We’ve chosen early morning Pacific Time sessions
because that supports accessibility for people on multiple continents.
If you answer yes to at least one of the questions below, then this course may be key to creating astonishing transformation in how you live and work, individually and within organizations.
For organizations:
- Do you long to find ways to align your organization with its purpose and values?
- Are you concerned about the level of engagement within the organization and want to increase flow and commitment?
- Do you sense that people are pulling in different directions without coherence around core priorities?
- Are people within the organization challenged in making decisions and following through on agreements?
This course is not intended for organizations that want to increase their operational capacity or improve relationships within their staff, though the focus on vision ends up contributing to those goals. It is intended for organizations that are values-driven and purpose-driven, even at cost to profit.
For individuals:
- Would you like to unleash energy and increase your capacity to live in integrity with your values?
- Do you long to connect with a sense of meaning in your life in this time of global crises?
- Are you longing to find what is yours to do and how to leverage what resources you have in response to what is needed at this time?
- Would you want to find ways of liberating yourself from your conditioning to be able to focus where you want?
This course is not intended for those seeking healing and support with personal or familial challenges, though, as with organizational work, we know that focusing on vision ends up doing that. It is intended for those who already have some capacity to be in leadership in their lives.
Who We Are
At a time of rapid transformation and accelerating crises in the world, the three of us are joining together in offering our newest tools, not yet offered to the public. Arnina and Miki are sisters. Emma is a CNVC certification candidate whose work is based on the ongoing integration of Arnina’s and Miki’s bodies of work. The work presented in this course is at the leading edge of bringing together the personal and the systemic. We will focus on purpose and on healing from trauma, and provide immediate support for challenges and long-term capacity building: the inner and the outer.
The course is designed for individuals, communities, and organizations. It follows every part of the diagram with live demonstrations and tools for continuing the work on your own. In addition, we are offering a follow-up course with Emma and assistants available to course participants, designed to provide hands-on support over a longer period for full integration of the material of this course.
This diagram is part of the Mobilizing toward Vision packet, conceived by Miki Kashtan, Emma Quayle, and Verene Nicolas ~ Hand drawn version by Emma Quayle ~ Digital rendering by A. Yaren Köse
What You Can Take Away
This is a short course, and the territory we want to cover is vast. We anticipate a fast pace with lots of content, deep engagement, and as much tenderness as needed to be able to make and to integrate the leaps we want for all of us.
Here are some of the benefits we imagine, for both individuals and organizations:
- Having a clear direction
Even while life continues to be challenging, you can find clarity about what is yours to do – individually and organizationally – and what you can put in place in order to be able to do it. - An accurate assessment of your capacity
An honest and compassionate articulation of your strengths and limitations is key to being able to mobilize resources with clarity and effectiveness. - An understanding of the power of honoring capacity limits
Being able to look at and honor actual capacity is a deep antidote to the cultural imperative to overstretch, individually and collectively. It is a practice of tremendous tenderness that brings with it unexpected power to act. - Increased capacity
Paradoxically, by accepting the limitations of capacity, energy is freed up from the battle against them and becomes more available for mobilizing the resources we have. - Clarity about openings and obstacles in your environment
As you become connected to vision, the passion for mobilizing towards it grows, and clarity about what is most doable in your environment becomes imperative. - Practices to compensate for your limitations
Asyou learn about what keeps you from engaging with purpose and values as you want, you can create practices anchored in your specific vision mobilization structure. These make it possible for you to gain the support and traction you need to continue to move towards vision. - The capacity to bring choice to healing work
Rather than the either/or of healing vs. purpose, this framework offers a purpose-based approach to healing: only working on that which interferes with purpose sufficiently that it cannot be compensated for by having agreements, both individually and collectively. - Agreements to guide your life and work
Everything you discover along the way is anchored in clear agreements that are fully within capacity, so they become a support rather than a burden. - An articulation of all that you do into clear systems
eThe agreements you create, based on your own values and purpose, are clustered into systems that support flow, ease in decision making, and ongoing integration of learning from what doesn’t flow. - An understanding of the systemic
Doing this work, even as an individual, can rapidly increase your ability to see the limits of an individualized lens and to focus, instead, on growing collective capacity.
If you want to know more about the work, you can find out more by downloading a copy of the Mobilizing toward Vision packet.
Course Outline
Given the level of interest in Miki’s and Arnina’s courses across the globe, we are scheduling this course at a time that is most likely to be accessible to people in multiple continents: Sunday at 7:30am Pacific time, which is early afternoon in parts of South America, afternoon in Europe and Africa, evening in much of Asia, and later in Eastern Asia. We hope you will choose to support this commitment to global reach by waking up early if you are in the Pacific time zone.
The first five sessions are mostly focused on individuals, though the exact same principles and ways of working also apply to groups and organizations, and we welcome questions and input from those whose focus is organizational. The last two sessions are entirely focused on applying everything learned so far to groups and organizations.
August 8: Moving towards Vision as a Path of Liberation ~ THIS SESSION IS FREE!
With Arnina, Emma and Miki
Most of us know life as it has been given to us is not working, and only few of us have a clear vision of an alternative, on any scale, that we can fully stand behind. The vision mobilization framework begins with identifying and connecting with our vision – for ourselves, for our families, for our organizations, and for the world. Moving from seeing what isn’t working to having a clear vision of possibility unleashes energy for living and for working for change.
August 15: Values and Purpose: Closing the Gap
With Arnina, Emma and Miki
The gap between the “now” and the vision is both internal and external. Most of us do not have the capacity to live and function internally in a way that is aligned with our vision. And, around us, the overwhelming majority of the systems and general condition of the world is based on scarcity, separation, and powerlessness; they are not aligned with principles of flow, togetherness, and choice.
Once we wake up to vision and see the gap, we can move ever closer to vision both internally and externally via two pathways. Internally, as individuals or organizations, we name our values based on identifying qualities within the vision and defining how those qualities are lived. Given the reality of how the world functions, though, we can’t fully close the gap internally. Here is where purpose comes in: what part of closing the vast outer gap that exists do we want to take on – individually or with others within an organization – as our purpose? Both values and purpose emerge from and pull towards the vision while being attentive to the reality of the now: our current capacity.
August 22: Naming Capacity and Choosing Focus
Arnina and Emma
Our capacity – both internally and externally, individually and collectively – is limited. Many current cultures are steeped in patriarchal principles of control, along with the imperative for more, for overstretching, for ignoring limits, for being tough, and for overworking. This is true even within those groups and organizations working to create change in the world and to free all of us from those very patterns.
This session focuses all of us on humility and on honoring limits and bringing tenderness to capacity. From there, we can choose – based on accurately assessing all that goes into our individual and collective capacity – where we want to put our energy, internally and externally, in terms of moving towards vision. This constitutes our approach to a theory of change.
August 29: Completing the Foundations
Emma
This session completes the cycle of the vision mobilization framework. We are not planning any new material for this session. Instead, we plan to review, answer questions, and offer coaching and support for those who are ready to put into practice what we are doing week by week.
September 5: Agreements as Support Structures
Emma and Miki
This session is designed to completely turn upside down everything we know about agreements: why we make them, why we break them, and why we hate them. Based on all the tenderness, humility, clarity, and passion that we anticipate will gather in the first four weeks, this session aims to propose the following:
- We make agreements to support us where our vision isn’t integrated, and only there. This is because even when we wake up to the depth of patriarchal conditioning we all live in and our vision pulls us forward, patterns and conditioning still interfere with the flow of moving towards it unless we anchor our pull in clear and helpful agreement.
- We break agreements because they are outside capacity and/or outside willingness. If we are attentive to those limits, most agreements will be kept.
- We hate agreements because they are not based on choice and clarity, and thus often feel like rules imposed on us. If we make agreements based on accurate assessments of what is going on relative to our vision, we will experience them as support.
The core takeaway is that every time we take action that increases capacity, we shrink the gap between vision and how we and human societies now function. In this session we also introduce the idea of clustering agreements into systems that support us in specific areas, so that we can increase capacity over time through wise and flexible agreements. The bigger introduction to these systems happens the following two weeks.
September 12: Organizational Systems to Align with Purpose and Values
Emma and Miki
In this session we move fully to the focus on organizational systems, which can be applied in both the organizational and individual applications of the work. We introduce the core systems that are necessary for organizations to function, and how they can be structured to support movement towards vision, and hence greater alignment with purpose and values. The systems we focus on are as follows:
- Decision Making
- How can we make more purpose- and values-aligned decisions, increase collaboration and efficiency by distributing decision-making and creating processes that support and build on trust so we can find an alternative to command and control, majority vote, or everyone participating in all decisions?
- Flow
- Resource flow: How can resources be organized in such a way that they flow towards needs with the least impact and in a way most aligned with purpose and values?
- Information flow: How can information move freely and efficiently so that what is shared is aligned with purpose and values, and anyone who needs information can find it with ease? How can trust and transparency be increased?
- Feedback flow: How can capacity be increased through learning based on useful sharing of feedback that is specific; oriented to values, purpose, and relationships; and is free of shame and blame?
- Conflict
- When flow comes to an end and there isn’t enough trust to decide what happens next, what can be done to restore trust and extract learning and feedback to improve flow and increase capacity?
September 26: Creating Organizational Agreements
Arnina, Emma and Miki
In this final session we look at the specific challenges that our current patriarchal patterning presents in building and keeping agreements within each of the five core systems, and explore agreements that can compensate for these challenges, bringing tenderness and clarity to how a group can move together without shaming or pathologizing lack of capacity. Within this, we look at the specific challenges that power differences bring, and at the role that support systems can provide in caring for the whole. When all can acknowledge their limitations, and all step forward to compensate only within capacity and willingness, an organization can move towards optimal functioning.
