Today we interviewed Giuseppe from “Elevate Your Talent”, who will be from next April 22 in Anda, giving a series of eight free talks to learn and practice Mindfulness for beginners. ♀️✨
1. When did you become interested in mindfulness and coaching?
Throughout my professional career I have held positions that involved the management, direction and motivation of people. The responsibilities were increasingly greater, as well as the need to achieve more demanding goals. Pressure, stress, lack of time had become the normality of every day. The same thing was happening with the people around me. So I became interested in mindfulness and coaching because they offer extraordinary resources to reduce stress and generate high performance in people. In addition, a little over a year ago I decided to start the path as a consultant to help people and organizations to be an example of excellence: mindfulness and coaching are very powerful methods to achieve transformation.
2. How has your life changed through these disciplines?
Coaching and mindfulness are both awareness processes. The first allows you to realize where you are and where you want to be. With the second you realize that you have stopped living to simply exist. Thoughts, emotions and our habits lead us to live constantly in the past or in the future, missing the only moment we have: the now. Including the practice of mindfulness in life allows us to wake up, to learn to respond to events instead of reacting.
To be able to accompany other people on their path to awakening and transformation, it is necessary to have gone through the same process, which marks a before and an after: nothing will be as before.
3. How would you define mindfulness?
It is an awakening. To understand it in its fullness I prefer to use the words of John Kabat-Zinn, the great doctor who introduced mindfulness in the West: “Mindfulness is the awareness that emerges when we direct our attention to the present moment without judgment”.
4. What are your courses about and who are your workshops for?
I love Zen philosophy and Japanese culture, which offer a different perspective to see reality. There are many things to learn in order to enjoy a full and balanced life. That is why my courses focus on the elements that allow us to be an example of excellence: purpose, values, presence and the art of taking action thanks to the Kaizen, Morita and Naikan methods.
The workshops are aimed at individuals and organizations that want to embark on this path.
5. Tell us a little about what these workshops will be like at Anda
I am convinced that people learn by doing. That’s why I love talks that combine knowledge, practical exercises and actions that are carried out after the classes in order to create new habits. The courses I will be giving at Anda will be an opportunity to generate a personal transformation combining these elements
6. Do you think mindfulness is misunderstood in the West?
There are many myths, legends and commonplaces about mindfulness. Fortunately there are more and more scientific studies that demonstrate its effectiveness and contribute to its dissemination and knowledge. Personally I think that part of the misunderstandings are due to the difficulties to show ourselves as we are, to develop feelings such as compassion and gratitude in a society as competitive as ours. However I think we are realizing that there are many unanswered questions and mindfulness is an extraordinary opportunity to do so.