Coach | Trainer | Speaker | Consultant
Many of us wish we could perform with the focus, strength and skill of a professional athlete. To do so requires a strong connection between our minds and our bodies—some research shows only a 5% d…
Sourced through Scoop.it from: blog.culturaldetective.com
Thanks Dianne for this great post summarizing our workshop in Valencia! #SiETAR #mindfulness #diversity
See on Scoop.it – Mindful Leadership & Intercultural Communication
Want to have a look at what #SIETAR (society for #intercultural education, training and research) looks like? Check out this video!
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Sure, sending an email is easy. How many of us have not written one while on hold with another call or in those few moments between one meeting and the next? Or how many are not sending text messages or smart phone messages while driving even?
Information can be sent from virtually anywhere nowadays.
Did you know?
Psychological social and emotional conditions (like receiving an unwanted e-mail for example) can have the same impact on you (physiologically speaking) as physical aggressions as they draw on many of the same neural networks.
What does this mean?
Even just anticipating a challenging conversation or event can have as much impact as living through it for real!
Within your brain, the amygdala (associated with emotions, memory, etc.) sounds the alarm, which releases stimulating substances in your body, readying it for the “fight or flee” response. Stress hormones are also released.
This means that simply the act of receiving an email can put you physiologically in a situation where you feel stressed and so emotional that you are not even able to respond adequately to the message sent to you.
In terms of communication, this has a direct impact on the quality and the effectiveness with which we work and interact. Being mindful in interpersonal communication can be learned; you can do so too!
Jenny
Becoming an effective communicator
I am sure that you have already attended a communications training of some sort in your life; be it to improve your communication skills, your team collaboration or to learn particular tools and methods that were supposed to enable you to become a better, more effective communicator.
As I wrote in an earlier post, communications is much more than its mere verbal aspect let alone a set of tools and measures:
Following a study of Albert Mehrabian, an American Psychologist, who looked into which aspects of communications are relevant to the actual understanding of information thus to effectively communicating:
Over the last weekend, I have been exploring a technique called “Insight Dialogue” which was recommended to me and really is mindfulness and awareness applied to interpersonal communications. While you pause and relax, you provide yourself with the opportunity to tune into your own feelings and emotions, stepping out of the habitual trigger-response mechanism and opening up, allowing (mutual) space for response rather than reactivity. While you trust what emerges and listen deeply, you finally propose an answer or input, which is truly beneficial to your counterpart or dialogue partners. You remain integer and compassionate not being entangled in emotions or feelings and clinging to words wanting to steer the conversation your way.
What a great way of connecting with each other and having a meaningful conversation. I am now even more passionate about including these techniques into my training, coaching and consulting work. Insight Dialogue certainly offers a wonderful way towards working on Self-Awareness and Management, Social Awareness and Relationship-Management all at the Center of Emotional Intelligence thus at the heart of Mindful Leadership.
Leadership, Diversity and Mindfulness applied to sports
Last Saturday at the SIETAR Europa conference, I had the chance to animate a wonderful workshop with a fellow interculturalist and friend Susan Salzbrenner from Fit Across Cultures. 
As we both have a strong background in sports and did not want to engage in more theories and “brain” focused presentations and activities, we decided to animate a session connecting our two brains[1]: the cranial one which we know and the so-called “enteric brain” located in our bellies (in the gut).
How did we do that?
Well, by linking intercultural training and the importance of “embodiment[2]” and mindfulness (moment to moment awareness) to athlete’s realities and movement. After a moment of mindful walking and grounding and by means of a very practical “experiment” we had the participants tune into themselves and connect with their feelings and body experience in different challenging intercultural and interpersonal situations.
Although this is far from being easy, the participants were wonderful and shared what was going on for them. Being able to relate to your bodily experience can actually inform you even before your thoughts come in, when it comes to decisions, dealing with particular emotional situations or simply in our daily lives. In the context of sports, athletes also have to train mentally in order to be able to resist pressure in competitions and perform at their best. Being in sync with their bodies helps them to overcome differences and difficult situations and enables diverse teams – when managed well – to outperform competitors.
What a great learning and what a powerful group! Thanks to all of you who have participated and thanks Raquel Benmergui for the wonderful graphic representations!
Jenny
[1] Compare to : Amnon Buchbinder on Philip Shepherd’s “Out of our heads”
[2] In the sense that: “We make the experience of culture through our bodies”, see Ida Castiglioni: “Embodiment of Culture”
Speak and listen as you would like to be spoken and listened to!
Have a great weekend, Jenny
Did you know that communication barriers can pop-up at every stage of the communication process (consisting of sender, message, channel/media, receiver, feedback and response) and have the potential to create misunderstanding and confusion.
To be an effective communicator and to get your point across without misunderstanding and confusion, your goal should be to lessen the frequency of these barriers at each stage of this process with clear, concise, accurate, well-planned communications.
Communications is thus only successful, when the receiver understands your message exactly the way you intended it!
Here are some possible barriers to effective communications:
So many things can go wrong already in the normal communication process; now imagine what happens when you find yourself in an intercultural context!
Photo credit: Ed Yourdon / Foter / CC BY-NC-SA
“Spend your leisure time in cultivating an ear attentive to discourse, for in this way you will find that you learn with ease what others have found out with difficulty.”- Isocrates on Goodreads.com.
As a new week is about to start, let me share some really simple but extremely important tips for effective, mindful listening with you:
Enjoy your week!
Jenny
Photo credit: sadmafioso / Foter / CC BY-NC
Happy Holiday Season
As Christmas is approaching and instead of rushing to the shops to find a last minute gift, why not giving mindfulness to somebody you love….?
Let me share how I came to work with and practice mindfulness:
At one point in my life, when children came into the family, my personal time became suddenly very scarce as I also continued to work full-time in positions with high responsibility involving international travel and dealing with everything else alongside. Up to that point, I had been able to manage my work-life balance quite well but suddenly without me noticing it, it changed. I did not take enough time out with and for myself anymore. This led to a heavy gall bladder incident in early 2009 where I was told that I was on the edge of burnout and that I had to stop running around.
I then saw an article about mindfulness and thought that it was very much in line with what and who I am. I decided to take up the challenge and found a MBSR teacher close to where I live and with whom I wanted to take up the journey. I actually gave it a try not knowing exactly what it was.
As a matter of fact, in a couple of weeks I rediscovered myself and wondered how I could have possibly been forgetting to take care of myself all this time. I began reading many books about mindfulness and at the same time engaged a lot in intercultural communications (which in fact is my specialization) attending courses etc. I discovered that mindfulness and the qualities of being open, non-judgmental, trusting etc. were exactly the same as what we would strive for when reaching higher levels of intercultural competence. This link (being myself a senior communications professional) struck my interest as well as the link to leadership.
Image Source: http://www.freeimages.co.uk
It is no surprise that I then fell on literature from Daniel Goleman and others writing about emotional intelligence as well from Otto Scharmer with his theory U. I suddenly found enormous pleasure at not only reading through all the literature on neuroscience, brain, leadership and interpersonal/intercultural communications I could get, but also deepening my own practice.
I attended many silence retreats and found them extremely nourishing and also kept looking forward every day to my own home practice. I began living in the present moment and saw colours, smelled things that I had forgotten. I also began being different with my children, showing them more things and being more patient. I subsequently decided to broaden my horizon by learning mindfulness for children, attending the training with mindfulschools.org in the US as well as with Eline Snel from the AMT in the Netherlands. I am now on my way to become a certified mindfulness for children teacher and am practicing with my own children as well as conducting interventions with other children privately for now. Training the leaders of tomorrow is wonderful!
Additionally, I took a jump into the unknown and am now working with mindfulness in the workplace (designing programmes and workshops on mindful leadership for women for instance), coaching individuals using mindfulness techniques as well as integrating the mindfulness approach into my communications work, i.e. mindful listening training with teams, responding to emails mindfully etc.
Mindfulness has become the “umbrella” under which I offer my services and my state of being… I find it deeply rewarding and fulfilling to work with people, accompanying them on their path of finding themselves again (not to say becoming human again). It is like the discovery of something that has been lost for a long time.
I am also now working more in-depth on projects aiming at bringing mindfulness to the formal school education sector here in Switzerland. The effects of what the leadership theory calls VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) can be strongly felt here too. Everything is in disruption, people are running around without liking what they do, feeling insecure and unhappy with less time every month.
I am now following my gut feeling and my inner guidance and although it is not easy, I feel that I am at the right place at the right time.
So, now you know it all!
Here’s wishing you an excellent Holiday Season and a Happy New Year!
Thanks for being on this journey with me and looking forward to interacting and maybe seeing you again next year.
Jenny
Having worked lately with various groups of people on effective internal communications and team building it struck me again how the trust factor remains of major importance for any successful intervention.
Not only trust and confidence in the capabilities of the facilitator but also trust in team members, collaborators and most and foremost trust in the participants themselves and in their own capabilities. Obviously, this trust has to be established and participants need to be ready to listen to their inner feelings and intuitions….this sounds like an easy exercise but as a matter of fact, for many it is the most difficult – as the most unusual – part.
As we all know, it is not possible not to communicate: our non-verbal signs and behaviour already give clues to our counterpart about what is going on (even if this often happens unconsciously), before the conversation per se has started. Being aware of how your own body behaves and moves in space and how others might perceive this, is in fact a first step towards more self-awareness and from that to trust in your own abilities and capacities. Adding empathy, curiosity and openness to others, you will have a strong basis for building relationships of trust and thus effective communications and effective intercultural communications.
Are you willing to trust and be mindful about how your own body relates to external stimuli and how you and your actions are perceived by others?