wellness and balance course for roddenberry fellowship

last year, i taught a 4-week (weekly 1h meetings) course for the roddenberry fellowship and i really liked it. i’m sharing it here because i’d love other folks to play with it!

agenda arc:

session 1: getting started. what is/isn’t wellness or balance? how do you know you do/don’t have them? how do they show up at individual, organizational, community, and societal scales?

homework: talk to someone about their experiences of these things. also, bring an example of someone who does these things well that you admire.

session 2: learning from our people and exploring a metaphor. what lessons did you glean from your conversation(s)? pick a metaphor you’ll use to seek balance or wellness.

homework: what you notice about your life when you look through the lens of your metaphor?

session 3: working our metaphors. how can your metaphor help you practice staying with wellness/balance/sustainability?

homework: craft one experiment around an area of struggle using your metaphor.

session 4: tying it all together and looking ahead. how was your experiment? what did you learn? what single practice can you commit to add to your system to help you stay well/balanced? who will you tell or involve in your learning? what accountability do you need?

a couple additional thoughts:

first, i chose to intentionally frame the course around individuals because i wanted to center the power of the individual leader (many fellows are at the top of their organizational hierarchies) to shift the ecosystem. but there is a whole other world of convo possible if you took wellness and balance to the collective/organizational level.

second, during our debrief convo, russ and meg asked if i were to teach a next level of depth of this course, what might i focus on. i thought for a minute and then landed on these four pathways to deepening:

if what i led in 2021 was the 101, these four pathways would be the 201 and each of them could get their own 4-week course. will i ever do that? i hope so! but for now, this is what i’ve got to share. if you’re interested in playing with this, lmk (lawrence [at] lqb2 [dot] co) and i’ll send you a copy of the facilitator agenda to play with. my only ask is that if you use it, you let me know how it worked and what you adapted!


resources:


words / writing / post-processing
411w / 15min / 8min