How do we hold ourselves with warmth as business owners, and accompany our collaborators through difficult times? The economy, and our present-day business environment, is a trauma all by itself. Based on my own experience and on Mark’s, some of the biggest challenges that self-employed individuals or owners of tiny businesses face include:

• Finding clients that are a joy to work with, while also making enough money.
• Having work that doesn’t simply pause (without consequences) for emergencies, exhaustion or everyday life.
• How to keep going through burnout, exhaustion, and overwhelm when you don’t have the option to slow down.
• Feeling overwhelmed by all there is to do, and wondering if it’s even possible to have a life or take care of yourself.

At the heart of all of these business challenges is our ability to create warm, stable relationships with clients, colleagues, suppliers, and team members, so that we can all work together to keep our ship moving, especially when the waters get rough.

The presence of trauma interrupts stable, sweet relationships. Sometimes it’s our clients’ traumas, sometimes it’s our team’s trauma, and sometimes it’s something from our own past that erupts, creating disconnection and loss of trust and safety.

“Wait!” you might be saying. “I already have my hands full, is it healthy for me to try to be a healer for all of my business collaborators and co-creators?”

When we look at the day-to-day impact of trauma, one of the things we see is that it creates incoherence within our own brains, and in our relationships with others. So whenever we’re working on resolving incoherence – in a team member’s performance, in a client’s or another person’s communication – we’re already working to heal trauma, even if we don’t know it.

In this free class, we’ll learn skills, practices and a philosophy about the everyday impacts of trauma that will carry us through the rapids with more self-confidence, ease and humor.

We will practice:

• Self-resonance for incoherence in ourselves and others
• Meeting incoherence with warmth
• Making clear requests and devising strategies to reduce incoherence

This class is experiential, and will include breakout room sessions. You are also welcome to attend just to listen; participation in breakout rooms is not a requirement.