"Mindfulness is not a nice to have, but a core capacity for living and working in the 21st century."
CORPORATE MINDFULNESS PROGRAMMES
I offer mindfulness programmes for individuals, teams and leaders.
When introducing mindfulness to organisations, my focus is on how companies can apply mindfulness to build resilience and emotional intelligence, and increase performance and creativity. I have a keen interest in applying mindfulness to building purposeful, innovative, compassionate and sustainable cultures that allow enterprises and individuals to thrive in the 21st century. My corporate client base includes start-ups, creative businesses, global multinationals and the government.
ORGANISATIONS I HAVE WORKED WITH
"Palma worked with our team across all levels over a period of six months last year. She had a very positive impact - helping us each, as both individuals as well as an office on the whole, approach our work and use new tools to get out from under feelings of being swamped. She has a very gentle but strong style and we are happy she still remains part of the family ."
Suki Larson, Chief Executive Officer, Mario Testino+
“Palma was a godsend to us! She came to us for 8 weeks and taught us how to shut out the noise, let go of negative and distracting thoughts and find the stillness where creativity flourishes.”
Caitlin Ryan, Executive Creative Director, Cheil UK
"Myself and a group of our team were lucky enough to be a part of Palma’s mindfulness session at the end of last year. We organised this prior to Christmas, so we could learn about how to deal with stressful situations by assessing situations properly and using meditation exercises. It was invaluable (especially over that crazy Christmas period!), and would recommend it to anyone. We have all picked up some great little tips from her session and have proved very handy at work, even if that means taking a mindfulness breather break mid-shift!"
Ashley Reffold, People & Development Coordinator, Soho House & Co
"Palma's expertise and insightful talks and mentoring were most valuable to our designers. She provided background theory but also practical take-aways to be incorporated in every day life. We would highly recommend Palma and her book "The Authority Guide to Mindful Leadership".
Michelle De Conto, Business Development Advisor, British Fashion Council
PRIVATE MINDFULNESS SESSIONS
When working with individual clients, I introduce mindfulness to help you maximise your potential and performance, change your natural response to stress, skillfully navigate change and live a happier and more meaningful life.
All my programmes are tailormade as I believe that offering "a one-size fits all" standard product fits no-one. My teaching style is highly intuitive and compassionate, informed by my experience as a corporate executive, daily experience as a passionate mindfulness practitioner and my keen interest in the neuroscience behind the practice.
"Mindfulness is at the heart of living a holistic lifestyle. It touches everything we do - the way we move, eat, work and interact with eachother."
"Palma guided me through meditation for well over a year, supporting me as a complete beginner from the start and also through a pregnancy. She has a calm, considerate and thoughtful approach and always took the time to tailor our practice and make the meditation bespoke for my needs. Palma was able to balance the physical and spiritual sides to meditation and goes out of her way to ensure that the philosophy and practice behind it is explained."
Anna Penfold, Consultant & Head of The HR Practice, Russel Reynolds Associates London
"The way to measure progress in your practice is not how good of a meditator you are but how you show up differently in your life."
What Is Mindfulness?
"Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way; on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally." - Jon Kabat-Zinn
Mindfulness is a simple, yet very powerful practice that allows us to train our attention. It allows us to manage our inner landscape of thoughts emotions and sensations, train our ability to stay focused and present and respond skillfully to what a situation requires. Rather than being a skill it is a way of being in the world. This way of being is characterised by presence, curiosity, compassion, calmness and acceptance.
Mindfulness practice has two components - a formal and an informal element:
The formal element is called meditation. In mindfulness meditation we train our attention muscle by focusing on our breath or bodily sensations. Training our attention increases our self-awareness, which is the first step to self-mastery. We also learn skills such as the ability to focus, cultivating a “beginner´s mind”, patience, equanimity, self-compassion, impulse control and curiosity.
The informal element applies what we learned during the meditation practice to our lives at large. During informal mindfulness practice, we bring mindfulness to everything we already do.
Mindfulness is not an additional skill that we are adding to our overpacked schedules, but an innate human quality that we have and need to rediscover.
TRY IT NOW: You might just want to pause here for a moment and try to re-connect with this intrinsic quality: reflect on a time in your life or an activity, where you were absolutely and totally engaged to the extent that you forgot everything around yourself and time stood still. For some of us this happens when we play music, are creative or are in nature, maybe watching a beautiful sunset, a flower or sitting by a beach and watching the waves coming and going.
Why Is Mindfulness Important?
Modern work-life is dominated by constant change, information overload, 24/7 connectivity, multitasking and back-to-back meetings. As a result, the ability and space to focus has now become a prized commodity. People´s attention is constantly under crossfire and it is challenging to carve out time for strategic thinking instead of just reacting to what is urgent. Many people feel tired but wired and despite of being crazily busy feel that they are not attending to the things that really matter.
We are living in a time of unprecedented pace of change, pressure and uncertainty, where “are you busy?” has become the new “how are you?” and feeling stressed is a constant companion to most of us.
The digital age is challenging us individually and collectively. With almost every industry in a process of disruption, we are experiencing more uncertainty than ever. We are constantly distracted and never fully present to any of the activities that we are doing: we text while we cross the street, worry about our bonus while we exercise, tweet while we are having a conversation and eat on the go or at our desks while having a conference call and checking emails at the same time. As a result, Harvard Professor Ellen Langer says "most of us are on autopilot virtually almost all of the time."
In this new era, we constantly need to adapt to changing circumstances and are asked to leave our comfort zone to take bold risks.
The problem is, whenever we are distracted, faced with change or under pressure, there is a tendency to get tripped up by our nervous system and react unconsciously with “fight-flight-freeze” as if we were still living in the Stone Age. As a result The World Health Organisation recently called stress "the health epidemic of the 21st century" and estimated that American businesses lose up to $300 billion a year due to employee stress.