Is mindfulness acceptable in a business workshop?

Full transcript

Intro

Welcome to episode number 10 of "Facilitators Q&A With Jay." I'm Jay Melone from New Haircut and 10 episodes is a little bit of a milestone. So I just wanted to pause for a second and reflect on this series.

I created it as a way of just acknowledging how hard facilitation is. Most of the facilitators that I meet are not facilitators. They're designers, they're engineers, they're product managers and they have a job and they're being asked to jump in and design and lead conversations. So that's pretty courageous. So I just want to acknowledge you if you're doing that.

And this series is meant to give you ideas and tips and inspiration to keep going forward with it. And today's topic, then it's kind of like a squishy topic. It's is it safe, is it okay and acceptable to do mindfulness practices? Is it okay in a corporate environment in a business environment to be quiet together, to meditate together? I don't know. Let's talk about it. Let's see what we think.

Today’s question

Alright, so let me just start off by saying a couple of years ago, had you told me that I was gonna be incorporating mindfulness or meditation nonetheless into any workshop that I was leading, I would say no way.

Coming out of the world of corporate America, where I came from the world of Accenture and big enterprise clients it was always very buttoned up. So anything that went outside of the bounds of the business context and business conversation seemed nuts. It seemed like we were going to be wasting people's time. seemed like antics that had no place in the business world.

And I learned that from the same place that you learned it from, from people that never spent the time to design those conversations to design the experiences. The main ingredient here is engagement, team engagement. We need everybody in the circle, everybody in the room to engage in the conversation. And how do you do that? You get people to engage by making them feel safe to engage to begin with.

And if you're worried about your agenda and your timeline and all the things that you have to get through in the next 30 minutes then you can expect people to stay pretty much half engaged or disengaged from the conversation. Because what's their reality like? They just got out of two or three back-to-back-to-back meetings. They're probably thinking about 20 other things other than your workshop.

So the really good news is it's a lot easier than it seems. The thing you have to do is just get over your initial fear of doing things differently and it's gonna be okay. People are going to be okay with it. There might be one or two people in the room that are looking at you sideways and thinking, what are we even doing right now? But I promise you the other 90% of the people in the room are thinking, thank you. Thank you for letting me just sit quietly for one second and collect my thoughts before you shoved me down this rabbit hole of new thinking and new ideas.

So it's not such a big deal. And if you think you're curious and you want to try to practice some of this stuff yourself there's really like three things that you have to try to do.

First, give people a heads up. Just let them know, hey, these are things that I've observed and been a part of in other meetings and workshops. And I'd like to do it a little bit differently. I know we're all busy. I know we're all stressed out. I thought it would just be a good idea for us to sit quietly for a second or two, and just allow us to kind of like settle in and be ready to have this conversation. Does that sound okay with you?

The second thing you can do is invite them into it, make it their decision if they want to join you. So make it an invitation ask their permission, say, so we're going to try this thing. We're just going to sit quietly and breathe together. If you feel comfortable doing it I'd love for you to do it with me. If you'd like to, if it makes you feel better, you can turn off your monitors. You can close your office door, you can close your blinds. You can lower your lights. Whatever makes you feel comfortable, give them a chance. You can invite them to stand up, to sit down, to sit in a more comfortable chair, like give them a chance to decide if this is something they want to do and then get comfortable doing it and make it an invitation.

And then third, take the pressure off yourself to be this meditative guru overnight. I've been meditating for over 10 years but the idea of me guiding other people through meditation, scared the crap out of me. So take it slowly. At first you might want to say let's just sit quietly for 30 seconds. Turn off our monitors, not speak, just sit quietly.

The next iteration of that might be that you guide them through some breathing, say like, I'm gonna count for a count of three and we're gonna breathe in together. And then the same thing and we're going to breathe out together. You can do that a couple of times.

And then if you feel like you're ready for a next step you can try to just kind of like allow them to check into their body, do a quick body scan. And really all that goes into that is just talking them through, feeling into their feet, feeling into their ankles and their calves and their knees up all the way through their head. Let your shoulders drop, let your jaw drop. To get inspired, go and listen to some meditations. There's a lot of free apps out there these days, Sleep Timer is a great one. I love Sarah Blondin. She's got some great meditations in there.

And if you're totally unwilling to do it yourself what I've done in the past is I've played guided meditations for everyone to listen to so you can just be part of it. Instead of leading it you can be part of it.

Like I said, this should feel stressful. Maybe it's not, but if it does, it's felt stressful for me even now, today, when I know I'm about to do any kind of guided meditation or mindfulness I feel tense in my chest and I just let it go because every single time that I've done it there's been at least one person in the room that thanked me, sincerely thanked me for just giving them a moment to check in. I hope that you'll try it. Someone in the room is going to really thank you and feel very connected and appreciative of what you've done for them.

And best case scenario is you're gonna get people to really kind of drop their walls and really engage in lean into the conversation, which might just unlock some big bold conversations and big ideas. I hope you try it give it a shot.

And stick around in a couple weeks from now I'm gonna start to invite guests to come and talk with me about their experience of being facilitators, design leaders, design thinkers, all these good things. Stick around and come back and join us for those sessions. It's going to be fun. Until then hope you've enjoyed these and I'll see you soon. Take care

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