My Path to Conscious Leadership
My personal experience with giving my all to my career (which I loved doing!), while raising two small children (which I also loved doing!), and choosing to behave in ways that were unknowingly leading to burnout was the catalyst for my journey to mindfulness. There were several wake up calls: my husband politely telling me I wasn’t acting like myself (I’m paraphrasing), my small son asking why I was spending a beautiful summer Sunday at our kitchen table answering work emails rather than playing with him outside...I woke up to the realization that nothing would change until I changed my behavior.
I began regularly attending yoga, a form of mindfulness practice I loved but practiced sporadically since college, and the physical and mental benefits were so transformational for me that I was hooked. In time, I decided to enroll in yoga teacher training at Elements3 (now Common Ground Yoga) to deepen my practice and became a 200 hour registered yoga teacher with the Yoga Alliance. Since I love finding ways to bring what I learn and what helps me grow to others, I joined forces with several co-workers to launch and teach meditation each morning as part of Criteo’s Mindful Mornings program.
During yoga teacher training my teacher led the class through a yoga nidra meditation. I came out of the meditation feeling deeply present, peaceful and connected to everything and everyone around me. I immediately knew I wanted to know more about yoga nidra and registered for an upcoming training at Kripalu, a non-profit yoga teaching center in Western Massachusetts. During the training participants went around the room introducing ourselves and sharing what brought us there. In addition to wanting to further immerse myself in the ancient teachings of yoga nidra, I shared that I was interested in melding the mindfulness skills I was cultivating in my personal life with the leadership skills I was leveraging in my professional life. A fellow participant spoke up, “Have you heard of The Conscious Leadership Group? That sounds like what you are looking for.” Having not heard of The Conscious Leadership Group I quickly purchased their book The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership and read it cover to cover.
I was so inspired by The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership that I started a conscious leadership club at Criteo and a group of like-minded individuals who were eager to explore different ways of living and leading in the world quickly formed.
When an opportunity arose to bring in an outside speaker to Criteo we excitedly invited Diana Chapman, co-founder of The Conscious Leadership Group and co-author of The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, to discuss conscious leadership and how to build trust. This gave me an opportunity to hear directly from Diana, and Diana graciously joined Criteo’s conscious leadership club for 2 hours after her speech! It was then that I began to realize this work was so much deeper than I had initially understood.
This realization propelled me to enroll in The Conscious Leadership Group’s 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership Coaching Training and enabled me to not only more deeply understand and infuse their practices in my leadership style (inside and outside of the workplace), but evolve how I led Criteo’s conscious leadership club and coached interested individuals at the company using their model.
In time, I began to recognize that the moments in my day that I spent coaching or teaching about conscious leadership and development were giving me the most energy, and I realized it was time for me to honor that inner knowing and pursue conscious executive and leadership coaching, training and development as a full-time career.
And here I am, having launched Lead With Bliss!
If you are a leader that recognizes you could be doing life better, whether your work-life, personal-life, or both, my heartfelt desire is to support you to get to the root of where you are stuck and make lasting change. It is possible to end recycling issues, to be more innovative with your team and have fun solving challenges together. It is possible to create more balance in your life, experience more joy, and deepen relationships with the people you care about most. It is all within you. I’m here to help.
If my story has inspired you to want to make a change in your life, take the first step and reach out to me here now so we can discuss how I can best support you on your path to growth and freedom.
