We all experience our personal reality with dozens of beliefs that strongly affect our mood and our ability to create and cooperate with family members and co-workers. These occurring worlds have an inextinguishable quality of malleability and addressing them are quick wins for our wellbeing. This also applies to the work environment, as quite often the combination of unconscious forces and challenging memories come in the way of our workflow. It is the role of a conscious leader to be able to recognize these individual patterns and bring light into the context.
Setting the ground for active listening
Just recently, in our Team Conscious Retreat, we did an exercise in which each member shared his or her most damaging work-related occurring world. As soon as we started, a barrier fell, as if it was allowed to be vulnerable for a moment, and we began to see each other in a more empathic way. This created a safe space for us to openly share our struggles, without judgments, and building together a bridge to deeply understanding each other.
Most of the times our thinking mind tends to be over dramatic, and sharing these internal thoughts helped us look at things from a different perspective. During the exercise, the new joiner of our team mentioned she was feeling overwhelmed and feared she wouldn’t be able to deliver the tasks on time. Our Area Manager & Chef, who used to host our retreats but now, given the pandemic, had to assume a back-office position, mentioned she was looping on the notion that she lost the capability of having impact on our clients’ experience.
Shifting challenging beliefs in a collaborative way
After putting these feelings into words and discussing them, we all helped each other realize that there are other ways to look at the same exact thing. Situations tend to be neutral, and we can choose how to look at them – this is the wisdom higher conscious brings. The second part of the exercise consisted of spending 15 minutes on each team member’ occurring world to find together a new belief that could replace the old one – not intellectually, but in an embodied way – transforming fears into strengths.
By building this growth container, based on communication and acceptance, we started working as talking mirrors, exposing the fragility of each other’s anticipatory fears, and helping our co-workers to see the light of hope that comes when we shift our perspective in a more constructive way.
In our retreat, we replaced the fear of the new joiner with excitement to explore growth and we helped our Area Manager understanding the real scale of what she is doing by onboarding hundreds of people in retreats all around the world. Self-transformation occurs then naturally, and the team dynamics change in one go, as if new potential was unblocked.
