Leadership Embodiment Workshop June 2021

Leadership Embodiment: Cultivating Clear Minds, Open Hearts, and Steady Cores

Include Others, Listen Deeply, Speak Up in a Unified Way with  Leadership Embodiment taught by Olivia Cheever, EdD, GCFP, Certified Leadership Coach and Elizabeth Valentine, LMT, CST, Certified Leadership Coach

Body-based awareness to be more fully ourselves:

As we step into a new place and transition from the past few years we notice that our nervous systems have gone through a lot. 

Let’s explore bringing our nervous systems back into balance to open new doorways to our wisdom, our compassion, and our resilience.

What is it that you are moving away from and moving towards in your life? How do you embody this? How do you generate what you want in your life now? How do you rejoin your family, community, and co-workers when you have had to be isolated?

Are you ready to cultivate more of a practice around this in your daily life? In this online class, we share tools from Aikido and Mindfulness, from Leadership Embodiment, created by Wendy Palmer. They help us to cultivate that felt sense of knowing how to come from Center. While doing so, how can we be compassionate toward ourselves and others with open hearts, clear minds, and steady cores? 

When we access compassion what do we notice? That is the experience that we cultivate through the body in shifting to “Center” from “Personality”. The more we practice, the more we are able to feel the change and the development of actual discernment, compassion, and resilience in our bodies. We will bring up our own examples in order to apply these LE tools to the real life situations we are grappling with.

In this work, we will simulate low grade stress situations to flush up our own response under pressure. Then we will practice some tools from LE to cultivate coming back to Center. Our focus will be getting clear on our tendencies and having the option or choice to shift them in our daily lives. We will practice it here in the class.

Because of being online, it changes how we teach the simulation exercises. We propose that you invite someone in your “bubble” to join in for certain simulation exercises during the class, so you will experience pressure in your body. If you aren’t able to have a partner, we will also be having you imagine the physical pressure. Our goal is to start a practice here with you and have your nervous systems learn how to apply it in the real world.

Through these practices, we unify 3 centers: Head, Heart, and Core while cultivating Wisdom, Compassion, and Resilience. This way of connecting cultivates deeper listening, more inclusion, and the capacity to speak up without being aggressive.

In this 5 hour class, we will be practicing various Centering tools which will change our physiology, our presence, and therefore the direction of our conversations from opposition to inclusion. Noticing when we are attached to persuading someone rather than deeply listening to their point of view which may not be ours.

We can practice these tools in moments of pressure, disconnection or stress to have more choice and think and act more skillfully.

Through simulation exercises we will take away:

• the ability to identify our signature stress pattern or how our system reacts under pressure

• the ability to shift through our body from our reactive state to a responsive skillful state -from “Personality”  to “Center”

• ways to re-engage clarity and compassion when faced with conflict or opposition or “Difficult Conversations”• practices to synchronize the physical and energetic system with what is being said verbally

DATE: Saturday June 5th, 2021 on Zoom

FEE:   $55

TIME:   See Class schedule for your time zone below:

Pacific Time (PDT)
8:30 am – 10:30 am with a brief 10 minute mid 1st half session break
10:30 am – 11:15am Longer Break
11:15am – 1:30pm with a brief 10 minute mid 2nd half session break

Eastern Time (EDT)
11:30 am – 1:30 pm with a brief 10 minute mid 1st half session break
1:30 pm – 2:15 pm Longer Break
2:15 pm – 4:30 pm with a brief 10 minute mid 2nd half session break

Central European Summer Time (CEST)
5:30pm – 7:30pm with a brief 10 minute mid 1st half session break
7:30 pm – 8:15 pm Longer Break
8:15 pm – 10:30 pm with a brief 10 minute mid 2nd half session break

Dr. Olivia Cheever is a certified Leadership Coach, consultant, trainer and Feldenkrais Method® somatic educator committed to joining with others to facilitate Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. She has worked with multicultural populations during her teaching/coaching career at Lesley University and Longy School of Music of Bard College. She has been engaged in Lesley University’s Courageous Conversations around race, gender, and privilege. Her cross-cultural doctoral research at Harvard looked at the ethical and empathic education of Indigenous healers and psychiatrists. With her interdisciplinary background as a Harvard trained therapist, somatic practitioner, and coach working with trauma and stress management, she provides a safe environment for people to experience their embodied presence in interaction with others with ease, alignment, inclusion and confidence in work and home environments. She works one on one and with groups on line and in person in her teaching/training/coaching practice based in Needham, MA and Bristol, VT.

Elizabeth Valentine is a certified Leadership Coach, consultant, trainer, and a somatic practitioner and educator committed to engaging with others to bring the practices of embodiment to facilitating Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Her Anthropology studies at Boston University instilled a cross-cultural perspective which led her to create her Holistic Wellness practice in France, for a diverse population which included immigrant women presenting health, trauma-based issues and inequitable power relationships. Elizabeth’s diverse experience also includes leading embodiment programs at The Kroc Center of Boston, And Still We Rise Productions, various Massachusetts Public School settings, the Restorative Justice Community and Unitarian Universalist programs in the North East. She works both virtually with organizations and one on one with her coaching and teaching in her private practice in West Concord MA.