Though we have learned about these concepts and may cognitively be very aware of them and their importance, however, the practice of these concepts is not typically imbedded in our schooling. The ability to bring ourselves totally present and be an instrument of change is an ongoing journey and one that requires commitment and regular practice. Often we find alternative routes to discover ourselves and the practice of mindfulness, such as meditation, yoga, spiritual paths, therapy or even religious practices.

As someone who consults and coaches in organizations I am struck by two seemingly incongruent dynamics within organizations. One is the lack of “mindfulness”—meaning the ability to be fully awake to the present moment. Most of us, if we look closely, will find our minds in the past or in the future, not focused on the here and now. We also more often than not are operating on unconscious emotional reactions. To be mindful, in my definition, is to be fully present to this moment and aware of what is arising without being attached or hooked by it.

The other dynamic I see in organizations is the longing for meaning, appreciation and a sense of community. People are starved for mindfulness, for balanced lives, for making a difference—and yet our organizations foster fast paces, information overload, stress, long hours and suffering.

After spending a hard but glorious week with Jon Kabat-Zinn and Saki Santorelli as a participant in their “Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction for Health Care Professionals” training, I am committed to bringing the practice of mindfulness to my work and to my clients in a more direct way. I want to dedicate portions of my blog to support my own journey and to share that experience in hopes that it may support others on their journeys.

To start, I’d like to share my learning from the program that I found most impactful:

1. Defining “presence” or mindfulness as being awake or focused on this moment. It’s not something to achieve in the future, it’s not a journey to be an enlightened soul or any other spiritual aspiration. It’s simply attending to this moment. And it’s available to you now. Now is all you really have anyway.
2. Allowing whatever is arising to simply be. Emotions and thoughts will arise; it’s the nature of the human being. There’s no right or wrong about it, it simply is. Allow them to be without judgment.
3. Noticing that we cling to or resist emotions and thoughts. We tend to want to keep emotions or experiences we see as positive and to get rid of the ones that we don’t want. Holding on or trying to change is what causes our suffering. The reactions to what’s arising are the source of pain. If you can just observe and be—without judgment about what is arising within you—you will find that more ease, more clarity and more choice is available to you.
4. Invoking curiosity and kindness toward yourself. Be an observer to yourself and your habits of mind and body.
5. Creating a regular practice of mindfulness and being fully committed to it; doing so will build and strengthen new muscles. Welcome the time and give it to yourself as a gift. Make friends with the practice.

Since returning from my week with Jon and Saki (as well as a wonderful group of fellow participants) I have made mindfulness practice the “bones” of my day. I have shifted the way I schedule my time. I put on my calendar the “practices” I want to commit to before I put anything else.

We all have work requirements that are non-negotiable, so you may want to put those in as well. I have coaching appointments and teaching and facilitation commitments already made. Many are not movable for a variety of reasons, or I choose not to move them.

I put on each day 30 minutes in the morning to sit quietly and just be with myself. Some people name that practice “meditating.” You can call it anything you like. I do that once in the morning and once at night. I also added in physical exercise. I like to do yoga at least twice each week and aerobic and strength training three times. I put them on my calendar. Everything else now has to fit around those events.

I also make a point during my day to stop and check in with myself. What do I notice, how am I feeling, what am I doing, thinking?? Observing with curiosity has brought new information, clarity, and spaciousness to my day. I can now very quickly recognize when I am no longer in the room (mentally or emotionally) and can readily bring myself back. This facility promotes my ability to be with my clients and myself fully.

Though I am not sure if any of my work or general life responsibilities have declined, I feel my pace has slowed and my anxiety has significantly decreased while enjoyment and ease have grown.

For those of you reading this who would like to join in the dialogue, you are most welcome.

I would love to hear your thoughts, learnings and questions.

We all share that fear, and it often drives us to over-facilitate or too feel overly responsible. In meetings, we are busy making ourselves look useful or helpful, or showing that we know something. But those behaviors are about us and not about the group’s needs. Our job as facilitators is to serve our clients’ needs.

If this dynamic sounds familiar to you, try the following exercise:

1. Define competence. What is competent?? List what you man by that. Don’t just list a few, try to list them all. Keep writing until you start to feel it’s silly. If you dig deep enough you find you have some funny beliefs driving you, and those need to be examined.
2. What’s driving you? When you look at the list, what sticks out? What is motivating your actions?? The need to be the expert? Fear of making a mistake? Of getting fired??
Examine your own motivation. Then move to step 3.
3. Decide what is in the best interest of the group. Ask yourself, how does my doing these things help the group build its own self-responsibility or capacity to resolve its own issues? What are a good facilitator’s goals? How am I supporting the group’s goals? Align your behavior with the outcomes you want for the group.
4. Make it manageable. Is it possible to achieve all those standards?? If you had to throw three quarters of the list out, what would you save?

As always, I’d love to hear your reactions or any tips you have for facilitators to help them and their groups be more successful.

Last night I was attending a meeting but not running it. It ran amuck! People were talking over each other and around each other. There was very little semblance of order. The group had to make a decision, but time was running out. Being a trained facilitator, I was trying hard to stay in observer mode and see if I could summarize the conversation and help the group see where it was. I could not do it. But here’s what I did do:

I stopped the conversation and all the disparate voices. I simply noted the time, reminded everyone of our collective goal, and asked if we might take a minute and go around the room to get everyone’s perspective on where they stood on the issue at hand. I called it a straw poll. They agreed and proceeded. It took some diligence on my part to keep the group quiet while each person talked, but we finally got everyone’s voice heard. Then the group was able to see where each person stood on the issue and what open questions still needed to be answered. The group was then able to reach a conclusion fairly quickly.

A list of lessons often attributed in an e-mail chain letter to the Dalai Lama (but actually lifted from Life’s Little Instruction Book) includes this gem: “When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.” So what’s the lesson here? A few:

1. You don’t always have to know everything. Ask others.
2. When conversations get messy, most people know it—and would welcome some help.
3. Be brave enough to point out what’s happening. It can be a relief to others!
4. When the process isn’t working, stop it.

The technique I used is a pretty simple one: Just suggest that the group take time out and get each person’s perspective. Or, if it’s a voting situation, take a preliminary poll. During this time there can be no debate. This is a just a chance to get a sense of where each person stands on a particular subject. When everyone’s done, then you can ask for a summation and thoughts for next steps. It’s easy and fairly quick, and it allows everyone to get a fuller picture of where things stand.

As always I would be interested in your feedback or experiences. As that “Dalai Lama” e-mail also advised, “Share your knowledge. It’s a way to achieve immortality.”

We have all had first impressions. Where do they come from?? We just see someone and we get sense of them. Some people feel intense, some warm and friendly, some aloof, some guarded and so on. The immediate impression you make is important to know. This energy is foundational. It’s what people sense or pick up almost immediately. How you use that quality can directly impact your work with others. If you ignore it, you may well be impacting in ways you are unaware of. If you use the quality with care it can support you in being successful.

If you come off as soft, you have more latitude with the words you choose. A client of mine who is a high-ranking executive in the government asked me to help her have a more authoritative presence. In her case, she had a very warm and soft presence. We were not going to change that; we were going to use it. We worked on strengthening her words. Given her natural warmth, she could use much stronger language than someone who has a commanding or intimidating presence. People with a strong, imposing presence have to soften their language to counter their natural energy. Being aware of your natural energy can help you adjust both you tone ad words to create in a conscious way the impact you want to have.

Take some time and think about how you strike people in a first impression. How would others describe you? Ask a few friends, “What was your first impression of me?” Another very telling exercise is to get with friend or trusted colleague and ask them to finish this sentence “ In your presence, I feel…” Their answers you get will be clues about how you strike people before you even talk!

Use the rule of “confront with your words and support with your tone.” If you bear in mind what energetics you bring and adjust this formula accordingly you will, in all likelihood, be able to manage your impact with more precision.

Try it. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

One technique is to create a visual representation of the group on a piece of paper and keep it by you. Here’s how to create the picture and how to use it:

1. Imagine people at a table. Take a piece of paper and draw a circle on it.
2. Place the name of each person who is on the call around the circle.
3. Be sure everyone checks in at the beginning of the call to get them present and known to everyone else in the meeting
4. As people talk, put a check mark next to their name
5. As the conversation progresses be sure to check who has spoken and who has not. Be sure to include people in the conversation who have not yet spoken or are joining in less than others.
6. Stop halfway through the meeting and check to see how the participants are doing. Ask if there is anything, in regard to being on the phone, they need before proceeding
7. At the end, do a quick check out with everyone to see how the meeting went and be sure to ask for any further suggestions to improve future calls.

Creating a picture of the group and noting their names will help you both visualize and remember who is on the call. Over time, you will find that your meetings feel more inclusive. If you ask for suggestions for improvement and follow them, you will undoubtedly find even more ways to make these virtual meetings efficient and productive.

I was traveling with a group of young people — a diverse group in terms of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, political ideologies and all passionate activists. We were in a remote setting away from the noise, rhetoric and often impersonal world of Washington, DC to condcut a three-day meeting. A few of the group members were a bit spooked by being in such a desolate area. We met two young men who are responsible for the property where we stayed. The two young men appeared, on the surface, quite different from us and they looked at us with curiosity. The situation was ripe with the possibility of negative judgments.

On the second evening of our stay, the men came to take us on a boat ride. Hesitantly and carefully, they asked questions about who we were and what we did for a living. As the evening unfolded and the openness of my traveling companions became more apparent, the conversations deepened. I watched as one young man spoke so honestly of how different he felt from “us.” He tentatively named “who he was” by describing his affinities. I am white, I am a Christian, I am a Republican and so on. One of the women in the goup engaged with him very intently. She stayed present to him, just took in what he said, offered no judgments. In answer to each label he mentioned, which might have created a wall, she said, “Some of us call ourselves that” and left it. She didn’t defend, argue, advise or try to enlighten. She just answered looking directly at him with her heart open and spoke truthfully. He shared some deeply personal stories. As the evening ended, he thanked us. I watched in total awe as he reached out to hug the woman he had been talking to and asked to stay in touch. They exchanged cards. As he left, the woman said, “Wow, I love him.” As we all stood in admiration of how she had effortlessly opened her heart to someone so different from herself and who she could easily have judged negatively or rejected. Instead she chose to be in conversation, which led to hearts opening and greater understanding. It was a lesson to us all.

Where do you close off? Who and what are you unwilling to be with? How does your own closed stance separate you from others? How do those walls serve?

Try seeing beyond the labels and rhetoric to the heart. Just listen and open and see what walls can crumble. How much better would we be as humans if we could bring the walls of false separation down?

Why is this useful? More often than not, groups jump around from topic to topic and never resolve anything. They will start on a subject and very quickly start taking “journeys” away from the main topic. One idea sparks another. If unchecked this dynamic can quickly keep the group from every reaching a conclusion. I am sure you have seen this in your meetings. Its one of the major reasons meetings feel unproductive.

All conversations are comprised of threads, which in turn include two important elements:

1. The topic: The subject of discussion
2. The journey: The process of talking about a topic in a sequential way

An example of a thread would be a discussion by a group about who might be selected to run a particular project. The “who might be selected” is the topic. The conversation’s “journey” might entail: outlining the conversation needed, describing the job requirements, developing criteria for selection, brainstorming names, airing reactions to the brainstorm, discussing the pros and cons of a candidate, taking a final vote, and making a plan for how the decision will be carried out. The conversation had a “thread” which included a topic and a journey.

Meetings generally have an overarching thread of their own—the “big” conversation that the meeting is designed to complete. This might be the achievement of a strategic plan or a final decision on a designated topic or any other goal the client has identified. Within that meeting thread there may be multiple sub-conversations or threads that need to be completed in order to achieve the larger goal. The meeting manager or facilitator’s job is to know the desired outcome and to help the group move through the necessary conversations to achieve that outcome.

The facilitator’s ability to track the conversation gives the group a sense of security. The group, through the facilitator, knows where it is at all times. In essence, the facilitator is providing a structure or map for the group to follow. A powerful facilitator knows what conversations are happening at any given moment and where the group is in the conversation—and can help them stay on track.

Sometimes it’s helpful to enlist others in the group to help with facilitation. In some meetings, I ask group members to speak up when they think the conversation has strayed off course. The more aware a group is of the “thread,” the more proficient they will become at managing their own conversations. The more proficient a group becomes, the more productive your meetings will be—and the fewer outside facilitators you will need!

First, let’s review the elements of a good meeting:

All meetings should have an agenda. But what does an effective agenda include? Here are the elements:

• Overall purpose: What is this meeting supposed to produce?
• Leadership: Who is formally in charge of the meeting?
• Attendees: Do we have the right people in the room for what we are doing here today?
• Topics: What are the topics we want to cover, and in what order, to achieve our purpose?
• What is the desired outcome of each of these “conversations” (information sharing, information gathering or a decision)?
• Who is in charge of each of the conversations?
• How long will each conversation last?
• Decision-making: Who are the decision makers? How will they be making the decisions, and when?
• Accountabilities: At the end of the meeting there should be a written agreement detailing who is doing what, when they will do it, and how people will know it was done.
• Evaluation: How did this meeting go?

Now that you know the elements of a good meeting, YOU can start positively impacting the productivity of a meeting.

First, you have three opportunities to influence a meeting:

1. Before a meeting
2. During the meeting
3. After the meeting

At any of these points you have four simple but POWERFUL techniques for supporting good meeting performance. You can notice, question, request or offer:

1. Notice: Simply state the data or information that you are observing
Example: I notice that…
“there are two conversations going on.”
“we are missing some key ‘data points.’”
“I am confused.”
“the right people have not been invited.”

2. Question: Ask a question or put an inquiry on the table.
Example: I’m wondering…
“is there a written agenda?”
“who is making this decision?”
“what information do we need to make this decision?”

3. Request: Ask for something.
Example: I would like…
“an agenda.”
“to know what you are hoping I will contribute to this meeting.”

Or

Could…
“ someone summarize what we have discussed?”
“take notes?”

4. Offer: Offer a suggestion that might improve the meeting.
Examples:
It might help if we…
I would be willing to…..
Maybe we could……

“take the notes.”
“make the next agenda.”
“decide on who should attend the next meeting.”

Before you use any of these techniques, be clear what you want, which technique you are using, and to whom you are speaking. Ask yourself:

• What do I (or the group) want or need?
• From whom do I need it?
• Which technique will work best?

After you have used your techniques, it is imperative to wait for the answer and be sure that the person or persons to whom you addressed your comments answers.

Make a commitment now. What meeting do you lead or attend that you want to improve? What needs improving? Pick one element. Who do you need to address and which technique will you use? Let me know how it goes.

Time out.

My external reaction: Calm, cool, collected.

My internal reaction: Panic, fear and anxiety, accompanied with thoughts such as, “I am totally incompetent” and “I better find a way to crawl to the door without flying objects hitting me.”

Resume Action: I stand there looking like the consummate facilitator, thoughtful and nonplussed. I allow the silence to settle. After what seems like a century, another board member pipes up, “Of course! Every time we do strategic planning we get clear on our direction, how we will use our resources and how we will achieve our goals. When we get clear, some people decide that’s not the future they want. They decide to move on, while the
people who embrace the vision recommit.”

There is a palpable shift in energy and the rest of the board nods enthusiastically in agreement. They sign the deal.

What lessons can you take away from my experience?

1. Strategic planning, if done well, brings clarity of direction.
2. Silence can be your friend. Allow it.
3. There is wisdom in the room even if it’s not yours.
4. Look cool even if you don’t feel cool.