Workshop | Holding Space — Facing Our Fears: Generative Mindfulness, Dialogue, and Inclusion

Session Submission Type: Workshop

Short Description

Bringing together dialogue and generative mindfulness with a sense of underlying love can support leaders who wish to create inclusive workplaces. Few of us feel strong enough to quietly sit, sensing the presence of fear or anger and just let it be as it is, yet this is a core skill for leaders today. A short workshop cannot change lifelong habits, however, it can offer insight into how such practice yields a path. You may leave with fresh insights into yourself and how your awareness practice can support you in leading in times of crisis.

Detailed Abstract

SIGNIFICANCE & GOALS
How often have you reflected on how tough it is to hold space for dialogue among people who need to talk, yet have deep differences? Despite our practice, meditation, or spiritual path, few of us feel strong enough to quietly sit, sensing our own fear and trusting our intuition about what others are feeling or experiencing directly in front of us. Honoring what others are feeling and experiencing while knowing enough about our own skillset to understand the context, audience, and “temperature” to react in ways that build respect, acknowledgment, and integrity during conflict and crisis in the moment is essential for leadership. Regardless of all societal characteristics and labels, most humans do not have the level of socio-emotional intelligence to calmly sit with our own and others’ strong beliefs and emotions. Yet this is a core skill for leaders in all areas of life in today’s world.

Generative mindfulness supports people in being present to themselves, their work, and one another while nourished by their own culture’s spiritual traditions. Developing a mindset and skillset to build dialogue across cultures and backgrounds to understand collective wisdom and purpose must be considered alongside traditional organizational structures, policies, and practices. Together, these practices support leaders in bringing more wisdom (and lightness!) to such ordinary yet difficult moments.

The workshop's goal is to introduce participants to how generative mindfulness and dialogue can enhance our capacity to embrace all people in the workplace and perhaps in our lives.

FRAMEWORK
Our framework brings together dialogue, generative mindfulness, and an acknowledgement of underlying love. These elements are often used separately: the power of the session is what happens when they are juxtaposed in the context of an intention towards a culture of inclusivity (Goldman Schuyler et al., 2021, and in press; Spiller et al., 2021).

Freire’s (1970) theory of dialogue helps leaders reflect on dialogue as a valuable process in leadership. His germinal work laid a foundation for critical pedagogical theorists to explore how educational practices can be made authentic and humane. It can serve as a similar foundation for leadership practices. Freire characterized dialogue as the ideal state and practice of education in which learners can fully become human. This represents a marked difference from the “banking” model of education wherein students are treated as objects (read: nonhuman) that knowledge is poured into. Ultimately, Freire regarded dialogue as the practice of becoming fully human and, therefore, argued that educational practice ought to foster dialogic teaching-and-learning practice. Senge (1990/2006) further articulated the value of dialogue in the context of leading teams: Rather than continuing to attempt to reach a decision when it becomes evident that people have different underlying assumptions, it is far more productive to explore the assumptions through dialogue, and only afterward return to decision-making. Here we will touch on basic principles to remind participants about how leaders can make dialogue a part of productive interaction when creating a workplace that values inclusivity.

Mindfulness practice has been shown to be helpful for calming the mind and thereby relieving stress at work (Good et al., 2016; Jamieson & Tuckey, 2017). But more is possible. As the two workshop facilitators wrote for a scholarly article last year:
"Instead of being a 'technique' or 'tool' for stress management, mindfulness practices can serve as what they have been for centuries: the foundations for a way of life that brings humans in touch with their fundamental nature. …
This is … conducive to action for a socially just world—efforts to change those systems that cause the high levels of stress in the workplace, rather than using mindfulness as a technique at the individual level to manage the stress (King & Badham, 2020; Purser, Ng, & Walsh 2017). Mindful perception does not need to focus merely on personal experiences and self-calming, but can incorporate awareness of the broader world, cultural patterns, and how they are affecting us (Magee, 2019). Such GENERATIVE MINDFULNESS builds on individual awareness practices, so that meditation does not become a pathway to what has in recent years been called 'spiritual bypassing': a term coined by John Welwood for using mindfulness practice or meditation to avoid facing developmental issues, rather than to become fully present (Fossella, 2011). Instead, we see the development of 'generative mindfulness': our term for a process of waking up to one’s interconnectedness with all other living beings within the context of culture and society." (Goldman Schuyler et al., 2021, p. 455)

CONTENT SIGNIFICANCE
Creating truly inclusive workplaces is very challenging, as can be seen in headlines about conflict over the teaching of anti-racism in the United States, conflicts between Hindus and Moslems in India, the rise of anti-immigration movements across Europe, and more.
The facilitators bring varied and deep experience from their professional training, spiritual formation, and lifelong explorations.

DESIGN
Introduction: Generative Mindfulness, dialogue, and inclusion - 10
Key points about dialogue – 15
Inclusion… and exclusion: Sensing behind the words - 15
Generative Mindfulness practice - 15
Living case and debrief - 55
Closing: what to carry onward – 10

EXPECTED OUTCOMES
Participants will -
1] Have a clear sense of the interdependence of dialogue, sensing inclusion/exclusion, and generative mindfulness in the moment-to-moment embodied practice of leadership.
2] Know how these are present or less so in their leadership and lives.
3] Know where to turn to further strengthen themselves in these areas.

POSSIBILITIES AND CONTRIBUTIONS
While there are many articles and books on each of these elements (dialogue, mindfulness, inclusion) our workshop, which is grounded in both our experience as facilitators and as scholars in this field, brings a unique fusion of these key factors.

TAKEAWAYS
We will invite participants to address how they intend to explore ways they can use these elements in their own leadership setting.
The discussion and engagement from this session will challenge the participants to develop practices to support their existing strengths as inclusive leaders.

Sub Unit

• Leadership Development

Presenters

• Kathryn Goldman Schuyler, Coherent Change

• Lemuel W Watson, Indiana University/Antioch University Graduate School of Leadership and Change