This is a successful model I’ve used with many individuals and organizations – using your own employees to create and self-sustain a long-term practice.
From Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
My background is a long corporate career in many organizations in IT, HR and Change Management.
Facilitator training and certification is online, with a quickstart toolkit of communication templates, meditation scripts you can use when leading live guided meditations, and recordings for when you are unable to lead live. Certification gives you the credentials. Doing both only takes 17-25 hours.
To be clear, this is not teacher training - this is the practical and programmatic side of starting and growing an ongoing practice that lasts. Even if you already have a practice growing, this can help boost it’s growth, or expand facilitation capacity so others can be trained as facilitators too.
This is about the practical ‘how-to’, not about the ‘why’.
Maybe you’ve brought in a great course, or a MF challenge. Enthusiasm & intrigue in the air – but 1 or 2 years down the road, what’s going to happen?
This is about Making It Last.
Living a very stressed out life, I got cancer in 2010. Mindfulness became my anchor.
Returning to Pacific Blue Cross as the change manager, my friends asked me to teach them what I knew about mindfulness meditation.
Started small with 12 people, and the benefit they got was fast and amazing.
185 people were coming to my weekly class on a drop-in basis.
I then began to offer mindfulness to other organizations in Vancouver.
My life’s purpose became: “To help as many people as possible create a better experience of life through mindfulness meditation.”
I cannot do this alone, so I started The Calm Monkey so I could train others in the practical, programmatic way to bring this to the world.
This is one of the key charts I produced from my engaged group while at Pacific Blue Cross.
Look at LOW self-rating: before taking classes, 38% (red) said their ability to handle stress was LOW. This reduced dramatically to 6% (green) after 5 classes.
Look at HIGH self-rating: before taking classes, only 15% (red) said their ability to handle stress was HIGH. This increased dramatically to 77% (green) after 5 classes. That’s a 500% increase.
I was the change manager for a massive 7 year transformation project at Pacific Blue Cross.
Very over budget, delayed, stressful.
I asked permission from my meditation group if I could experiment with them by combining change management with meditation to see how it helps them through change. I surveyed them 5 months post-implementation.
Executives deemed this a change management success because people were calm, committed, and worked together to problem-solve as the project had a lot of technological difficulties.
I write a write paper about my case study of Pacific Blue Cross and it won as the winning white paper with the global Association of Change Management professions. Please get the white paper from www.TheCalmMonkey.com as it helps many get approval to begin this at work.
Some interest by key mgmt. You don’t need across-the-board active support. As long as you don’t have an active blocker, you can do this.
Are you ready to drive this? Do you have the courage?
You want to create a practice that’s engaging, respected, long-term that employees trust – be careful that they don’t think this is only for the benefit of the organization and not really for them.
This model is NOT med teacher training. Facilitation not same as Teaching.
Facilitators share own experience, create safe space, lead live meds & discussions, administer the program.
Fac Training is online and takes 7-10 hours to complete, equipped w toolkit. Certification takes 10-12 hours. This teaches the practical & programmatic side of how get support, promote, grow, trust, results.
My students have all sorts of roles: mgrs, CMs, HR, admin asst, coaches, counselors, yoga instuctors, etc. Some are employees within an organization, some are consultants offering mindfulness services to their clients and some provide services to their community.
There are 2 main approaches to implement – there is no ‘right’ way.
Depends heavily on many factors: size of organization, formality of processes, HR, etc.
Starting small, even with a top-down approach is great – facilitators can get the experience, confidence, collect the benefits in data form and grow from there.
Growing from a grassroots perspective seems to result in more buy-in and trust from an employee population.
Give it time to grow; don’t expect a huge uptake at the start.
Step 2: you will get people interested in having an ongoing practice AND people who would love to facilitate.
Even if you have 5 people interested in being participants, do it, it’s great to start small.
Step 3: Facilitators need to be properly trained - don’t expect them to start from scratch or know how to skillfully run a program or lead live guided meditations. Avoid the mistakes that can kill a program.
Step 6: as an innovative idea, once you are up and running, consider helping people through difficult change. (see later slides)
Change management is about helping people and organizations through change.
People are living in survival mode, major monkey mind, auto-pilot interacting, reacting, behaving.
We can help them discover what experience they want to have through difficult change, even if their circumstances remain difficult around them.
I recently ran a public meditation study with my specialized change management meditation recording.
Results exceeded expectations!
I just posted my research paper on this on my website days ago. www.TheCalmMonkey.com.
This shows how their ability to deal with the chg shifted from before & after the study.
Look at VERY LOW/LOW:
RED is BEFORE the study: 47% (39 ppl) rated their Ability to Deal w Chg as VERY LOW/LOW.
After the study, in GREEN, a dramatic drop to only 2% (2 ppl) saying Ability to Deal w Chg is VERY LOW/LOW.
Look at HIGH/VERY HIGH:
BEFORE the study, only 10% (8 ppl) rated their Ability to Deal w Chg as High.
AFTER THE STUDY, a dramatic jump to 67% (56 ppl) rating their Ability at High.
Green shows that most of the participants noticed ‘more’ in each of these areas.
People’s comments were incredible – plentiful, enthusiastic, and wanting to share this with their co-workers and friends.
I asked them ‘if The Calm Monkey were to continue taking this further, what would help you?’ I received in-depth, amazing responses, which is fueling my development of an upcoming Dealing with Change Toolkit.
The one person who said No, interestingly received positive benefit herself. She had meditation experience and felt that someone with no meditation experience at all may have trouble listening to a meditation. However, the data showed that everyone received benefit.
Participants were distributed with regards to their level of meditation experience. All participants showed positive benefits.
2 major outcomes from this study:
Research Paper - available on The Calm Monkey’s website.
‘Dealing with Change toolkit’ is being developed and will be available this summer. This is will be for individuals to buy or for organizations to distribute to their employees to help them through difficult change. It will be a quick, practical toolkit to teach them a little about how people go through difficult change, provide them with the Dealing with Change meditation plus other complementary meditations.
Don’t let this be a fad, use these techniques to keep it going long-term and show the benefits.
Please use my email to contact me, and use the resources to further your mission.
If you are curious about Facilitator Training & Certification, try the free preview.
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