GET TRANSFORMATIONAL RESULTS THROUGH A WHOLE-PERSON APPROACH
Live, lead, and perform better.
"I analyze and collate data from brain, human performance, leadership, resilience, and healthcare research, as well as evidence-based strategies from renowned experts in training and coaching to deliver high-quality, personalized solutions, training, and coaching that meets your specific needs and goals."
Laura Bennett
Our work together is a partnership.
The coaching relationship is a partnership bewteen the coach and the client(s) in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires, motivates, and enables clients to maximize their personal and professional potential.* The process of coaching involves clients bringing their wants or needs for growth, development, or change. Clients may shape long-range goals to work toward over time or “just-in-time” topics that need to be addressed more immediately. Coaching is about thought, insight, and action. The intention of coaching is to create progress toward your objectives or preferred way of being.
Clients sponsored for coaching by their employer may bring developmental feedback or specific goals related to their job performance as part of their coaching agenda. Employers may provide 360 reviews or assessment results for consideration in the process. As an added option, I perform strengths-focused 360 assessments co-developed with the client.
*adapted from the International Coaching Federation
ABOUT MINDFULNESS
What is mindfulness?
Mindfulness is maintaining moment-to-moment awareness of what is going on within and around you in an open and accepting way, one without judgments or wanting things to be different. Mindful awareness practices cultivate habits of mind that generate insight, reduce stress, increase joy and compassion, and create the foundation for emotional intelligence. Mindfulness practice helps to change patterns of thinking and bodily reactions to stress that have negative effects. Mindfulness allows us to see things as they are without clouded judgment or getting hijacked by emotions, which gives us power to choose skillful responses and take action based on reality rather than misperceptions or over-emotional reactions. The state of mindfulness is cultivated by mindfulness meditation, mindful eating, mindful movement, and intentional mind-body awareness to simple, normal day-to-day activities including showering, getting dressed, and answering the phone. Nearly everyone can learn mindfulness and maintain a practice. Many results are immediate and become greater the more you practice. Mindfulness easily becomes a way of life and has a ripple-effect that benefits all.
MINDFULNESS IS AN EVIDENCE-BASED PRACTICE
There are tens of thousands of research studies and academic articles about mindfulness in areas of human physiology and performance, leadership and management, health and wellness, stress and resilience, and more. We know that practicing mindfulness is associated with positive effects on the brain, mind, and body. Studies show that mindfulness reduces mind-wandering, which occurs 30-50% of our day. Mind-wandering is associated with errors and less happiness when compared to moments of attention to present moment activities. Mindfulness promotes feelings of wellbeing and enhances the ability to navigate life's challenges with clarity, joy, and resilience.
BENEFITS OF MINDFULNESS
Mindfulness training is shown to have benefits to:
- stress reduction
- enhanced relaxation
- human performance
- attention & concentration
- preventative health
- sense of well-being, health, and vitality
- stress management
- immunity
- sleep
- protection of DNA from damage
- communication
- relationships
- chronic disease management
- pain
- resilience
- anger management
- spirituality
- hope
- overcoming challenges
- leadership
- navigating change
- self confidence
- compassion
- emotional intelligence
- working with difficult emotions
- less fear of emotion
- learning ability
- productivity
- working memory
- test performance
- reduced job and caregiver burnout
- trauma
- depression
- anxiety
- PTSD
- parenting
- and protection against age-related cognitive decline
Mindfulness is the foundation for emotional intelligence
What is emotional intelligence?
Emotional intelligence (aka EI or EQ) is the capacity to be aware of and monitor one's emotions and the emotions of others, identify and label emotions, manage emotions, and use emotional information of self and others to understand interpersonal dynamics, and skillfully guide thinking and decision-making with empathy.
Why is emotional intelligence important?
Emotional intelligence is widely-recognized as critical for high-impact leadership, effective communication, collaboration, and navigating the challenges of the modern workplace and relationships. Mindfulness and other related practices help us become more emotionally intelligent. Throughout our lives we are commonly taught to suppress or push away our emotions, to not be expressive. People become out of touch with themselves and their emotions for a variety of reasons including upbringing, schooling, culture, societal and workplace norms, traumas, and other experiences. People become unaware that they are experiencing emotions or understand what emotion they are having. Some people, even if aware, do not know what their emotions mean. From time-to-time we may become "carried away" by emotions which leads to impulsive behavior, feeling out of control, tossed around, or beat-up. Often people are afraid of having emotions for fear of how they feel or fear of losing control. Through mindfulness we can experience emotions and even welcome them with understanding, without fear, and without being carried away. Through mindfulness we can transform our experiences.
People with high EI are aware of and can recognize, name, and understand their own emotions. They know how conditions such as sleep, hunger, environment, sensory experiences, triggers, and stress situations affect their emotional reactions, thoughts, and feelings. They know how to manage their emotions. They also know how their emotions, moods, and reactions will affect other people, and therefore influence and motivate them. People with high EI can recognize and attune to the emotions of others, creating a sense of connection, making others feel heard and understood. Mindful, emotionally intelligent people can create positive personal and professional relationships and manage difficult emotions and conflict. Mindful, emotionally intelligent leaders effectively create trust, motivate, and mentor their colleagues and direct reports.
Emotional intelligence competencies include:
Personal Competence:
Our emotional self-awareness, accurate self-assessment, self-confidence.
How we manage ourselves, self-control, transparency, adaptability, achievement, initiative.
Social Competence:
Social awareness, empathy, organizational awareness, service, inspirational leadership, influence, developing others, change catalyst, conflict management, teamwork and collaboration.
PEOPLE WITH HIGH-EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE KNOW THAT:
- Emotions should be attended.
- Emotions provide us with useful information
- Connection with others occurs through emotions, and these connections are important in all aspects of life.
- Emotions are contagious and should be managed mindfully.
*Adapted from: Goleman, D., Boyatzis, R, & McKee, A. (2002). Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence. MA, Harvard Business School Press.
ABOUT YOGA
Strengthen and expand your capacities even more.
For clients who want greater holistic well-being as part of their results, you can choose to incorporate yoga into training or coaching plans. As a certified yoga-teacher, Laura is privileged to share the practice and benefits of yoga with her clients. Yoga can amplify the effects of other services and generate energy and intrinsic motivation for change in other areas of life and health.
Yoga originated in India as a comprehensive system for well-being on all levels - physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. Yoga was originally practiced only by males. However, yoga practices have been modified over the years to be available to all people. Yoga incorporates meditation, physical postures (with modifications for every body in any environment), and methods of breathing to increase and manage energy. Yoga has become popular in the US as a form of exercise, strength and balance training, and relaxation.
Learn to balance effort and ease
Through yoga you learn discipline and how to balance effort and ease on the mat (or chair) to help you be disciplined and balance effort and ease in everyday life. It is great as a practice alone or added to workouts for greater strength and flexibility. Yoga is excellent for kids and adults. Yoga is a perfect addition to services for workplace wellness. Through yoga you can practice deliberate mindfulness in motion for alignment of mind, body, and spirit. Don't worry! You do not need to be flexible and there is no need to achieve challenging postures.
Good evidence supports yoga as a transformational health & fitness practice.
Studies about yoga have found that it has many benefits including:
• Stress reduction and a reduction of stress hormones cortisol, epinephrine and norepinephrine
• Increased self-enhancement, motivation to feel good and have positive self esteem
• Emotion regulation
• Reduced anxiety
• Improved working memory
• Improved sleep
• Psychological wellbeing
• Physical wellbeing
• Improved symptoms in people with depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder
• Reductions in inflammatory processes and levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines in cancer, HIV, depression, anxiety, wound healing, sleep disorder, cardiovascular diseases, and fibromyalgia
• Reduced menopausal symptoms
• Improved grip strength
• Improved comfort in pregnancy
• Improved blood glucose management in diabetes.
• Reduced cholesterol
• Improved life satisfaction
• Brain wave activity
• Structural brain changes/gray matter increase
• Increased depth of respiration