Janet Fouts's Blog, page 15
June 27, 2019
Work doesn’t have to suck #Mindful Social with @JasonLauritsen
When you ask someone about their experience in the world of work, what kind of stories do you hear? Many of us go to work and come home feeling stressed, less than enough, exhausted. Friday is looked forward to. Monday? Not so much.
I really enjoyed chatting with Jason Lauritsen this week about his new book, Unlocking High Performance, and his work with leaders, working to improve broken workplace culture and our relationship with work.
About Jason
Jason is a keynote speaker, author, and consultant and an employee engagement and workplace culture expert who will challenge you to think differently.
A former corporate Human Resources executive, Jason has dedicated his career to helping leaders build organizations that are good for both people and profits. He also led the research team for Quantum Workplace’s Best Places to Work program where he has studied the employee experience at thousands of companies to understand what the best workplaces in the world do differently than the rest.
Jason is the author of the books Unlocking High Performance: How to use performance management to engage and empower employees to reach their full potential and Social Gravity: Harnessing the Natural Laws of Relationships.
Connect with Jason at:
https://jasonlauritsen.com/
https://twitter.com/jasonlauritsen
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonlauritsen/
June 11, 2019
Care for Caregivers- Stories We Tell Ourselves – A Workshop
We caregivers can be very, very, hard on ourselves. We tell ourselves the wildest stories and sometimes we believe them without thinking. Stories like: ”I can’t handle this”, I’m not good enough”, ” That person is just trying to make me feel bad”, and the classic “I can never do enough!”. Maybe that’s because of stress, exhaustion, emotional overload, or lack of focus, but whatever the reason it’s not helping anyone even a little bit.
Join us for an interactive online workshop June 26, from 11:30 to 1 PM PT
to unveil the stories we are telling ourselves and how they affect us emotionally and physically.
The course is 90 minutes in length and will take place on Zoom, via video or just audio, from wherever you are. We’ll offer tips to evaluate these stories and to create a new level of understanding and inner power.
Who should take this class
All are welcome. If you’re finding yourself mired in self-criticism and frustration, you’ll get value from this course.
Registration for this class is a one-time fee of $18.50 (US)
Sign Me Up!
About the Teachers
Cynthia Gregory, MFA, CPCC is an accomplished author and executive and writing coach. Cynthia helps clients articulate their visions, develop working strategies to help them meet creative goals, and she guides clients with a sense of accountability to the art and expression of their creative vision. Her book “Journaling as a Sacred Practice: An Art of Extreme Bravery” offers encouragement, advice, and guidance on the craft of journaling to draw out our creativity and heart.
Janet Fouts is an entrepreneur, executive and mindfulness coach, best selling author, speaker, trainer, and advocate for caregivers. Janet works with clients to build self-awareness, compassion and resilience through emotional intelligence and mindfulness training. Her latest book, “When Life Hits the Fan- A Mindful Guide to Caring For Yourself While Caring For Others” offers perspectives on mindful self-care for caregivers, even when they think there is no time.
May 23, 2019
Bruce McIntyre on a mindful approach to #caregiving and #parkinsons. #mindfulsocial
This chat with Bruce McIntyre covers a lot of topics, from his personal journey as a caregiver to serving as the Executive Director of the Parkinson Foundation of Oklahoma. He’s been through quite a lot on this journey and has dedicated his life to helping other family caregivers learn how to take care of their loved ones as well as themselves. As a leader, he’s learned lessons along the way to bring more kindness and less judgment to how he works with his team, and how to really talk to people to understand what their challenges are.
Bruce shares some of his tips for managing through the roller coaster of being a caregiver and learning how to develop habits that can help us stay on track. Like “Get up and get out!” Reminding us to get moving so that we can get our energy flowing, clear our mind and feel better.
He also shares what’s in his “Serenity Toolbox” a collection of tools to help people manage their life effectively and gain a sense of calm and grounded-ness. (You’ll have to listen in to hear them!) as well as his tips for how to allow time to meditate, eliminating distractions and practicing open-awareness.
Bruce is the author of four books: Thrive Anyway, Parkinson Positive, Graceful Transitions, and Resilient Life. He shares his expert guidance and warm humor with thousands of people each year. He has keynoted such events as the 2016 National Caregiving Conference in Chicago as well as over 100 disease conferences, caregiving gatherings, and church events since 2008. Bruce was also recognized as one of the first year’s recipients of the National Visionary Caregiving Award in 2018.
As a caregiver for his wife for the past 15 years, Bruce understands the world of chronic illness and caregiving. He earned a Master of Divinity in 2002 and has led the Caregiver Fundamentals Project in Oklahoma City and served family caregivers as a church, business, and nonprofit leader. You can learn more about him at BruceMcIntyre.com.
April 2, 2019
Give a #Caregiver a break – #WhenLifeHitstheFan
As a caregiver and an entrepreneur, I know only too well how overloaded we can be. The most common refrain I hear from caregivers is “I don’t have time to take care of myself”. The thing is, if we don’t take time to care for ourselves, everyone suffers, including those we care for. When I wrote “when Life Hits the Fan” it was the beginning of a journey to help caregivers learn how to use mindfulness to take better care of themselves and others too. To learn how even in the darkest of times we can be resilient and see that there is hope.
Later this month I’m hosting a retreat in Sedona, AZ to facilitate learning new ways to be resilient and aware of ways to practice self-care. It only makes sense that I’d offer to give away some seats in the retreat to people who really need this. The contest below is a way to tell a story of a family caregiver you know and offer them a way to attend the retreat. I can’t offer travel or accommodations, but I can offer my services and the lessons I’ve learned. Enter someone you know below, and let’s show them that we see them, that they are valued, and that yes, they DO have time to care for themselves too.
Employee Benefits Programs Missing the Mark?
In a recent report from the Harvard Business School (The Caring Company) less than 25% of employers say that being a caregiver impacts the performance of employees. Wow, that’s simply obtuse when over 80% of employees surveyed said that caregiving had impacted their performance. 20% of those interviewed stated that being a caregiver hurt their careers. My own experiences with caregivers certainly bear witness to this. They simply hide their caregiving duties until the stress and exhaustion force them to quit.
What do employers know?
We can’t blame employers for not knowing what we don’t disclose. Employees may fear retribution, discrimination, loss of advancement opportunities, missed raises and bonuses.But if employers are truly in touch with their team, they can see the signs. According to the report “Employers identified unplanned absences and missed days of work (33%), late arrival at work (28%), and early departure from work (17%) as the top three behaviors that always undermine career progression. Those are all behaviors that frequently arise due to an employee’s need to respond to a caregiving obligation.“
Who are the Carers?
While some may assume that caregivers who quit are in “less important” roles in the company, that’s not actually true. You may be surprised to learn that the percentage who left a position rose higher at each rung on the corporate ladder.
Employee 23%
Manager of employees 44%
Manager of managers 53%
Senior leaders 61%
The cost of not caring for caregivers
Senior leaders are most likely to leave to care for a family member. Let that sink in for a moment. The cost of finding, hiring and retaining skilled teams is rising.
(SHRM) reported that on average it costs a company 6 to 9 months of an employee’s salary to replace him or her. On top of that it affects productivity, engagement, company culture and overhead.
Taking a conscious business approach
With the changing population and the rise in nontraditional families, caregivers have fewer resources to turn to. We are going to have to face the fact that caregiving is a much larger part of the workforce than we realized. Helping employees manage their roles as employees, caregivers, family members and members of the community is becoming more important to a modern workforce.
Companies in the conscious business movement are recognizing that when people thrive in an organization the company is more successful and that trickles down into every aspect of a community.
Today’s corporate environment is moving toward enhanced employee benefits plans, and that’s great, but it’s time to take a closer look at who those plans serve. Employers are looking to provide wellness plans, but corners get cut and programs that look good on paper may not serve the needs of the employees. A recent report on corporate wellness programs on by Jeremiah Owyang points out that digital wellness programs may be a good start, but it’s crucial that we involve that human to human factor in wellness programs if we truly want to see them become part of the corporate culture.
Interested in hearing how you can support caregivers in your organization?
Schedule time to talk about programs for stress reduction, building personal resilience in your company.
March 27, 2019
Life is going to hit the fan. So what can you do?
Every single person in the world either has experienced or will experience terrible loss and hurdles to overcome at some point in their lifetime. These things can be terrifying, even emotionally or psychologically disabling.
The stress can make us more rigid and prone to injury and illness, and unable to deal with even the smallest obstacles. Something as tiny as not being able to loosen the cap on the jelly jar can send us over the edge. We lose our ability to bounce back, our resiliency.
It’s easy to look at people who seem to handle stress with ease as super-heroes, isn’t it? In fact, these people may have exactly the same difficulties in their own lives, but experience and practice have made it easier for them to cope.
The good news is, resiliency can be learned.
It takes practice and patience, but you can learn to roll with the punches instead of taking every single hit straight to your face! Over the next few posts I’m going to share some tools for enriching our lives with more resiliency. Ways we can learn to cope with life.
In general, we’ve all developed some sort of coping method, going back to our childhood. It doesn’t take us long to realize that we don’t always have things our way, and usually after a few temper tantrums in our childhood we learn to accept this fact and manage our lives more skillfully.
Sometimes we just need a break — time to cool off and reflect on a course of action. Other times we may lean on a loved one or a friend for compassion and support. Still, other times we need to act immediately and get things done. Even then, it’s best to pause and take even just one single breath before leaping into action, to give our brains time to process a skillful reaction to a stressful situation, instead of an impulsive one.
Of course, as a caregiver for a loved one in your life, it may be that you’ve been dealing with an ongoing situation for days, months, years, or even decades. In order to continue to respond mindfully to these situations, we may need to look at our automatic responses and re-evaluate them.
Interested in digging deeper?
Stay tuned, this is the first in a series of posts on dealing with developing a more resilient approach to life. Some of which I shared in my book When Life Hits the Fan, and if you want a deeper dive face-to-face? Join us for the Sedona retreat coming up in April.
How do you bounce back? What tools have you developed to be more resilient in your life? Share them in the comments!
March 25, 2019
Are You Trapped by Responsibility Fatigue?
You may not have heard of it, but there’s this thing called “Responsibility Fatigue”. It happens to a lot of us when we simply can’t say no. The more we don’t say no, the more people rely on us. At home, at work, out in the world. Sometimes it literally feels like there’s a sign on our forehead that says “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it”! And so we get overloaded, exhausted, often more than a little frustrated or angry.
As this NPR show mentions, Responsibility Fatigue can come in our middle age years when more and more of us are finding the need to care for aging parents. We may also be caring for our grandkids, a child with special needs, a partner or friend with a terminal disease. Often while working a full-time job too. It is exhausting.
So, what to do?
You really, really have to take care of yourself. Believe me, I’ve been there. Overwhelmed with work, caregiving, family, friends, and trying desperately to find time to just breathe!
That was a few years ago. Now I’ve learned new tools to take care of myself as well as all the rest. I’m no longer wondering how to make it through another day, I’m looking forward to each and every one. I even learned to calm my mind to meditate every day, and it’s become a grounding life-saver when things get tough. Life isn’t perfect, but it has become easier for me to get in touch with my joy, my passion and my own sense of being.
My life’s work is to help others learn these skills too
I’m teaching online, coaching one on one, in workshops, and on April 25-27th I’m hosting a retreat in Sedona to teach skills in resilience and to bring the happy back into our lives.
Make time for your own self-care and join us!
I’m going to teach skills you can use to actually say no once in a while and be OK with that. Skills to reduce stress and build resilience to bounce back from the hard knocks life deals us. You’ll come home feeling refreshed and ready to apply what you’ve learned to daily life. There are a few more spots left in the retreat. Use the code “Sedona150” for $150 off the retreat cost at checkout.
Are You Trapped In Overwhelm Mode?
You may not have heard of it, but there’s this thing called “Responsibility Fatigue”. It happens to a lot of us when we simply can’t say no. The more we don’t say no, the more people rely on us. At home, at work, out in the world. Sometimes it literally feels like there’s a sign on our forehead that says “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it”! And so we get overloaded, exhausted, often more than a little frustrated or angry.
As this NPR show mentions, Responsibility Fatigue can come in our middle age years when more and more of us are finding the need to care for aging parents. We may also be caring for our grandkids, a child with special needs, a partner or friend with a terminal disease. Often while working a full-time job too. It is exhausting.
So, what to do?
You really, really have to take care of yourself. Believe me, I’ve been there. Overwhelmed with work, caregiving, family, friends, and trying desperately to find time to just breathe!
That was a few years ago. Now I’ve learned new tools to take care of myself as well as all the rest. I’m no longer wondering how to make it through another day, I’m looking forward to each and every one. I even learned to calm my mind to meditate every day, and it’s become a grounding life-saver when things get tough. Life isn’t perfect, but it has become easier for me to get in touch with my joy, my passion and my own sense of being.
My life’s work is to help others learn these skills too
I’m teaching online, coaching one on one, in workshops, and on April 25-27th I’m hosting a retreat in Sedona to teach skills in resilience and to bring the happy back into our lives.
Make time for your own self-care and join us!
I’m going to teach skills you can use to actually say no once in a while and be OK with that. Skills to reduce stress and build resilience to bounce back from the hard knocks life deals us. You’ll come home feeling refreshed and ready to apply what you’ve learned to daily life. There are a few more spots left in the retreat. Use the code “Sedona150” for $150 off the retreat cost at checkout.
March 22, 2019
Power Your Tribe- #MindfulSocial with @Comaford
This week on Mindful Social I talk with Christine Comaford about her newest book: Power Your Tribe. The book hits home on a lot of levels, particularly when we’re talking about creating a safe space for growth, energy, and creativity in the workplace. Listen up!
Here’s an excerpt from the book on the concept of emotional agility:
Change and Growth Require Emotional Agility
What if I told you that a bird doesn’t need its wings to fly from A to B? Or that it doesn’t need to flap its wings to fly? You’d think I was being preposterous.
Wings for a bird are like emotions for human beings. Life is an emotional experience. Work is an emotional experience. Human beings navigate with their emotions. Emotions are the wings that get us from A to B. Without them, we can’t fly. The greatest highs, lows, triumphs, and fears all come from emotional experience. Emotions are a large part of how we experience the world, each other, and ourselves. And emotional agility is how well we use our wings to fly.
Christine has created a tool for understanding where we are during our day in an emotional sense and walks us through some great frameworks on how to re-frame how we see and respond through understanding and regulating our emotions.
Click the image of the wheel below to learn how to regulate your emotional state in just a few steps.
Learn more about her work, her retreat this September on ancient wisdom and connecting to the natural world, and be sure to visit the Smart Tribes Institute for her assessments, infographics, videos and more.
About Christine
For over 30 years leadership and culture coach Christine Comaford has helped organizations navigate growth and change. She specializes in applied neuroscience, which helps her clients achieve tremendous results in record time. An entrepreneur who has built and sold five companies with an average ROI of 700 percent, she was a software engineer in the early days of Microsoft and Apple. Christine is a human behavior expert, a leadership columnist for Forbes.com, and the New York Times bestselling author of Power Your Tribe, SmartTribes and Rules for Renegades. She has been named one of the Top 50 Human Behavior Experts to Follow and one of the Global Employee Engagement Influencers.
Find Christine on Twitter, LinkedIn , Facebook , and Wikipedia .
March 12, 2019
Entrepreneurship and Making the Transition to Wellness #MindfulSocial With @HeidiSloss
As many of you know by now, my business has evolved considerably over the last few years, and life and work have grown markedly better. Why? Because I’m focusing on what really matters to me, my family and my clients. As a coach, I’m working with clients in all areas of their lives and the Mindful Social podcast reflects how bringing a mindful approach to how we live and work is changing the way we do business.
This week I’m speaking with Heidi Sloss, another entrepreneur who has also made some major changes in her life and work. She’s taken her experiences owning several businesses and feeling “stuck” and rigid in her life, now she’s on a new career path, one that helps people be well. With close to 500 hours of training as a Yoga instructor, she is transforming lives, and it feels great!
Listen to the podcast below and share your comments here or on the podcast page. We’d love to hear from you!
About the retreat
I’m honored that Heidi has chosen to join me to teach Gentle Flow and Restorative Yoga at the retreat in Sedona, April 25-27. If you too are craving a profound feeling of connection in a safe environment and would like to experience her training as well as mindfulness and emotional intelligence training that has helped me in my own transformation, learn more about the retreat!
More About Heidi
Heidi BK Sloss, RYT-200, lives and teaches yoga and meditation in Silicon Valley, CA. She combines 30+ years of spiritual practice with the moving meditation of yoga, guiding her students to focus the mind, relax the body, connect the spirit and open the heart.
Heidi is a certified Yoga for Healthy Aging Teacher (Baxter Bell, RYT-500 and Melina Meza, RYT-500) and has completed a 20 hour Pelvic Floor Teacher Training (Leslie Howard, eRYT-500), a 30 hour Restorative Yoga Teacher Training (Judith Hanson Lasater, RYT-500, Ph.D., PT) as well as a 200 hour Yoga Teacher Training (Noell Clark, RYT-500). She is in process of becoming a RYT-500 at Breathe Together Yoga Studio in Los Gatos.
For more information about Heidi, please visit her website at www.heidisloss.com