Women's Health | Mindful OctobHER 2023
Patrick Kozakiewicz
Associate Director for Well-being | Manager | Mindfulness Supervisor & Teacher | Agile Thought Leader l Coach
EDITORS NOTE
The month of October traditionally is celebrated as OctobHER where we focus on women's health, especially prevention of any potential health issues.? We start our Newsletter with short summary of The Mindful Month with links to recordings from all of our mindful events. This month's podcast is all about Women's Health, focusing especially on the hormones, brought by health professionals. In October we bring you blog post from Yolanda about “what now” after the mindful month, Mindful Leader Summit summary from Patrick and update on mindfulness in Greece from Stefanos.?
In the learning corner we share a short video message from Andrea, Pooja and Priscila. Mindful book of the month is "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up"recommended by Stefanos, art of the month is a sketch inspired by the tale of two wolves by Rachel. Champion of the month is Lucian Paucean - let's mindfully congratulate him all together!
We are grateful for your interest. Thank you for?taking?time to?browse?through our Newsletter from the Kyndryl Mindful community. I hope you will find something of value in it and share it further. Thank you kindly for being and doing what you do.
September Mindful Month Summary
by Dr. Rachel Formella
September was?celebrated as the Mindful Month at Kyndryl , during which we focused on learning and cultivating mindfulness. We were approaching each session with mindful attitudes: non-judgment, patience, beginner’s mind, trust, non-striving, acceptance, letting go, gratitude, generosity. This intentional practice encourages people to slow down, pay attention, and appreciate the richness of present moment, with a non-judgmental awareness of one's thoughts, emotions, and surroundings. The benefits of a Mindful Month can be profound, as it helps individuals reduce stress, improve mental clarity, and enhance their overall well-being. It encourages a shift from autopilot to being present and making concious choices mindfully. During Mindful Month, kyndryls got to engage in various activities such as specilal events (we got 9 of those!), classes and drop-in sessions. We have been collecting survey results after all of our events and we are happy to say that we have reached 90% NPS score!?
Podcast of the Month - The Beat S1: Women's Health
Joining us today is Charlotte Hunter, a registered and qualified Nutritional Therapist and Functional Medicine Practitioner for 10 years. In her day to day life, she helps men, women and children eat well and be healthy. Her firm belief is that food can be nutritious, delicious, and can support a number of health conditions and issues. Her main focus is helping women navigate the menopause. She knows how food can help balance hormones, making conditions and challenges less impactful and more manageable.? Being mindful about our health and hormonal changes can make a huge difference to how we feel. This podcast can hep you learn more about menstrual cycle and even menopause. Weather you are a woman or someone who wants to support women in your life - this podcast is for you!
OctobHER
Just like in previous years, OctobHER is focused in prevention. Not only about Brest Cancer, but also through the understanding of Mental Health caring.?This way, we encourage the prevention of major diseases or repetitive illnesses in all our employees.
Topics like, emotions, feelings, stress, nutrition, wellbeing, mindfulness, yoga, body caring, neuroscience, diversity, work-life-balance, menopause and many others will support women to take care and educate themselves about the real aspects of prevention.
OctobHER Mindful events?
Learning Corner
We invite you to listen to a short video message from Andrea Nemcova , Pooja Singh , PMP ? and Priscila Brambila .
Updates from Kyndryl Mindful Greece
This month I decided to experiment with the agenda for the Greek Mindfulness sessions at Kyndryl Offices. Instead of trying to choose practices for a novice audience, I thought it would be more beneficial to draw from my current personal encounters with mindfulness andspeak about these.
During the summer, two family members told me about how they dealt with highly stressful situations by using breathwork.?
The first was my brother. He is a sailor, used to work for 6-month period traveling the sea. During his last trip, we found himself on a very old vessel that could actually… sink at any moment. The chief engineer, his manager, made things worse by being irrational, lacking organization skills, and imposing random working schedules based on his whim.
Not being able to cope with the situation, and realizing that tension was building inside of him, he searched for ways to ease his stress. He came into 3min and 10 min guided breathwork practices that we would do daily.
The second case was a cousin of mine. She is living in France, works as a lawyer, and last winter she was preparing for a very tough qualification exam. If succeeded, she would be hired as a civil servant for the French state.
During this stressful period of working a day job and studying for the exams, she came across a Sophrology Class. Sophrology is a dynamic relaxation method that includes physical and mental exercises to promote health and well-being. In the classes they would focus a lot on breathwork, employing different patterns of breathing based on expected results.
Researching further on the topic, I found that even American Navy Seals do the breathwork! They use box-breathing to stay calm during battle scenarios.
Breathwork has a number of advantages: Short practices are very efficient in calming the body and mind. You don't need to have any background on the topic, you just do. Even people who are skeptical about mindfulness or similar practices are willing to try counting breaths.
So breathwork, and more specifically box-breathing, was the practice of choice for the session at Kyndryl. The instructions were simple: we focus on our breath and bring our mind gently back to the practice if needed. We inhale for 4 seconds, hold for 4, exhale for 4, hold for 4, and all over again for 5 minutes.
By the way, my cousin did succeed with the exams, and my brother was able to cope with work (and resign early from this trip). At times, our own business environment can be very challenging. I hope our Kyndryls will find this practice beneficial when dealing with change, demanding situations, or difficult clients.
Advanced Class | Frame by Frame | Deepening Your Mindfulness Practice coming to our Kyndryls
These eight weeks offer a new course that has been developed for those who have already completed a mindfulness course and want to explore mindfulness more deeply.?
The aim of this course is to help participants rediscover calm in a chaotic world by deepening their mindfulness practice through the exploration of feeling tones.
领英推荐
Updates from Kyndryl Mindful Spanish
MINDFUL CHAMPION OF THE MONTH
We are so grateful to have Lucian with us. He may be still new to the mindful leadership team, but he fit right in. He is very carrying, kind and compassionate. He is also bringing new energy to the team and already proved himself very helpful. Lucian is just about to start co-teaching his first cohort of Introducing Mindfulness course and help with leading the mindful reading drop-in sessions - feel free to enroll and support him as a new teacher! :) Hopefully in the future Lucian will be able to offer some sessions in his native language, which is Romanian!?
BOOK OF THE MONTH
recommendation from Dr. Stefanos Koutsoumpis
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. Most of the time I'm reading self-help books. But this book about Tidying up really caught my attention. It's not a practical guide with rules, dos and don'ts. It's more like a mindset. Marie Kondo, in her KonMari method, introduces a practical way to bring mindfulness to our daily activities, feel more gratitude, and enhance positive experiences. She advocates that items evoke an inherent feeling tone in us, bringing up positive, neutral of negative feelings.
The KonMari Method? encourages tidying by category beginning with clothes, then moving on to books, papers, komono (miscellaneous items), and, finally, sentimental items. Keep only those things that speak to the heart or "spark Joy" as Mari says.
What really spoke to my heart, was the the KonMari Party. This is an one-time event that focuses on decluttering and tidying up. Eg, we start with clothes. We pile all our clothes on a bed or the floor and become aware of the amount of items we have. Then we take each piece of clothing on our hand, and get the feeling tone: "does this spark joy"? It doesn't matter if it's a brand new pair of pants we never got to wear, or an old torn-up T-shirt. The only thing that matters, is if it sparks joy. If yes, we put it back in the closet. If not, we offer gratitude to the item for the joy it brought us when we did wear it, or when we bought it, and then discard it.
What I thought after reading the book, is that this de-cluttering can be easily transferred to our personal and professional lives: what are the parts in our life that spark joy in us? What friends, habits, or activities do support our well-being? We can pursue more of them. What doesn't give us any positive feelings (any more)? We can offer gratitude to it and gracefully let it go.
Marie is now an international bestseller writer, featuring her own series on Netflix, has written more books on Sparking Joy in your life, and has created a worldwide network of KonMarie consultants.
MINDFUL ART OF THE MONTH
“Tale of Two Wolves” pencil sketch? by Rachel Formella
An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy.?“It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.”
MINDFUL BLOG | What Now
by Yolanda H.
Hello, well Mindful Month has come and gone. What did you learn? What are you going to change or add in your life that will sustain you in being more mindful???
A lot of times we get excited about maybe a new habit we want to do. It could be a new diet, new exercise, or maybe eating more healthily, or even spending more time being or doing something you love to do.? So, you go out and start the habit and you are all excited about it. You do it daily. Then the next week you miss a day, the following week you miss 2 days and then by the end of the month you kind of forget about it and you go back into your autopilot mode.??
What happened? Well, you really were liking what you were doing but it was disturbing your usual routine. It was not something you ever thought would help you, what would my friends or family think of me if I started this habit? I don’t have time to do this you think to yourself. It is as if you are trying to talk yourself out of it.??
What would be helpful for you is if you would sit down and do some research on what you want to do for your new habit. Learn everything about it, listen to podcasts, read books, attend events to learn more or just talk to someone who already has this habit in their life. Ask them questions and be honest in what you say.??
Creating good habits which later become a big part of your life is not an easy thing to do. One thing that would benefit you is to realize that you are a human being and what you do for yourself is just as important as doing something for others. If your mind is not healthy then you can re-train it. No matter what type of lifestyle you had growing up, it affects your mind in the way you think, act, respond to others and the way you treat yourself as a human being. It is so crucial to take care of your mind.??
Think of your mind as an automobile. It needs a tweak here and there. You must give it gas, water, air the tires, change the oil, fill the fluids, and even wash the exterior and interior. What would happen if you never did any of those things to your automobile? It would eventually stop working and you would have to tow it to get it fixed. Why not maintain it now before it starts to slow down???
We are living in an era that we have never seen before in any generation. To sustain our health, we also must sustain our mind, which is a big part of our physical health. Mind and body work hand in hand.??
The saying by American psychologist William James: “You’re not what you think you are, but what you think, you are!” says a lot. ?I say that “Your mind can shape the person; you want to be or it can just shape your mind!” ?It is never too late nor too early.??
8th Annual Mindful Leader Summit
by Patrick Kozakiewicz
I recently attended and spoke at the 8th Annual Mindful Leader Summit in Washington, DC from Sept 29 - Oct 1st with Jeff Schmitt, CSP, Director of Health & Safety at Kyndryl. This is the world's largest summit focused on mindfulness & compassion at work and it was filled with morning yoga & meditations, keynotes, talks, case studies, practice sessions, embodiment, connection, and networking opportunities.?
There were wonderful key notes from Dr. Judson Brewer, MD, Ph.D., director of research and innovation at Brown University's Mindfulness Center, Kristin Neff, Ph.D., co-founder of the nonprofit Center for Mindful Self-Compassion and co-creator of the globally recognized and empirically supported Mindful Self-Compassion training program and Marc Brackett, Ph.D. founder and director of Yale University's Center for Emotional Intelligence and acclaimed author of "Permission to Feel."
I learned about what is currently happening in the field, how A.I is playing an ever greater role, the importance of building in emotional intelligence and compassion into our work and so much more. We also made commitments to strengthen our partnership with Ernst&Young and SAP in the space of mindfulness and I look forward to sharing more with you all in the days, weeks and months to come.
Recent Accomplishments
Enterprise Enablement & Communications Lead | Agile Coach | Mindfulness | AI Enthusiast | Image Consultant | Podcaster | Empowering Growth and Transformation through Strategy, Agility & Branding
1 年I am delighted and grateful to be a part of this wonderful and mindful community! ??????
Organisational Coach|Program & Project Management | Agile| Servant Leadership| Mentor
1 年Thank you for keeping us on track with our mindfulness journeys Patrick Kozakiewicz ??