"How we work together" dialogues
To create space for explicit discussion of team dynamics. Periodically dedicate time to dialogue focused on how the team works together. Topics might include: • How do we typica…
Being B4
Self-Awareness
Ability to be in reflective contact with thoughts, emotions, desires, and actions; to maintain a realistic self-image and to regulate oneself.
Tools for this skill (24)
Adapting Response Patterns
Using Albert Ellis's ABC model (Activating event – Belief – Consequence), participants analyse their own automatic, self-sabotaging reactions under pressure, identify the unhelp…
Body Awareness
Across multiple sessions, participants train attention to their bodily and affective responses inside real learning and work situations — where concentration lives, how tension…
Body Scan Meditation
A guided practice of moving attention slowly and systematically through the body, noticing sensation without trying to change it. Usually done lying down with audio guidance, 20…
Climate Emotions Wheel
A color wheel of climate-related emotions (anger, fear, sadness, positivity and their finer shades) used as a check-in and vocabulary tool: participants locate and name what the…
Cognitive Defusion Practice
The core ACT move of stepping back from a thought so it becomes something you HAVE rather than something you ARE: rephrasing "I don't matter to anyone" as "I am having the thoug…
Guided Journaling (Theory U)
Writing through a scripted sequence of questions that walk the U: from current challenges and frustrations, through looking at your journey and self from outside, to the deeper…
Immunity to Change Map
A four-column mapping process that surfaces why sincere improvement goals stall: (1) the commitment to improve, (2) what I do/don't do instead, (3) hidden competing commitments…
Meditation on Meeting Needs
A ten-minute guided meditation on the machinery underneath consumption: resting with the breath, participants observe moods and feelings as they shift, and notice the subtle sen…
Noticing and naming team patterns in real-time
To develop the team's capacity to notice what is happening in the moment. Cultivate the habit of pausing to name what is happening: • 'I notice the energy dropped when we starte…
Periodic team health assessment
To create structured opportunity for the team to assess its own functioning. Use questions that team members respond to individually, followed by collective discussion. Dimensio…
Process-focused debriefs
To build the habit of reflecting not just on outcomes but on processes. After significant meetings, decisions, or interactions, take 5-10 minutes to debrief not just what was de…
RAIN Meditation
A four-step mindfulness practice for meeting difficult emotion where it stands: Recognize what is happening, Allow it to be here, Investigate with gentle curiosity (in the body,…
Seeds Collecting
A small companion practice to journaling: capture the resonant notations — a phrase, an image, a half-thought — that carry a charge of possible deep change; protect them, return…
Sitting Meditation (Breath-Anchored)
The core formal mindfulness practice: sitting upright, resting attention on a chosen anchor — usually the breath — and each time the mind wanders, gently returning it, without j…
Spiral Journal
A quiet opener: each person draws a spiral and, guided by four prompts read slowly aloud, writes brief reflections into its quadrants — arriving, noticing, remembering, intendin…
Subject-Object Interview
Kegan's research-grade developmental interview: ~60–90 minutes of structured conversation around prompts (angry, anxious, success, torn…) through which a trained interviewer ass…
The Inner Weather Report
A seconds-scale daily micro-practice for Self-Awareness (VCoL collection): Pause for 5-10 seconds and direct attention inward. Notice: What emotion am I feeling right now? What…
The Reaction Pause
A seconds-scale daily micro-practice for Self-Awareness (VCoL collection): When you notice a strong reaction forming, pause before acting or speaking. Observe: 'I notice I am ha…
The Stuck Exercise
A Social Presencing Theater practice: one person embodies a real stuck situation from their life or work as a physical shape ("sculpture 1"), stays with it, and lets the body —…
The Superhero in Me
Through a superhero framing, participants explore their capabilities and challenges by casting them: strengths as a superhero, compensated weaknesses as a sidekick, and challeng…
The Trigger Map
A seconds-scale daily micro-practice for Self-Awareness (VCoL collection): When you notice a strong reaction, pause and name it: 'I notice I'm feeling...' Then ask: 'What trigge…
Time-out signal for process awareness
To enable any team member to pause interaction when communication patterns have become unproductive. Establish an agreed signal (such as forming a 'T' with hands) that any team…
VIA Character Strengths Survey
A free, psychometrically validated self-assessment (~15 minutes, after registration) ranking 24 character strengths across six virtues. The ranked profile becomes material for r…
Also develops it (39)
Acting in Alignment
Participants surface and rank their core values through imagination and ordering tasks, then examine honestly where recent actions expressed or contradicted them, and commit to…
After-action reviews
To extract learning from completed projects while experience is still fresh. Following completion of a project or significant event, gather involved team members. Address four q…
Appreciative framing in team discourse
To balance attention to problems with attention to what is working. When discussing team performance or reviewing work, deliberately include appreciative questions alongside pro…
Climate Circles / Climate Cafés
Hosted talking circles where participants voluntarily share what the climate crisis stirs in them — fear, anger, guilt, hope — in a confidential, non-judgmental space with no fi…
Creating unconditional space for emergence
To create opportunities to explore without pressure to reach conclusions. Periodically create protected time for a different quality of conversation: • No agenda or predetermine…
Drawing Together
Participants tell the story of a challenge and their journey through it using only five symbols — circle, rectangle, triangle, spiral, star-person — drawn, not spoken. Drawings…
DTF Cognitive Assessment & Coaching
A structured interview with a trained DTF analyst that maps a person's current patterns of dialectical thinking — which thought forms (structure, process, relation, transformati…
Fostering Resilience
Participants share real setback experiences and the strategies that got them through — first alone in writing, then in pairs, then harvested with the group — building both a per…
Inside-Outside Presence
Training simultaneous attentiveness: staying in contact with one's own inner state while remaining fully attentive to the surroundings and other people — practiced in exercises…
Intentional pauses
To slow down habitual autopilot responses and create space for more considered engagement. Introduce intentional pauses at key moments: • Before an important discussion, take 30…
Interrelational Meditation
Mindfulness extended into relationship: in pairs, participants alternate between eyes-closed contact with their own present experience and open-eyed, non-judgmental seeing of th…
Intervision on Inner Development
Recurring peer-coaching sessions where participants bring their own inner-development questions — a skill they're working on, a pattern they've noticed — and coach each other wi…
Ladder of Inference
Argyris's classic made practical: walk a charged conclusion back down the ladder — from the action taken, through beliefs, interpretations, and selected data, to the observable…
Learning Mindset Moment
Sustainability work involves learning and adaptation. An openness to learning helps teams adjust approaches rather than defending unsuccessful ones, strengthening the effectiven…
Listening Assessment
A daily solo tracking practice: at day's end, estimate how much of your listening happened at each of Scharmer's four levels — downloading (reconfirming what you know), factual,…
Maintaining momentum through difficulty
Difficult periods can stall team momentum. Resilient teams maintain momentum even through difficulty. During difficult periods, focus on maintaining forward motion: • Identify s…
Meet Yourself at 90
A guided values visualization from the ACT tradition: after settling into body and breath, participants imagine themselves at their 90th birthday, visited by someone who matters…
Mindful Pause (Informal Practice)
The informal half of mindfulness training: bringing awareness deliberately into everyday activities — pausing before responding where one would otherwise act through habit or im…
Multi-horizon tracking
To make visible the team's progress and impact across multiple time horizons. Create a simple tracking tool that includes indicators across at least three time horizons: Operati…
My Natural Next Step
A two-hour workshop for the values–behaviour gap: each participant identifies a small sustainability-related change they keep avoiding because it is uncomfortable, explores with…
Network Relationship Patterns
Quartets use a shared vocabulary of ten recurring work-relationship patterns to name how they actually interact — where energy flows, where it drains — and pick one pattern to s…
NVC Dialogue Practice
Practicing Marshall Rosenberg's core sequence on a real tension, in pairs or triads: state the observation without evaluation, name the feeling, connect it to the underlying nee…
Open Sentences
Pairs sit face to face; one speaks, completing a sentence-stem read aloud by the facilitator ("When I see what's happening to the natural world, what breaks my heart is…"), whil…
Pattern identification discussions
To build the team's ability to notice recurring patterns across situations. Periodically hold a discussion specifically focused on patterns: Internal patterns: What situations k…
Periodic values-behavior alignment review
To examine whether actual behavior aligns with stated values. Review the team's stated values. For each value, discuss: 1. Where have we lived this value well recently? What are…
Personal Polarity Map
Barry Johnson's polarity mapping applied to personal growth: an eight-step paper exercise that reframes a stuck self-improvement wish ("be clearer") as one pole of a polarity wh…
Presence Pause
Presence helps us notice when automatic reactions or convenience are pulling us away from sustainability commitments. It creates space for more considered responses aligned with…
Regular team retrospectives
To create ongoing opportunities to reflect on how the team is working. Hold a retrospective every two to four weeks with a simple format: What has been going well that we should…
Socially Inclusive Research
Using the Wheel of Power and embodied exercises, participants examine power, privilege, and intersectionality in community research — locating themselves on the wheel, feeling w…
Talking with Pixies
A playful externalization of competing inner voices: in quartets, one person describes a stalled ambition while two others voice the "pixies" — contrasting inner voices, one urg…
Team Check-in
An NVC-grounded ritual for teams: unhurried rounds in which each person expresses honestly how they are and what they need, received with empathic listening and no fixing — reco…
The Noticing Game
Two people take turns completing the sentences "Being with you, I notice…" (or "Hearing that, I notice…"), naming present-moment sensations, feelings, and impulses as they arise…
The Repeating Question
In pairs, walking: one person asks the same question again and again — "What do I find enjoyable and important in life?" — receiving each answer in silence and asking once more.…
The Shield
Each participant draws a large shield divided into four fields and fills them with PICTURES (no words) on personal themes — "this describes me…", "a difficulty I got over…", "I…
Threshold Walk
A miniature quest: carrying one real question, each person walks alone in nature for about an hour, stepping deliberately over a chosen threshold — a stick, a stream, a gate — t…
Values emergence through decision-making
Discover actual values through examining decisions and patterns. Try monthly reviews of recent significant decisions, asking: What did we actually prioritize in this decision? W…
Values Mapping
A team maps what matters to it and why: individual values surfaced, clustered into the team's shared landscape, tensions between values named, and the map kept for decisions und…
Visual Narratives
Groups build a collective narrative about stress and translate it into object-based art installations — working with creative constraints, a scent, found objects, and feedback f…
Working through collective resentments and divisions
To address patterns of division that limit the team's capacity. Periodically create space to examine whether the team is carrying resentments or grievances: Are there other team…