Still on the Mat in 2015!
Another year has passed and I am happily still on the mat. Bringing together ideas from multiple disciplines and practices can be a bit awkward at times, and downright daunting! Yet the journey is its own reward. As I look back over 2014 and complete the first workweek of the New Year, I would like to share a few reflections.
2014 brought some really great opportunities.
While I was attending my yoga teacher training early in the year, the original concept for Management on the Mat was born. I have since had the privilege of teaching a couple of weekly vinyasa yoga classes and sharing the management on the mat concept with scholars and practitioners at the International Society for Organization Development and Change’s annual conference in Amsterdam, where I got some really great feedback. I developed and pilot tested the first workshop this year as well. Stay tuned for your opportunity to learn new ideas in a new and exciting way in the coming months!
My colleagues and I also produced the first edited collection of writings on quantum storytelling concepts. Quantum storytelling applies quantum physics inspired concepts to organization development and is an early exploration of time, space, matter, and spirituality in that context. This was a very challenging and exciting project, to say the least! Being Quantum: Ontological Storytelling in the Age of Antenarrative is available from the publisher, Cambridge Scholars, and can be purchased on Amazon.com as well. I had the honor of co-editing with David Boje, whose patience in showing me the ropes was nothing short of amazing.
Dr. Daphne DePorres and I did a study of perceived fractal patterns in the social fabric of our local yoga scene and gave a talk at the International Conference of Management Cases in Greater Noida, India. The study was a lot of fun and we learned a lot about the community in the process. This marks the third published paper where the method of asking people where they see fractal patterns in a particular context and using that to identify scalable themes was used. We coined the term “ontological systems mapping” as a result, since taking this approach can help to identify deep, underlying rules and principles that characterize social networks.
We also hosted the 4th annual Quantum Storytelling Conference in Las Cruces, New Mexico in December and were pleased to greet many of our regular contributors, along with some new faces. There were many new ideas shared and plenty of creative applications of the concepts my colleagues and I have been developing together for the last few years. I gave a talk on ontological systems mapping where I drew from the yoga study and my doctoral dissertation to begin developing a tool for identifying the unwritten rules in a social system through storytelling centered on recurring patterns.
Personally it was a year of tremendous personal growth for my family and me. We laughed a lot, enjoyed the simple things, and were fortunate to have time together. There were many other great opportunities, challenges, joys, and struggles— all of which made 2014 a year well lived on every level.
It was a year of hard work and positive growth in all directions.
Dr. Phil Brown of Six Points Consulting challenges his coaching clients to pick a word for the year in January and this year my word is “thrive.” I chose it because it’s more than just growth, covers the full range of generative experiences in both the personal and professional realms, and seems to also encompass “joy” (last year’s word). I have some exciting new projects in the works, not to mention finishing the ones I started in 2014 and I am diving head first into the warm, pleasant waters of this new year of opportunity.
So how about you? What’s the good word for you and your success in 2015?
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