Why Us?
Chronic Tsunami
Daily life feels like a relentless storm of incoming demands on your time and attention. Downtime is infrequent. Not only do you worry that you’ll fall short at work or with family or with health or a dozen other things. A haunting discomfort or even sadness may start to set in amidst the busyness – a sense that some central point has been lost, or that things are fundamentally out of balance.
SOLUTION: The Higher Third
Few topics in individual and organizational coaching occupy more bandwidth than “work-life balance.” Alas, the limitation of most approaches is that they try to treat a deep and deeply personal question as though it’s just a matter of time management or shifting minutiae.
What’s really called for is a larger context, a higher organizing principle within which to evaluate and make choices. We call this principle “The Higher Third.” Instead of just balancing competing priorities, you get crystal clarity about the unifying principles of your life and how they can effectively be put into practice to prioritize, integrate, eliminate, or choose among competing alternatives. This applies both to major decisions and to the most granular levels of day-to-day action.
Instead of inner division, there’s an opportunity to feel a much stronger sense of congruence and ease. The outcome is both greater effectiveness and much deeper fulfillment.
Bursting Bubbles
You get valuable insight, peace of mind, or inspiration, but find it doesn’t really carry over to daily life in all its sheer busyness and complexity. People will talk about “integration” of mindfulness or various practices or insights, but that’s often a sign that the insights or practices are not very well integrated to begin with.
SOLUTION:
Mindfulness Outside the Box™
That’s why we’ve created a system of practice we call “Mindfulness Outside the Box™.” Mindfulness Outside the Box applies the very real power of mindfulness and awareness-based modalities directly to life-in-the-midst-of-it-all. Taken out of their usual structure and frame of reference (the “bubble” or “box”) practices of awareness become seamlessly embedded in the midst of daily life, so there’s not so much need to “integrate” them.
Each participant discovers their own unique natural rhythm moving between reflection and action, stillness and movement, and so on. Transitions of activity or setting become more fluid so that you can navigate them with ease and power.
Crappy Choices
You face an ongoing dilemma that nags a bit, or maybe even troubles you at your very core. On the one hand, you seek to live by your highest values. On the other hand, there are practical realities of life to be faced, and you have to navigate them as effectively as possible. For example, you may want to live with empathy, integrity, and a clear sense that you’re making the world a better place. But it may not always be clear exactly how to do that and effectively run a successful and competitive business, or pay the bills, or take care of the thousand practical things that need to get taken care of.
SOLUTION: Strategic Agency
There is, in fact, a highly practical way to reframe this entire issue so that you make your choices from a place of power and inspiration. Instead of getting stuck or feeling internally divided, the practical dilemmas and challenges actually become fuel for creative action and a deeper sense of personal agency. You can strategically choose when to be bold or unyielding, and when to make principled compromises — without ever having to compromise your principles.
The Great Fade
You attend a workshop, seminar or retreat, and think it’s great, maybe even life-changing — only to see all the breakthroughs you experienced fade a couple weeks after the program ends. It’s one thing to have an epiphany or insight; it’s quite another to experience deep, lasting change that doesn’t cave when the old habits and circumstances start to kick back in. It’s one thing to see a short-lived truce with family members or your work team. It’s another to experience lasting transformation.
SOLUTION:
Rebuilding Habit Architecture
At HFI, we focus on the architecture of habit formation. We know that it’s simultaneously a matter of individual initiative, and also deeply embedded in social/interpersonal structures. So we work multi-dimensionally and integrally (see the MLLS page) to help you make the changes you want to make, and to help them stick.