What do you think about Mindfulness? Whether you are already practicing or thinking of starting, feeling interested and curious about it or dismissing it as a fashionable gimmick, you certainly must have an opinion about it. This is too popular a subject to ignore it. Interestingly, what

“Dear Laura, my workplace has become a nightmare; the workload is horrible, nothing is ever good enough, or fast enough, I am exhausted, my family suffers, I suffer, but I have no choice. Urgent requests keep coming, pressure increases, positions disappear, and I am afraid to loose my j

Have you ever seen a manager jump on a new opportunity with blind enthusiasm and drag her team towards unchecked risks? Have you ever seen an executive react to a criticism by demolishing one by one the opposing arguments until he forgets his original point? We have all seen this.

Emotionally

Not everybody is skilled in providing constructive and respectful feedback. Even with the best of intentions, many managers are unable to give useful feedback without judging, patronizing, or somehow acting superior, while making the other person feel small. When faced with this type of “feedback” (which sounds like criticism), it is natural to feel bad, but we can learn to stay calm and extract only the useful stuff from it.

Companies like Google and Apple have long been using mindfulness training as a way to drive increased collaboration and creativity. Yet many business leaders are still skeptical about it. The prejudice might stem form a frequent confusion between therapeutic or spiritual practices of meditation and mindfulness on one side, and learning the Skills of Mindfulness and Mindful Leadership on the other side.

Originally a farmhouse, with adjoining meadows, woodland, and a small forest, powered by solar energy, renovated with recycled and sustainable materials, with a cozy and minimalistic interior, the Grooa Inspiria Learning Center is ideal for off-site meetings and workshops.

Surrounded by nature, it offers an opportunity to stimulate creativity and learning.

Disagreements and conflicts are not necessarily problems that we need to remove; they are also opportunities to learn from each other.

The C.L.E.A.R. ™ Mindset Method is a revolutionary approach that helps us build the skills necessary to do just that: transform conflicts into positive change. Here we share an example of its application.

 If you think that mindfulness is hard to achieve, I have news for you. You and I, and everybody else, are naturally capable of being mindful. Mindfulness is an innate capability of our human mind. Except, we don’t often use it. In a world that offers multiple stimulations and easy distractions, we often drift away from the present moment into multitasking.

 If you are like me, you are probably very busy right now, juggling the additional work and private demands that seem to make most of us a bit more frantic than usual as we approach Christmas.

Every year I try very hard to plan for additional buffer time to help me cope with the inevitable year-end urgencies; and every year I end up filling up all my buffer time and a little more.

Yet there is progress: I am still busy, but not stressed. What is the secret?

If you find it difficult to say NO to colleagues, friends, your boss, or family, you are probably juggling a lot of tasks at the moment!

Since you are busy, I will keep this short: you may want to try the ”YES, AND... ?” approach.