CASE STUDY: Transforming Leadership Through Presence
The Compassionate Friends National Conference
CHALLENGE:
100 leaders needed to guide 1,000 grieving parents through a healing journey at their national conference. The challenge: How could they effectively lead others to healing if they themselves were operating from stress and task-orientation, or their own needs weren’t fully tended to?
APPROACH:
Rather than traditional team building or motivation techniques, I introduced a transformative approach combining:
- Guided breath awareness
- Scientific understanding of body-mind connection
- Shift from "doing" to "being"
- Reframing of leadership as "going first"
KEY INSIGHT:
Leaders can't guide others to places they aren’t themselves. By experiencing deep presence and healing firsthand, they become channels for transformation rather than just task managers.
RESULTS:
Leadership Impact: "I'm multi-tasking for this conference, wearing lots of hats. Always going. As soon as you started speaking my friend tapped me and said 'you need to listen.' I shut my laptop and listened. You changed my perspective for the whole day. I breathed. What you do is so needed." - Conference Leader
"What you do... I haven't felt that at peace at these conferences ever before." - Board Member
Organizational Outcomes:
- CEO reported it was "one of the best conferences they'd ever had.”
- Transformed approach to leadership throughout conference
- Created sustainable model for leader well-being