My posts to date have been focused on leadership insights gathered from my life and career as a corporate CEO, providing tools and frameworks to support leaders of all types of companies.
In this post, I would like to share an example of inspiring impactful leadership in the non-profit space that I experienced at a retreat in West Bali last week.
The background is that my wife, Melinda, has been a volunteer with The Contentment Foundation (TCF) (https://www.contentment.org) for over a year and sits on their Internal Advisory Board.
Last week, TCF had its annual Wellbeing Worldwide Retreat, its first in three years due to COVID. I was kindly asked along and anticipated being a passive attendee relaxing and doing touristy stuff. Instead, all 62 attendees from 10 countries, including myself, were actively involved and taken on a learning and reflective journey by the founder and CEO of The Contentment Foundation, Dr. Daniel Cordaro and his incredible team.
Dr. Cordaro, is an Ashoka Fellow, Edmund Hillary Fellow, UBS Global Visionary, former Director of Wellbeing at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, and is currently an adjunct professor at Columbia University, where he teaches virtually. He launched the Contentment Foundation, a culmination of his research and findings, as a service to humanity in 2015.
So, what is TCF? This is not simply expressed, so I strongly encourage you to visit their website. My elevator pitch for them is that their purpose is to enhance children’s social and emotional well-being through their research-based Four Pillars of Wellbeing framework:
- Mindfulness
- Self-Curiosity
- Community
- Contentment & Balance
The Four Pillars of Wellbeing is a whole school program that offers scientifically-evidenced based practices rooted in ancient philosophy for cultivating sustainable wellbeing in life. TCF is also catching the eye of corporations as they see the benefit of social and emotional wellness in their workforces.
What impressed me and left me inspired were the teachers and educational administrators that came along. They have an amazing passion for making a difference, not just by focusing on a subject curriculum, but by providing children with the tools to thrive in a challenging and complex world.
The Four Pillars of Wellbeing has already been rolled out in 60 schools in over 7 countries after starting in a single school in Tampa, Florida four years ago. It is now poised to roll out across entire cities; USA: Los Angeles, New York State, Bhutan: Paro, as these cities recognise the importance of teaching wellbeing approaches to school children. The ultimate audacious goal of TCF is indestructible Wellness Worldwide.
So, as I said at the outset, this is a different post than normal for me. I was left inspired by an organization and a group of people that are clearly trying to change the world by building the well-being skill set of the next generation.
Reflecting on my experience and the relevance to my Impactful Leadership program, a few things came to mind:
- Vision: Non-profits engage their teams through an inspiring purpose. For-profit enterprises must also have a clear purpose, beyond valuation growth, to inspire and retain their team.
- People: Great leaders attract and inspire great talent, who together as a team accomplish incredible things.
- Culture: TCF has an aligned culture yet has no head office and operates virtually across the globe … proving that this can be done.
- Structure: The start-up and social enterprise spaces are extremely similar, with the same challenges in scaling multi-country, multi-stakeholder organizations. All organizations rely on their leaders to have a clear vision and purpose and an integrated plan of execution.
- Information Technology: People (team and customers) respond to what is measured. TCF uses an innovative platform to access and monitor impact; all businesses must measure their impact and validate that they can deliver against their value proposition.
- Resilience: All organizations, particularly those scaling fast put immense pressure on the leaders and team requiring the organizations to be aware of and utilise social and emotional wellness approaches. A question is whether you recognise this in your organization.
I’m curious. How has this post impacted you? How do you and your team practice social and emotional wellbeing?
If you would like to know more about The Contentment Foundation and how to bring social-emotional wellbeing to your life or organization, please contact Impactful Leadership.
Image: Carlos de Miguel on Unsplash
