SEM01A-Turning Work into a Zen Garden: Mindfulness for You and Your Team (separate registration required)

Amid the chaos of overprogrammed, overstressed life in the digital age, we are increasingly hearing calls for finding ways to experience more reflection, more joy, and greater happiness in our lives as well as to reconnect with our feelings and experience life with people around us more meaningfully. Nowhere do we need such emphasis more than in the workplace, where, thrown together with others under the pressure cookers of productivity, personalities, and politics, we're very often unhappy on many levels.Yet we don't need to be unhappy—and unhappiness, not surprisingly, is not productive. So it's in our personal and professional interests to do something about it!This workshop will help you do just that by introducing you to research showing the importance of mindfulness to a happy and productive workplace. It will also lead you in experiencing a variety of activities grouped under the heading of "mindfulness" designed to help you be more thoughtful about, and aware of, your own thoughts, feelings, and emotions—and to be a better steward of those of others. We'll be drawing on the best-selling work Search Inside Yourself by Chade-Meng Tan, legendary Google engineer, which has recently introduced the centuries-old practice of mindfulness to many in the fast-paced workplace of today. So join the deans of the NERCOMP Learning Organization Academy as we talk about mindfulness. We'll experience a variety of meditative, reflective, and mindful activities and think about how we might put these to use in the workplace.