I’ve been working with a women’s aid organisation that is running a rolling empowerment programme to help women become strong and independent individuals. The programme covers themes on inner self, emotions, behaviours and decision-making - that’s the bit I’ve been brought in to cover.
The programme as a whole is to help women, who are or who have been in traumatic relationships with their partners, to understand how life experiences, emotions and decisions can affect mental and physical health. It also covers how other people and the environment affect them, plus demonstrates resources to them that they can use to help move forward practically. For instance, the women have been learning about car maintenance, plumbing and finance, too.
The organisation has found extraordinary uplift in the well-being of their clients who had experienced 1-1 support and were then invited to join this group programme with 12 participants in each cohort. Participants stated that they’d never experienced help where it supported them in such a whole way. More than this many participants have formed bonds and set up whats-app groups. Some groups are staying connected, becoming friends and supporting each other.
I’d been invited to design and facilitate sessions on leadership and wellbeing. I designed the sessions in such a way that the wellbeing session served as foundation for the leadership one. I drew content from both agile values and concepts, and from my wellbeing practice. Each time I run these sessions they emerge in a different way because it is the needs of the participants in the group which drive where we get to and how we get there.
In one of my wellbeing sessions we started with a colour meditation.They found the meditation relaxing and also uplifting as it provided them with space to focus on just themselves, and also to visualise positive states. We had a discussion around colour which involved clothes, environments and emotions, and the women had many stories to tell about their relationship with colour. The women here tend to speak from the heart and the stories have become a key feature in my sessions.
In one group we created journey maps to draw out and reflect on all the positive influences and moments in their life that helped to shape their strengths. The participants come from different walks of life, but it is clear that the struggles they had been through had negative effects on their self-confidence and self-belief.
Then in one of the leadership sessions, I invited participants to consider how their journeys displayed similar positive leadership qualities they’d just identified to be key in a good leader. This really got them to pause and reflect deeply. A shift occurred when they pointed to each other in the group and articulated how they demonstrated leadership qualities such as courage, determination, listening, care, compassion and respect. They could see it in others, and only when it was mirrored back to them personally, could they begin to acknowledge that they might hold leadership qualities themselves.
In one of the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® sessions though one participant was struggling with believing she had any leadership qualities at all. She didn’t feel that she was a leader, and yet she was the most academically gifted participant across all the sessions I’d undertaken. She burst into tears and couldn’t bring herself to pick up even one brick, but what happened next was interesting. The other participants built her model for her and reflected it back to her. They had become a team and organised themselves to take care of her and lift her up.
Magic!
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