Find a quiet place where you can listen to Kyle walk you through the loving kindness meditation. This video is designed to not have distracting images so you can focus on the exercise.

If you have never dipped your toe into the world of meditation and mindfulness, this is a great place to start with a short exercise. This video is designed to not have distracting images so you can focus on the exercise.

I’m autistic. It isn’t something people often talk about but there are so many of us out there that maybe we should talk about it more. I don’t really mind in the end whether I am ‘on the spectrum’ or not, but I do want others to realise that it’s ok to speak out. And it just might be your super-power if you can drag it out of the shadows and into the light. Mindfulness, over time, has allowed me to recognise and eventually expand the space between the events that occur (what happens), and how I choose to react. It doesn’t repress emotions, thoughts, desires, or fears; rather it allows us to understand them better and experience them more fully, all without the negative connotations that often overwhelm us before we know it.

In Series 5 of our video series to help teams and leaders continue on their agile journey and expand their growth mindset. Today Kyle starts off with a primer on Mindfulness to ensure we are all working from the same information.

In Series 5 of our video series to help teams and leaders continue on their agile journey and expand their growth mindset, we are turning the controls over to one of our guest bloggers, Kyle Richardson, who is also our mindful coach here at Agility for All. This entire series will be about mindfulness and meditation. Be prepared. Kyle will be walking you through exercises real-time that you can try.  In today's episode we get an opportunity to hear Indra A. Books, our founder and CEO, talk to Kyle about how he made the decision to take this path and how it can help organizations grow.

When we create a hierarchy at work it can easily become more than just an HR-necessity to make line management functions have clear ownership. Too often it becomes indicative of how we work and think, placing ourselves mentally in a small group that reports to and interacts with the business via a single channel. Teams need to accept that the HR org-chart is useful only in the few cases where a direct single-person reporting line gives them clarity, a sense of safety, and of being cared for. Outside of that limited set of situations I want them to act as if we were a flat team without the hierarchy.

Are we focusing on the right questions? Build a culture of work from anywhere. What that looks like may be different depending on the team or department, but at the end of the day they are best positioned to self-organize and determine what makes sense for their contribution to the value you are bringing to your customers. And remember that while the pandemic forced a solution upon us, what happens going forward is within your control to guide and shape with the end goal to create safe spaces for high performing teams who can focus on delivery value.

Our leadership goal should be to allow people to experience joy and to flourish. Everything we think and feel has a need to be recognized. However, when we are able to hold everything more lightly, our sense of being wronged will fade. We need to feel compassion for ourselves, because without it we can never forgive and heal from the mistakes we will inevitably make. Acceptance is our way of letting go. It is about relinquishing the control we never actually had over the outcomes. Our ills and troubles can accumulate into insurmountable challenges if we let them. There is so much outside of our control, and yet the most important things of all are always freely given and only we can give them away: our ability to think and the actions we choose to take.

After a year of pandemic changed work cultures, the debate is on. Some companies have fully embraced new ways of working and others are salmon swimming upstream trying to get back to a comfortable normal that is never going to return. The pandemic knocked companies on their heads and exposed the ugly secrets lurking within in many cases but remote work is not a fad or a passing fancy.

Write your own story and read it aloud if you can. Read the stories of others and come to know how close we all are; how superficial the differences we see when we don’t have the time or shared perspective to learn otherwise. Stories allow us to heal and become stronger by providing a safer place for us to re-live the hurt, to understand and to see the opportunities that exist despite the suffering. They help us see the joy that exists.