"No Love - No Fee" - Training Offer

Integration Training is currently offering a "No Love - No Fee" guarantee - if clients don't love the training we provide they don't have to pay.

I started this as I'm confidant that the stress management, team building, time management, communication training and leadership training we provide works. I had the experience of being a customer for other services recently and I didn't like how I was expected to take a risk - paying money for "a maybe". My point was that if you can do something why would you not offer your customers a money-back guarantee?

If you work for an organisation that would like some risk-free training - stress management, time management, communication training, office team building or leadership training - then drop me a line - 07762 541 855 mark@integartiontraining.co.uk

Mark

What Can Business Teach the Buddha?

I spend much of my life packaging material from the “alternative” world to produce a form that appeals to business and the mainstream in general. I use mindfulness in stress workshops, embodied exercises in corporate leadership training and NonViolent Communication on appraisals courses. Next week however I will be doing things the other way around – “selling” business at Buddhafield.

Buddhafield is a wonderful festival of meditation, yoga, and music where you get sent if you’re too big a hippy for Glastonbury. I led a workshop there last year on Embodied Peacebuilding which went down well. This year I decided that for a challenge I would lead a talk on “Conscious Business – Can Business be a Spiritual Practice?” And “What can Business teach Buddhafield?”

I’m still deciding on the content and thought I’d start thinking out loud here. Here are a few thoughts on things that alternative communities I’ve been in contact with might learn from business:

- Effectively coordinating action over time. Rigour and commitment
- Evidence base – i.e. what actually works - the limits of fundamentalism and relativism
- Putting feeling over rationality instead of alongside it.
- Basic ethics and keeping things simple
- Self –reliance (as well as communion)
- Re-owning the urges for power, prestige and achievement rather than repressing them

I’d love to hear from readers who have some additions to these?
My thinking on the matter is influenced by Ken Wilber’s “Post Trans Fallacy” – pre rational/materisalistic and post rational/materialistic look a lot alike but the former is superstitious and dogmatic while the latter “transcends and includes” to be truly integral. In Spiral Dynamics terms it’s the movement from relativist green (much of Buddhafield) to a world view that includes achieveist orange (much of business) and traditionalist blue (old-school business as well as much traditional spirituality).

As for the Buddha – well that was just a nice title. More on Buddhism and business here. Perhaps he set the tone for spiritual practice as “anti-wealth” by renouncing his position as a prince. But then as Fred Kofman points out- the last ox-herding picture in Zen is “return to the market-place with helping hands.” The marketplace not the bloody hot-yoga studio.

Embodied Learning

The Strozzi Institute - world leaders in embodied learning and good friends - have added a page to their site that may be of interest:

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Why Embodied Learning?

In a world of continuous change and constant social innovation, learning has taken on a new meaning. While it was once sufficient to be competent at the same job over a lifetime, we are now required to continually learn new skills, to adapt to people with widely different backgrounds, and to be flexible enough to change roles, job positions, and organizational directions. Learning over the course of our career has become a necessity. Learning how to learn is one of the most powerful ways of dealing with the changes of today’s world. In this time of accelerated change, learning to learn gives us a competitive advantage. To succeed in the future we must be learning individuals in learning organizations. The current conversations about neuroscience and leadership gives scientific grounding for the effectiveness of embodied learning....

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Somatic Coaching tips

Guest blogger and Integration Training Associate Anthony Davies (pictured left coaching) on somatic coaching:

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Somatic Coaching is a progressive form of coaching that produces genuine transformation for individuals and groups. Through the process you can benefit by: -

- Creating a greater centred presence
- Learning to replace outdated habits with positive practices
- Experiencing a greater sense of aliveness throughout your body
- Enabling yourself to take action more effectively in the world

Four top tips that emerge from Somatic Coaching: -

1. Make sure you get clear about what you are declaring for the future you are creating. Envision the end in mind.
2. Ease and dissolve ‘banding’ or ‘armouring’ in the body. Typically these are areas of built-up tension. You can release these through somatic movement, regular hands on Somatic Bodywork, and ideally both.
3. Commit to doing daily physiological practices, with intention. Richard Strozzi-Heckler is known for writing “until it is in the muscle knowledge is just a rumour.” You can literally change yourself through your body, and you change your life.
4. Yes, and breathe deeper!


Anthony Davies is a Brighton-based Somatic Coach, qualified through Strozzi Institute California . He practices one on one, and runs groups in Brighton and internationally. There are spaces open on his July Somatic Coaching that he is running. For information on his group work please email anthony@somaticcoach.co.uk

Stress Management Videos

The good 'ole Heath and Safety Exectutive (HSE) has released some new stress management videos. Here's a cheesy stress management video from Youtube too:



Of course if the stress gets to much you could just do this:




Currently working on my own stress management video - watch this space.

NVC Summer Camp

I will be leading somatic exercsies and embodied games at a Non Violent Communication Summer Camp in the Norfolk UK this year 21-27th August. This is the first event of its kind in the UK I believe.

Transformational Training

The learning that most interests me is transformational training. There are different ways to explain what I mean by this - training that works on the level of the self, training that changes the participants , not just adding tricks and tips or just training that really works.

Training people to do things to “fix” a problem is not enough and the issue will just re-emerge. To give a concrete example let’s take stress management. Usually in the stress workshops I lead people will blame and external factor like “too many e-mails” or a “bad boss” for their stress. What always emerges however is that these are stimuli and symptoms of stress and the person that is under the stress that is also involved in generating it. The ability to say and ask for help for example are two key “skills” which actually exist on the level of being – what we embody, our long-term moods and how we live “in” language. If for example you are stuck in a way of being that means you cannot ask for help you will likely always be stressed no matter what tricks an tips you are taught, who your boss is or how many e-mail you have.

This is why in my opinion much training and coaching is a waste of time and doesn’t get results. How then to ensure transformational learning occurs? Here are some key factors

Peak Experiences

Intense state changes and emotional intensity is important. The role of body and emotional states cannot be overstated – intellectual understanding alone is not enough.

Practices and Time

Practices – and by this I mean long-term recurrent activities done mindfully (not habits) – are essential for transformational learning. There are no quick fixes however intense and experience. Malcolm Gladwells’s claim that expertise takes 10,000 hours is really common-sense. No one has ever learnt a lanugauge, a sport or to drive overnight – why should business skills like leadership be any different?

Community

If you get a junky clean in rehab and then throw out him back into a crack den to live with active users – how long will he stay clean for? My point is that environmental and cultural support for learning is crucial if it is to be sustained.

AQAL Model

Being able to distinguish between “multiple intelligences and stages of development, along with quadrants (individual and collective, internal and external), types (e.g. masculine and feminine) and states (waking, dreaming, trance, etc) is crucial for transformational training. A clear model helps and Ken Wilber’s AQAL (All Quadrants, All Lines) model is the clearest and most comprehensive model I know of.

Aside from my own training and coaching – two good examples of transformational training (also known as ontological training) are the Newfield coaching course I have just completed and the leadership courses run by the Strozzi Institute. Both highly recommended.

Stress and the HSE

"Effective Ways to Tackle Stress" from the governments HSE website. Apparently they "have written to the Chief Executive and Human Resource Director of every large company in the UK telling them why they must tackle stress at work." I should be getting a few extra calls for stress management training then :-)