Category: Podcasts

Why Remember This One?

category Loving, Moments, Podcasts

Take a listen to this 30-minute podcast with Chip Heath, Stanford professor and author of the book, The Power of Moments, featured in the Moments Action Kit. The gist is that while we may not always pay attention or give the deserved attention to crafting Moments, we do remember certain Moments. What is it that makes some Moments disappear and some Moments last forever? Heath has found that positive Moments are dominated and defined by four principles: elevation (extreme joy), insight (a sudden realization), pride (us at our best), and Connection (our personal relationships). Those are the ones that stick.

We also love that Sonia Rhodes, founder of The Experience Lab, is featured in The Power of Moments for the defining Moment that brought her to this Experience work.

Think of the Moments we create in our organizations – do they evoke elevation, insight, pride, or Connection? How can we enhance these Experiences by adding another one of these elements?
The Empathy Museum

category Loving, Podcasts, Wholehearted

Would you walk a mile in someone else’s shoes? Literally? At the Empathy Museum, you can do just that. Founded in 2015 by empathy expert Roman Krznaric, the Empathy Museum is a travelling collection of participatory arts projects that focus on Storytelling and dialogue. The “Mile in My Shoes” exhibit allows you to select an actual pair of shoes, walk around in them, and listen to the story accompanying them. The aim is to inspire compassion and understanding for the lives and stories of others.

While many of us can’t go visit the Empathy Museum in person, we can learn from its founder. Krznaric acknowledges that empathy is “trending” right now in the world of business, and he thinks it’s for good reason: because empathy is undeniably powerful. In this piece, he shares the Six Habits of Highly Empathic People (all habits we can easily integrate into our daily lives): cultivate curiosity about strangers, challenge prejudices and discover commonalities, try another person’s life, listen hard and open up, inspire mass action and social change, and develop an ambitious imagination. It’s also worth taking a listen to the podcast “A Mile in My Shoes” available wherever you get your podcasts.

In what ways might we encourage and facilitate active empathy in our organizations? How are we gathering the stories of our team members, providers, patients, and guests and sharing them to inspire a more global understanding of the humans that make up our Experience? Can we intentionally strive to feel what others feel for deeper knowing?
Healing Power of Compassion

category Loving, Podcasts, Wholehearted

In this episode of The Psychology Podcast, we learn about the healing power of wholeheartedness. Dr. Kristin Neff, an expert in compassion, shares the impact that self-support has on our emotional, spiritual, professional, and physical wellbeing. Approaching all of our actions with kindness, compassion, and wholeheartedness allows us to tap into our strongest sense of health. Tied directly to mindfulness, self-compassion ensures that we can be our own best ally. When we lead with self-compassion, we decrease our Experience of anxiety, depression, stress, and illness which are scientifically tied to stress. We can truly benefit from learning how to care for ourselves as we care for others.

Carry Being in Your Pocket

category Being, Living, Podcasts

As we learn more about the physical and mental benefits of mindfulness, apps such as “Calm” and “Headspace” have become incredibly popular. These apps provide techniques for mindfulness and meditation – integrating the power of smart technology with the age-old wisdom of slowing down to breathe. The apps offer guided meditations, music features, notifications and reminders, and even a timer to set how long you’d like calming sounds to play as you drift off to sleep. 


These apps make Being much more accessible for anyone. In just 10 minutes, whether on our morning walk, during a quick quiet moment of respite, or over a lunch break, our phones can serve as a transportation device to settling in and Being in the present.

Download one of the apps above to Experience mindfulness. How might we take advantage of this at the ready mindfulness at the patient bedside, in our team member lounges, and in our public spaces?
On Being

category Being, Living, Podcasts

We are not the only ones reflecting on the important nature of Being; Krista Tippett devotes her whole podcast to it. “On Being” is a weekly conversation between long-time journalist and radio host, Tippett, and her guest of the week. Exploring topics of spirituality, LIVING, LOVING, and other pieces of life that define our ability to be, the show opens your mind to how experts on Being improve their personal practice and integrate it into their work. Take, for instance, this episode featuring Brother David Steindl-Rast. A Benedictine monk and a champion of interfaith dialogue, Brother David shares how Gratitude and gratefulness have guided his life’s work and provides ways to integrate these qualities into our own practice of Being.

Consider how gratefulness or spirituality might inform the way individuals on our teams approach their work? How about how they inform the healing journey of our patients?
What Happens When We Meditate?

category Being, Living, Podcasts

Mindfulness isn’t just good for our spirits; it’s good for our bodies. In this one-hour discussion from the Aspen Ideas Festival, filmmaker Perri Peltz and meditation expert and advocate Bob Roth dig into the hard science behind the practice and benefits of meditation. 

As they break down the three different types of focused breathing (focused attention, open monitoring, and self-transcending), Roth identifies which areas of the brain are activated and the brain activity that occurs. The gamma, theta, and alpha-1 brain waves that result from the three different types of meditation are the root of the positive health effects of meditation such as decreased pain, a higher functioning immune system, decreased anxiety and depression, greater attention, and increased self-control. As it turns out, meditation nourishes our minds, bodies, and spirits.

What might result if we gifted our team members with time for a practice of Being? What about our patients? Let’s choose to make time for Being and make it a priority.
Humanity’s Story

category Living, Podcasts, Storytelling, Videos

 

We love the folks at StoryCorps who are on a mission to “preserve and share humanity’s stories in order to build connections between people and create a more just and compassionate world.” They work tirelessly to record the stories of ordinary people and share them in a way that properly celebrates the beauty of humanity in all of its challenges and triumphs. Initially StoryCorps was known for their  mobile tour —taking their iconic recording studio on the road to cities around the country to ensure they’re hearing stories in their most raw form: straight from the storytellers’ mouths. Next they added the StoryCorps app — putting the power of story gathering and storytelling into our hands. And now, during this time of Pandemic they’ve added a virtual tour to their suite of story collection methods. Partnering with various artists, StoryCorps selects particularly poignant stories to be illustrated and shared on YouTube and other social media platforms to appeal to visually driven audiences. Be sure to sign up for their podcast to hear a new story each week.

LOOKING at Personalized Learning

category Looking, Personalizing, Podcasts

The notion of a classroom and education was LOOKED at with fresh eyes when students across the country spent their semesters learning from home in 2020 and 2021.   To date, “Personalized learning” has equated to a computer-based education system that allows students to set their own goals and pace and receive instructions via algorithms at the point where they individually need it. This podcast explores the benefit of the approach. And while it is based on an individual’s skills and has been a wonderful support piece of the teaching puzzle, in it’s current form, it’s not the perfect answer.

This Forbes piece proposes a new definition for consideration.  What if this fall Personalized learning meant designing an education Experience that was just right for each child?  It would require more time, more resources, more effort, and yet it may be the beacon of possibility schools need to design toward for students to thrive in what will certainly be a different beginning to the new school year.

 

LOOKING at our own learning tools and methods, what might we need to modify? What questions could we ask to understand how each team member best learns? How might this insight inform and influence the environment and approach we take?
To Thine Own Self Be True

category Looking, Noticing, Podcasts

What’s your superpower? Your kryptonite? How quickly could you answer those questions? This simple three-step guide to becoming self-aware from The Harvard Business Review doesn’t just talk about how important self-awareness is (that’s not a new insight), it talks about how to actually accomplish it. Great leaders don’t only Notice those around them, they Notice themselves through the careful practice and cultivation of self-awareness.

To boil it down, self-awareness really only requires three simple steps:

  1. We must understand our own makeup–our personalities, our strengths, and our habits.
  2. We must make a focused effort to observe our decisions and decision-making processes. What do we discover upon making these (sometimes difficult) observations?
  3. We must turn awareness outwards and use it as a tool for team building. When we know what our strengths and weaknesses are, we can better fill in the gaps on our teams.

Please also enjoy this podcast from The Anxious Achiever where Jason Rosario discusses how he Noticed how vulnerability can be a leadership superpower.

A Delightful Box

category Leading, Orchestration, Podcasts

Monthly subscription boxes continue to be a household go-to, so making a business stand out is a challenge. Beauty product company BirchBox brilliantly realized that its sustainability as a business depended on placing the Orchestration of the customer Experience in the most savvy hands – those of its customers. Birchbox launched as a transformational company giving consumers the beauty counter-sampling Experience, curated and shipped to their homes each month. Because they are a mostly digital interface, BirchBox knew that in order to avoid fading into a saturated market, they needed to stay relevant, and what better way to do that than to put the power into the hands of the consumer? Using customer input, they are able to tailor the Experience to the customer’s beauty preferences and then offer products that the customer might not have found themselves. By Orchestrating and personalizing the Experience, BirchBox can delight its customers every time they open a box. Founder Katia Beauchamp shares how she built Birchbox and divulged that she believes “if you’re going to do something discretionary, it’s the retailer’s responsibility to make it really delightful.”

How can we Orchestrate a personalized Experience for our internal and external customers? As leaders, how can we invite others to provide input?