In our ever-connected world, we rarely work in isolation.  Whether we are on teams, boards or in our families, we are in constant communication and relationship with other people.  Unbeknownst to many of us, we are also in constant communication within ourselves.  Our thoughts unconsciously affect our emotions, behavior and results, often to our detriment. Learning how to recognize and reframe limiting beliefs is one of the most powerful leadership and life tools one can employ to increase success at work and happiness in life.

Professional Benefits:

As a business leader, you’ll develop tools to open your aperture to a more creative and expansive mindset, where you can choose narratives and actions that work better for you and your team. 

You will also better appreciate differences instead of experiencing the resentment/friction caused by them, and you’ll grow a much greater respect for the opinions, beliefs and personalities of others.

Other Benefits:

At this session, you observe your internal monologue and the huge impact it has on your experience of life, you step outside it, learn how to handle it constructively, and you stop being your worst enemy and the victim of your own narrative.

You also understand where the beliefs and opinions of others really come from, why they can be so different and diverse (even though they have access to the same information and resources as you), and you learn to accept and respect them.

Our brains are designed to problem solve rather than appreciate. It's no wonder that stress abounds at work. Stress caused by problems such as dysfunctional communication, misaligned departments, mistrust and lack of a shared purpose impacts our health as much as smoking 5 cigarettes a day.  Yet scores of research show that when we experience positive emotions such as gratitude on a regular basis, we reduce stress, enhance resilience, teamwork, creativity and problem-solving abilities (U Penn, Seligman).   Establishing a simple gratitude practice can reap enormous dividends for your team, your own happiness and other important relationships in your life.

Professional Benefits:

How a leader shows up impacts how they treat others and has ripple effects on all their relationships - both professional and personal - and their success.  The attitude of gratitude from a leader has a big impact on their and their team’s resilience by helping them to feel seen, valued and appreciated.

Boosting resilience will help people deal with stress, anxiety and uncertainty. 

This produces a positive, safe work culture where people feel motivated to work together to achieve the leader’s and the company’s objectives.

Other Benefits:

You often know intellectually that you should be grateful for all the blessings in your life; this week, you learn how to go beyond thinking to feeling gratitude on a deeper level, and how to incorporate a practice of gratitude in your life that can nurture a profound sense of happiness.

You understand the role that gratitude plays in reinforcing resilience and happiness within yourself. You learn how to focus on the positives of others, and understand how you can spend more time expressing this appreciation to them.

Many of us believe that happiness at work is an oxymoron.  We spend at least one third of our lives at work. Unfortunately, two thirds of employees are disengaged and unhappy (Gallup). But it doesn’t have to be this way.

In both our work and personal lives, we often unconsciously train ourselves to delay our happiness. We think we will be happy one day in the future, when we achieve certain conditions or goals. We are so goal oriented that we treat the present moment as a means to an end, which prevents us from feeling joy and fulfilment along the way. 

When we focus on the task at hand - on playing our best game rather than winning - we experience greater creativity, productivity, and happiness at work.

Professional Benefits:

This mindset is proven to have been prevalent in some of the most successful sports teams – those that focus on playing their best game, and celebrate successes throughout, rather than just focusing on winning and delaying all celebration until that is achieved. Basically, the more you focus on playing your best game instead of on winning, the more you actually end up winning.

By not being paralyzed by stress and anxiety, leaders and their teams become more effective. By celebrating the team’s successes and progress as they go, leaders create a more positive and motivated work environment. They also learn how to avoid dysfunctional mechanisms like blaming, complaining, finding excuses, etc., and how to create environments without them.

Other Benefits

This week, you start to break that self-limiting habit and enjoy the journey of life as it is lived, in the present moment. Have you ever heard someone say “You need to find happiness and fulfillment in yourself”? Well, this is the week you learn what it actually means and how to do it practically.

You may set goals and objectives at work or in your personal life that you set out to achieve, but these can often actually cause significant stress and anxiety around the prospect of not achieving them. This actually takes your focus away from doing your best to achieve them, and from enjoying and living every moment in the present fully.

At this session, you learn how to let goals give the overall direction, and then how to actually focus your emotional and intellectual intelligence on completing the tasks at hand. This is about having a clear destination and then focusing on progress as you go, and crucially, practicing the ability to celebrate progress continually along the way.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging are popular topics in today’s society for good reason.  Diverse and inclusive teams and companies outperform their peers.  They are 35% more productive, make better decisions 87% of the time, and earn 2.5x higher cash flow per employee (LinkedIn).

Sadly, the structures and stresses of modern life increasingly push us into seeing ourselves as separate individuals who need to compete for survival; “me against the world” can become our default mode and we feel alienated, anxious, unfulfilled and alone.

But, while we often don’t feel it, we're part of a larger, interconnected system that is bigger than ourselves. Anything that we try to achieve or create depends on others in some way. Decisions need approval, projects need finance, services need consumers, etc.

Professional Benefits:

This module is about moving away from the focus of leaders on themselves as individuals and embracing the understanding that we all depend on each other and are part of something bigger than just ourselves.

For example, a CEO may feel burdened with coming up with the right ideas and making the right decisions each and every time. As a result, their leadership style will be focusing more on themselves than the others around them.

If a leader focuses more on the “We” instead of just “I”, then they give more space to the others around them to share their own ideas, rather than just creating a space where people can only comment on the ideas presented by the leaders.

Truly believing that we are all interconnected allows leaders to reduce their need for control and better delegate to and empower members of their team. This also helps to create a better non-blame culture as everybody is working collectively together to achieve a goal.

Other Benefits:

At this session, you learn how to harness the power of belonging and practise the concept of creating purpose in every action and situation in your life and every interaction with anyone. This is a very powerful, inspiring tool that helps you live a life fulfilled with meaning each and every day, and particularly helps you at difficult moments of loneliness, pressure and insecurities.

In our minds, we tell ourselves stories about ourselves, our lives and the people and situations around us. These powerful narratives drive our choices and experiences of life.  In the vast majority of cases, these stories help us go through life happily, but whenever we feel unhappy, stressed, insecure, powerless or stuck in a situation, it is because our narrative about that situation isn’t serving us well. We blame the situation, over which we have little to no control, not the narrative we are creating about it, which is fully in our control.  At times like these we need to update our mental operations manual to get unstuck, create a new narrative and take action.

Professional Benefits:

Since leaders often have to promote their ideas with unwavering confidence, they can get stuck inside their narratives even more easily. In this module, they realise that narratives can be changed, and learn how to create different narratives that work much better for them, their teams and their interactions and relationships with others. This is a powerful skill, for when you change your narrative, you change your life. Leaders who do this well open new opportunities, generate more and better ideas and have happier, more engaged teams and families.

This module particularly helps leaders who want to create more effective and cohesive teams to learn how to turn possible negative biases about team members into narratives of collaboration.

Other Benefits:

In this module, you familiarize yourself with the narratives you hold about yourself and other people, and how they impact your behaviours and interactions with others. Next, you understand whether these narratives are helpful or unhelpful and the role of confirmation bias in reinforcing them.

You then delve into a significant narrative where you feel stuck and find where it can be unstuck and retold in a more empowering way. And while reality doesn’t necessarily change immediately, your attitude, emotions and the way you handle reality do change immediately.

The present is the most important time – the only time when we have the power to make decisions and take action – and being present is a booster of all our activities. Yet, too often we’re held back by some past that we can't let go of, or burdened by the fear or anxiety of a future that still needs to happen... and we miss the present.

Professional Benefits:

Leaders can use awareness of the present moment and mindfulness skills to help others not get stuck on past mistakes or in feelings of anxiety related to the future. Instead, they can encourage themselves and their team members to focus on the best action they can take in the present moment, given the knowledge and resources available to them.

Leaders can transform the culture of responsibility: from guilt for things that didn’t work out as intended to ability to respond in the present, with safety and trust and without blame or accusations.

Other Benefits:

This week, you learn about mind wandering (the opposite of being present) and your ideas about time. You experience the power of being present in the present as a booster to any activity and relationship, and you learn how to let go of clinging, control and anxiety, and make all your personal – intellectual, creative, emotional, etc. – resources available into whatever is happening right here right now.

You disempower feelings like guilt, regret, fear and anxiety. You learn how to reflect on the past, make peace and learn from it, but not linger.

In our relationships with others - whether at work or in our personal lives - we often recreate the relationship we have internally with ourselves. This is true on a very deep level, often beyond our daily awareness. A fracture within can mar all our relationships and cause instability and stress throughout our lives.

Most of us are not even aware that we have a relationship with ourselves.  Think of yourself as an iceberg, with your surface identity on top (what we look like, say, and how we appear to ourselves and the world), and everything else below the water (our feelings, cultural background, biases, etc.).  The part of our iceberg that’s visible is just a tiny fraction of the rest of the ice hidden below the sea.  Most of us aren’t aware of this iceberg, nevermind the hidden contents within it.  Nor do we realize that this iceberg drives our behavior.  When we relate to other people, we think we are relating to their surface identity but most of the time we are bumping up against their iceberg below.  No wonder why relationships get so tricky!  

Healthy relationships with ourselves and others begin when we accept and see our icebergs for what they are, and address the roots of our issues rather than the symptoms.  With others, we can recognize that there is more than what appears on the surface, and approach tensions or conflict with curiosity and compassion.

Professional Benefits:

When you become aware of the feelings, beliefs, expectations and biases that drive your actions and results, you are empowered to accept or change them to achieve the results you seek.  More importantly, when you see and own your iceberg, you are more likely to forge deeper connections and relationships with others.  Leaders who practice self-awareness are more authentic, relatable and inspiring.

Other Benefits:

This week, you familiarize yourself with your self-image and learn ways to practice self-love. You also debunk some myths about relationships and review some empowering tools to create and nurture more authentic, constructive relationships.

This module is also about how you build relationships with other people, how these are influenced by the expectations that you place on these relationships, where these expectations come from and how they influence how you react to situations when they don’t turn out in the way that you were anticipating (e.g., resentment, giving up on people, etc.).

We often let circumstances dictate our decisions, sidelining both our personal and professional values in the process. This misalignment not only erodes our personal integrity but also diminishes the value of our company. Surprisingly, many of us operate without a clear understanding of our core values – the essential drivers behind our actions, wellbeing, and decision-making. This module aims to disrupt this status quo, challenging participants to deeply explore and align with their foundational values and find ways to connect those to their company’s.

Professional Benefits:

A clearer understanding of key personal values provides leaders with a much more effective framework for decision making.

This helps leaders navigate complex challenges, confidently stand by their decisions, and enhance team and organizational wellbeing.

Leaders learn how to master the art of leveraging values for pivotal decisions, ensuring alignment with both personal and corporate ethos. The outcome? A surge in energy, heightened motivation, and superior performance.

Other Benefits:

We learn how to empower ourselves and our values as opposed to being led by the circumstances.

This module frees us from fear and indecisiveness in making choices and taking action by obliterating the whole concept of making a mistake or failing.

Next, it shows how in every situation, congruence with our values is an empowering, liberating tool for shaping our lives and we can enjoy the benefits, energy and self-confidence that come from it.

And finally, it offers a transformative journey to identify and clarify our one or two paramount values that truly influence our behaviour and choices.

Fears, big and small, are deeply ingrained in our lives. The things we do out of fear! Fear holds us back or even paralyses us, but it doesn't give us more information about the riskiness of the situation; it just tells us a story about our self-limiting beliefs.

Professional Benefits:

In this module, leaders learn how to really grow from their fears, which are often the primary obstacle to their becoming authentic, vulnerable, creative, relatable, and empathetic leaders.

This module shows leaders how to accept fears, allow them, learn from them and finally let them flow and leave. This is a more effective and definite approach than the typical advice of fighting or denying fears.

As a result, leaders also learn how to create workplaces where people feel safe to admit to, face and outgrow their fears; workplaces of fulfilling engagement.

Other Benefits:

This week, you learn and practice powerful tools to understand where your fears come from and what they can teach you so that you truly overcome them (instead of ignoring or suppressing them) and grow beyond your self-imposed obstacles.