Hello. Gosh, it's been so much fun watching all these presentations and seeing how things are going. And uh so it took me a little while to get here, but I'm here now. Um, wanted to let you know a little bit about me. I'm a digital marketer.I've been working coding for a long time as well. But my story of really understanding what compassion meant began from a place of really deep burnout. I was running a digital agency. I was working with global companies and I had a team to manage. At the same time, I was caring for a family member who was critically ill, had a lot on my plate and honestly taking care of myself, felt selfish. I didn't allow myself to even think about it or to look inward. I just kept moving because that's what we do when we're burned out, isn't it? I didn't allow myself to look inward at all. I just kept going fried, too busy to do anything about it until I finally just had to, I was feeling isolated, depressed, burned out and depleted. So I started casting around for a way to get back to a place of balance, a place of wellness. And it took a while. But one day I stumbled upon the power of mindfulness and how it helped me with the stress and the burnout. And I started to dive into studying, I love to study things.

And there's so much amazing knowledge about how the mind works, especially when we're struggling. Over time, I developed a deep passion for the teachings of mindfulness based emotional intelligence, positive psychology, neuroscience. And it helped me in so many ways, instead of being reactive to all of it, I became resilient. I learned to be a better boss, a better leader, a better collaborator and a better friend. It dawned on me one day just how long I'd been struggling just to have a little self care. Now it's been a few years and then I shut down my company and I started a new company called Nearly Mindful. Nearly Mindful serves people who are like me, always struggling, overwhelmed, overloaded, busy, busy, busy. And I shared what I learned through writing and teaching, leading workshops and retreats. It's been life changing for me and for my clients. Maybe even for those around me, the topic of compassion is so important in these crazy times. We're considering going back into the office or working from home or some kind of a hybrid situation. And it's really crucial that we understand the stress we've all been under for the last 1518 months. It's been a long haul. And we're all bringing that stress, the fear and the anxiety back with us.

There's so many different experiences and stories to hear and to tell and that affects everyone in the workplace, in our lives, in our communities, our families. So as employees, leaders, investors, when we go through this level of disruption, we're gonna be dealing with a lot of emotions, a lot of baggage and that can lead to opportunities to work together differently, to relate to others and to ourselves differently. Mindfulness helps us to be more self aware and more aware of others too. And with that improved awareness, we can be more intentional with how we approach an issue. Make better informed decisions, be more open to see other perspectives, be better listeners. Now, lately, I've been asked a lot about talking about empathy in the workplace and don't get me wrong. Empathy is important. It's a crucial skill. But if you lead even a small team and you leave empathy out there and you start to absorb all that trauma that the team brings with them when they come back, it could be hard, it could be very hard. Empathy is important but also compassion and it's important to understand that they're different. Empathy is what we feel with and share the emotions of another being. Compassion is not so much feeling with but feeling for another being.

We we're concerned we're motivated to help in some way and with all that's coming at us right now. Many people are overloaded with what's called empathic distress. They're feeling so much that the hurt just soaks into our very being. It's painful. We get stressed, sometimes we withdraw from that person or the situation. Maybe we even carry that pain to others around us. This can create bias in the workplace. We're avoiding the people that have the pain or not so much the people that have the pain, but the pain that we feel when we're near them. So we start to avoid them, we start to make different choices. Maybe we change the way that we manage or interact with others. Maybe it changes the dynamics of our teams. Now, compassion on the other hand, can create more of a positive feeling. Compassion releases Oxytocin and dopamine. They call those the feel good neurotransmitters to the brain.

They're part of the reward system simply switching from I feel your pain. Two I feel for you and I wanna help causes totally different feelings for us and for the other person, compassion is like stepping back just a little for a better perspective on what's happening rather than being in it rather than trying to live it with them. We can observe what's happening and act from awareness, not reactivity, not reaction to pain. Instead we're helping acting, coordinating and listening and let's not forget leading. It doesn't mean we get so removed, we're not cold. It's not that we don't experience the emotions but our relationship to those emotions. It's different when we bring forward the desire to help. That gives us a sense of connectedness, a sense of purpose and belonging to both parties. So you can see the compassion is not what they call a soft skill. No, it's a strength. Compassion helps bring us together. It helps us to form teams that pull together through adversity that help each other through that adverse adversity and compassion isn't just for everyone else.

Sometimes we get so caught up in our own feelings and emotions that we get bogged down lost in self criticism, fear and doubt, especially when we're making decisions that affect the lives of those around us. We can get caught up in rumination, worrying, rushing to make decisions or locked up an indecision. Both of those are common traits when we're burned out, overloaded and don't know what to do. So this is when we can bring the skill of compassion to ourselves too, building awareness of the situation from a fresh perspective to get that perspective. It's kind of like looking through the eyes of a trusted friend and offering yourself the kindness that that friend would bring to you. What would they say? How would they approach what's going on with you right now? This stepping back, that's a key of resilience our ability to manage through improves productivity because we're not caught up in that net of self talk and judgment we're not beating ourselves up, unnecessarily. Research shows a strong association between self compassion and reduced reactivity to trauma and difficulties rather than rushing forward or avoiding. We can use our perspective to see a path forward even in the most difficult of times, no matter where we are on the corporate ladder.

If we exhibit compassion for others and ourselves, we build a sense of trust, psychological flexibility and that encourages better performance, better engagement, collaboration, better relationships. So how do we begin to practice compassion as a habit? First, we must recognize when we are a little too close to the feelings, to the emotions. When we feel the pain physically personally, when we find ourselves just wanting to escape or avoiding, rather than experiencing it, when we're recognizing in ourselves that we're anxious, tense, overwhelmed by the feelings, take a moment to collect yourself. It might be just a breath, a simple pause, even a look out the window can give you a sense of distance so that you can be present. Look out the window, gather yourself and come back, use your mindfulness skills to ask what's happening in this very moment. Becoming aware of the emotions, the feelings, physical and emotional. Is there tension in this situation? Instead of being swamped by these emotions, you can recognize the need to step back. Get a little perspective. Imagine yourself as a bird up in the corner, watching what's going on.

That distance is really, really helpful. And that's what compassion brings us. We can use self compassion to recognize this doesn't feel good. What's going on right now is hard. I'm uncomfortable and when we recognize that that can diffuse the feelings that are attached to it, compassion is sort of a muscle like any muscle. It's strongest. If we practice, learn to take time throughout the day to check in with yourself, train your mind to recognize when you need that perspective. When you need to step back and create habits that tend towards kindness, listening, compassion and attention, the changes in yourself pour in those around you. So you can choose to make a cognitive shift from automatic to conscious choices. When we bring compassion training to teams, it can transform how they work together. One of the practices I use with teams is called just like me. It's based on maslow's understanding that all of us have common needs, physiological needs, like food and rest safety, a sense of belonging, respect and self actualization. However, not everyone pursues those needs in the same way.

It is important for us to meet people where they are not imposing our vision of what is right upon theirs. To remember that each person has these same needs as we do and each sees them being fulfilled in a different way. Let's try it together for just a moment. Bring to mind a person you aren't quite comfortable with right now. It could be a family per family friend that maybe you had an argument with. It could be someone at work that just you don't get along with. Maybe someone that you disagree with or that you have different goals and values someone you interacted with recently out in the community. See if you can see this person in your mind's eye, their face, their attitude, close your eyes, if you need to and bring them fully into the room with you. And now silently say to yourself, just like me, this person wants to be comfortable, just like me, this person wants to be safe to belong, to be respected. Just like me. This person wants to have a sense of agency and check in with yourself for a moment. How does that feel when you do this practice? You may begin to see those needs that just like you, they have similar needs, however they experience it and however you experience, is it ok?

They do what they do believe what they believe because it helps them to be more safe, to feel better, hope that what they do will serve their needs just like you do with your own needs. And when you go through this process, you'll start to feel commonality and compassion comes forward and that allows you to do a little what I call gentle inquiry. You might ask yourself now in a little different state, what's going on here, what am I not considering? What do they need? Right? Now. And what do I need? How could we both get the result we're looking for? And after a little distant observation, you might see the answer or again, you might find, you need to gently inquire what's going on. We know there are so many types of suffering, especially now and it pops up in unexpected and complex ways, especially in the workplace, brutal timelines, toxic work cultures, highly demanding managers, competitive pressures, maybe just the physicality of being back in the office or in a hybrid situation, working from home and disconnected from the individuals on the team.

All of this creates opportunities for suffering and to disconnect from compassionate action, separating the team from each other even more. So how do we encourage compassion and simple by giving more attention to awareness? I recently worked with a client, I'll call her Jody.

She'd only been working as a user interface developer for a few months for a large corporation. She never physically met anyone she worked with. She worked only remotely and communicated mostly through those endless video meetings. She was in the middle of a big project, working with a designer, the project manager, a brand manager, two engineers. Everybody wanted changes. Miscommunication between teams made the situation worse and the pressure she was under was intense. The whole concept kept getting muddier and muddier because she was new. She felt she was the low woman in the hierarchy. So even though she was quite skilled the pressure and the communication issues overwhelmed her sense of self. So she just kept her head down and worked longer hours doing everything. Everybody asked all the while the frustration for everyone was building. When marketing came back with more revisions, it was the last straw. She shut down after she had a little distance to cool down, she realized she had her set of facts based on what each group was telling her was needed. But she really didn't have a clear view of the big picture. She had her head down so much. She was missing details working in a way that seemed logical to her, but didn't jive with what was with what was really needed.

She realized she was making judgments based on her perspective alone and her unconscious bias without picking her head up high enough to see the whole picture. It was time for her to ask what's going on. Jody set an intention to sit down with honest curiosity and an open mind with each member of the team reexamining the needs of each one with a humble desire to see the whole picture. When she finished. Not only did Joni have a more complete picture of the project, she won over all the different parties as a person who truly did want the best result. Her ability to be curious without representing judgment served her well, she created strong relationships and now frequently finds herself being a liaison between the teams as humans, we have a natural capacity for compassion. But the everyday pressures of life and our culture can suppress it, push it to the back of our minds. It doesn't have to be that way when we bring mindful awareness forward, purposefully creating habits that help us remember to stop, to be aware, to not gloss over life but fully experience it and have compassion for the needs of others as well of ourselves.

We begin to see things more clearly live life more fully and that is reflected in everything we do. So the clothes I ask you set an intention to check in with yourself few times a day, set a timer. If you have to over time, you'll see a difference. Reactivity levels drop, resilience and happiness increases life simply seems easier to manage. And I wish this for you as it has become. So for me, thank you for this opportunity. I really appreciated all of the talks that I've been listening to and it's been really fun. I'm looking at my clock and seeing that it's kind of time for me to close. But if you have any questions, please add them and I will move over to the chat. Thank you everyone. If you'd like to get in touch with me, please do reach out my website, my phone number. You can always reach me on linkedin by clicking on my bio and get my main social connections. And if you need a little help in this area. If you need to just think about how you can use compassion in your life, in your business, in your office. Let me know. Just reach out. I'm here for you. Thank you. Thank you, Eden. I can't see the chat and my other monitor at the same time. So that makes it fun, doesn't it? But I'm glad you were here. Thank you. Take care everyone.