Help us reach 800 CPL blog subscribers!

Photo Credit: Craig Neal

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You might notice something different about us—we have updated our brand, website and blog. We are excited to share our new name, CPL, too.

With the beautiful new blog format, however, we lost our list of subscribers. As our valued readers, we need your help to build our list. Help us reach 800 by June 1, 2017!

Use the Subscribe box to the below  then follow instructions to verify. We don't want you to miss a post! Many thanks! Do you know someone who would enjoy the blog? Feel free to forward it to them.

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Using Convening to Transform Company Culture (this is a duplicate to the post RH already made in June)

PHoto credit: craig neal

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With family in town, I'm thinking about how to create a positive future for all people, whether their path takes them into the business world or not.  An equitable workplace is on my mind.  I worry that it might not be possible to spark shifts in company cultures that dissolve the glass ceiling and create inclusion for people looking to advance.  And, I hope that such corporate transformations are already happening.  

This is why convening matters. Convening provides a platform for inner and outer work, critical to knowing self as an effective and enduring leader.  

In this important annual conversation - relevant for anyone who is making forward-thinking business decisions, has a daughter or son or knows someone rising through the ranks, Heartland and St. Catherine University will relay how company culture impacts women’s corporate advancement in Minnesota and why having men at the table matters.

June 10th will be a day of rich learning and action-oriented outcomes. We’d love to see you there. Register here.

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Reexamine Purpose and Organizational Culture

Photo Credit: Craig Neal

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By Rachel Harris

Periodically, we publish articles and case studies on importance of organizational culture in strategy conversations. Read on for another installment.

Reflecting on your strategic initiative, can you recall a time you were at a cross-roads? You are not alone!

Whether the new strategic initiative is hampered by lack of clarity on company purpose or not, gaining insight into a company's culture has lasting benefits. This is true for any sort of change management initiative - and is often the difference between success and failure. 

Time and time again we've experienced clients frequently mistaking strategy as the underlying problem, when in fact, matching a company's culture to any change initiative is the key to success. We're often called in when there is a pain point, such as when a new program launch is in trouble or a strategic initiative has lost steam. 

When you cannot take the pain of the status quo anymore, give us a jingle at 612-920-3039. Until then, please read these testimonials from our clients for inspiration.

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Just-in-Time-Convening: A Client Success Story

Photo Credit: Craig Neal

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by Rachel Harris

There are many key aspects in convening with purpose and productivity. To ensure your organization's meetings are highly effective for attendees, Heartland presents a list of 10 key Principles of Convening. Many of our clients use these 10 Principles to further their convening skills. One of our recent clients - a team leader in a regional engineering agency - often finds himself in interdepartmental team meetings led by people of varying abilities.

He has taken the Art of Convening training and understands there are always opportunities to take advantage of employing the Principles of Convening in meetings. In his role, he travels from building to building meeting with different teams. He also understands the Principles of Convening are great equalizers in meetings within his role.

Wanting to ensure his time is effective, he envisioned an opportunity for convening principles to be posted and referred to in meetings. Upon hearing his request, Heartland collaborated with the Organizational Development department to install the Principles of Convening Poster in conference rooms. Once added, the interdepartmental teams' ability to collaborate increased. Here at Heartland, we have created a list of 10 key principles to advance and improve the practice and art of convening.

Listen: Respect everyone’s voice; hear their contribution and refrain from fixing, problem-solving, advice-giving.

Speak from your own experience: Speak from the “I”, your personal experience creates trust.

Slow down the conversation: Allow pauses between speakers to create space for collective genius and innovation to emerge.

Speak with sincerity and brevity: Speak your truth and make each word count.

Suspend certainty: Ask yourself, “What don’t you know?” Look for the surprises.

Allow space for difference: Seek to understand, welcome the divergent and convergent views.

Explore new ways of thinking and being: Look for and expect surprises.

Presume positive intent: Be aware of your judgments.

Each person has a role to play: Know that everyone is needed and each person has come to contribute the outcome.

Any engagement can be transformed through essential conversations: Intention to speak and act authentically from a common vision can transform any meeting Heartland's 10 Principles of Convening.

Following Heartland's 10 Principles of Convening will allow for your organization to conduct proactive meetings more successfully and thoroughly. These principles will encourage clarification, engagement, and open-mindedness within your convening. If you have meetings with people of varying skill level who seek to collaborate effectively and are occasionally challenged in doing so, consider adding the Principles of Convening your conference room. Contact Heartland today to maximize your collaboration, leadership or convening capacities. Follow us on our LinkedIn page to receive weekly updates on our blog and convening skills! Contact us at 612.920.3029 for your next consultation on the Art of Convening.

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Effective Meetings 101

Photo Credit: Craig Neal

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by Rachel Harris

In many companies and organizations, leaders struggle to conduct effective meetings. There is sometimes not enough or too much time, other times employees zone out, unable to retain the important information at hand. This is not the leader or the employee's fault but rather, the structure and conduction of the meeting. In order to conduct an effective meeting to create more productivity within your area, review these 3 simple tips to help take a step in the right direction.

Here are our top 3 tried and true tips for creating effective meetings and being more productive:

1. Clarify Intent

Set aside 3 minutes to revisit the purpose before planning your next meeting agenda. Reflect on the company vision, department mission and project's purpose to ensure you on track.

2. Set Context

Increase chances of content absorption by incorporating 2 - ­3 minutes of context for the meeting. People learn and process information at different rates. Even if a meeting is held weekly, restating the overview will serve as a transition from whatever people were doing prior to joining the meeting.

3. Check-­In

Add a check­in at the start of the meeting to "Hear All the Voices." Based on brain science, when people have a chance to speak within the first 5 minutes of a meeting, they are more likely to pay attention throughout the duration of the meeting.

According to the Harvard Business Review on A Guide To Running Meetings, author Amy Gallo writes to keep your meetings short and not going over an hour long. Research has shown that time pressures can lead to a more effective conversation - seeing as there is a limited amount of time go over the subject. However, always leave enough time for what is needing to be addressed, never rush a session.  

Based on the Art of Convening, these 3 tips will transform your meetings, boost engagement, and retain talented people. If you or your company is needing guidance on taking your next steps in creating effective meetings, give us a jingle at CPL @ 612­-920-­3039 to get started on your improvements.

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Miracle of a Single Flower

Bedside-roses

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"If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change."

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~ Buddha

via www.beautydialogues.com

From friend Amy Lenzo, Beauty Dialogues

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Authentic online conversations- what I learned

Photo Credit: Craig Neal

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Patricia and I were recently at our publisher's 20th anniversary event in San Francisco. There were several AoC Training grads here including Amy Lenzo, who set up online communications for the World Cafe' Global Community and Rose Singer, longtime AoC practitioner. Several of the authors have read AoC and are using the principles and practices in their consulting, coaching, and teaching.

What have I learned? It's all about relationships!! Everyone is yearning for, and seeking, authentic engagements. lots of talk about using social media and how to have sincere connection online. I'm currently in a workshop now lead by Amy on having authentic online conversations on social media like FaceBook, Twitter, Linkdin and on and on.....

What have you learned that you can share with other AoC Grads?

via heartlandcircle.blogs.com

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The Art of Listening: When people listen, creative waters flow

photo credit: craig neal

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The Art of Listening: Brenda Ueland 

http://traubman.igc.org/listenof.htm

It is through this creative process that we at once love and are loved

I want to write about the great and powerful thing that listening is. And how we forget it. And how we don't listen to our children, or those we love. And least of all - which is so important, too - to those we do not love. But we should. Because listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. Think how the friends that really listen to us are the ones we move toward, and we want to sit in their radius as though it did us good, like ultraviolet rays.

This is the reason: When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life. You know how if a person laughs at your jokes you become funnier and funnier, and if he does not, every tiny little joke in you weakens up and dies. Well, that is the principle of it.It makes people happy and free when they are listened to. And if you are a listener, it is the secret of having a good time in society (because everybody around you becomes lively and interesting), of comforting people, of doing them good.

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Who are the people, for example, to whom you go for advice?

Not to the hard, practical ones who can tell you exactly

what to do, but to the listeners; that is, the kindest,

least censorious, least bossy people you know.

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When we listen to people there is an alternating current that recharges us so we never get tired of each other. We are constantly being re-created.

Now, there are brilliant people who cannot listen much. They have no ingoing wires on their apparatus. They are entertaining, but exhausting, too.

I think it is because these lecturers, these brilliant performers, by not giving us a chance to talk, do not let this little creative fountain inside us begin to spring and cast up new thoughts and unexpected laughter and wisdom. That is why, when someone has listened to you, you go home rested and lighthearted.

When people listen, creative waters flow

Now this little creative fountain is in us all. It is the spirit, or the intelligence, or the imagination - whatever you want to call it. If you are very tired, strained, have no solitude, run too many errands, talk to too many people, drink too many cocktails, this little fountain is muddied over and covered with a lot of debris. The result is you stop living from the center, the creative fountain, and you live from the periphery, from externals. That is, you go along on mere willpower without imagination.

It is when people really listen to us, with quiet, fascinated attention, that the little fountain begins to work again, to accelerate in the most surprising way.

I discovered all this about three years ago, and truly it made a revolutionary change in my life. Before that, when I went to a party, I would think anxiously: "Now try hard. Be lively. Say bright things. Talk. Don't let down." And when tired, I would have to drink a lot of coffee to keep this up.

Now before going to a party, I just tell myself to listen with affection to anyone who talks to me, to be in their shoes when they talk; to try to know them without my mind pressing against theirs, or arguing, or changing the subject.

Sometimes, of course, I cannot listen as well as others. But when I have this listening power, people crowd around and their heads keep turning to me as though irresistibly pulled. By listening I have started up their creative fountain. I do them good.

Now why does it do them good? I have a kind of mystical notion about this. I think it is only by expressing all that is inside that purer and purer streams come.

It is so in writing. You are taught in school to put down on paper only the bright things. Wrong. Pour out the dull things on paper too - you can tear them up afterward - for only then do the bright ones come.

If you hold back the dull things, you are certain to hold back what is clear and beautiful and true and lively. 

Women listen better

I think women have this listening faculty more than men. It is not the fault of men. They lose it because of their long habit of striving in business, of self-assertion. And the more forceful men are, the less they can listen as they grow older. And that is why women in general are more fun than men, more restful and inspiriting.

Now this non-listening of able men is the cause of one of the saddest things in the world - the loneliness of fathers, of those quietly sad men who move along with their grown children like remote ghosts.

When my father was over 70, he was a fiery, humorous, admirable man, a scholar, a man of great force. But he was deep in the loneliness of old age and another generation. He was so fond of me. But he could not hear me - not one word I said, really. I was just audience. I would walk around the lake with him on a beautiful afternoon and he would talk to me about Darwin and Huxley and higher criticism of the Bible.

"Yes, I see, I see," I kept saying and tried to keep my mind pinned to it, but I was restive and bored. There was a feeling of helplessness because he could not hear what I had to say about it. When I spoke I found myself shouting, as one does to a foreigner, and in a kind of despair that he could not hear me. After the walk I would feel that I had worked off my duty and I was anxious to get him settled and reading in his Morris chair, so that I could go out and have a livelier time with other people. And he would sigh and look after me absentmindedly with perplexed loneliness.

For years afterward I have thought with real suffering about my father's loneliness. Such a wonderful man, and reaching out to me and wanting to know me! But he could not. He could not listen. But now I think that if only I had known as much about listening then as I do now, I could have bridged the chasm between us. To give an example:

Recently, a man I had not seen for 20 years wrote me. He was an unusually forceful man and had made a great deal of money. But he had lost his ability to listen. He talked rapidly and told wonderful stories and it was just fascinating to hear them. But when I spoke - restlessness: "Just hand me that, will you? ... Where is my pipe?" It was just a habit. He read countless books and was eager to take in ideas, but he just could not listen to people.

Patient listening

Well, this is what I did. I was more patient - I did not resist his non-listening talk as I did my father's. I listened and listened to him, not once pressing against him, even in thought, with my own self-assertion.

I said to myself: "He has been under a driving pressure for years. His family has grown to resist his talk. But now, by listening, I will pull it all out of him. He must talk freely and on and on. When he has been really listened to enough, he will grow tranquil. He will begin to want to hear me."

And he did, after a few days. He began asking me questions. And presently I was saying gently:

"You see, it has become hard for you to listen."

He stopped dead and stared at me. And it was because I had listened with such complete, absorbed, uncritical sympathy, without one flaw of boredom or impatience, that he now believed and trusted me, although he did not know this.

"Now talk," he said. "Tell me about that. Tell me all about that."

Well, we walked back and forth across the lawn and I told him my ideas about it.

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"You love your children, but probably don't let them in. Unless you listen, you can't know anybody. Oh, you will know facts and what is in the newspapers and all of history, perhaps, but you will not know one single person. You know, I have come to think listening is love, that's what it really is."

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Well, I don't think I would have written this article if my notions had not had such an extraordinary effect on this man. For he says they have changed his whole life. He wrote me that his children at once came closer; he was astonished to see what they are; how original, independent, courageous. His wife seemed really to care about him again, and they were actually talking about all kinds of things and making each other laugh.

Family tragedies

For just as the tragedy of parents and children is not listening, so it is of husbands and wives. If they disagree they begin to shout louder and louder - if not actually, at least inwardly - hanging fiercely and deafly onto their own ideas, instead of listening and becoming quieter and more comprehending.

But the most serious result of not listening is that worst thing in the world, boredom; for it is really the death of love. It seals people off from each other more than any other thing.

Now, how to listen. It is harder than you think. Creative listeners are those who want you to be recklessly yourself, even at your very worst, even vituperative, bad- tempered. They are laughing and just delighted with any manifestation of yourself, bad or good. For true listeners know that if you are bad-tempered it does not mean that you are always so. They don't love you just when you are nice; they love all of you.

In order to listen, here are some suggestions: Try to learn tranquility, to live in the present a part of the time every day. Sometimes say to yourself: "Now. What is happening now? This friend is talking. I am quiet. There is endless time. I hear it, every word." Then suddenly you begin to hear not only what people are saying, but also what they are trying to say, and you sense the whole truth about them. And you sense existence, not piecemeal, not this object and that, but as a translucent whole.

Then watch your self-assertiveness. And give it up. Remember, it is not enough just to will to listen to people. One must really listen. Only then does the magic begin.

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We should all know this: that listening, not talking,

is the gifted and great role, and the imaginative role.

And the true listener is much more beloved, magnetic

than the talker, and he is more effective and learns more and

does more good.

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We should all know this: that listening, not talking, is the gifted and great role, and the imaginative role. And the true listener is much more beloved, magnetic than the talker, and he is more effective and learns more and does more good. And so try listening. Listen to your wife, your husband, your father, your mother, your children, your friends; to those who love you and those who don't, to those who bore you, to your enemies. It will work a small miracle. And perhaps a great one.

Brenda Ueland, a prolific Minnesota author and columnist, died in 1985 at the age of 93. Her father was a lawyer and judge, her mother a suffrage leader. From a collection of her essays, "Strength To Your Sword Arm: Selected Writings by Brenda Ueland." Copyright 1992 by The Estate of Brenda Ueland. Reprinted on this webpage by permission of Holy Cow! Press, Box 3170, Mt. Royal Station, Duluth, Minn. 55803. Phone/Fax: 218-724-1653

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Response to Fear- Claudia Eisinger

photo credit: craig neal

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I was very moved by Claudia's response to the VisionHolder call with Joe Bailey.

Craig

Hi Joe and Craig,

A heart-felt “thank you” to both of you for your time and generosity in sharing your experiences and viewpoint on last night’s  VisionHolder (see previous post below and audio to right) call.

One thing is still sitting with me that I would like to share with you.  It is in relation to the two sides of fear - as a weapon and as a tool.  I am thinking that fear as a weapon is what really stops us in our tracks and keeps us from acting (being stuck or frozen).  It is what you said, Joe, as “being trapped in the prison of a limited life of narrow thinking and awareness.”  It is being stuck in the ‘what if’s.’

I appreciate that fear is also a divine tool that guides us to a better understanding of what we are thinking, feeling, and believing, and in observing that to come to a deeper awakening to our unlimited nature and innately positive qualities.  The image that keeps coming to mind is of fear as a divine tool as being the doorway to see and act from our true nature, one of love.

I was recently able to see and get the illusion of me living in the fishbowl of fear.  I was able to see the huge layer of protection around my true, loving, joyous heart and that inner, carefree child. This layer of protection is important, but it was keeping me confined and unable to express my full, unlimited nature. This layer of protection showed up in my awareness as this thick, rigid blue cone wrapped around my true heart.  The cone was protecting me from all the pain around in me and around me in our world.  This showed up as darkness in a nebulous atmosphere around this blue cone.  But the cone was so tight and it constricted even more when I wanted to express myself more openly and fully.  In the past, if I managed to let go and be more open and vulnerable, I was still living in the fear of being hurt.  However, in this observer state, a doorway opened in my awareness and the insight came to me a few days later - that there is something bigger and more powerful than fear.  It is true love, unlimited love.  I saw it as this colorful light, sparkling in golden and red, but all the colors of the rainbow were there.  It was around all the fear in the world and in me, around my heart and the blue protective cone. 

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"I realized that as I choose to live in this unlimited awareness of true love, the protective layer is easing its grip and expanding so that the inner child of true love can thrive."

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I realized that as I choose to live in this unlimited awareness of true love, the protective layer is easing its grip and expanding so that the inner child of true love can thrive.  I feel that have a greater capacity for allowing for the pain and fear that now (less frequently) emerges in me, and have a greater capacity to allow for it in others –giving it space, to observe it, acknowledge it, and listen to it – allow it to be, without the resistance, because I “know” that I am sitting in the Ocean of Love that can accommodate all fear, pain, hurt, negativity.  I am coming to understand that this is true Compassion. In the conscious of unlimited love, I can more easily choose to experience the love in me, even though the fear is there.  As I move into the expanded consciousness of love, the fear is healed.  I let the fear go accommodated by this Ocean of Unlimited Love and choose to let the love flow into my heart, and flow through me into the world, into the hearts of others.

So, we are important catalysts for others by creating an atmosphere of unlimited love, so that they can see and experience their highest nature, to build that trust in themselves and in true love.  I am also choosing to be present with myself in compassion and acceptance so that I can be an instrument for the Divine.  Then, together, Love can flows into the world and into every human heart from our Source. This allows me to be more open and trusting, as I know that I don’t have to either push away or even hold onto the fear that exists.  Instead, I can be an instrument, almost like a divine vacuum cleaner that sucks out the fear, lets it flow to the divine, so I don’t get burdened with it and in that space, allows for Unlimited Love to fill the vacuum for all to experience. This, to me, is true service – similar to what trees do – absorb the CO2 and release the oxygen.  In this we all create a loving atmosphere in which to thrive.  It starts with an new expanded attitude: Love is larger than anything else and surrounds our hearts and the world, even though fear and pain also exist.

Thank you for being containers for this flow of insight and love!

With lightness and joy,

Claudia

Claudia J. Eisinger

claudia@fifthelementassociates.com <mailto:claudia@fifthelementassociates.com>

www.fifthelementassociates.com <blocked::http://www.fifthelementassociates.com/>

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