What is the Grow Your Life Group Workshop?
Part workshop, part master-mind support group – the Grow Your Life workshop is my effort to create a proactive vehicle for personal growth:
- Through sharing and discussion of personal goals, values and challenges, and
- Through structured exercises and activities inspired from my own pursuit of personal development as a communications specialist, an attorney, a teacher, a writer and poet, an environmental, political and human rights activist, a long-time student of spirituality, and a permaculturist.
The Grow Your Life Workshop is also a deliberate attempt to apply to the social dynamics of our personal lives the ecological wisdom of permaculture, which works with natural forces to weave a diverse web of resilient relationships in the environment to produce healthy, abundant, and richly satisfying homesteads and harvests.
Above all, the Grow Your Life Workshop is a dedicated dynamic space for you to get organized, inspired, creative and connected with the things that matter most to you in life.
This space is “dedicated” because by signing up, you are setting aside two hours a week to tend to your own growth and wellbeing. This space is “dynamic” because it offers a rich social and collaborative small group context in which your voiced intentions, concerns, challenges, experiences and inspirations interact with those of up to eight other group members, including a skilled facilitator. The Grow Your Life Workshop thus offers the opportunity to step your personal goals and pursuit of wellbeing out of the isolation of private thought and into a shared interactive enterprise. At the same time that the Grow Your Life Workshop offers structure, sophistication and nurturance to your efforts to grow at your leading edges, the workshop does so in an informal, organic manner that imposes no institutional group think, expectations or standards. It is simply smart time devoted to living the adventure of your life ever more fully.
In the same way that a permaculturist approaches working with a garden in any particular environment, we begin our work together in the Grow Your Life Workshop simply by surveying the ecological situation and then looking together for inspiration as to where and how to begin our work. What are the motivations, goals, resources, needs that are present in the room? Do we want structured activity or do we want space and time to understand better what we want to grow in our lives? Do we want to build connection? Do we want exposure to new ideas? Is there a need at one particular level that is most pressing? In cultivating a healthy ecology for growth, we can have great flexibility to be present in the unique place where our group participants desire to be growing. In tapping into the needs of the group, diversity among participants in terms of experience, talents, needs, and personality is highly valued for it enriches our experience in supporting and working with each other adventurously.
Participation in the Grow Your Life Workshop is structured in four-week intervals and is open-ended to individuals and entire groups that enjoy having a weekly workshop/support community on an ongoing basis. At the same time, four weeks is sufficient time to provide an introductory engagement with the seven layers of personal development worked with in the Grow Your Life model and to assist workshop participants to develop a strategy for making use of this introduction in continuing to pursue their goals after the workshop.
