I don’t play it up a lot in my life as a communications consultant, but I’m a qualified yoga teacher. I also meditate often. Not that it matters, but I did once get a thousand-day streak on the Headspace app. What can I say? I must have needed it!
I also now realize that anybody alpha enough to meditate that many days in a row needs to relax a bit and let it go. The best feeling was waking up one morning and saying, “you know what? I’m good for today.” And actually meaning it. Starting again from day one is itself a valuable meditation mindset. Approaching things with “beginner’s mind.” Not bringing all your previous experiences to bear.
These parts of my life help to maintain perspective, most of the time. Communications and public relations are fields rife with urgency. There are deadlines to meet, and everybody wants to believe the story they have to tell is the big one. It’s a field where blood pressures get tested and tempers sometimes fray––yes, even my own. Although I have an unwritten rule to only to lose my temper in a professional environment at most once a year. Every time I do it, it costs me. So, it’s always better to take a deep breath and step back than wade into an argument. I know that’s true. And I try to reflect it in my life as well as my work. If I do lose my temper, I also try to apologize and mean it. Nobody’s perfect. I do try to extend grace to others knowing I’m lucky when people do so.
Particularly around election time it can be helpful to spend 20 minutes meditating. Tuning into my deep breaths helps me get in touch with the humbler side of myself. The one that can accept he’s not an expert in everything. The most watched videos on my yoga website? A six-minute meditation to chill out if you’re too competitive. And a 60-minute yoga class with a Kate Bush playlist on Spotify that syncs up to it. I recommend them both for testing times.
Likewise, I try not to sound too much like a yoga teacher when I’m working with clients. They tend to want results, not somebody who tells them the journey is the destination. And I have to be careful not to sound too much like a hippy. I sometimes think I’m lucky I grew up in a nasty concrete suburb in Southeast London. There’s still enough residual grit in my personality to make me effective when it counts. I don’t open meetings with suggested meditations or by doing “dharma talks”!
I bring all this up because I’ve been working with a new client recently that brings a lot of my experience in. iBme runs secular meditation and mindfulness camps for young people. And they operate with a collaborative leadership model. I’ve been working with them for a month or two now and we’re trying to reimagine their social media. In a world where app designers make doom-scrolling part of the experience, how can we make it positive? Is that even possible?
The great thing about collaborative leadership is: It brings anti-colonialism into practice. Instead of me, for example, as the consultant, telling the young people what to do, we work together. The young people have stronger ideas about social media than I do, and being frank, they use it more often. So we’ve started with a question. What would it look like to have a social media channel that reflects the experience of a real-life camp?
And we’re letting the answers emerge for themselves.
Decisions do take longer to get made but we don’t waste time going down “expert” tangents. We enjoy being open to the possible answers we’re finding and we communicate a lot along the way. I’d say the biggest thing I’m learning is to let go a bit and let the young people lead our direction. It feels positive and the outcomes are already showing up well. The other thing about the experience is: It makes me realize how rare it is. And I can see where many more organizations would value a more open-minded approach. We talk a lot about being “community led” in the nonprofit world. But we don’t always do it as often as we think we do. Good intentions are a good start. But they need to be the start of something more.
I’m not offering this up as anything definitive, either. Only to say that I’ve found it inspiring to work on this project. I hope it stimulates some good discussion and other thoughts.
Have a great week, and namaste!
