude
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Acceptance
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Forgiveness
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Empathy
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Compassion
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Honesty
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Love
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Surrender
Each of these capabilities will be helpful to increase your leadership effectiveness and accelerate your personal growth. In addition, they are the prerequisite to cultivate a mindset of abundance and positive thoughts, which decreases stress and anxiety, and therefore promotes your overall health and well-being.
Although you are representing these qualities on your deepest level already, it requires effort and training to cultivate an strengthen them, so that they can become your automated way of living.
Think about how much time you spent in school to train your math skills? Or, if you are playing an instrument, how much practise went into it before you were really performing well? Now in contrast, compare this in the amount of time you are actively practicing "gratitude". You see what I mean? Many of use have not actively invested in training these particular capabilties.
The good news is that each of them represent a skill, and therefore you can work on improving those skills. As long as you are motivated and make it a priority to put in the effort to train them, you will see major improvements in your overall life.
It might be the case that you are already using some of them successfully on a regular basis in your daily life. That's great! However, even then with proper training you can further increase their impact.
Interestingly, training them in combination with training your mind to let go of false beliefs, and reprogramming your old reactive patterns, will further accelerate your consciousness growth. This means there is a synergy in pillars one through five, that they support each other, and progress in one will automatically accelerate your progress in the other pillars.
Pillar 5: Clarity on Your Purpose and Mission
The most important question everyone should reflect on is this:
Why are you here?
You need clarity on who you really are. To do this, you will learn a simple process and method to define your most essential values.
If what you’re doing is not aligned with your most essential values, you are setup to suffer in the long run. Furthermore, if your organization's values are not aligned with your most essential values, it is time to re-evaluate what you’re doing.
Second, as a Mindful Leader it is helpful to have a clear mission aligned with your values.
I’ll teach you a simple process for crafting a powerful mission, including ways to make sure your mission is consciousness driven, not ego driven.
You will brainstorm your most essential values and draft a personal mission statement.
Defining values and a personal mission statement can be a lengthy process and that evolves over time. It needs ongoing reflection and therefore requires sufficient progress in pillars 1–4.
At the end of this lesson you will reflect for a few minutes and determine the two or three most relevant action items to focus on in the coming weeks and months to make progress toward achieving clarity on your most essential values and mission. Those action items will become part of your larger plan developed during this seminar.
Pillar 6: New Leadership
Once you’ve made progress in pillars 1–5, you can start to harvest your efforts and apply mindful leadership to your organization.
To provide guidance for leaders, I compiled the 12 Mindful Leadership Principles a few years ago. They are intuitive to understand, easy to learn, but hard to master (as they require sufficient progress in pillars 1–5).
I will first provide you with a short overview of the 12 Mindful Leadership Principles and then provide practical tips based on my experiences applying them to large and small organizations.
To make this relevant to your organization, we’ll break into small groups and come up with ideas on how to apply the mindfulness leadership principles to your business.
At the end of this lesson, you will reflect a few minutes and determine the two or three most relevant action items to focus on in the coming weeks and months to make progress toward mindful leadership to your organization. Those action items will become part of your larger plan developed during this seminar.
Pillar 7: New Workplace
Pillars 1–6 provide a solid foundation toward becoming a Mindful Leader.
Now it is time to apply everything you have learned to create a new workplace where everyone can thrive, grow, and make a positive contribution to this planet!
As you’re building a conscious and sustainable business, there are important aspects of your workplace culture that must be nurtured by you, the leader. Together, they are shaping the New Workplace:
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Purpose (Individual/Team/Organization)
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Corporate Values
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Mastery
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Autonomy
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Team Health
We will do a brief overview of each focus areas, and I will share a few best practices that I’ve learned over the past years to make sure they are met. We will also discuss metrics to measure progress.
At the end of this lesson you will reflect for a few minutes and determine the two or three most relevant action items to focus on in the coming weeks and months to make progress toward defining new workplace ideas for your organization. Those action items will become part of your larger plan created during this seminar.
Your commitment:
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Arrive curiosity and with an open mind
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Have a strong desire and commitment to personal growth and transformation
Some of the Key Takeaways from this Workshop:
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An introduction to Mindful Leadership and its impact on your effectiveness as a leader
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Fresh ideas to transform your leadership and take it to the next level
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Awareness of the unexplored depth and capacity of your consciousness, self-imposed limitations holding you back, and concrete, personalized solutions
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More clarity on your purpose and how it aligns with your organization’s mission
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Understanding how to apply the 12 Mindful Leadership Principles in your organization to improve collaboration, increase employee happiness, and achieve greater and sustainable business results
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Practical advice on how to transcend the status quo and work toward building a purposeful, impactful organization
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A network of new friends and like-minded leaders, allowing you to stay in touch and mastermind going forward
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Becoming a Mindful Leader
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Learning about other opportunities and relevant workshops to continue your journey
Where:
The Seinerzeit Spreewald Resort is located in the heart of the Spreewald and surrounded by the peace of nature.
Although only a short drive from Berlin (less than an hour), the location will give you plenty of space to disconnect from the hustle of daily stress and reconnect in nature with your thoughts and spirit.
When:
Seminars will occur once or twice a quarter starting in Q3 2020.
The first event will be on a Friday running from 8:30 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Signup is on a first come, first serve basis. There are only up to 12 seats available to keep the group small and focused.
Language:
English (or German, depending on the audience)
Cost:
Workshop attendance costs 695 Euros (including VAT/Mwst).
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Food is included. There will be a delicious and energizing breakfast, a tasty lunch, and a healthy dinner.
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There will also be a coffee and cake break in the afternoon.
Have more Questions?
Contact me directly.
Contact me to secure your Space now for the next upcoming Event