Spring 2023 Virtual Event

with Olga Trusova, author of Calm Living: Simple Design Transformations to Fill your Space With Tranquility on Tuesday, April 4th.

What color are you feeling? This was the first question Olga asked to get us thinking of how to describe our mood. Audience colors ranged from periwinkle to gray with lots of blues and greens and even a cardinal red. Companies such as Google and Starbucks use this exercise as a team check-in with teammates. It’s also a tool you can use to check in with yourself on how you are feeling during the day and use this information to better structure your time and energy.

Here are 3 ways Olga shared to build resilience and calm in the hybrid workplace:

1. Flare and Focus: Thriving in today’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world demands both divergent and convergent thinking. When something is more uncertain or complex, start by brainstorming all ideas and solutions surrounding a problem. Then narrow down the options by looking for similarities. Practice convergent thinking with the goal of finding one idea or a small subset of ideas that are worth further investment of time and resources.

2. Prototype your way forward: Test out your ideas, accept feedback to develop a better model. Prototypes work for not only physical products, but services and experiences as well.

3. Embrace imperfection: Treat every problem as an opportunity. This is an important skill of the growth mindset. The bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity for creative problem-solving.

As a group, we discussed some of the most challenging aspects of the workplace post-pandemic and some of the positive, unexpected benefits of this new environment. For many, having less of a boundary between work and home life has been a challenge. Olga discussed developing rituals and routines to set boundaries between work and home.

Olga provided tools to make our workplace function better. Take stock of a place where you feel comfortable and productive and see if you can incorporate some of those aspects into your home office. Use sticky notes to identify areas of your home or workplace that feel negative or difficult. Try to rearrange your space to minimize those areas.

You can find more examples and exercises in her book Calm Living. You can also delve more deeply into these topics in future workshops with Olga. Follow her on LinkedIn to learn more.

Catch the full presentation at: https://tinyurl.com/calmliving

Thank you to Olga for sharing her wisdom and to our activities and alumnae who joined and helped create a rich discussion!