Shows
Mindful AgilityTrigger Translator: Discover triggers with body sensations, and then transform confrontation to communication in home and workIn this thought-provoking episode of Mindful Agility, learn how to transform confrontational encounters into productive dialogues. Ankur Shah Delight and Dan Greening share a transformational technique to handle triggering comments, guiding listeners to notice their physical reactions, pause, seek the core of the statement, rephrase it, and share with the other party. Hear an engaging case study where a potentially volatile workplace scenario is skillfully diffused. It's an essential guide for anyone seeking to enhance their communication skills, foster healthier relationships, and maintain a calm mental space amid conflict. Lean in, breathe deep, and transform your conversations.
2023-06-2721 min
Mindful AgilityProcrastination: Find the Cues, Choices, and Rewards that damage our Mental and Physical Health and derail our Opportunities. Tim Ferriss shares the Fear Setting exercise. Dan Greening shares his Habit Deflection approachIn this Mindful Agility podcast episode on procrastination, hosts Mirela Petalli and Dan Greening delve into the hidden costs of procrastination. Have you wondered how procrastination could impact not just your work, but also your mental and physical health? This episode uncovers shocking research findings from Sweden that link procrastination to poor health outcomes. Tune in to discover an innovative tool developed by productivity guru Tim Ferriss to help overcome his fear of failure. You'll also hear compelling personal stories of overcoming procrastination through mindfulness techniques. Are you ready to turn your procrastination habit around and boost your success...
2023-05-3021 min
Mindful AgilityMove Fast and Break Cheap Things: Warren Buffett and Elon Musk staged low-cost experiments for the faster winWant to learn the secret behind Warren Buffett's success? Curious about how SpaceX rockets are built? This episode of Mindful Agility podcast uncovers the power of low-cost experiments and how they can propel your success. Hosts Dan Greening and Dan Dickson discuss how to use low-cost experiments to reduce risk and increase reward, and suggest practical steps to apply this concept in your own life. Learn how to turn your significant projects into a series of small, manageable experiments. By embracing failure and learning from it, you can fast-track your road to success. Tune in to find out how!
2023-05-2316 min
Mindful AgilityPsychological SafetyToxic work and home environments are all around us: intimidation, humiliation, secret discussions, manipulation. Those environments are psychologically unsafe. When we and those around us feel unsafe, we become fearful, stop learning, and fail to improve.Discover the power of psychological safety in fostering high-performing teams, as we dive into techniques to cultivate trust and open communication. Learn from Google's Project Aristotle case study, Mirela Petalli’s experiences in hospitals, and Dan Greening’s experiences in tech companies, which reveal the transformative impact of psychological safety on productivity and collaboration.Join us as we challenge norm...
2023-05-0920 min
Mindful AgilityIncremental Reciprocity Builds Successful RelationshipsDiscover the secret behind successful partnerships in this episode on incremental reciprocity. Start with a small task without expecting anything in return, and ask your partner to match your effort. As you both grow, this technique helps measure reliability and build trust. Famous duos like Lennon-McCartney and Oprah Winfrey-Gayle King used this method to achieve greatness. Enhance your teamwork and friendships by trying this approach yourself. Give it a shot and transform your connections!One more example of how mindfulness and agile skills help you succeed, from the Mindful Agility podcast.Credits...
2023-05-0219 min
Mindful AgilityBook 1.2: Practice MattersStaff Daniel Greening, host, agile coach, and computer scientist Mirela Petalli, co-host, meditation guide, and neurocritical nursing instructor Dan Dickson, business coach, executive and management consultant Links Mindful Agility Substack ("The Mindful Sprint" weekly brief) Mindful Agility web site Mindful Agility Community Facebook group Mindful Agility Youtube channel
2023-04-2520 min
Mindful AgilityFive Whys for Lasting BreakthroughsUnlock the mindful power of the Five Whys technique in this intriguing episode, with agile coach Dan Greening and corporate fixer Dan Dickson. The Five Whys method has transformed businesses and personal lives, revealing hidden causes of problems, and promoting safer, more lasting improvements. Hear intriguing stories, like how Toyota fixed a recurring production line issue for good, and how Dan Greening hosted a Five Whys "party" that possibly saved an employee's job! Learn how this simple, effective approach can help you tackle challenges in your own life. Listen now, to transform your approach to problem-solving forever!
2023-04-2513 min
Mindful AgilityChapter 1.1: Find Success without the RecipeBy developing two uncommon skills, mindfulness and agility, you can achieve true success in most fields of life and work. You must define success on your own terms, rather than rely on others' metrics or recipes. Imitating others who have been successful works fine to get your feet wet, but it won't make you successful, because the world has new competitors, and you are a different person.Mindfulness practices develop skills in seeing the world more clearly, along with its opportunities and dangers. With mindfulness, we can discover hidden causes more readily, and we can fix problems...
2023-03-2832 min
Mindful AgilityLearning from Failure, Without Losing Your MindLearning from failure ought to be easy. Good experiments should fail, about half the time, especially if they aren't costly. And agile experiments are designed to be low cost. But failure, it turns out, freaks us out, especially when we are new to a field. That might explain why agile transformations fail at a very high rate, even though the benefits of agile are well studied. Folks in an agile transformation are new to agile, and little failures at the beginning can lead them to run away.In this episode, Dan Dickson and Dan Greening talk about...
2023-02-2849 min
Mindful AgilityWhy Bother? Purpose Drives Creative People to Minimize Distraction, Recruit Buddies, and Build SuccessOur clumsiness in life creates most of our suffering. We haven't practiced the skills we need to be happy. We don’t see what’s going on around us. We don’t see the causes early enough to prevent a train-wreck in work or life. And when we don’t know how to distinguish truth from delusion, well that leads to a world of hurt. But if we don't have a purpose, should we or anyone else care that we mess up?Mindfulness skills help us reduce the dumb stuff we do to ourselves. When we get m...
2023-02-071h 14
Mindful AgilityThe OODA loop: Learn faster and smarter while slowing down impediments. An American military strategist used OODA to beat enemies in war. OODA can help you succeed with peace of mind.The faster and better we take action against impediments, the more successful we'll be, according to renowned military strategist John Boyd, developer of the OODA Loop.The OODA loop is observe, orient, decide and act. It’s how we take action in new situations and succeed. In this episode of the Mindful Agility podcast, Tom Looy explores how John Boyd used the OODA Loop to help fighter jet pilots, and ultimately whole military campaigns, succeed against enemies. You can use it in your own life, even to overcome your own “opponents,” the dysfunctions that hold you back.
2023-01-1745 min
Mindful AgilityFailure in Dublin: Matt Learns Lessons the Hard and Fast Way, through ExperimentsWhen we fail, we can easily fall into anxiety, guilt, or depression. But failure can lead us toward success. A simple Google search reveals many famous people discuss their failures and subsequent successes. We can succeed through failure, too!In this episode of the Mindful Agility podcast, Mirela Petalli, Matthew Zimmerman, Dan Dickson and Dan Greening discuss an episode of Matt's life. He moved to Ireland, thinking it would solve all his problems, and discovered: Nope. But through that humiliating experience, Matt unexpectedly discovered folks he could count on, and years later, he realized his experiment gave...
2022-12-2739 min
Mindful AgilityWine Store: The pandemic compels old school Manhattan store to modernize to retain market. Can mindfulness and agile get Dan Dickson unstuck?People around us need help. Our inclination is to rush in, fix the problem, and rush out. After all we have stuff we need to do, ourselves. But we can get stuck. And stay stuck. For months.Dan Dickson wanted his friend’s pet project, a wine store in Manhattan, to succeed. Dan had the skills to add online transactions to their web site. But, he didn’t want to get stuck doing all the work forever.Dan Dickson built the new site, and created the wine database structure. Because he didn’t want to create...
2022-11-1535 min
Mindful AgilityMindful Parenting: Christina Smith Shares How Agile Methods And Frequent Feedback Give Her Children The Tools They Need To SucceedIn this episode Christina Smith, a certified scrum master, shares how she started using scrum and mindfulness not only in her work, but also her parenting.Like most parents, Christina wants her children to lead happy and fulfilling lives, both now and when they are adults. She also needs them to take out the trash now and then too. Stressed with trying to be a perfect parent, Christina decided to experiment and apply the same techniques she uses as an agile scrum master at work to her parenting, and the results were surprising.
2022-10-0441 min
Mindful AgilityEnjoy.com Crashes Into Reality, Bye Bye $500 Million: Ron Johnson confidence, venture capital fueled unsafe speed. Mindful Agility was too slow, cautious for their tasteIn this third and final episode on fabled merchandiser, Ron Johnson, we discuss the startup Enjoy.com, which turned $500M of invested capital and goodwill into nothing. This was Johnson's second attempt as a CEO. What did he learn from that failure? How did it shape his new company? Your co-hosts, Dan Dickson and Dan Greening, bring perspectives of traditional and agile management, finance and technology, retail and service. We think our analysis demonstrates how you can make better choices in your own projects, big and small, for much greater levels of success.We examine t...
2022-09-1345 min
Mindful AgilityBusiness on Fire Part II: Could Business Mindfulness Have Stopped the Failure of Steve Jobs' Protege Ron Johnson at JC Penney?This is the second episode of a three-part series on fabled merchandiser, Ron Johnson, and how he failed to restore JC Penney to its former leadership in retailing. In this episode we're going to be talking very explicitly about business mindfulness and how it applies.If you want to understand "business mindfulness," this is the episode for you. If you'd like some background on scaling mindfulness, you'll like Episode 2 on self-similarity (our first full episode). If you'd like to hear our detailed failure analysis of Ron Johnson and JCPenney, that's in Episode 11, the one just before this.
2022-08-161h 18
Mindful AgilityBusiness on Fire Part I: Steve Jobs protege Ron Johnson burns JC Penney cash fast as CEOAs an executive working for other CEOs, Ron Johnson succeeded wildly in redesigning Target stores and building Apple Stores from scratch. But then, as a CEO, Ron Johnson crashed and burned two later companies.Join Dan Dickson, a seasoned retail executive and Harvard Business School grad, and Dan Greening, co-host of Mindful Agility, as we talk about Ron Johnson's first failure, JC Penney.Major shifts in management practice arise in response to crises. Lean Manufacturing helped Toyota and Japan survive, after the Japanese industrial base had been destroyed in World War II. Lean Manufacturing now...
2022-07-1943 min
Mindful AgilityWant lasting change? Label emotionsIf we want lasting change, emotions may be our strongest opponent. When forced to change, people feel fear, rage, anxiety, and other emotions.Emotions are designed to satisfy basic needs: defend, fight, flight, reproduce. But when they overwhelm us, they shut down logic. They’re great when we’re suddenly confronted by a lion in the African savanna, we don’t have to take time to think. We just feel fear and run. But when building a strong family, or tackling some other tough, long-term challenge, emotions can confuse and distract us. We often don’t even no...
2022-06-2844 min
Mindful AgilityHand to mouth awareness: stop harmful habits and get a great smileNurse Heather's four year old son, Jack, likes to put his fingers in his mouth. But this can lead to dental problems in the future. She heard the episode about Matt learning to keep track of his keys, by noticing that he was setting them down and saying "I'm putting my keys on the counter." Heather wondered whether it could help her son.We also discover that Heather has bigger plans, involving her husband, and this was just a practice run.These last two episodes explore "noticing and labeling." There's been a lot of recent...
2022-06-0735 min
Mindful AgilityYou Lost Your Keys. Again?!We all have hapless friends who would lose their head if it wasn't attached. Maybe we are that friend! Matt recently moved in with his girlfriend, Mirela Petalli (our co-host), and Matt realized losing his keys kept making them late. Can mindful agility help?Matt and Mirela worked together. Matt is familiar with Scrum, an agile technique; Mirela is familiar with mindfulness. Together they take us on an exploration of how mindfulness alone can help us get more done. When we bring in agile, we raise the bar further. Does mindful agility help Matt keep track of...
2022-05-1753 min
Mindful AgilityNoah Rasheta: Fewer Expectations, More SuccessOur stories provide a shorthand self, which gives us focus while the stories make sense, but they put our happiness at risk. If we imagine them to be complete and permanent we are doomed to suffer. When we release our attachment to our stories, we create freedom. Only through our actions will we transform ourselves and our world. The stories are only decorative.We talk with Noah Rasheta about the stories around him, as he lives a life with fewer attachments. We find out how we can avoid those attachments by doing things, but not b...
2022-04-2626 min
Mindful AgilityNoah Rasheta: The Entrepreneur Driving the School BusWhen we choose ambitious goals, we're going to create stories about them. But nothing lasts forever: our jobs, our achievements, our friends, our relationships... or our stories. If we attach our identities to ephemeral stories (and aren't all our stories ephemeral?), we will suffer.Noah Rasheta, the host of the Secular Buddhism podcast and author of three books on Buddhism, abandons the story he told himself and others, that he was a successful entrepreneur. He takes us on a journey of self-discovery, finding comfort with unknown challenges, changing stories, and new pivots that may be needed. From...
2022-04-0526 min
Mindful AgilityIterations for UkraineThe Russian war on Ukraine is in full force. The Mindful Agility co-hosts have ties to Eastern Europe. We are contending with our own reactivity, as we interact with others less familiar with the region.Our friend, Rob Coles, discusses how he employed an agile strategy to direct funds to individuals on the ground in Ukraine. He ran several iterations, adapting with each new discovery to send money more effectively. To understand the challenges ahead, we can employ compassion. There are combatants, refugees, residents of war zones, anxious news consumers, and people dealing with economic...
2022-03-1527 min
Mindful Agility95% Vegan, 100% Happy: Goals and CompassionToday we're discussing goals, interdependence and compassion. Nurse Heather faced a challenge that the rest of us encounter. She had a goal that seemed incompatible with her family and environment. Our goals and our social environment often conflict. In our personal lives, if we want to stop smoking, focus more on studying, or lose weight, our family and friends can present big challenges. In our work lives, too, if we want to meet with teammates daily, get feedback weekly, or honestly experiment- i.e., when failure is possible- our colleagues, customers and bosses can present bi...
2022-02-1528 min
Mindful AgilityResolutions Just Humiliate Me: Goals and ReactivityImprovement is hard enough, whether we're trying to fix a Fortune 100 company or quit smoking. Our reactivity can create unrealistic expectations and then encourage others to dictate our futures. Reactivity tells us to give up when our first attempts fall short. It tells us to feel guilty, which can sideline us further. Mindfulness meditation teaches us to harness those few seconds between our emotions and actions. It can push the pause button on our amygdalas and increase our likelihood of success, in everything we do. Join us as we explore the intersection of mindfulness and ag...
2022-02-0124 min
Mindful AgilityZooming In and Out on Life: Self-SimilarityMany systems exhibit self-similarity. If you zoom in or out, you keep seeing similar patterns. Recognizing self-similarity can help us become more agile at different scales of our lives and work. We can discover new insights, even when our limited language and perspective gets in the way.Meditation is a big part of mindfulness. This episode experiment includes a guided meditation on the topic.CreditsThe sting separator sound used in this episode is a derivative of Swing beat 120 xylophone side-chained by Casonika used under license CC BY by Daniel Greening.
2022-01-0126 min
Mindful AgilityTrailerWelcome to the Mindful Agility podcast. Mindfulness and agile can help you lead a more fulfilled life, at work and at home. Mindfulness practices help us gain insight and clarity, while agile practices help us forge new paths. We explore both. Support usRate the podcast and its episodes. Share the podcast with friends. Follow and comment in our Facebook page, "Mindful Agility podcast".HostsMirela Petalli is a trained mindfulness instructor and a neuro critical care nursing instructor. Mirela and Dan have studied mindfulness together for a fe...
2021-12-3001 min