Meet The Practitioner – Corporate Mindfulness Workshops
In 2004 Maret qualified as a Clinical Psychologist with a doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Southampton (DClinPsych, 2004) and quickly discovered that this was only the beginning of her journey, and not the destination.
Around this time, she was fortunate to discover the practice of mindfulness and a community of mindfulness-based teachers that showed her how to learn to accept herself. This ignited a passion for working with self-awareness practices and sharing the benefits of these with other professionals.
These days, Maret acts as a Clinical and an Organisational Psychologist having enhanced her skills by completing the Inner MBA – a conscious business mastery programme, created in partnership with LinkedIn, SoundsTrue and Wisdom 2.0.
These are skills that Maret continues to use everyday, leading post-graduate education programmes for healthcare professionals at the University of Southampton and developing mindfulness programmes and teacher training for The University of Oxford. In her current work, Maret leads a staff-psychology service within the NHS Acute Healthcare Service and has her own her business, New Forest Mindfulness Ltd.
What is mindfulness and what do your corporate mindfulness sessions involve?
Mindfulness is about being in the present moment, rather than dwelling in the past, or being caught up in the future. Extensive, high quality research shows us that living in the present moment is connected to our happiness and physical and mental health at work and at home.
Managing and/or working alongside others starts with managing ourselves and so our sessions consider how to regulate our emotions, our body and how to relate to our thoughts, beliefs and stories as individuals and as teams in order to be most effective in our work. We explore concepts and skills such as mindfulness, compassion and psychological safety, facilitated by experts in these fields.
Compassion is the ability to see and empathise with suffering, and the desire to alleviate this, but we are often better at doing this for others rather than ourselves. Our awareness-based sessions give participants the opportunity to pause, connect with themselves and connect with each other, as well as time to resource and energise as individuals, teams and organisationally.
Research such as the Google Aristotle Project shows that the most effective teams are those that have psychological safety. Our workshops clarify what psychological safety is and how to enhance this within your team.
Mindfulness, self-compassion and developing psychological safety are skills. We need to practise them to develop and maintain the skill in the face of challenges – just like with driving a car or learning to swim. Our sessions provide the direct experience of practising these skills through the opportunity for reflection to deepen and enhance learning, with active discussion and understanding the theory of mindfulness and how this connects with work/life.
Experiencing the practice of mindfulness, self-compassion, and developing psychological safety during your corporate away-day gives participants the direct felt benefits of these practices. They leave with a sense of groundedness, feeling resourced/calmer and more connected with themselves and each other, and with what is important to them.
Do you practise mindfulness yourself?
I have practised mindfulness and compassion based approaches personally for well over 20 years. I later immersed myself professionally in the field of awareness based practice after I qualified as a Dialectical Behavioural Therapist (DBT) in 2005, and as a Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) teacher in 2007.
Mindfulness practise resources me in a busy life, so that I can get my work done and be there for those who are important to me. It helps me to stay steady when encountering difficulties and enhances my creativity and problem solving skills. All this has also been demonstrated through research and so I feel very fortunate to have these skills to draw upon in a world that is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA).
Mind-body meditation practices give me personally the best opportunity to grow in qualities like patience, kindness and trust, enabling me to be more compassionate towards myself and others, and freer from old patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving that no longer serve me well. For example, paying attention to being in nature and to beauty – the forest, the sea, trees, sunlight etc. Connection with others – friends, family, pets, colleagues, participants etc. etc. Exercise – particularly yoga, swimming and walking – especially in beautiful surroundings.
What are the top 3 benefits of your corporate mindfulness sessions?
Time to pause, re-energise and calm, body and mind.
Connection with yourself and rediscovering what is important to you
Skills that you can take away with you and utilise in every aspect of your work and your life.
Do you have any exciting wellness projects you would like to share with our readers?
I have just launched two new services for professionals and organisations:
Psychological coaching – offering evidence-based psychological coaching for professionals, leaders and organisations, provided by expert clinical & coaching psychologists and tailored to their needs and interests. Including traditional coaching models like GROW, STEPPA, OSKAR, FUEL, plus mind-body approaches including somatic & mindfulness-based coaching, and psychological growth models such as Cognitive-Behavioural, Systems, Systemic Theories, Acceptance & Commitment, Solution Focused etc.
Integrative leadership training – connecting the intra-personal with the inter-personal for power and potential within leadership. Our integrative leadership development training draws upon the latest in psychological, neurological and leadership science to deliver a unique programme evolving leaders working with and within complex systems to reach their potential. Neuroscience shows us that what we pay attention to grows, and so we enable teams to explore the concept of attention and how to maximise it and spend this currency of attention wisely.
Are you looking for a corporate away day venue in the New Forest? Join us at Careys Manor for your next corporate event, and surround yourself with nature, fresh air and quiet – the most productive space to work, and a relaxing place to reset. Discover our new Corporate Wellness Packages today, which can include events mentioned in today’s blog from our partner Alan Ball.
