It started with suffering.

From Immanual: Chief Compassion Officer, CompassionLeaders

I started out my career as a cancer scientist, working to develop new cancer therapies in a biotech company in the California Bay Area. After a layoff in 2012, I made a deliberate choice to do something even more impactful with my life. For three years I ran a in-home senior care agency. Here I experiencied human suffering and death in close quarters, until I realized I could not handle the empathy fatigue that came with that role. My untrained mind responded to suffering and death by becoming depressed. Digging deep and wide for answers, I began studying empathy and compassion: how some people remain seemingly resilient to suffering and others break down, how compassion manifests in everyday living, what come in the way… This was, and is a fascinating area of enquiry for me. I realized most people agree that compassion is a fundamental aspect of meaningful living, but misconceive it in a way that blocks them from actively trying to pursue compassion as a lifestyle. With mentoring from some amazing minds in this space, I realized that while all aspects of living need a compassion boost, the workplace, where we spend the majority of our ‘awake hours’ is critically lacking in compassion. I spent enormous time and effort collecting stories of workplace compassion, reading published information, talking to experts, and amalgamating it into a framework that anyone anywhere could access. That is how our 9-Pillars of Compassion framework was created. With the formation of the framework came a need create training programs to disseminate knowledge and assessments to evaluate their effectiveness. We did all that. And we decided to go a step further, to ask how we can make the framework scalable beyond the confines of training. So we created a cloud based multi-platform app to inspire, facilitate and recognize compassion at work. And so CompassionLeaders was born. The beauty of the effort is that it continues to attract amazing individuals invested in the vision- a vision of creating a kinder world starting with compassionate workplaces.

The need for compassionate workplaces extends beyond industry type, size and location. This is the new revolution- successful workplaces created by heart-centered workplaces and organizations that support that mindset. We are proud and thrilled to be leading the charge.

For those curious to learn more about CompassionLeaders, here is the rundown: 

Compassion can change your company’s workculture. Innovation, employee retention, productivity, happiness are all proven outcomes of compassionate workplaces. CompassionLeaders has created an unique framework of training and technology to bring a culture of compassion to your work. Learn more at www.compassionleaders.com