Leading mindfulness in the workplace requires more than just reading a script. It's about understanding participant safety and being knowledgeable about the practices you're leading. - Wendy Quan

Wendy Quan had been living a stressful life juggling her career, family, and personal challenges when cancer struck her in 2010. This life-altering event catalyzed her deep dive into mindfulness meditation. She found solace and strength in mindfulness. As she returned to her workplace, her colleagues' curiosity about her calm demeanor amidst chaos led her to introduce them to this powerful tool. This started a grassroots mindfulness practice that eventually spread to the entire organization.

Her success wasn't unnoticed; she was soon awarded at an international conference for change management for a paper she had created on her experience, which included metrics about people's experiences she had put in place.

Now she runs The Calm Monkey, teaching others how to lead mindfulness training and programs in organizations. She was invited to create a course on the prestigious Great Courses and you can also find her work on Audible. In short, in the mindfulness world, she's a rock star.

In this episode, you'll hear her incredible story firsthand and sage advice about potential dangers and mistakes when leading mindfulness in the workplace.

Wendy emphasizes credible training, evidence-based practices, and participant safety. She highlights the importance of understanding the intent behind one's actions and not simply following a script. Wendy also discusses the significance of trauma-informed facilitation and practices and neurodiversity-informed practices. The importance of language, invitation, and empowerment is emphasized throughout the conversation. This episode serves as a valuable resource for mindfulness facilitators and trainers in the workplace, providing insights on ensuring participant safety and facilitating effective mindfulness practice.

Transformative Impact of Mindfulness

Wendy Quan’s journey is a testament to the transformative power of mindfulness, particularly in helping cope with life-altering events like cancer. Her consistent practice of mindfulness meditation supported her personally and positively impacted her workplace, paving the path for a more mindful organizational culture. Her work outlines the significant potential of mindfulness in improving overall employee well-being and fostering a more harmonious work environment.

Criticality of Proper Training

The importance of credible training in mindfulness facilitation can't be overlooked. It equips facilitators with the necessary knowledge and understanding to lead workplace mindfulness sessions professionally. Wendy Quan emphasizes that training should be focused on evidence-based practices to ensure that mindfulness in the workplace is secular and backed by scientific research, making it accessible and beneficial for all.

Potential Pitfalls and Hurdles

There are potential pitfalls in leading mindfulness practices without adequate knowledge and understanding. Without proper training, facilitators can inadvertently introduce ineffective practices or trigger unpleasant reactions in participants. Wendy Quan discusses the importance of a thoughtfully prepared and embodied approach, the need for trauma-informed practices, and the respect for neurodiversity in participants. This underscores the intricacies of leading mindfulness sessions and the proactive steps needed to ensure participant safety and effectiveness.

The key moments in this episode are:

00:00:01 - Introduction,

00:01:47 - Wendy's Background,

00:03:12 - Impressive Accomplishments,

00:04:00 - Wendy's Personal Journey,

00:07:47 - Capturing Data and Evidence,

00:10:18 - Training and Certification,

00:18:13 - Burning Bridges in the Workplace,

00:19:31 - Lack of Understanding as a Red Flag,

00:21:14 - Participant Safety and Trauma-Informed Practices,

00:23:03 - Neurodiversity-Informed Facilitation,

00:25:19 - Setting Up and Leading Mindfulness Practices,

00:34:26 - Getting Started with Offering Mindfulness Services,

00:37:14 - Mindfulness Plus Specialized Services,

00:39:12 - The Power of Mindfulness in Personal Services,

00:39:36 - Wrap-up and Gratitude,

00:40:02 - Conclusion,

Mentioned in this episode:

The Mindful Coach Podcast

The Mindful Coach Association produces this podcast. An association for coaches and other helping professionals who value mindfulness in life and work. The association was created to help create community, and provide resources and ongoing learning for those aligned with its published principles and practices. If you're aligned with this work, join us at https://mindfulcoachassociation.com or contribute to our work with link provided. All funds go directly to cover costs and growth.

So welcome to this edition of the Mindful Coach podcast. I'm thrilled to have our special guest today, Wendy Quan. And let me tell you a little bit about Wendy. She is the founder of The Mindful Coach Association and a pioneer in mindfulness facilitator training and certification for the workplace, where experienced meditators learn best practices to implement mindfulness at work and become skilled mindfulness facilitators. She's a workplace mindfulness expert in the five star rated course transform Your Work Life with Mindfulness, which is also called Mindfulness for the Workplace on no less than the great courses Wondrium and Audible.

So she's in excellent company with that cohort and so you can learn to create better experiences for yourself at work and in life with these courses. Wendy has taught at many mindfulness events, including at the Greater Good Science Center of UC Berkeley with a corporate background in human resources, information technology and change management. Together with her personal experience of mindfulness through cancer, she has trained over 425 mindfulness facilitators worldwide and gratefully served in organizations big and small, including Google and the National Park Service. Wow. Wow.

That is an amazing list of accomplishments and achievements.

So welcome to the show. I'm really happy to see you and have you Wendy. Oh, Brettt. Thank you. That's such a kind introduction.

I'm happy to be here with Know. We have been talking for quite a while, back and forth, off and on over the last year or so and I'm just so impressed with the work that you're doing and the way you have really taken created something really powerful, I think, in The Mindful Coach Association. And for those listeners, The Mindful Coach Association, that's her main website, The Mindful Coach Association. And you can go there and you can see the various courses and offerings and services that she has. But let's find out a little bit about how you got started.

Like how was it that you wound up engaged in a really deep way with mindfulness at a personal level. Okay. Thank you, Brett. I'll try to keep it shorter. Everybody has quite a story, right?

I would say that I was living a very typical, know, stressed out dealing with career and job and family and all sorts of things. So I took a number of different meditation courses over the years, like probably 20 years ago, but I never took it that seriously until I had basically whack on the side of the head. So in 2010, I got cancer and I had to take time off work. Yes, that really stops you in your tracks when you get something like that. Yeah, I can only imagine.

Yeah. So through that whole experience, I realized that mindfulness meditation could be really powerful for me. And that's when I dove pretty deeply in it. I took a lot more training in it, I practiced every day and it became my foundation for getting through all of that. So basically what happened to get me to where I am today is at that time.

So back in 2010, I went back to work and at that time I was working for a healthcare provider, health insurance provider, and I was the manager of change management and helping the company through a huge business transformation. So super stressful job. And my coworkers asked me how I got through the cancer experience, so not easily, but so smoothly I would say. And that's what started all this. Brett.

They asked me what I knew about mindfulness meditation and could I show them. And back then so this was 2011 now, and nobody was talking about Mindfulness. In the organization, was like, what? Right. And I was really quite worried, to be honest with you, about my reputation in the organization, because back then if you meditated, you were a closet meditator.

Most people were. Right. So basically I got about twelve people, my friends, into a room. We made sure we chose a room without windows. I showed them over the couple of weeks, I showed them what I knew.

I started introducing them to mindfulness meditation and it helped them so much, I couldn't believe it in such a short period of time. So they encouraged me to open up these sessions to the entire company. So at that time we had, sorry, I can't remember, I think about 800 people in the organization and I opened it up to the whole company. It was once a week. I did volunteer sessions at lunchtime.

And back then there was no training, there was no course that you could take about implementation in the workplace. Right, that's true. Right. So it was certainly a lot of meditation teacher training programs, but not a lot about Mindfulness specifically, and nothing about the workplace. So I honestly was just winging it and showed them what I knew.

Made some mistakes for sure, but overall the benefit was huge and I'm really glad I sought to capture the data of the benefits that people were reporting. Oh wait, so tell me about that a little bit. You decided, so here you are, kind of like in blazing a trail like mindful is the workplace. Yeah, we can do that and I don't see anybody else doing it, but we're going to. And you're seeing a benefit and then it occurs to you to capture some data.

Yes. How did you go about doing that? Again, I had no template for that or training, but I was the organizational change manager at the time, so what I did. I'm glad you asked that question. Thanks.

Because I went even further with this mindfulness. I combined mindfulness with what I knew about change management, which is about helping people through difficult change, because we were going through a seven year business transformation project that changed every job, every business process in the organization. Oh, man. And so that's a whole other session, maybe. How do you combine change management with mindfulness?

But it was mostly mindfulness, and I just captured what they were saying. What was their state of being, their stress level, their resiliency level, what kind of thoughts were going through their head before coming to any of the sessions, and then after coming to at least five of my sessions, and the data was quite shocking, actually. I was really amazed how much it helped people. So I wrote a paper, a white paper, and the The Mindful Coach Association of Change Management Professionals was calling for white papers. And I was a member of that organization, so I submitted it.

It was peer reviewed, and it won as the annual conference, international conference for change management. And they flew me to Las Vegas, and I presented the paper on stage at Caesar's Palace. And that was the first big thing that, you know, in the workplace, it matters, evidence matters, because not everybody is going to just jump at it just because well, right. It's a business, right. And so they're interested in the metrics.

Right. So being a change manager, I knew what the company was interested in to make change more effective. And the only way you can do that, like having successful change, is by helping people through difficulty in the change, because if they're struggling with it, their mind is not present, they might call in sick, all sorts of things. Right. It has a lot to do with mindset and how they're dealing with the change.

So applying mindfulness to that can be extremely powerful, and I was able to capture that. So the white paper is available on my website if people are interested in okay, that's fabulous. We'll link to it in the show notes so people can look that up. Okay, go ahead. Yeah, sorry.

Okay, I'll try to wrap the story up. So basically, I started to then help other organizations with mindfulness. And then in 2014, I started training other people to do what I was doing. So that's what The Mindful Coach Association has become is facilitator mindfulness facilitator training and certification for the workplace. So to teach people not only how to become a skilled mindfulness facilitator, but what about all the rubber hits the road logistics about getting organizations interested?

How do you do that once they're interested? What do you do and how do you do it? So there's all of that. So your training covers didn't mean to interrupt, but your training is not only about what to do in terms of how do I guide and lead mindfulness trainings, but also about the business engagement aspect as well. Yes.

It covers really sort of the logistical and the support aspect of all of this. And how do you get leadership support? That's such a big know in The Mindful Coach Association, we have a lot of coaches who are interested in doing more work with organizations. And so there's a piece there that isn't specifically about mindfulness, but all the coaches, they value mindfulness in their work. I understand the distinction here is that what you're doing is you're helping a coach or anyone basically learn to become a mindfulness facilitator to these organizations.

Is that a fair statement? Yeah, that's a good way to describe it, for sure. I mean, basically it's not always clear cut, though, because there's a lot of people in my facilitator community around the world who are coaches, and they use mindfulness in their practice in different ways, meaning that they could use mindfulness in the way that you teach. Brent so as you're interacting with people, how do you do that mindfully? So your experience is a mindful and meaningful experience, and how do you build that relationship with your client mindfully?

And that's what you're an expert on training people on. And what I do through The Mindful Coach Association is kind of the next step. If somebody wants to learn how to lead mindfulness as a service, a service offering, or they just want to add, like, sprinkle in mindfulness as they're dealing with clients, whether that's like one on one client or a group or an organization, it doesn't matter. There's ways to kind of sprinkle in mindfulness and you don't even necessarily have to call it mindfulness. I see, right.

But you're still skilled at what do you do and how do you do that. Interesting. So what you're saying is that you're not necessarily saying it's a straight up mindfulness training. Someone could take it and put their own kind of flavor on what they do in a mindful way. I'm a little fuzzy on that.

Okay, well, the people that come into my program need to have a certain level of eligibility, so they're already mindfulness or meditation practitioners with a pretty solid foundation. So my program does not teach people how to practice mindfulness. It's the next level of okay to transition from a personal practitioner who embodies mindfulness. How do you transition to helping others with mindfulness? How do you speak about mindfulness?

How do you facilitate mindfulness? How do you make sure you're leading people in the right way? So does that make sense? Yeah. So they're bringing a mindfulness program into an organization, in this case.

So that's really powerful and so desperately needed these days. That's really great. And so somewhere along the way, you got invited to do the class for great courses. And that sounded like, from our conversations, like, how should I say achievement unlocked, like a digital badge, hey, I achieved this. It's like, amazing.

So did that just surface how did that happen? Good question. They found me on LinkedIn, to be honest with you, power and social media, my website and contacted me and it was a good fit. So that course is all about helping people create a better experience of work for themselves. Like what are all the difficulties people have at work and how do you practically, in an easy way, apply mindfulness to change your experience of your work, even if things around you don't change?

That's so amazingly needed these days.

I'm sure you've had great, good success with that course. And I'll link to that in the show notes as well so people can look at it. Because certainly there's so much stress and tension and the great resignation and people trying to find meaning these days and insisting on creating good boundaries there about this is crossing the line. I'm not willing to take this anymore because I value myself more than the company policy. Exactly.

So thank you for that amazing work. Now, in terms of the people out there who are interested in maybe teaching mindfulness, what do you think is the value of having a training like this so that they can go into this well prepared? What could happen if they don't what happens if they don't have this kind of a background? Right, that's a really good question because I find that a lot of people, including myself back in 2011, we all come to our life through our own lens and experience, obviously. Right.

So what I find is, as an example, is somebody who is a meditator, for instance, will come to me and want to teach other people. But their definition of mindfulness is not quite right, for instance, or there's a lot of confusion. Understandably, there's a lot of confusion because there's no standard out there as to what are the different categories and types of meditation and where does mindfulness fit in there, because that's just one type of meditation. And of course, with mindfulness there's what I call micro practices that you can incorporate as you go about your day. Yes, I'm a big fan of that.

Right. So I think that sort of the dangers of not being trained are a few I'd like to point out, because it's really about how and what do you lead. I think what's difficult and not right is if somebody thinks they know what mindfulness is based on whatever experience they happen to have had and they start showing other people without any training because these days it's very different than it was in 2011. The mindfulness field has really matured. There's a lot more maturing to do and research, for sure, but it really has come a long way.

So there's different discussions and leaders in the mindfulness field, including myself, who are really, actually quite concerned about people showing people in the wrong way. Like for instance, I would say like burning your bridges in the workplace. So let's say you start leading Mindfulness in the Workplace without any training, and of course you've got the best intentions in mind and you want to help people, and that's all wonderful, wonderful stuff. But do you really know the best practices in leading Mindfulness in the Workplace? Have you taken credible training like MBSR?

Mindfulness based stress reduction. That's the gold standard out there, developed by John Cabot Zinn many, many years ago. But let's say they've come to the practice through a Buddhist lens, for instance, or a spiritual lens, and there's a lot of best practices that I teach about the workplace. It's really, really important to have a workplace friendly program that is secular, meaning non spiritual and non religious, and important that it's evidence based, that everything you're showing has evidence behind it. Okay.

Trauma informed and neurodiversity informed as well. Oh my God, thank you for that. I really appreciate you naming that specifically. It's a big deal. It is.

And again, we could spend hours, Brett, just on those topics, right. You know about that. So here's an example. I've had people come into my program and it's totally fine because through the program they learn so much and then they come out of the program understanding what's right. But people might come in and say, okay, I've been leading Mindfulness in the Workplace for a while, and I use singing bowls and I use Affirmations, and I have people sit in a cross legged position and have their fingers, their forefinger and their thumbs touching, and I'll just say, oh, can you tell me more about that?

And why are you doing that? And they say, I don't know, that's just something I've seen at workshops. So that's what I teach. But without a really good understanding of what they're doing. Yeah, that's a clue, I think, right?

I don't know. I'm going to interject here for just a moment because it's kind of like I have a bias around this. It's pretty strong in coaching. It's kind of like what I call the coaching intent. Right.

I want to know why I'm saying what I'm saying. It's not just something I heard somebody do. It's like there's a reason, there's a rationale. So if you find yourself teaching anything and you don't know why you're doing it, that's a flag. Yes, thank you for saying that.

Yeah, it really is, because you might teach it, but then somebody asks you a question, well, why are we doing that? And they're like, oh, I don't know, I just enjoy it myself. I thought you guys would too.

That's a point there, right. Being careful about realizing that we all have blind spots. I do too. There's things that I don't know, but you need to make sure you understand what it is you're leading. So that's about what you're leading.

And then I would also say about how you're leading is really around participant safety, and that raises eyebrows sometimes. Like, what do you mean participant safety. This is all about helping people calm down and reduce stress. Well, you know what? It's a lot more than that because there is trauma informed facilitation and practices.

You can't know what people are going through in their day to day life and sometimes people will say, oh, I've been with this group for a long time, I know them really well. Well, you may not know what happened to them the night before. For instance, something bad could have happened or they had trauma currently or in the past or bad anxiety. So we have to be really careful and knowledgeable about how to lead people that may be triggered by some of these practices. There are some people, for instance, who if you do like box breathing, box breathing is very common and enjoyable by some people, where you breathe in for account of four, you hold your breath for account of four, you breathe out for account of four, and then you hold again.

That's called box breathing. And some people love it. But you know what? Sometimes it triggers anxiety in people. So again, that's an example of as a facilitator, what would you do about that?

How do you be proactive? Right? Because I've heard stories like people saying, hey, I'm being triggered by this mindfulness practice and the instructor is just saying, well just go back and keep doing it and just be present with the experience. And sometimes that's good advice and sometimes that's really not good advice. And knowing the differences makes a massive difference.

Yes, exactly. And I think too closely related is neurodiversity informed practices and facilitation. It's kind of similar in the way that we need to realize that everybody is unique and everybody in terms of neurodiversity is on a continuum. I see it as a continuum and which means that everybody has their own unique way of experiencing things, how they take things in, how they experience the world basically. Right?

So again, an example is maybe breathing a certain way, like rhythmic breathing is very good for some people and for other people it could really cause them a lot of anxiety and some people are more able to experience mindfulness through the feeling of touch or smell the different senses, for example. So neurodiversity and foreign facilitation takes into account a lot of options giving people options for how and explanations too as to why one person might experience something and like it and the next person beside them doesn't. Yeah, I love it that you mentioned and explanations because I think it's really important that people who are neurodiverse who do experience things differently don't feel like they're wrong or there's something wrong with them. I encounter people frequently that like a contemplative practice of just sitting down and watching your thoughts is not going to work for them and they need something that's more of a somatic engagement, something that's more tactile or visual perhaps. And it takes some high quality attention on my part or whoever's facilitating part to notice, help them orient around what's going to work for them, and then create a practice or prescribe a practice.

Sometimes I call it a prescription to help them engage in a mindful way. Is that the kind of thing you're talking about? Absolutely, yeah. Good examples. That's really great.

Wow. Go ahead, please. I would just like, if I may say one more thing, because I think it's really important, too, is that it's not just about reading a script when you're helping somebody else or leading a meditation or leading a mindfulness practice. It's not just, oh, I found this cool script, I've got to read it out. It's so much more than that.

How do you set up before you start leading that practice? What is it you're saying to get people prepared and perhaps have the best experience possible as they go through that practice. So setting it up before and also, how are you leading it when you're leading it and then afterwards, too, what kinds of things can you do? And if somebody doesn't do this well and they're just reading a script, quite honestly, it could certainly sound like they're just reading a script and they're not embodying it. Yeah, there's so much as you know about embodying experience yourself, which helps create that environment for other people.

There's such a trust that goes on. I've been thinking about this lately because I've been leading a few meditations, and I remember when I was being coached and going through coach training, there were some people leading meditations and they would lead us into places that I kind of wish I wasn't being led to. Like, experiences that were like, wait, what? No, I don't want that experience. And I realized there's a real implicit trust.

Whenever you close your eyes as you go inside and you're listening to someone's voice, that's a really big act of faith and trust. And it just really oh, I don't know how to say it just kind of amplified in a big way how much I need to honor and respect that whenever I'm in that role. Absolutely. And no matter what we do, it doesn't mean that nobody will ever have a bad experience or get triggered. We can't control that.

But what we can do is do what we can proactively. And then if somebody is triggered, being able to recognize what that looks like and how to deal with it as well. And a lot of it, too, is wording and like what you're saying, Brad? I think there's a lot to be said about inviting people. Exactly.

Not telling them what to do. It's one of the biggest mistakes that new facilitators make because they're reading a script and they're saying, okay, now do this with your breath and do this with your posture. And that's too rigid and too prescriptive, and it doesn't invite people and leave it open enough. Yeah, that's so beautiful and so necessary that language matters so much. And so the precise use of language is crucial.

I had some great coaching in that in Somatic Psychotherapy, where it was in the Hokomi style, which is very not Buddhist, but it has its roots in things like nonviolence, and you let the client lead. And so there was always just invitations to the client rather than directives. And so that was very powerful. And the other thing that I do, and I'm sure I don't know if this resonates in your work or not, but I always express and frequently give the client permission or the student permission to not do what I'm saying. Exactly.

If this works, if you feel like, if this is okay, should you wish you're invited to do this as you see fit or as is aligned with you, and that empowers them to say no and not feel bad about it. Yeah, that's a great point, because if we don't do that as we're leading, what can happen is people will feel like they're failing or they feel out of place, like, oh, everybody else is probably doing this, but I'm not, so I'm not going to come back next time. Yeah. For instance. So basically, I think we'll call it dangers, but one of the mistakes that we can make is not being aware of all that.

And then I've seen some groups that start, okay, and then people start dropping off, but the facilitator doesn't know why because it's not often that somebody would give them the feedback that, you know what? I'm feeling anxious after your sessions. Because people I mean, that's another thing. People assume that you're supposed to become all blissful and everything after a practice, and if they're not, they think, oh, well, this is not for me. So we don't often get feedback from people who are not happy with what we might be leading.

That's really good point, because good feedback is really hard to get in the world. That's actionable. I totally appreciate that. That's really true. One of the most valuable things in the facilitator community is that we have what I call practice sandboxes.

So it's like, come on into the sandbox. And we have very small groups, like maybe four to six people. And people get an opportunity to lead their practice with their peers in a very safe environment. We're here to make mistakes and to get constructive feedback. And that's super helpful because there's a lot of times we don't realize what we're doing.

Maybe it's body language, maybe it's how we're saying certain words or the script we're using, all that sort of thing. Well, that's really powerful because there's no substitute for practice. And the feedback is crucial because you can't course correct without multiple points of view. You need lots of people to tell you how you are to get an idea of what you're really like.

I'm old enough character that I've had a lot of feedback around the way I do things. So I feel really solid in the way I come across. And that doesn't mean of course I can't make improvements, but it's great to be in a place where I know because I've had 600 people tell me and so 500 of them say the same thing. You kind of get a sense that, okay, well, there's something about that.

They're not just making that up. So getting that feedback often and from lots of different folks is a really great way to feel solid in your skills. And that then helps you create rapport with people because they feel you being authentically connected to who you are and the way you're coming across. And that just magnifies the impact of what you're doing. So much.

So I really feel like that's a very powerful offering you have there. The sandbox in peer coaching that way so magnificent. What else are you doing? How can people find you and engage with your work? My website is Zommonkey.com.

That's the best way. And my contact information is on there and also LinkedIn. Wendy Quan on LinkedIn and I'm happy to receive any questions from anybody. If people want to email me, it's Wendy@thecommonkey.com. Thank you so much, Wendy.

We'll put all of that in the show notes. Any parting suggestions to our coaches and other helping professionals out there who are in the world of doing mindful present work with their people? There's a lot I could share and happy to share anytime. A couple of things, I guess, when it comes to mindfulness, I think, just to reiterate, it's really important to really understand it yourself and embody it, make it who you are before you even think about showing other people how to practice. And if you want to approach organizations or offer mindfulness services as part of your services, I really recommend that it be workplace friendly, evidence based, trauma and neurodiversity informed, for sure.

It depends on the audience though. There's definitely leeway there in terms of if somebody is leading like a specific community group that's maybe a spiritual group or something, then of course the scope of what you lead can be different. So again, just being really open to what people are offering, but making sure that you understand what you're offering is the key. Beautiful. Well, and I'm going to ask one more question because I can hear my audience asking in my imaginary senses, I'm imagining if I was in the audience, what would I want to ask?

Wendy? And as I'm channeling the audience and going, so how do you get started with that? How does one decide, I want to start offering these services to business? What's, like your top of mind, this is what you do to get started? Hit us.

I hope I'm answering your question in the way you hope, so let me know if I don't. I would always say a couple of things that. When you're starting your marketing around it, I would say make sure you call it mindfulness and not meditation. And of course, when you're leading mindfulness, it can be the micro practices or it could be mindfulness meditation. But workplaces absolutely are tuned into that word called mindfulness and their interest, most organizations are interested and they just know that we should be doing something about that.

Whether they take action or not, it's a different thing. So that's one thing. And I would say that when I do coaching for my facilitators who are starting a business, the ones that are most successful are the ones who can integrate mindfulness with other skills, other services. And coaching is absolutely one of those situations that it goes really well together. So another way to say that is I noticed that if somebody starts only a mindfulness services business, if they're trying to make that their bread and butter, it's very actually difficult to do that.

Okay. Only offering mindfulness services, like I said, if you're integrating it with something else, whether it's kind of more implicit and you're kind of just working it into what you're already doing, or you actually have a separate service called mindfulness workshops, that's okay. But people who are doing more than just mindfulness are more successful at it. There's certainly people who are doing this on a volunteer basis. It's not about building a big organization or they're just kind of doing it on the side.

And whatever trickles in, whatever money trickles in is great. So there's all different kinds of scenarios out there. Yeah, that's perfect. That's exactly what I was asking about. So leading with making sure that it's mindfulness involved in terms of like when they're looking for someone to do mindfulness, you want that word in your offering and then also combining it with something that you have an expertise in that you can facilitate so that it's mindfulness plus a service of some kind.

So it has a particular engagement beyond just mindfulness, but mindfulness engaged in some way in the organization. Yeah, thank you. And I think I'd go a little bit further with that and say and add to what I said that one thing that can be very effective is not just saying, I am teaching mindfulness, take my mindfulness course. That could work for sure, but it's more about what's the goal if you put your mind into the client's head, what are the things that they're looking for. And the first things that usually come to mind are stress reduction, calming down.

And that's all good, but if you have sort of a niche market who has something very specific, like for instance, this was a bit of a surprise to me, but one of our Facilitators does one on one mindfulness coaching, integrating it into their services, and she's a professional makeup artist. Oh, that's very interesting. It is. There's a huge variety of people in the community, so it's not just okay, how do I sell to this organization? But she is a professional makeup artist, and she is integrating Mindfulness into what she's doing.

So the person has a very different experience because what she's, I think dealing with a lot is a client's lacks in self confidence, in how they look. Sure. So here's a really neat and unique example of how you can help somebody with maybe a bit of a mindfulness practice or just tuning into how they feel with the makeup on. For instance, like, do you feel your confidence boosting? There's so many creative ways that you mindfulness.

So that's what I'd say, too, is maybe think about targeting what people are looking for. What are the sore pain points? Right. And saying we're using mindfulness to help you get there. Beautiful.

That's fabulous. That just opens a big door for a lot of people who are doing personal services. I can imagine mindfulness in hair, mindfulness and personal training. So many ways where you're one on one with somebody and just taking it to another level. Right.

Wow. So powerful. That's brilliant. So thank you so much for joining us today. I know this is going to be a pin to the top of the list episode, and so I really appreciate it.

Wendy, we'll have all the notes of the resources that you mentioned in the show, so I don't know what else to say, but blessings to you and thank you so much for being on the show. Oh, thank you. It was fun talking to you, and I hope this was really helpful to your listeners. I'm sure it will be. Thank you so much.

You're welcome. Okay, so let's.