Summer Leadership Group
Welcome!
This is a leadership group for people who are in professional roles that require them to foster inclusion, support others, and inspire trust. Our goal is to enhance our capacity to do this without burnout by relying on methods from meditation and psychology, neuroscience, macro-social work, and transformative justice studies.
Dates and Link
All of our meetings are virtual, 60 minutes, and every Tuesday at 12 ET from July 16-September 10. (Note: no meeting on August 27th.)
12 pm ET on Zoom
Question and answer sessions are available either via email or zoom chat. Please email lesley@sagelycreative.com to inquire.
Recordings and Resources
July 16th
Article: Healing Systems, Stanford Social Systems Review
SUMMARY
Themes:
Wanting to be connectors, wanting to work with our own awareness of emotion, building our capacity to be with emotion without feeling overwhelmed by it, aligning with our own intention and heart’s desires without guilt and with confidence, listening to others as a tool with higher awareness of our own presence
Individual experiences:
Jamie has a keen awareness of emotional charge that is present but not always paid attention to (by others). This is a talent and a powerful skill, especially when we work with the charge as present in the relationship or in the community without trying to metabolize it ourselves. This will be a focus of some of our somatic and nervous system co-regulation work. Jess has recently taken on work specifically in the humanities. This mirrors Jamie’s experience moving from more cut/dry areas of expertise to spaces where people and emotions are centered. Jess will be working at the intersection of story/narrative and healing by focusing on certain student populations. Her own work on alignment with her highest talents has led her to this position, which will be a model for others. Moving away from a defensive support of the humanities to a confident recognition of it as a site of human healing will emerge as we go. Nadia is in a unique position that allows her to integrate her counseling expertise and her administrative work at a college that is experiencing a cultural transition. Her experience training people to listen and to experience the power of being heard is valuable in this work. We will enhance this process of integration through somatic awareness–increasing our awareness of self while we listen.
Full circle summary:
Our capacity to listen and offer a feeling of being heard will increase over the course of this group. This enhances our own feeling of safety, which radiates to those around us. It starts with recognizing the presence of emotional charge–specifically its impact on our own bodies and nervous systems. Emotional processing allows us to reexamine, reframe, and rewrite the story of our experience. Experiencing our own regulated nervous system and safety helps us align to our highest talents.
July 23rd
Article: Creating the Conditions
SUMMARY
Reverberations - understanding prior experience’s impact and how we engage with it
Working with the neuroscience of trauma healing - using dual attention, metacognition, compassionate witnessing, and conscious envisioning
July 30th
SUMMARY
What does it look like to envision a way outside the triangle?
August 6th
SUMMARY
Bottom up - using nervous system co-regulation to engage differently
Resourcing and grounding with Robyn Smith, LCSW
August 13th
SUMMARY
A summary:
- We can use what we know about trauma healing to foster inclusive community, no matter what our setting. Please see this page from the NICABM.
- Responses to overwhelm create patterns of attention that direct our actions. We can use the skills that we develop from this when we come back to the knowledge that we are valuable first and all experiences stem out from this primary fact. Please see the two images attached. The first is patterned stories and the second is healed stories related to attention.
- Moving outside the triangle is a journey we are on together. We get stuck inside the triangle when we confuse our worth and our role. Our experiences in life will pop up to offer us practice along this route. For example, Jessica’s colleague who felt undervalued or Jamie’s server. And I always think of our children as people inviting us to see value first. A lot can shift when we view every one we're in interaction with as someone who is also working to re-imagine a human-value-first world.
August 20th
SUMMARY
A summary:
We had a lovely discussion today about what it is to stay round and full even in an environment that gives us dents.
Please see here a short how-to for using the compassionate witnessing practice when unraveling perfectionism.
Remember that this approach is taking what we know about compassion and the neuroscience of trauma healing (NICABM link here) and applying it to inclusive community building. It requires both self referencing (as the facilitator, i.e. staying round) and witnessing the whole (moving outside the triangle).
September 3
SUMMARY
Using macro social work models to see all the influencing factors. Learning to be with ourselves and witness without vibrating.
Article on the exercise: https://diversitydifferently.substack.com/p/privilege-doesnt-do-what-you-think
Program Outline
(Open to adaptation based on our interests)
July 16th
We’ll begin by bringing in our own goals and intentions. What is something in your life that you’d like to have more clarity about by the end of this program?
Reading: Healing Systems, Stanford Social Systems Review
July 23rd
Trauma-informed: Recognizing the influence of prior experiences of overwhelm
Characteristics of activated responses
Patterns of attention as sites of redirection
Victim-Perpetrator-Savior triangle: its slippery nature and how to step out of it
July 30th
Discussion: practicing with current issues: s-v-p triangle
August 6th
Nervous system regulation with Robyn Smith, LCSW
Grounding exercises through the practice of resourcing
What trauma therapists do for self-care
Reading: “Face to Face,” an article by Melanie Suchet in Psychoanalytic Dialogues
August 13th
Attention redirection
When we redirect our attention, how might that change the beliefs we have about our own contributions?
What does it feel like to redirect our attention to increase our presence in challenging circumstances?
Moving outside the victim-perpetrator-savior dynamic through the transformative justice model
August 20th
Discussion: practicing with current issues
September 3rd
Moving from Individual to Systems
Keeping our attention on both individual and systemic influences
Using macro social work models
September 10th
Conclusions
Community Commitments
The following community commitment guidelines come from the UNC School of Social Work, with whom Sagely partners to offer research internships. Please feel free to share them. We will be using them for our group as well.
Use "I" statements.
Take space, make space.
Acknowledge intention while naming impact.
Commit to confidentiality. What's said here stays here, but what's learned here leaves here.
Use folks' correct names and pronouns.
We are all on a learning journey. Have grace for ourselves and each other.
Avoid "in group" and coded language by explaining and unpacking acronyms.
Agreements
Sagely agrees to keep all information you share confidential.
Sagely uses visualizations, meditations, and case studies that are specifically designed for our groups. They build off of each other and require some instruction before use. We ask that you not share these materials. If you feel that a particular item might be of use in your organization, please contact us about adapting it for your setting.
Sagely keeps recordings of sessions on this password-protected site. We ask that you do not share recordings with anyone outside the group. We ask that you keep all information that your group members share confidential. Thank you.