 Welcome back everybody for our final session of the day. We're going to wrap up today with what I think is a very interesting session called A Manager's Guide to Meditation and Mindfulness, which will be presented by Matthias Zauer, the president of the Consciously Group. Now you might be wondering why this topic on a conference agenda that's so strongly focused on data management, but we like to try and mix in some personal growth and development topics at EDW, but the themes of this session have been especially important over the past year, as we've all been tied to homes and dealing with stress, etc. So I felt personally it was important that we give you the opportunity to explore it a bit more. As with our other sessions, all audience members are muted during these sessions, so please submit your questions in the Q&A window on the right, and we'll get to those at the end of the presentation. We'll get going now. Let's begin our presentation. Thank you, Matthias. Please take it away. Amazing. Thank you, Tony. So hello everyone. Thank you so much for coming to A Manager's Guide to Meditation and Mindfulness. While everyone is joining and getting settled in, I'm going to start off with a brief arriving practice and intention setting. Like everyone to keep in mind today that any exercises I introduce are always presented as an invitation, so please feel free to participate at your comfort level, whether that be practicing along with me, taking notes, or simply observing, it is always up to you. In addition, while not all these practices might work in your organization, during the Q&A at the end of the session, I'm going to invite you to ask me about your specific situation, and we can discuss how you can integrate mindfulness into your team or use it to deal with any particular issues you might be having. So I'm going to invite you to join me in an awareness practice. So I'm going to ask that we settle into our seats, just being aware of our bodies in our chairs, and taking a few deep breaths in and out. And again, now every time you breathe out, I want you to release any stress or muscle tension. I'm sure you've all had a really long, dense day. And next we're going to shift our awareness to our environment. So I just want you to notice, without naming anything or passing any judgment, do you hear any sounds? Notice any sense? Then I want to shift our awareness to our minds. Are we feeling stressed, preoccupied, tired? And I want you to acknowledge your thoughts without judgment, still breathing deeply. And I want you to answer this question. What is my intention for attending today's session? Try not to search for an answer, just let it come. I want you to sit with this thought for a moment and sort of revisit this thought throughout the session and at the end of the session today. So a little bit about me. My name is Mathias Sauer and I'm the founder of the Consciously Group. I am a trauma-informed, trauma-sensitive mindfulness coach and facilitator specializing in corporate mindfulness training and mindful public relations. I'm so excited that you've joined me today for this introductory session on mindfulness for managers. As Tony mentioned, we've all had our realities changed drastically over the last year and now is more important than ever to tend to our own well-being. Rates of anxiety and depression are four times higher than they were before COVID and we're all still trying to manage and cope with the current situation. So my goal is that you're able to leave this session with some practical tools to implement in your professional and personal life to be a more mindful you. So this is a brief outline of the session today. We're going to be learning about mindfulness, the benefits, how you can manage mindfully, create a mindful team, manage your own stress, and finally we'll learn how to curate a practice that's best suited for you. So what is mindfulness? Mindfulness at its core is a moment-to-moment awareness of one's experience, thoughts, feelings, and environment without judgment or overreaction. You'll notice today throughout the session that withholding judgment is going to be a major theme that we're looking at. So our goal with mindfulness is to be present both mind and body. So mindfulness encompasses a wide variety of practices such as meditation, mindful communication, breath work, grounding, and much more. So we're going to quickly look at some common misconceptions about mindfulness so we can confront these ideas head-on. So first, people often think that meditation is all there is to mindfulness. And the only way that you can practice it is by sitting and meditating. However, as I mentioned, there are many different types of mindfulness practices that we can look to to help with our mindfulness practice and we're going to be touching on a lot of those toward the end of the session. A lot of people think that if you can't clear your head to meditate or during mindfulness practices, you're doing it wrong. And this causes people to get stressed out or frustrated when they can't clear their head. They think they're doing it wrong and then they just sort of give up on their practice. So even the most experienced practitioners in the world still let thoughts seep in during meditation. This is a practice and everything gets easier the more we practice. So just know that you're doing an amazing job just by practicing it all and just by being here in this session today. People also think that you have to dedicate a lot of time to your practice or it takes weeks, months, years to see the results of mindfulness. So you have the freedom and choice to dedicate as much or as little time as you want to your practice. You can experience the benefits of mindfulness from even a small amount of time invested and oftentimes the benefits can be experienced almost immediately with certain practices. Any mindfulness practice that you're committing to will bring benefit. Also people think that mindfulness has to be practiced in a quiet space at home at a meditation studio alone but situations where we can't step away to be in a quiet place or alone might sometimes be when we need mindfulness the most. Luckily there are many practices that we can use when we're around other people at work driving in any situation when we need to return to a sense of calm and feel grounded. We're going to be looking at some of these practices later on. So practicing mindfulness and bringing it to your organization has a ton of benefits for both the organization as well as employees. So some of the benefits to the organization include a reduction in absenteeism and turnover, increased productivity and creativity, improved teamwork and communication and even increased trust in leadership. Some of the benefits to employees include the prevention of burnout, decrease in anxiety and stress, increase in motivation, positive thinking and overall well-being. So managing mindfully. What is a mindful manager and why would we want to manage mindfully? So a mindful manager is present, non-judgmental and tackles problems with clarity. They encourage creativity, awareness and innovation. Mindful managers not only have success managing their own stress and workloads but they're able to help their teams do so as well. They lead others with compassion, boost morale and increased productivity. All great things that we probably all want within our teams. So the first step to becoming a mindful manager is mindful communication. Three to touch on active listening and mindful responding. You've probably heard of active listening but what is it really and why is it important? So active listening is a highly receptive state of listening where our focus is on creating a space where other people can share openly without feeling interrupted or judged. Practicing this with our teams and colleagues will strengthen communication, increase understanding and enhance a sense of trust. So how do we actively listen? We want to give the person speaking our full attention. This means putting our phones down, not being on our computer and removing distractions. We also want to try our best to minimize our affirming sounds, our mm-hmms, yas, okays, those little words that we throw in that we think indicate that we're listening but it actually can make people feel rushed and interrupted. Finally, we want to give them the time they need to complete their thought. After we think they're finished speaking, we want to give the person at least five seconds before we respond to ensure they're done. Oftentimes, you'll find that when people are given the space to speak, they have more to say. Mindful responding. So we also need to ensure that our responses are mindful, not just our listening. We do this by taking a few moments to think and process what we just heard and consciously responding to what the other person has said, not just responding for the sake of filling silence or speaking. Challenging negative responses. So we always want to ensure we are responding and not reacting. So this allows for a work environment that's supportive, trusting and productive. To achieve this, we want to do our best to challenge our negative responses. Before we respond, we need to be aware of our emotions and gauge if we feel any sort of stress, frustration, any negative emotion that might cause us to overreact. If we identify our negative emotions, we can then stop, reflect and choose a better response. For example, if I have an employee tell me that they forgot to send out an extremely important report, my initial reaction might be frustration, and this could result in me being rude, raising my voice, or reacting in a poor manner towards my employee. When I take those brief seconds to assess how I'm feeling, I'm then able to remove myself from the judgment that I have placed on my employee, or my employee's action rather, and I'm able to consciously shift the focus to how we can remedy the situation and set. Next, we want to mind our assumptions. You know what they say about assuming, and it can most times be true. So we want to avoid making assumptions about our colleagues at work. This means avoiding assumptions such as their comprehension or understanding of a project, avoiding assuming another person's timeline or pace of work, bandwidth, you get the idea. So making assumptions creates a story in our minds that can be very different from the actual reality. So when managing a team, if we project our assumptions onto our employees, we can create a negative and sometimes hostile work environment. The best remedy for this in a work capacity is to ask, ask, ask, and be open to the answer. Encourage your employees to come to you with any questions, ask your employees if they understand the expectations, ask if they need support on a project, ask if they have the bandwidth, ask if they're on track, and never assume you know the answer. Finally, we want to create and hold space. This means we want to foster an environment that is free of judgment, that provides support, and that allows for our employees to show up as their unique selves with their individual talents. The next piece of managing mindfully is time management. So enabling our team to manage their time effectively is very important. One of the fastest ways to decrease quality of work and productivity is by overloading our employees. While we want employees to feel comfortable alerting us to their overload or low bandwidth, it is just as crucial for you as a mindful manager to pay attention to the projects your team members are on, what their workload is like, and notice in advance or during these projects if they have more than a reasonable amount of work on their plates or they're not being provided the support they need. One great way to help decrease stress among our team is to have a dedicated meeting-free day. Keeping in mind this may not always be possible when external clients are involved, but committing to at least one day a week that is free from internal meetings positions your team for success. Mondays tend to be the best day to do this. Having meatless Mondays is sometimes coined, gives your team the opportunity to catch up after the weekend, seek support, problem solve, and prepare for the week ahead without interruption. Flexible work hours. So a mindful manager is going to lead with understanding and compassion as we already noted. This means we want to see ourselves in others and understand that we're all leading very busy sometimes overwhelming lives. On top of dealing with all of the new issues that are related to COVID, so we've got a lot going on, as you know. So giving our employees autonomy over their day can have profound effects on productivity and morale. Allowing your employees to schedule their workday within reason, decreases stress, and improves work-life balance. This might mean offering your employees flex hours, allowing for varying start end times, and recognizing that we're all generally working from home right now and being mindful of the fact that employees might be struggling with things at home, maybe children that need extra attention, and even just needing time to tend to their physical and mental well-being. We also want to be aware that working from home has pushed us further in the direction of employees being always on, and I'm sure as managers, you are experiencing that as well yourselves. This means we're working longer and later hours because we're working from home. So we want to actually encourage our employees to set boundaries, sign off at a reasonable time, and let work rest in the evenings. We want to ensure that we're taking a break during the day to have lunch and recharge. Your encouragement towards your employees is going to be extremely important here, as it helps them understand that you are not holding that expectation that they over extend themselves and burn themselves out. Finally, it's also very important that we avoid multitasking. This might be confusing to hear because our work culture, especially in America, in our capitalist culture, tends to praise multitasking, but multitasking is actually the biggest productivity and work quality killer. We should instead set aside specific times where we are dedicated to working on a specific project or task. Throughout the day, we get pulled in a million different directions, which increases our stress and our overload. Working on one task at a time helps to regulate our nervous system and actually increases productivity a large amount. So this is all good, but how do we actually create a mindful team? So first, we're going to communicate to our team, preferably in a live setting like on Zoom, of our intent to integrate mindfulness and why we feel this is important to our team. Transparency is key here, and our team needs to see this change is coming directly from your intent to foster a better work environment. Then we're going to give specified action steps on our plan, how we're going to work to integrate mindfulness and what support is going to be available. Second, we want to take this time to identify points of stress that you're already aware of. This helps your team to see that you're genuine in your intent to facilitate positive change, explain how you plan to use mindfulness and awareness to solve the problems and ease these issues. The third step is to create a space for open communication. We already talked a bit about holding space, and this is going to carry through all of your mindfulness initiatives. So it's ideal if you can allow for both open dialogue with your team and provide an opportunity for anonymous feedback. This will be important for all teams, but it's particularly necessary for teams that might be struggling with a hostile or negative work environment already. You want your team to have a safe way to communicate issues to you that need to be addressed. This is going to also be the time to have your employees identify their own points of stress and other problems that you might not be aware of. You want to commit to this change in your team and hold yourself accountable first and foremost. When your team sees your genuine commitment, their buy-in will come easily. Identify how you'll be holding yourself accountable and allow your team to decide how they can hold you themselves and their colleagues accountable with this change. Finally, you want to check in at least once a month with your team on your new mindfulness initiatives. So we've spoken about how you can manage your team mindfully, but the odds are high that you yourselves are also dealing with stress, overload, anxiety, what have you. You might have heard the saying, you can't pour from an empty cup. So how do we help ourselves so that we can help others in our team? First, we discussed in detail already how to help your team mindfully manage their time. This is going to be absolutely crucial for you. All of the key points we went over for your team need to be applied to your own work and personal life as well. Just like we want to encourage our team to turn off at the end of the work day, I want to invite you to make this a priority for yourself as well. Do your absolute best to limit working outside of your work hours. This allows us to create a mental separation between working time and personal time. Since it's currently very hard for us to separate actual work and our home physical environments, like we used to because we're working from home, it's very, very important to create this mental separation. Next, we want to set boundaries and stick to them. Advise your team of your available hours and do your best not to work outside of these hours. If you have children or a partner at home, talk to them about your structure and let them know what times of day you'll be available to interact, and make sure to carve out some alone and personal time to rest and recharge after work. This is going to be fundamental in your own well-being. Now we're going to talk about mindfulness and technology. So technology can be an amazing tool when we use it as such. I probably don't have to tell you how amazing technology could be given the conference. So as you know, we've got so much technology now, but oftentimes we are allowing our technology to take over and let it control us. There are a few things we can do to avoid this. First, we need to pay attention to where we use our technology. We want to avoid using our technology where we want to have mental separation between being in work mode and being in personal arrest mode. So this means things like not using our phone in bed or at the dinner table, not working on your computer in bed, basically anywhere that you feel is important to be present, this is not a space for technology. We also need to try our best to dedicate a working space where your work computer stays permanently. This is where work is done, and the rest of your home is a work-free space. This doesn't have to be an office or even a separate desk. If you work at your kitchen table, that's totally okay. Just make sure that that space at your table, your desk, your office is where work is done consistently. When we use our technology is equally as important. So I invite you to try this. When you wake up in the morning, do your best to not touch your phone, not turn on your laptop, not turn on your TV for the first 30 minutes of your day, an hour if possible. Spend this time free of technology, meditate, journal, have some breakfast or tea, relax with your partner, your children, or yourself, and do things that make you feel good. The same goes for the end of our day as early as possible after work, but minimum an hour before bed if you can. Power down your technology and focus on being present with yourself and your family. This gives our nervous system a break from all of the extra stimulation. It enhances our communication, our relationship with our family and our partner, and fosters a happier, healthier environment. How we use our technology. So I mentioned before that technology is a tool as you know. So I'm going to encourage you to curate your settings on your phone and your computer so they are the best tools possible. Every time we get a notification, it distracts our attention, gets us off track, decreases our productivity, and actually stresses our nervous system. So I invite you to curate a technology environment that is the healthiest for you. This means turning off unnecessary notifications, deleting apps that aren't necessary, or are big time wasters. I know for me that's my social media apps, so I just delete them off my phone. We can also try turning our phone on do not disturb when possible and adjusting our computer notification settings so we're only receiving necessary notifications when we're working on a task. These are all keys to help foster a healthy relationship with technology. Finally, I want to touch on blue light. So you've likely heard that our screens emit blue light and that this is bad, but why? Excuse me. Blue light is naturally occurring in sunlight and helps to regulate our natural circadian rhythm by affecting our melatonin production. However, we're getting all this blue light from our screens, our phones, our computers, our TVs before and after sunrise and sunset, and this can really throw us off. This affects our ability to get to sleep, stay asleep, and the quality of our sleep as well. It contributes to mental exhaustion as we aren't queuing our brains to start to relax because we're staring at all these screens until we go to bed. So the first thing we want to do is adjust the settings on our phones and our computers. Our phones and computers will have settings to minimize blue light, often called nightlight or blue light filters. I have mindset to naturally turn on automatically on my phone and computer at sunset and turns off in the morning at sunrise. In addition, we can get blue light filtering glasses. I wear mine whenever I'm on my computer. You can also have blue light filters put into your prescription lenses if you wear glasses already, looking for good quality glasses from a reputable eyewear company as oftentimes the cheaper pairs you might see on Amazon don't actually filter blue light like they say they do. In addition, we already chatted about leaving our phone in the morning and in the evening. This is going to be crucial to minimize the blue light that we're getting. So putting your phones and your computers down as soon as you can in the evening is going to really help minimize the blue light that we're receiving. Now we're going to look at a handful of exercises or micro practices that can be practiced on the go at work around people in your car whenever you need some small practices to ground yourself, be present and work through stress or anxiety. These are some of the practices I mentioned at the beginning of the session. So this is going to be the more practical part of the session. So I encourage you to take notes and join in these practices with me. Remember that the invitation here is to participate in these exercises at your comfort level. After I've walked through each exercise, I'll give everyone a 15 second notice before I move on to the next practice to allow you to continue trying to practice on your own, make any notes on the next exercise. So first, we're going to talk about breathing. So there are many different kinds of breath work, but if you're just starting your practice and you're not sure to very intense breath work or an overwhelming breath breathing practice, I want to invite you to use these simple breathing exercises. So I invite you to try this practice with me. The invitation here is to sit up straight and simply breathe in through your nose as deeply as you can into your diaphragm when you get to the top of the breath, hold for just a second, then pursing your lips and breathing out through your mouth. So I invite you to try that now with me a couple of times, breathing in, holding briefly at the top and breathing out through pursed lips. As you breathe in, I want you to imagine yourself breathing in, positivity and happiness. Imagine yourself feeling lighter, holding briefly at the top of your breath. And as we breathe out, imagine all of our stress and negative energy holding at the bottom briefly and breathing in through your nose again, good. Only good energy feeling better and better as we get to the top of our breath, resting at the top and breathing out through our mouth, releasing all of the stress that you're holding onto. We're going to do this two more times, breathing in, holding at the top, breathing out, holding at the bottom, breathing in and breathing out. I invite you to take any notes, continue that breathing practice and we're going to move on to the next exercise in 15 short seconds. Amazing. So another breathing exercise is going to be called box breathing. So the invitation here is that you're going to breathe in for four seconds, hold your breath for four seconds at the top, breathe out for four seconds, hold for four seconds again, breathing in for four seconds as you repeat this. You can also picture yourself drawing this box in your mind as you breathe if that's comfortable for you and helps you with this practice. I'm going to invite you now, let's all try it. We're going to practice three times. So breathing in, one, two, three, four, holding, one, two, three, four, breathing out, one, two, three, four, and holding, one, two, three, four. Amazing. One more time. Breathing in, two, three, four, and holding, two, three, four, breathing out, two, three, four, and holding, two, three, four. Last time, breathing in, two, three, four, and holding, two, three, four, breathing out, two, three, four, and holding, two, three, four. Thank you so much for joining in that practice with me. Keep going if you would like as I speak or feel free to just relax for a moment. So one of these exercises might have been more comfortable than the other. Sometimes some of us prefer more structured practices, some of us prefer less structure in our practice. There are many ways to practice mindfulness with breath and I invite you to find a breathing flow that works best for you. We'll be moving on to the next practice in 50 in short seconds. And now we are going to move on to the next practice. We're going to look at two touch anchored exercises. So you might have heard of EFT which is emotional freedom technique or tapping. This is a larger practice that we won't get into today. We're going to go over a mini version called gamut point tapping. So the invitation here is to locate our gamut point between our pinky finger and our ring finger, about half an inch below our knuckle. And we're going to tap on it in a rhythmic motion. Whether you tap faster or slower is all fine. Whatever is most comfortable for you. We're then going to identify a mantra that is in alignment with our current stress that we might be feeling when we're resorting to this practice. So a mantra is just a phrase we're going to be repeating during an exercise. It might be something like I am safe. I am calm. I am loved. I am acknowledged. I am worthy. Whatever it may be for you. But for the purpose of this exercise I invite you to just choose one mantra to repeat. So I am going to choose the mantra I am calm. Feel free to use whichever one that you like. So we're going to repeat this tapping and mantra either out loud or in our head for as long as we need. So it might go like this. Just tapping. I am calm. I am calm. Always remembering to breathe but not putting too much focus on your breath. Let's continue this practice for 15 more seconds and then we're going to move on to the next. Calmly tapping and repeating our mantra. Moving on to our next practice we are going to try a practice called hand tracing. This is another touch anchored exercise. I'll be explaining a little bit more about anchors and how we use them in a couple of slides. So first we're going to take our hand. Either one works or the other is comfortable for you. And we're going to take our index finger of the other hand. Starting at our wrist on the inside we're tracing the outsides of our fingers. And I invite you to try this with me. Just slowly tracing and when we get to the outside of our wrist we go back. Now at first this might not seem like much but now the invitation is to close your eyes. Focus on the sensation that you feel as you trace your hand. Focusing all your awareness on the sensations that you're feeling on the outsides of your fingers. Now you might notice as soon as you close your eyes and focus on this feeling you'll notice that these sensations increase drastically. You might not have really felt anything before and now this might feel like a very sensitive part of your body and just repeating all the while breathing. Now this is a really amazing exercise when we're feeling like we need to be grounded or we need to really reconnect with our body. It's a great practice when dealing with anxiety. So we're going to be moving on from this practice in 15 seconds. Amazing. So now we're going to go over two short meditation practices. The first is a body scan. So body scans can be done any time interval that you would like. One minute, 30 minutes an hour, five minutes, there's no time limit. However a one to three minute body scan can be a great short practice that can be used to ground ourselves, come back into our bodies if we're feeling overwhelmed and it can even help a great deal with dealing with pain and discomfort. Personally I suffer from a back injury and body scans are a really amazing tool that I use to sort of release pain and refocus myself when I'm feeling a little overwhelmed with what I'm dealing with. So the invitation here is to settle into your seat, lay down, sit on the couch, whatever is comfortable and simply follow my voice. So when doing this practice on your own you can look up a guided body scan on YouTube or guide yourself through it in your mind. So settling in I invite you to close your eyes if you are comfortable we're going to take a few deep breaths like we practiced before in through our nose out through our mouth and we're going to focus our attention on our toes simply becoming aware of them moving our attention slowly to our heels and to our calves again just becoming aware of our body if during this practice you notice any pain or discomfort simply do your best to acknowledge it without judgment and let it go moving now to our knees ensuring we're still breathing in and breathing out moving our attention to our hips to our stomach as we move through our bodies passing each body part moving now to our chest breathing in and breathing out then to our shoulders all the while breathing moving down our arms to our fingertips and just being aware of any sensations not naming these sensations or passing any judgment just acknowledging them moving back up to our shoulders neck releasing any tension moving up to our jaw noticing if our jaw is clenched releasing if it is and just acknowledging our body as we move through our face and our head to the crown of our head now focusing on releasing any thoughts and refocusing on our breath breathing in relaxing our body as a whole breathing still and when you're ready in 15 seconds we're going to move to our last practice amazing so finally we are going to learn how to use anchors for short meditations so I mentioned touch anchored when we were doing the gamut point and the hand tracing so it's great to have anchors to do quick meditations for 1 to 5 minutes when you need a quick break or you want to re-center so what is an anchor an anchor is basically anything we're going to use to focus on in our meditation anchors can be breath like in our breathing exercises they can be physical touch like in our gamut point and hand tracing the way our body is sitting in our chair touching the ground an anchor can be a focused touch it can be listening to the noises around you or meditation music it can be visualizing whatever you choose to focus on in your mind it can be something in the physical world that you choose to look at and focus on it can even be something like a scent or a smell in the room anything that's going to help you center yourself and we want to bring our thoughts back to our anchor throughout our meditation so what we're going to do in our meditation here is to pick an anchor whatever feels most comfortable in this moment sound, breath, touch, visualization and this is going to be our focus point so I invite you to close your eyes taking a few deep breaths releasing any tension hopefully we're a little relaxed from the body scan and bringing our attention to our anchor as we continue to breathe however only focusing on our anchor not paying much attention to our breath unless that is what you have chosen for your anchor staying here with a soft focus on our anchor now when we meditate thoughts will most certainly enter our minds and I ask that all you do is acknowledge your thoughts without judgment simply let them go as we return to focus on our anchor all the while still breathing and focusing on our anchor as thoughts come let them come acknowledge them without judgment and let them go with ease as we refocus on our anchor repeating this throughout the practice acknowledging our thoughts and refocusing when you're ready I invite you to open your eyes and rejoin me and I will give you a few seconds before we move on thank you so much for joining me in those practices I hope that some of them resonated with you now we're going to talk about building our practice I'm sure Tony didn't want to interrupt me in our meditation but I'm aware of the time we will be done in a moment for the Q&A so what we want to do when we're building our practice is choosing exercises that resonate with us in thousands of different ways that we can practice mindfulness but it's not going to work very well if we are rejecting the practices if we don't feel comfortable if we don't like them if our mind is wandering too much we can't get settled we want to curate a practice that is solely ours with exercises that feel good to us so if some of the exercises that we practice today resonate with you practice those similar practices how you can build on those practices with those anchors or similar types of practices do some research look online what other kind of practices find something that feels good to you next we want to ensure we dedicate reasonable time so what I mean by reasonable time is that we want to ensure that we are not trying to do too much but we're also not doing too little so we want to take an amount of time that is going to work in our day if I pick I want to meditate for an hour every morning or practice mindfulness for an hour every morning and I'm starting from zero that might be a little much and I might have a really hard time committing to that and what we don't want to do is overwhelm ourselves and start judging ourselves or feel like I can't do it I'm just going to give up on my practice if you can only commit five minutes in the morning amazing you can commit to a minute or two throughout your day with some of these micro practices also totally fine what we want to do is we want to take small steps so start with your three minute meditation in the morning if that's where you're starting start with a five minute journaling practice start with a little bit of tapping throughout the day or some breathing exercises and slowly add on more and more practices as you build your practice as a whole so it's curated to your time your experience and how you're feeling I also want to ask that you always try to release judgment we've mentioned that a few times today but especially with self-compassion when we're dealing with our own practice we want to release judgment and practice forgiveness if you forget to do your exercises or your meditations that's totally fine release that judgment and forgive yourself moving forward in a positive manner you'll do it the next day or the next day later that day find time when you can and make sure that you understand that this practice is for you if it's creating any sort of negativity or bad feelings we want to try and forgive any judgment there so we can foster a good relationship with our practice finally we want to seek support and learning resources online there's amazing books that you can read surrounding mindfulness and these practices try either getting your partner involved getting your kids involved with mindfulness some of your friends if you're doing it at work a team initiative is great and also note that you can always look to professional mindfulness coaches to come and work with your team or work with you one-on-one to help support you in your mindfulness journey so thank you so much that is all I have it's been such a pleasure chatting with you today and I would love to answer any questions that you might have how to integrate mindfulness into your teams your personal practice anything that you're interested in Matia, thank you that was wonderful as we give people a chance to put some questions in I mean it's actually a hard session to think of what your thoughts are you're going through but one thing that occurred to me I guess I'll admit I'm pretty old school I'm kind of of a generation that looks at some things like this with a little bit of a dubious perspective and you know thankfully I've opened up or broaden my horizons over the past few years but I know there's a lot of people like me in particularly big organizations who just look at the softer topics with a lot of resistance it's like we don't need that I don't need that sort of thing how do you deal with resistance to this type of education or broadening I guess absolutely so that is a really great question so one of the great things about mindfulness is that there is so much scientific research behind the benefits so John Kabat-Zinn was actually one of the first you know North American names to study mindfulness in a scientific backed capacity and he developed the you might have heard the MBSR mindfulness based stress reduction curriculum at the University of Massachusetts in the 1970s and that was sort of the start to researching and understanding mindfulness as a science and our human anatomy and our brain and the positive effects that we have so there and I can provide tons of resources as to the actual science behind why mindfulness is beneficial so all of the benefits that I mentioned in you know for an organization and for employees these are scientifically backed benefits that we know are real in addition you know companies are becoming more and more aware that they have to offer some sort of support to their employees especially in times like this and moving forward as our world is changing and people are becoming you know more self aware and looking to things like mindfulness to help themselves and companies are realizing big companies have whole departments dedicated to their employee wellness and essentially what's happening is that companies who aren't offering any sort of mindfulness type resources to their employees are actually falling behind so it's becoming a really important tool for recruitment and things to offer your employees as well I mentioned there's a huge financial benefit to companies being the reduction in turnover absenteeism, presenteeism when I'm at work and I'm not actually doing anything because my mind is elsewhere and so you know the long-winded answer to your question is I've got a slew of resources and it can easily be searched online the actual scientific benefits to mindfulness and why you want to bring it into your organization and companies are realizing this it's no longer just oh we have yoga on Thursdays that isn't cutting it that's not doing enough for your employees on a wellness level and employees that aren't looking to offer these sort of things are going to be falling behind very quickly so it's a data-driven solution in a sense yeah some folks in the audience who've asked for some of those resources so I'll follow up with you to get that we'll post it later you know I think we're actually going to have to wrap it up there today this is wonderful though thank you so much I want to mention to everybody in the audience again that there's a session survey form that you can fill out to give some feedback I know Mattia would appreciate it and we would as well but otherwise that wraps up our first day of the conference portion of EDW this year you're welcome to continue networking with other attendees within the SPOTME app and please don't forget to check out the sponsor section for more information about the tools available to support your data management programs we will be back the sponsor will be back again tomorrow from 7.30 a.m. pacific time and our sessions will begin at 8 a.m. pacific 11 a.m. eastern we look forward to seeing you then I think I'm getting us out of here just in time before my dog starts to bark for his dinner thank you very much again everybody this was a wonderful day and the day thank you Mattia and we will see you all again tomorrow bye bye