Growing a business to give back. Critical lessons in love and leadership.

Revanti “Rani” Puranik is co-owner, EVP and Incoming CEO of Houston-based Worldwide Oilfield Machine (WOM). Over 15 years ago, she joined WOM, an oil and gas equipment manufacturing firm, and has since implemented the framework for communication standardisation operations and business development. As a result of these frameworks, the company grew to more than $350 million in annual revenue. Rani has been named one of the “Top 25 Most Influential Women in Energy 2022” by Oil and Gas Investor and Hart Energy.

Rani grew up in Houston, Texas for the first nineteen years of her life. For the next nineteen she lived in Pune, India were she founded and ran a dance company for leadership and empowerment. In 2007 she moved back to Houston where she joined WOM and in 2014 she graduated with a MBNA in Finance from Rice University. In 2016 she became the global Global CFO at WOM before becoming the incoming CEO. A different part of her life is that she is the Chair for her family foundation. The Puranik Foundation operates a residential school in Pune India for under-resourced children with 250 children currently living on campus. Three generations of Rani’s family are involved with the foundation, her mother who set it up, Rani who is very active in multiple programmes across the globe and Rani’s eldest daughter who is the managing director for all of the US based foundation projects. Rani also has a third hat, with her first book due to be published in November 2022.

The oil industry is still heavily male dominated so Rani has needed to be resilient.  She feels that there have been a number of women ahead of her who paved the way and allowed her to be stronger in the business. She also believes that the industry goes beyond gender and is more about merit. If we show up as human beings, are dedicated, committed, understand our skills and talent, are open minded and able to collaborate with a variety of people it goes beyond what your gender is. When people start to look at you in a meritocracy you are taken forward and that is what has helped her to stand her ground.

There a lot of women in senior positions who feel they are more talented than their male colleagues because they've had to fight twice as hard to get where they want to be. Rani would give these voices credit because they have had to fight a little harder, been stronger, showed up a bit more, been more resilient and had to give the benefit of the doubt. It has happened in the oil industry but it is easing up a little bit and Rani has seen a change with a push towards hard work and merit.

Rani’s family has always had an ‘earn and return’ philosophy. WOM was started by father and he was always focused on business growth but her mother is more about what can we give back to society. Rani can understand the views of both parents and the way she sees is that we are not immortal. With that in mind she is building and growing the business to really give back. The goal for the next five years is to be a $1 bn company but in tandem with that is the life goal – the company wants to positively impact one billion lives around the world. This is more than a company philosophy, its the culture and fabric of who they are as a company and team.

By wrapping meaning into the working day people can see that they are there to achieve not only a financial goal but that they also have a goal of purpose. When things get tough you know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Their customers are not just clients who pay - they are every life they can touch. This can be the lives of people working in the company though employee programmes and benefits or the career ladder but also by impacting positively and making life better for the end customer. What keeps the company going is innovation and efficiency. If they can bring the overall coast down that gets handed over to the customer so their expenses come down and the end user eventually gains the benefit.

The company is also very clear on its impact on the environment. They do provide equipment to drill for oil and gas but use technology to minimise the disposal, the materials used and the overall harm to the environment. In operations they consider the people out on the fields to make their life safer, better and easier as well as produce at a more economical rate. Their philosophy is about people.

The nature of business is to innovate and many businesses in the sector are getting into more renewable alternative energy. At WOM they consider themselves to be a vertically integrated manufacturing company with their core competences being in bending and molding steel with very specialised coating processes. They are primarily an engineering and manufacturing company who can cater for any heavy industry requirements out in the field, for example rail, defence or shipbuilding, so that is the type of expansion they are looking at in addition to renewables.

Being the founder and CEO of a dance company in India and now CEO of a multinational, Rani has realised there are 4 stages to leadership.  Stage 1 is listening, Stage 2 is acting as the bridge, Stage 3 is providing inspiration and Stage 4 is letting go, which Rani feels is the best part of leadership. Employees have gone through the different stages and now have the inspiration, confidence, and know how to lead.

The idea of legacy is important to Rani. This hit her when she lost her brother in 2018. He was 8 years younger than her and his sudden passing made her realise that we are not immortal.  She feels that if she can make conscious and mindful decisions today she will have the potential to make the next life better and her efforts will pass on from one life to the next. To Rani the effort and intension of making a life better are a legacy. This can be linked to her creation of meaning. When things get tough there is a sense of purpose and legacy in both the organisation and the foundation.

People often see large companies with huge resources and wealth but whether it’s in good times or bad, Rani feels we are all just stewards. She has always been spiritually inclined and has looked for a larger purpose and meaning in life. This isn’t just because she is part of a big family business but because she feels very responsible and that has made her look for that meaning. There are always situations when we have to dig in our heels, stay determined and keep going but there are also times when we have to surrender and say I’m not in control here. Not everything goes our way and that's when it clicks and you realise you are just a steward, a bridge to connect one generation to the next. If you give your best then everything else will come together and when you give with a good heart in some shape or form it does come back.

Rani’s book Seven Letters to My Daughters (Morgan James Publishing, Fall 2022), pulls together different threads and strands of her life. The motivation to write it came from her girls who said she should write her story so her message can become her legacy. She dug into the science of ourselves and found that conceptually we regenerate ourselves every seven years so as human beings we are new people every seven years. She wrote a letter for every 7 years and each contains a critical lesson of love and how to lead. What is it to be a leader How do you lead? What does legacy mean and how do you build that? They are things she believes has made her successful, satisfied and peaceful in this day and age.

For more information, please visit https://ranipuranik6.wpengine.com/

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.
Find out more about our innovative Resilience and Burnout solutions.

Are you connected?

In today’s turbulent business world, an organisation needs to be adaptive, agile and resilient. It needs to be able to build change, structural resilience and process improvement. In short, it needs a resilient culture.

To achieve this, leaders need to be connected to their teams and to their organisation to drive maximum resiliency. When team members work together, they can solve problems, rise above setbacks, provide innovative and agile solutions and draw strength from each other. They understand their place in the organisation, have the confidence that they know where the organisation is headed and understand how they and their role contributes to its overall success.

If employees take care of their physical, mental and emotional needs so they don't suffer from stress, the organisation benefits through improved productivity, job performance, staff retention, engagement and reduced absence.

Building a resilient culture will result in trust, accountability and flexibility. It will also enable an organisation be better placed to deal with change, so when a crisis or disruption hits, they are better able to adapt and pull through.

How resilient is the culture of your organisation?

A practical approach to leadership. The Zen Executive

Jim Blake is the CEO of Unity World Headquarters, a spiritual, non-denomination, non-profit founded in 1889 in Kansas City, Missouri. It helps people of all faiths and cultures apply positive spiritual principles in their daily lives. He had previously held numerous executive positions in the corporate world, including as Director of Customer Operations for Landis+Gyr, a global leader in the utility industry, and Vice President of Products and Technology for Rhythm Engineering.

Jim is based in Missouri which is known for its weather threats including tornado’s and recently the state has been experiencing 95 - 100 degree heat. There is an on-going threat from nature whether its fire, snow or storms and you need resilience to deal with these sudden changes in weather. Part of being resilient is acceptance of where you are and what may or may not happen. Establishing the proper mind set for being prepared is important, as preparation is the key to eliminating fear. If we accept the risks and prepare properly then you can reduce the fear and anxiety that might come with threats from the weather and from anything else.

Acceptance is a vital skill of understanding. Taking the stoic approach when things happen - what you do about them is the thing that makes the difference. Some people come out of adverse events well whilst others are completely defined by it, sometimes for the rest of their life. Acceptance is also an important part of healing. Our emotional posture and thoughts about these things dictate our experience of it. Something happens in your life and its how you handle that through your thoughts and emotions that determines your experience of that event. Accept and move though it and you’ll still have the rest of the day to be fine or hold on to it and let it impact your decision-making and how you interact with people for the rest of the day. It’s an important self-awareness skill.

Jim’s undergraduate degree was in IT coding but although he enjoyed it he found it to be isolating. In the early 1990s IT companies were moving away from main frames and mid ranges to PCs. With new devices and the Internet coming on line Jim took the opportunity to move into network communications. It was more social and more big picture and so he took his career in that direction. Since then he has led teams in general IT, application support, coding and network development until in 2016 he joined Unity World Headquarters as CEO.

Leading a non-profit is a very complex role perhaps more so than a commercial organisation. Jim’s background in programming and project management work formed a great base and he had learned huge amount from the leading global organisations he had worked in. The main things he had taken away were their commitment to innovation, their dedication to new product development and their focus on bringing on talent. That innovation served him well at Unity and gave him a really powerful way to use his experience and apply a whole new set of thinking in how it does it does its work.

Unity sits under an umbrella of teachings called new thoughts from the late 1800’s. These ancient principals that were mainly taken from the east and are traditions based on spiritual principals related to emotions, thoughts and how these create the experience you have as your life unfolds.  All of these new thoughts, areas or traditions work on a practical level not as a lot of dogma. Unity didn’t want to be classified as a religious organisation because it wanted it’s teaching to continue to evolve over time. Through its website it provides a lot of resources that are practical with sections on healing, grief, addiction and other everyday problems but looking at them from a spiritual perspective that takes its truths from all of the major traditions from the east.

Jim’s book, The Zen Executive, is based on the experiences he had during his corporate career. The first section is about self care - getting in touch with how your feelings and emotions impact your experiences and why and how you can better care for yourself. The better we do this in mind body and spirit, the better we perform and the better we show up.  When we show up stressed and angry, it affects our decision- making and the relationships around us.

The second part of the book is about the intersection between business and life and the practices that make people feel that they cannot combine their spiritual and work lives. Jim feels they can be combined so you can bring your whole self to work. The last part is about leadership and understanding leadership from a new perspective so you bring compassion, empathy and wellbeing for yourself and those you serve with to bear. There is the idea that you cant be good to people and that you have to treat them with fear intimidation, command and control. Jim thinks that if you do it the other way the results are even better. When a person feels safe, heard and appreciated, they are far more productive than if they are in fear and stress around their work.

Some people confuse the message about being safe, heard and appreciated as being soft, woolly and non-accountable but those things are not true. People still need to be measured, to show they are doing a good job. They need to be encouraged and have their potential understood and maximised. Leadership is not just about letting people run riot. One of the major points in the book is that you can still hold people accountable but that you can do it in a way with compassion, respect and transparency so you bring out the best in their performance. People know when they are doing a good job and what they are capable of so it's the job of the leader to hold a lens up and say ‘you’re doing this and that's great but you could be doing more’. Some people find this threatening, challenging, bullying or patronising. That's their choice. The job of the leader is to see the potential and then help their employees to see it to.

Jim feels we need to bring our whole self to work and advocates that some of the things we do at work are in alignment with things that exist in our spiritual life such as compassion, empathy and deep listening. The idea that work just has to be work and that `I can t bring some of what I believe in terms of my own spirituality’. You don't have to put it on blast but Jim suggests we can bring a spiritual approach to our work and posture of service to what are doing and how we are doing it. We don't need to share the reasons and motivations that inspire us with everyone but we don't need to exclude them from the workplace either. Jim feels the way to do this is to bring the same spiritual posture we feel in our most comfortable setting to the office in how we treat people how we approach our work and how we endeavour to inspire others. By finding the why and then giving context you understand the meaning of the work you’re doing. You are linking work to meaning.

You can learn more about Jim at www.1amjimblake.com where there are details about his book “The Zen Executive”. You can find out more about Unity at http://www.uinty.org

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.
Find out more about our innovative Resilience and Burnout solutions.

Self-esteem. Recreate the narrative.

Self-esteem, the worth in which you hold yourself, can be a challenge for people with low self-esteem because they often use belittling language towards themselves. Their ‘attribution style’ sees positive things as being temporary or down to ‘luck’ so they don’t build on achievements or learn from them. They use an attribution that anything ‘bad’ is due to them and that it’s likely to repeat over time. This narrative builds on ‘confirmation bias’, the cognitive routine that highlights evidence of what we believe, and reinforces the self-esteem spiral as negative opinions are ‘proved’.

It’s vital that we recreate our narrative - the broad journey of our lives and how we see ourselves moving forward - as well as learning to catch ourselves when we knock ourselves down, Learning to reframe is key by creating language with a time-bound limit of negativity. Instead of saying 'I’m really not good at this’, learn to say “I’m really not good at this now, or today’. The creation of a time-bound element forces the brain to solve the problem of how to improve. So ‘how will I be later’, or even better ‘how will I choose to be better later’.

The realisation that all thoughts and actions are a function of choice provides the opportunity to choose differently and to begin to develop a realisation that you have ‘a voice’ that you can listen to when you choose to do so.

Self-reflection for positive change. My Almost Midlife Crisis.

Jennifer Villamil’s career passion has been advertising. She has worked in the industry for 18 years but her other great passion is podcasting. In mid April 2022 when she was 13 weeks pregnant she was laid off from her advertising role and the changes she was going though made her feel that she close to having a mid life crisis. She really didn’t know what was next.

During the pandemic she had been in lockdown in Chicago, which was operating strict health guidelines. She was due to get married in May 2020 but as soon as the pandemic started she realised it was going to be a big deal and she started a journal. She kept this though the whole pandemic for her own self-reflection and as a way to document moving her wedding multiple times and reevaluating her life during the pandemic. It was during this self-refection that she decided to start her podcast as a way to come to terms with approaching middle age and all the emotions that come with it.

Jennifer feels that the term mid life crisis has a really bad reputation but that it can be a time for positive change and far more exciting and interesting than we think. The idea of a mid life crisis is now defined differently. Jennifer feels it can start at different times. The reason why it was originally seen as a mid life crisis is because at the mid point of our lives we start reevaluating things. This still holds true but the pandemic has caused many people to have a mid life crisis simply because they had time to think about their life choices.

That’s really what a mid life crisis is. A time to reevaluate what’s going on in your life whether it’s your career, relationships, who you are as a person, whether this is who you want to be or whether this is what you want to be doing in the next chapter of your life and then introducing changes to ensure the next chapter is better than the last and that we benefit from the changes that we make.

The reason why mid life crisis tend to occur a little bit later in life is because of the difference in our sense of mortality.  At 18 you feel you have all the time in the world but the older you get, the more you start realising that a lot of time has passed and that you don't have an unlimited amount of time. A sense of mortality creates anxiety or uncomfortable feelings around the idea that we need to make changes. When some people feel this sense of mortality they suffer from an urgency to make changes and can go out and something destructive like wreck a marriage or long term relationship by having an affair. The key is to hold off on doing something rashly and take the time to self reflect and understand why we feel uncomfortable and what is creating this desire for change. If we can understand this we can make the right choices in a healthy way.

Jennifer feels that going though big life changes later in life is completely different because the way you think about it and that the things that matter to you are so different in your 40’s than they were in your 20’s. There is a fresh approach to ageing now although conventionally a mid life crisis still occurs around the age of 40. Jennifer thinks that 40 is a milestone but at the same time its exciting, a new chapter in a place where you are comfortable in who you are but are also trying to be better physically mentally or spiritually. There are still so many opportunities to make things better going forward.

You can learn more about Jennifer at myalmostmidlifecrisis.com. where there are details about her ‘My Almost Midlife Crisis Podcast’ and her "What a Year, a COVID Journal’ book.

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.
Find out more about our innovative Resilience and Burnout solutions.

Leading an agile organisation

The increase in technology based innovation and in evolving customer expectations has driven change at an incredible pace. This has highlighted the importance of having an organisation that is ‘agile and able to adapt quickly and effectively to changing markets and requirements.

Agile organisations can reinvent their approach to business through a balance of flexibility and stability that allows them to react to changing circumstances in a future orientated way. This then enables a positive impact on productivity, quality, customer relationships, team morale, flexibility and the achievement of goals.

To ensure these benefits are achieved, teams need to realise agility is based on a willingness to embrace change. An alignment is required between existing roles and new processes and these should be seen as a top strategic priority which is reinforced across the organisations culture. Leaders need to be seen to embrace the changes themselves whilst providing an environment where employees feel safe, not afraid to fail and able to work with their leaders in finding solutions to current and future challenges.

Organisational agility is essential in today’s rapidly changing world. Organisations need to be ready to challenge and change their operating models so they are able to respond to change and create the capacity to deliver transformation and improvement. 

Energy Medicine Yoga for stress and trauma.

Lauren Walker has been studying and practicing yoga since 1996. She loved the practice and found it helpful on many levels but when she experienced traumatic events yoga was not able to help her overcome them.  She realised she needed to find something else and that was energy or more particularly energy medicine.

When she started studying energy medicine she realised what energy actually was. It changed her understanding of herself as an energetic being and her practice of yoga gradually transformed into energy medicine yoga utilising powerful energy techniques and practices and transformed them in the lens of yoga practice. 

Most people don't have an understanding of ourselves as pure energy beings or that the world is purely energy. Science helps clarify this but can also muddy things. How can we actually apply this science? Where does the science reflect the value and truth of these alternative practices. And where does it come down to people using words like quantum so they feel they are more validated in the actually scientific ways they are meant to be?

Lauren feels there is more room to explore this. Western science is validating these ancient practices in studies to show where these scientific and spiritual practices come together and validate each other. At the end of the day though it’s really a question of ‘does this work for you do these techniques help to you be more in your life better with more ease, peace calm and freedom’.

There has been a lot more understanding of stress and trauma from the medical establishment. Stress causes disease. There is good stress and bad stress. Unresolved trauma also leads to disease and this speaks to that truth that everything is energy. Traumatic experiences are energies that knock your fluid incoherent energies out of coherence and it is the same with stress. Energy medicine and Energy Medicine Yoga speaks to those very specific energies. How they work in the body. How they move in the body. How to resolve them.

Most important we actually move the physical body energy systems animated in the physical body idea of expansion and contraction moving giving space in the body for energy to move and flow. Movement is important for stress and trauma. The more you move in a specific and guided way using the understanding of where the energy flows are in the body, the more freedom we have.

Any issue that you are having, whether physical, mental, emotional or spiritual comes down to where the energy is out of balance. It affects everyone in different ways. Whether its stress, trauma, depression or relationships not working, energy medicine yoga addresses the issue and provides the tools to pinpoint where to take the practices depending on what is going on for you.

Energy touches every areas of your life - how you’re feeling or sleeping, how your relationships are working, how quickly you heal, whether you have an optimistic or pessimistic outlook or whether you take action of pull back. All are affected by how coherent all of your energy systems are.

There are nine energy systems and all of those animate the physical systems that all work together synergistically. There is a need to find which area is out of balance energetically and bring it back into balance so that the body does what its meant to do – to heal. It is not at all like a western medicine problem – its much more holistic and integrated and less challenging.

You can find out more about Lauren at EMYoga.net Her new book is The Energy to Heal: Find Lasting Freedom from Stress and Trauma through Energy Medicine Yoga (Llewellyn Publications, May 20, 2022).

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.
Find out more about our innovative Resilience and Burnout solutions.

The demise of the annual performance review

Over the past few years there has been a growing trend away from annual performance reviews. As a result many organisations including Deloitte, Adobe and Accenture are now reporting improved employee morale, productivity and innovation.

With the changing nature of business and employee expectations, organisations need to adapt quickly to ensure business continuity. An annual process of management, monitoring, evaluation and realignment no longer provides this.

By its nature, an annual performance review consolidates a year’s worth of feedback into one meeting with recent events understandably at the fore. This means managers feel they don’t have to provide in-the-moment or regular feedback and employees hold back their thoughts about their role, the organisation and their ideas for potential changes or improvements. Often there is no organisation-wide standard so reviews can be seen as unfair when promotions and salary increases are included as part of the process. 

Many employees want more feedback so the focus should perhaps change to continuous performance management. This would allow a more informal, agile and less stressful process with the organisation able to dynamically set goals, get feedback and improve productivity along with better collaboration, greater alignment and more collective responsibility. Employees would benefit from increased recognition and work evaluation, more performance feedback and empowerment and the alignment of their personal goals with organisational ones

There is a clear correlation between higher level of motivation and timely, accurate feedback so maybe its time for managers to look for ways to give effective continuous feedback.?

The actor’s mindset. The role of resilience

Craig Archibald is an acting coach in California who works with actors at all levels in their careers – from movie stars to those just starting out. He grew up in western Canada and got involved in the theatre when he was 11 years old. He became a professional actor when he was 15 and put himself through college using the money he made from acting. His college professors were British ex-pats and at the end of his course they suggested his next move should be to study in the UK.  He came to London and got a job at the Royal National Theatre as well as studying with leading teachers from RADA, Webber Douglas and the Guildhall. He then moved to New York’s Neighbourhood Playhouse and studied the Stanislavski method to acting. He had a twenty-year acting career before realising he also had a different set of skills, those of writing, producing and coaching.

Craig went through a major life change in his mid 40s and moved from Manhattan to Malibu where he took some time to get some perspective on life. He then decided to focus most of his attention on coaching and set up a west coast version of his New York coaching operation where over the last 12 -15 years he has worked with a lot of young artists to get their careers on the road as well as working with people higher in the industry to help them become more grounded.  Hollywood can be distracting and very ego driven and the problem with that is that is that you are going to be disappointed because your ego will always find reasons for failure. Turning that around and making it a positive is part of what Craig does along with mentoring people coming into the industry so they are a little more prepared. There is so much judgement nowadays particularly through social media and the capacity for people to say unpleasant things is far more common than it used to be. People in the public eye have to be able to take those negative comments and turn them around – to use them and then let them go.

Anyone who has worked in the theatre has had to learn the idea of doing something day in day out, whether you want to or not. If you are ill, tired or just don’t feel like it, you still have to turn up and perform. This teaches you a certain type of resilience – the ability to weather the storm, to manage your performance and give what needs to be given. This is not necessariliy 100 % but its always ‘just good enough’. You then lose the idea of perfection.  Craig tells his clients to aim to be above 95% every time. True professionals are disciplined enough to be above 95% every time. They aim to be the best they can be on the day but also to allow themselves room to be human, to be vulnerable and to weather the storm. Craig feels true professionalism lives at that level. With discipline, focus and the ability to maintain a performance focus, the audience might not know where you are on the scale but they receive the very best you can give them at that time.

Craig uses the expression ‘Acting is living truthfully under the imaginary circumstances’ to describe what actors do. Sometimes you get roles that are very close to who you actually are so the imaginary circumstances are very similiar to your personal circumstances. If you don't get a role like that and are an actor who can do deeper character roles and knows how to address getting into character you have the ability to create a character, and change the voice, hair colour, accent and stature. Gary Oldman is a master of this - he uses ‘Gary’ when he needs to and creates other layers to characters when he doesn't. He crosses that line so that some performances he gives are close to who he is whilst others are another character completely. Really it comes down to the individual given circumstances of the character. Some people are more comfortable playing someone closer to themselves whilst others are happier diving into the deep end of creating a character. It depends on the individual actor and how they see it.

Working in TV is completely different. It moves very quickly so its easier to use your basic personality to be in front of the camera 9 to late, Monday to Friday. Generally actors love playing something other than themselves so can find a way to put something different in their perspective, attitude or characters point of view. It’s more fun for them than playing themselves. On TV its a difficult job, full time and intense with lots of pressure and script changes. Actors tend to be a bit more protected, simple and starrtightforward with their work so they can adapt to those changes as they go through the day and not be thrown off and have to recreate all the time!

In leadership terms and in human behaviour terms there is a great drive for authenticity. Craig thinks authenticity is the key to everything. Actors give their authenticity depending on their characters authenticity. They can play someone whose not authentic through the given circumstances - whatever the script tells us we have to live truthfully inside those given circumstances. Within this wecan find where the character is or isn’t authentic. We have to ask  ‘what is my obstacle?’ What you do when faced by an obstacle gives the audience that characters moral code. The moral code is given by the actions a charcter takes. Actors ‘what is my obsctacle?’ and as a charcter what do I do as that character to get around it? It gives the moral complasss for that character. We have to be that character and use that mortal compass and authentically use myself to fill up that moral compass at whatever level that is.

Actors have to deal with a lot of rejection which can be pretty brutal. Boundaries are part of dealing with rejection and are also essential in life. It is not the rejection that hurts you rather your self. The rejection can be small but the negative voices that you have are going to come out and take over. Craig recommends daily practices such as meditation of physical activity. Positive self care makes a difference and helps you get into your own world again. Craig tells his clients that if they are being rejected its a good thing because youre actually auditioning and not just sitting around waiting for someone to call. You are actively pursuing your career so that’s a win. Each casting meeting means you are proving that you are a quality artist even though you might not be right for this project. If you can win the room you’re going to have an acting career.

You need resilience to come back from rejection. Craig feels you need to make a crisis management plan so you are ahead of the game. Whatever happens you will know what to do, how to come back from those moments and pre think a crisis. In this crisis this is what I’m going to do. If you give youerself the space and time to feel your feelings before you respond and take your time to remove yourself from the situation so you can clear your emotions and get ack to your authientic self so you can respond in a way you are proud of.

You can find out more at the Archibaldstudio.com Craig is also the author of The Actor’s Mindset: Acting as a Craft, Discipline, and Business.

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.
Find out more about our innovative Resilience and Burnout solutions.

Why leaders need to limit their empathy

Empathy, the ability to understand and be sensitive to another person’s feelings and thoughts, is a valuable skill. In the workplace, the challenging times we’ve all been through and, in many cases are still facing, has meant that empathy has become an increasingly important part of managers and leaders toolkit.

However, it is possible to take empathy too far. Leaders are often faced with situations involving dissatisfaction, disappointment, domestic problems or conflict and, whilst it's good for them to understand how their team feels about things, directly experiencing everyone’s problems and emotions without being able to control them can be exhausting.

Emotions, even happy ones, can be draining so finding a way to limit the amount of empathy they feel for their employees can help ensure they don't become overburdened or burnt out. Regulating feelings and controlling emotions allows them to keep a clear mind and helps maintain a balance so they don't get overwhelmed with emotion.

Empathetic leaders can consistently and powerfully engage their teams but excessive empathy can deplete their mental resources and lead to “compassion fatigue, and burnout. Every leader needs to understand when it’s essential to move beyond empathy and define a way forward.

A list of upcoming podcast guests is available here or read our previous blogs.
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Choice, growth and resilience

Amy Eliza Wong has been a leadership coach for ten years and partners with leaders and teams on growth, transformation and flow with a particular interest in communication, which she feels is the entry point for all things transformation. Before she became a leadership coach, she worked at Sun Microsystems for ten years having studied mathematics at Berkeley. After having her first child she gained a Masters in Transpersonal Psychology, a subject she found fascinating, and this combined with her Maths background provided the perfect balance for coaching.

Psychology is the study of mental processes in human behaviour but Transactional Psychology is not limited to mental processes. It looks at the systems view of the human condition, factoring in things like consciousness in the womb, consciousness as a whole and also pulls in ancient wisdom traditions so becomes a much larger study of Psychology. 

Amy looks at resilience in terms of growth. We are interfacing with the stuff of life and every moment is contributing to our growth. Perspectives and beliefs are growing whether we like it or not. Growth and resilience go hand in hand. We can think about our growth in two ways - by accident or on purpose. If we want to be resilient we need to take life by the horns and maximise our wellbeing by embracing both. Most people focus on growth on purpose because that's what’s wanted – its the things we planned for, were hoping for and were willing to get uncomfortable for but it's the growth by accident that we need to look at. This is usually related to shame, disappointment or embarrassment - the stuff of failures, mistakes and setbacks - but where we have tools to harness both categories that's when we live on purpose.

Amy uses purpose as an adverb - on purpose meaning that it is intentional and we are fully harnessing choice with full intension and awareness. When we can choose to be on purpose we choose to harness our choice and respond rather than react to life.  Doing things with a sense of purpose knowing where you are growing and doing it purposefully.

Amy’s book is called Living on Purpose which is based on her own personal stories about growth and transformation and conversations she has had with a diverse set of individuals. She uses these powerful stories with social neuroscience to present a roadmap of the five choices of perceptional shifts that we can choose to make in order to stop self sabotage and loose the self imposed limitations we have. These are born in our belief system and it’s the interpretations we make that end up muting the quality of our own life.

People want to achieve something. The thing could be to make more money, to own their business, become a CEO etc., but Amy feels that we only think we want the thing we want. What we actually want is the feeling we think we would have as a result of achieving that thing. We are trained to use the thing as a proxy – we became attached to the thing and the strategy of realising it. This is largely due to educational system and how we develop as humans. In school we do what we were told. To get good grades, to make our parents happy and get into a good college and university, then to get a good job, make lots of money and then we’ll be happy. We put all our trust into following this strategy because it’s what I’m supposed to do to be happy. It never works though because we never really check if that's what’s going to get me to what I really want to feel. The choice is to feel it out rather than figure it out.

The chief source of failure is choosing what you want in the moment rather than what really want. This captures the slipperiness of choice because we can say we want to be healthy but at the same time we really want a bag of potato chips and to watch the game. We have to look at what we truly want and be honest with ourselves. What is the choice that aligns with what we truly want rather than what we want in the moment. We are not set up to have deferred gratification and are constantly investing in cognitive processing and energy to achieve that. Aligning our chemistry with our purpose is important. Quick wins are important. Self care, getting enough sleep and eating well are all important because if we are if not in an optimal state it is even harder to find the band width and reserves to make the choice that truly serves us.

Her new book is Living on Purpose: Five Deliberate Choices to Realize Fulfillment and Joy (BrainTrust Ink, May 24, 2022).

Learn more at alwaysonpurpose.com. 

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.
Find out more about our innovative Resilience and Burnout solutions.

The rise of the silent meeting

Meetings are indispensable to the functioning of any organisation. Whilst some people love them, there are just as many who hate them and see them as endless drains on their time, a hinder their productivity or the cause of their anxiety and stress.

Meetings are organised to share and exchange information. But are all meetings effective? Are all attendees equally proactive? Are all presentations engaging? Often the more introverted members of the team aren’t confident enough to put their views forward whilst the more extrovert just don't stop talking. Frequently meeting preparation isn’t done so people are guessing at what was proposed and are putting forward ideas that aren’t based on the complete picture. This all leads to time wasting, less knowledge sharing and the introverts hating meetings even more. But meetings do have their place so simply eliminating them isn’t an option hence the rise of the silent meeting.

Silence at work is often thought to be something that should be avoided so meetings often involve a lot of mindless chatter. But some companies have started to put silence at the forefront of what they do. Instead of the traditional bullet-pointed presentation kicking things off, meetings start with everyone studying a short document to access all the information. They can then make their own notes and think through their point of view before expressing it.

This process might seem to take up a large chunk of the allocated time but, because everyone has fully understood the information before they speak, repetition or confusion is cut out and only what’s really necessary gets discussed. Meetings therefore don’t take as long to conduct and are more productive. Silent meetings also give everyone the chance to speak and share their ideas which is especially important for quieter, more introverted team members who tend to stand back if other more confident people monopolise the conversation.

Silent meetings work in many forms and generally are better for remote attendees, non-native speakers, introverts and often for attendee equality. They operate equally well face-to-face or virtually so why not see if it works for your organisation.

A list of upcoming podcast guests is available here or read our previous blogs.
Find out more about our innovative Resilience and Burnout solutions.

Ignite your life. The importance of a resilient mindset.

Rob Verhelst or ‘Fireman Rob” has been a fireman in Madison, Wisconsin since 2000. He was just 23 years old when he worked in search and rescue after the 9/11 attacks in New York and this impacted on him and changed his life completely in many different ways. In 2011 he undertook his first Ironman in Wisconsin with a 2.4 km swim, a 112 kms bike ride and a 26.2 kms run. He did the whole of the run element in his fire gear which weighs around 50 lbs. Since then his has completed 23 full Ironman and 28 Half Ironman around the world and also speaks to people about the importance of having a resilient mindset.

When 9/11 happened he was 23 years old. This type of event can have a huge effect on people – they can be scarred for life or thrive and move forward. At 23 with only a year in the fire service Rob found the situation very surreal. He didn't understand how to process it. Rob feels that the biggest problem people have is that they try to find meaning in it. How did this happen? How could this happen? What’s the point? He had these feelings for many years. He was married twice and used alcohol to quell the darkness. There were a lot of things going on in his life during those years that dragged him down before he started going forward. To get out of the hole was hard and it was not until he was older that he started to look into his mental health.

Rob tried to find all the positives he could find from what had happened. One of the biggest was that for that time after 9/11 everyone was working together regardless of religion, gender, colour or political beliefs – they were working together for a common purpose. He now looks at that as one of the most impactful things in his life, that its possible for us to work together and have a bigger purpose than just having our point heard and being right.

A situation like 9/11 is caused by the worst of human behaviour but after it he saw the best of human behaviour. Many people who haven’t been through this type of trauma don't understand how this could negatively affect you because they think that the good of what you see outweighs the bad but this isn’t necessarily the case. As humans we are more predisposed to seeing the negative or having our mind go to the trauma. There are many things in your mind neurology and we don’t always know what goes on in our mind. When you go to a fire you have a multitude of tools to handle a dynamic situation.  For mental health you need to have a toolbox because you never know what you’re going to need to use.

There are certain triggers for trauma and you don't always know what they are. PTSD covers many things, from sexual assault to trauma in the fire service, and it is hard for people to rationalise it because each trauma is unique. There is something unique about people who experience physical post-traumatic things rather than mental ones as different criteria link them together. A diagnosis of PTSD is something that really affects your life. It can get hold of your neurochemistry and affect you in the way that alcohol can affect your neurochemistry.

Rob’s coming back process started with his first Ironman. He initially did a Half Ironman as a trial. It was a challenge but in the military and fire service a lot individuals challenge themselves. When he completed it he realised how much he enjoyed seeing how people were impacted by what he was doing. The pain he felt and went through during the race was actually what he needed. It made him feel he was still alive and was doing something that was beneficial but this was hard for some people to understand.

Rob has his own Fireman Rob Foundation which donates bears to children in hospital and is also part of the First Responder Resilience Project which will be launched in September. This is a mental health programme for first responders that has been built by first responders. The aim is to provide understanding on the most basic level - you can’t get help unless you accept you have something wrong.

Managing our brain and our brains health is a natural part of life process. We can have dysfunction, mental illness and mental health and can go though the three conditions regularly without trauma. Too often we set people up to be victims before we give them the opportunity to learn.

Rob feels there are no day’s off from depression, anxiety etc., you just have to learn to live through it and not try to get past it. It is important to him that people see many different sides and understand different perspectives - if he can find other things or understand other ways of doing things its gold to him.

You can find out more about Robert at https://www.firemanrob.com/ or his book Forged In Fires

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.
Find out more about our innovative Resilience and Burnout solutions.

The benefits of workplace mentoring

Mentoring has often been seen as a great way to help new employees to integrate into the workforce but it could be used for a whole lot more.  A strong mentorship programme can help improve employee engagement, create more diversity, help with succession planning, develop leadership skills, create a strong company culture as well as impact positively on personal development and mental health.

Mentoring can be done on an informal basis by ‘buddying up’ or via a more structured programme but, whichever way, it needs to be part of the company culture. A formalised programme should be part of the recruitment process so new employees are matched with mentors straight away. Managers across the organsiation need to be onboard and the programme communicated so everyone knows it’s an important part of the goals and objectives of the organisation and one they that they can participate in.

It’s not just the organisation that benefits. Mentors have the opportunity to develop their leadership skills and show their readiness for further responsibility in addition to increasing the fulfillment they get from their role. For mentees, the support and encouragement they get helps them develop new skills, improve their confidence and ultimately provide them with further career advancement opportunities.

At the moment many organisations are looking for new ways to nurture and retain their best employees. Mentoring can play an important role in this by not only providing support for new employees but also helping to create an open, inviting culture that helps in the retention of staff.

A list of upcoming podcast guests is available here or read our previous blogs.
Find out more about our innovative Resilience and Burnout solutions.

The Bullied Brain. A new perspective

Dr Jennifer Fraser has been working for a number of years on the idea that if we are raised in a certain culture, in a very intensely trained belief system it becomes very hard to separate your mind from this. Your brain on an anatomical level gets sculpted by your experience. If we are all raised in a certain culture we all come to believe its reality when in actual fact its not.

In her first book Jennifer looked literature to consider how a person goes from being a reader of culture, growing up seeped in a belief system, for example racism, religion or financial, and how this belief system scripts your brain as a child and makes it difficult to see any alternatives. How does someone switch from being a reader and consumer of culture to someone who writes culture, thinks or does things differently and then expresses this to others.

In neuro science emotions aren’t just something innate or inherent within your being. Neuro scientists now talk about how our emotions are actually constructs that are built based on our past experience. One person might look at a loss that's pending and feel overwhelmed by grief because of past scripting whilst another suffer so many loses that they build a resilience to it. They know its not going to destroy them and use another emotional concept in reaction – the idea of really thinking very consciously and purposely about how they are going to act and behave and also how they are feeling. They aren’t just going to feel how they were told they needed to feel growing up as a child. They are an adult so are going to make some choices based on the emotional concept they’ve drawn on depending on they are faced with.

This is the nature of being an adult. In today’s world a lot of mental health practioners treat their clients as children. At work we see leaders and managers treating their teams as children then go home and treat their children as little adults. Have we lost the idea of adulthood?

Jennifer feels this idea is particularly interesting in relation to bullying and abuse. She was recently asked to comment about a case in Canada where a large group of teenagers physically beat and shamed a girl then filmed it and put it out through social media. It was an horrendous act and the police wanted to press charges but It is incredibly difficult to obtain a conviction for adult abusive behaviour.. The legal systems treats adults with kid gloves, people cover up for them and protect them but the police were keen to charge the teenagers when its well documented that the brain is programmed in adolesence to the age of 25 to be risk takers and reward seekers. The pre frontal cortex is not mature and so the decision-making mechanism isn’t good nor is the ability to think about consequences. The brain is not mature or thinking nor does it have rational adult like qualities.

This may relate to the language we use. The term stress is now devalued and meaningless, there is no distinction in mental health between dysfunction, illness or mental health. Low mood or depression means you have a mental health problem. In the same way bullying has lost significance so now anybody using an unpleasant tone of voice is bullying and this detracts from the real situation. Part of the problem is that we have lost the ability to define what we mean by these terms. Being rude to someone else isn’t bullying nor is saying something on Facebook. True bullying is something that takes place over time.

Jennifer doesn't talk about bullying amongst children. She feels it’s impossible to try to solve the epidemic in the youth populations. She talks about adults who bully and abuse children which she feels is the biggest power imbalance on the planet and the most taboo subject. People don't want to talk about parents, teachers doctors or coaches bullying children.

Brain works, paradigms or belief systems train us to behave in certain ways, stop us disobeying or thinking outside the box and tell us to stick to the plan. The plan is that we tell children at a very early age.and train and sculpt their brains to believe that adults, regardless of their behaviour are to be respected. That is a fatal law right at the beginning. When we use the word bullying it is part of the whitewashing because we don’t want to deal with the situation as it makes us uncomfortable. It brings a lot of anxiety and vulnerabiities. To be an adult a lot of people believe that it means you align yourself with power.

Some of the most powerful people in the world today behave like children. That has to be changed. The public encourages this behaviour and it shows that in a cultural way we have lost some of our training around critical thinking and empathy. We need to understand that if we want to get something done about things like bullying we’ve got to start working together in a thoughtful, purposeful, mindful insightful, educated, researched and evidenced based way. You should not be in a leadership position if you cant do that.

Jennifer has come to realise that what she thinks happens is when we become childlike in our behaviour its because we don't know what to do with our brains. We ignore our brains because we cant see it so we act as if its not there. It used to be thought that concussion was a moral testing ground. If you suffered a concussion and then straight back on the rugby or football pitch it was showing you had resilience, that your teammates came first and that you’d do anything for the coach and the win. It was seen as sign of great character but in fact a person with concussion has a brain trauma which can be really serious but because we are a visual, species we can’t see it so it hasn’t happened.

We can’t see our brains so we don’t think or talk about them. We don't teach children about them or encourage teachers to find out more. We don't tell organisations that when young people come to work for them they are not mature. They have incredible creative and vast learning brains but they don't have mature brains until they are 25 so you have to work differently with them if you want to be successful.

We have two choices if we don't pay attention to our brains. We can remain a victim and turn negative, bullying and abusive type behaviour that happen to us against ourselves and develop a mind bully mentality. We don't believe in ourselves, fullfiil our potential or suffer from substance abuse. We put on a facade when we go to work, become a perpetual victim and don't know how to get better. The other group that suffer bullying or abusive behaviour in childhood and their formative years go out and align themselves with the bully and become the next bully. They are as traumitised as the victim but  they align with power and identify with  the aggressor.

If someone has been abused and then goes out in the world when they meet people they are looking for the emotion concept that helps them navigate their world and creates a sense of reality for them. When they go though their file holder and find abuser they think they know how that works, they are comfortable navigating that world, they know the feelings so they can act it out again. They are not going to choose an emotion concept that they don't have in their file holder such as respect - they don’t have that emotion concept so can’t predict it in their next relationships.To get better they have to change their brain by using neuroplascity to purposefully create an emotional concept for respectful relationship with someone.

The human brain is remarkably skilled at learning everything we want it to learn. If you put in the time you can take someone who is highly abusive and rewire and reprogramme their brain. It takes a lot of hard work but after 6 weeks you can see changes that show the brain is not defaulting to bullying behaviour because its been retrained and rewired to actually pause, take a deep breathe and choose a different path - to choose respect, empathy, compassion, diplomacy or assertiveness because we can train all of those skills in the brain. The exciting thing is that as soon as we start working with our brains we can start changing things because our brains are highly adept at healing.

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.

Find out more about our innovative Resilience and Burnout solutions.

Jennifer’s first book, Teaching Bullies: Zero Tolerance on the Court or in the Classroom (Motion Press, Aug. 8, 2015), explores what happens when the bully is a teacher or coach.

Her new book, The Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health (Prometheus Books, April 1, 2022), delves into how bullying affects the brain and how the brain can heal.

You can find out more about Jennifer at bulliedbrain.com

Making it happen

Sam Syed is co-founder, CFO and COO at Capsll, an app that enables users to gather their once-scattered memories into digital time capsules. Sam was born in London and is one of six brothers from a working class family. He has a Portuguese and Pakistani heritage and became aware of racism at a young age. but feels this helped him build his resilience. He looked on himself as different but in a good way. He was the only coloured person in his group so any racial slurs toughened him up and made him a better person. His working class background also meant he grew up wanting things but didn't always get them. His friends all got weekly pocket money but he didn't and he quickly realised that he would have to break the mould so he could obtain things for himself.

Sam says he had a fantastic childhood and upbringing but is also thankful that it wasn't ‘silver spooned’ so that what he accomplished was from his own personal success. He thinks his biggest success is that he never settles and that he’s always looked for the ‘what if’. He started his career as an equity broker in London advising clients on Commodities, Equities and FX, eventually rising to the role of Derivatives Trader.

In 2012 he was offered a wealth management position in Dubai helping clients achieve their financial goals through all areas of wealth management. Originally he wanted to think about it but he now thinks it was the best decision he ever made. After building a successful career in Dubai he was then asked if he had ever thought about moving his career to Manhattan. He hadn’t but he was very curious and that was what took him to New York. The first year was very difficult. The salary he had been promised didn’t materialise and he was unable to move any of his clients from Dubai so he had to start from scratch but he managed to build a new ‘empire’ in New York and won some national awards. It was at this point that his long time friend Clint called him with an idea he wanted to run past him.

Sam’s passion for history and philosophy added to the lessons he had learnt as a boy and from the time he spent in Dubai and New York meant he was up for the challenge and he moved from managing other peoples wealth to having to create a new business. He feels that building from scratch is much harder. The challenges he faced during the start- up of Capsll App were completely different to those in the corporate world.  Having raised all their funding, he realised the things that he had left behind – the support from a mentor or boss, a calendar filled with what you should be doing and when which provides a routine and structure for each day.  

Sam feels you need external help and advice as well as internal support and help. There is a fear in the corporate world now that you can’t disagree with each other. But if you cant have disagreements then innovation and creativity disappear.  If you have different views or highly passionate and enthusiastic people conflict is inevitable. Companies need heated debate but also a way of not making things personal so you can see the point of the conversation in the first place.

Sam is now excited to be making a difference to people’s lives by utilising the Capsll App and helping them preserve memories of their legacy in a different way.

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.

For more information, please visit https://www.capsll.app/

The shift to internal mobility

Although some sectors saw increased unemployment levels during the pandemic, many organisations are now finding it hard to recruit highly qualified candidates. This makes it all the more important to access the skills already existing in the organisation so the focus moves from external recruitment to internal mobility.

Internal Mobility programmes give employees the opportunity and training to take on a new role or even a career path with in their organisation. Through prioritising career paths, cross-training and lateral career moves, skills and experience can be transferred and nurtured internally and employees up skilled.

A successful IM programme needs to consider the organisations future strategy and then align what skills are needed now and in the future to achieve these aims. It also needs to understand the requirements of learners as well as the business so a programme is developed that engages everyone.

Studies have shown that employees are eager to develop themselves further. For some people it’s even a requirement for staying with a company. In 2022, internal mobility anchored in the company culture and made easily accessible could be the best way to develop, nurture and ultimately retain talent.

Creation Spirituality – Creativity, compassion and justice

Matthew Fox is a spiritual theologian, an Episcopal priest and an activist for gender, racial and eco- justice. He has written more than 39 books that have been translated into over 60 languages. As founder of the University of Creation Spirituality in California and The Cosmic Mass, he conducts dozens of workshops each year and is a visiting scholar at the Academy for the Love of Learning. He is the recipient of many awards including: The Abbey Courage of Conscience Peace Award. Recent projects include Order of the Sacred Earth and Daily Meditations with Matthew Fox as well as The Cosmic Mass. 

In 1993 he was expelled from the Dominican order of the Catholic church after 34 years, by Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI). His mistake was reviving Creation Spirituality, which decries original sin (the doctrine that we’re all born sinners) in favor of Everyone Born is a Blessing and all of creation being an original blessing.  Creation Spirituality blends teachings from the Christian mystics with science, the arts, social justice, environmentalism, and ideas from other spiritual traditions worldwide (including those of indigenous cultures). He then became an Episcopal priest on the basis that he wanted to work with young people to bring life back to ritual and worship.

Matthew feels the difference between spirituality and religion is that religion has evolved to become mostly about social structures whereas spirituality is the essence of the inner work that we do. Awe and wonder at the joy of living, grief and suffering, silence and creativity. We need creativity to help us find some balance in our lives, compassion and justice. A lot of people want these things but don't want to go through the church to find them. Religion comes and goes in different eras or moments in time and at certain points in the west has become linked to empire building and politics but spirituality is the essence.

Nowadays we can’t take things like clean air or clean water for granted. A return to a sense of the sacred is at the heart of spirituality. We need to learn and appreciate the simple but necessary things in life. The natural environment and nature are sacred and the indigenous people know this. More people though are now finding that nature is a gift as science is telling us there is no planet that is as hospitable, beautiful or diverse as earth

We have come through lockdown and started to realise that human beings are social animals and need to collaborate but we now seem to be going in the opposite direction and starting to fight and fall out with each other. We seem to have lost the sense of community that spiritualism and belief can give us. There was a shared consciousness that religion gave us through the symbol of going to church. It is having a shared ethic or view of the world that helps hold a community together.

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.

You can find out more at www.matthewfox.org or www.dailymeditationswithmatthewfox.org

The Africa Family Business Summit (AFBS)

The first Africa Family Business Summit (AFBS) will be held on Friday June 24th 2022, at the Kempinski Hotel, Gold Coast City, Accra with Dr Russell Thackeray being one of the speakers.

The aim of the AFBS is to bring together family business practioners and help them to build a network that will allow them to share information and insights amongst themselves. The audience will be made up of family business owners and senior management, the next generations of their families and other key stakeholders in family businesses.

Africa is often seen as becoming the powerhouse of the global economy over the next few years and family businesses are at the heart of African culture. The Summit provides the opportunity not just to think about individual businesses but also to collaborate, initially across Ghana and then across Africa.

The majority of businesses in Africa are family run so it is important to build a network for this powerful group of businesses. This years event is being held in Ghana but in 2023 it’ll be in Nigeria and after that there are plans to take it to Kenya, South Africa, Botswana and beyond.

There will be two sessions. The Afternoon Session will run between 1 pm and 4 pm and will be in a workshop format that Dr Thackeray will lead on building personal resilience and the toolkits needed to facilitate this. The Evening Session will allow wider networking and focus more on organisational resilience with key speakers on the theme of  “Building Resilience in Family Businesses for Continuity”. This session will run between 5.30 pm and 9 pm.

The AFBS is a hybrid conference with virtual and face to face attendance. For more information visit the website www.ravensconsulting.com Alternatively  call or WhatsApp + 233 241 379 084

The Culture of ‘Belonging’

DDS Dobson-Smith is the CEO and founder of a SoulTrained, a consultancy with the mission to help leaders and individuals to become more of who they really are. SoulTrained was formed three years ago and before that DDS had a twenty 20-year career in HR and L&D gained in a variety of organisations including M&S and Sony Music Entertainment as well as advertising agencies and civil engineering consultancies. Because of DDS’S background and qualifications in psychology and psychotherapy the idea of bringing that into the workplace really appealed. The SoulTrained ethos of ‘training’ at a soul level believes that when we shift things at the soul level we systemically address changes in behaviour attitude and approach. The idea behind SoulTrained is that they are there to help leaders and individuals to become more of who they really are.

DDS feels that our soul is our light, the very essence of who we are as an individual. When we are born our soul is very present. People talk about how you can see the soul of a child in their early years because it’s very close to the surface. Then when we grow up and experience life we learn to cover up our soul because its either too bright for other people to handle or because we want to protect it from people who are mean or cruel to us. Over time we build up armour that we put on and wear to protect ourselves but which also stops us from connecting from other people. This is particularly true at work where many people, particularly those who come from groups that have identities that come from marginalised or historically excluded groups, cover up aspects of who they are. When we accept ourselves as we are for who we are and accept others for who they are as they are, so much gets moved out of the way. DDS feels this is congruence, of being in touch with your inner self rather than authenticity.

All living things have a soul. The collection of souls that come together become the organisations soul because an organisation is more than a piece of paper, a website or bank account. As an individual we can experience inner conflict, the world of discrepancy theory. The ‘who we think we’ are versus the ‘who we want to be’ versus the ‘who we really are’. This inner conflict we experience as individuals can be experienced at a group or organisational level as well. It comes back to congruency or being in rapport with self, with others and with life itself.

DDS uses Attachment Theory as one of the lenses through which to talk about how to create more belonging at work. From Attachment Theory we learn how to create a template for all of our future relationships through the relationship we have with out primary caregivers from the moment we are born. Connection and nurture is actually a biological imperative and that when we don't experience attachment, nurture and care in our adult life, it can have the same impact as when we don't experience it in our childhood.

There are parallels between parenting styles and styles in which we are parented and how those play out in the workplace.  Someone who is being managed might have a tendency to unconsciously act out the way they might have behaved as a child. When we are managing someone we might a tendency to act out the way in which we were parented.  So many parallels exist between our childhood and adulthood that if we are not aware of the patterns we have learned we may go and replay them in our adult life.

If you are congruent you have the capacity to belong. Belonging is something that is an experience that is part of building an appropriate culture in the workplace. The concept of belonging is particularly topical at the moment. The Great Resignation or as DDS refers to it The Great Realisation has seen a large number of people start to ask themselves some big questions about their life and whether what they do workwise fires them up or brings them light.  If the answer is no, people have decided to make a career change. Some have said yes it is what I want to do but question whether they are doing it where they want to do it or whether it is bringing meaning, purpose and a sense of belonging. The experience of belonging is what many people are seeking, somewhere they can go and be themselves so they aren’t using up energy to cover up, dumb down or suppress aspects of their personality or themselves in order to fit in.  When they aren’t using that energy to create a persona to fit in, that energy is released and available for work.

In order to have that experience of belonging you have to have the behaviour of inclusion in an organisation. That doesn’t just mean how people interact with each other it means policies, decision-making processes and frameworks. In order to have inclusion you have to have diversity. Diversity is binary. An organisation is either diverse or not. The question is ‘do I see people who are like me or not like me’. If the answer to both is yes then its probable that you have diversity. To get belonging you need inclusion. To get inclusion you need diversity but diversity might not always lead to inclusion and inclusion might not always lead to belonging.

The two most important people metrics to consider are employee attrition and employee engagement. DDS sees a correlation between the two in that when one goes up the other goes down. You want attrition to go down, not necessarily to zero because some healthy turnover is good but organisations need to look at the industry average and do better than that. You want engagement to increasingly go up. Engagement is different to happiness. It’s not about making people happy, it’s about the things that help people to feel aligned and motivated to show up.

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.

You can find out more at www.soultrained.com or DDS’s new book is You Can Be Yourself Here: Your Pocket Guide to Creating Inclusive Workplaces by Using the Psychology of Belonging (Lioncrest Publishing, Feb. 2, 2022).