The Awakened Leader
3 Month Deep Rest & Resilience program for Leaders, CEO’s, Executives and Solo/Entrepreneurs
Are you great at what you do but never quite feel like you’re living the life you want?
Have you engaged with self-improvement programs, had excellent business coaching, and mastered time management …
… but when life gets busy or chaotic again you slip back into default mode:
self-doubt, anger, frustration, unhappiness, procrastination, exhaustion.
If you’re ready to experience unwavering resilience and equanimity, no matter what life throws at you, I can show you how.
The Deep Rest Program is designed to help business leaders master tranquillity and develop an unshakable sense of ease and well-being, no matter what.
This is a powerful, 3-month transformation for professionals who are great at what they do, but want to thrive amidst the chaos, so that the people around them say
“Woooooooha, what happened to you? I want some of what you’ve got!”
Over the last 10 years I’ve worked with dozens of time-pressed professionals who were looking for a way to feel truly happy and at ease in their lives, while still performing at the top of their field and having a full and fulfilling life. Many were feeling empty and tired. Most said they didn’t have the time to do things like meditation or another self-improvement program.
Deep Rest showed them that there is a simple way to experience:
An uninterrupted core of bulletproof resilience.
A calm and ease that stays throughout the day.
The ability to feel spacious amidst the crazy-assed pace of life.
The ability to pivot and handle anything life throws your way.
The Deep Rest program will introduce you to your most rested nature – the place where you can access peacefulness, creativity for problem-solving, and your quiet calm core that is always at rest, even as your mind and body are challenged!
And it wasn’t about carving out time from a busy schedule: Deep Rest practices open up time and instill a deep sense of stability and energy. This can enable you to become less reactive, and more responsive. It will give you clarity about what matters most and where to direct your core actions in work and life.
What’s stopping you from living the way you want to live, every day? Join the program today!
Course Content
The course is divided into 5 pillars, each building on the previous. We will explore each module over a three-week period, and each week, you’ll be given certain practices, meditations, Non-Sleep Deep Rest sessions and inquiries to take you toward mastery of the content. Non of this content will be overwhelming. You’ll be given practices that support your time, not take from it.
As we journey through the program together, I will be taking your feedback as to what has worked and been effective. I’ll also be listening to what you want and need. In this way, the content may morph, change and grow as we move through our time together. What follows is an outline for our time together.
PILLARS
Pillar 1 - Master Tranquility
Pillar 2 - Unwavering Resilience
Pillar 3 - Positive Intuition
Pillar 4 - Visionary Genius
Pillar 5 -Steadfast Fortitude
Pillar 1
Master Tranquility
From Overwhelm to Wellbeing.
Understand the neuroscientific discovery of the ‘Default Mode Network’ and how our brains are naturally wired to keep vigil for threats.
Flip Your Thinking. Explore practices that are research-proven to transform negative and recursive loops of thought and promote a deep sense of well-being. Discover how these practices pave the way for easy access to deeper rest.
Get Out Of Your Head. Our minds constantly produce thoughts, and it’s very hard to stop it. When we pay attention to body sensations, a natural transition from thinking to feeling takes place. Learn to exchange unending trains of thought for a deeply restful experience of inhabiting your physicality. Dissolve physical tension and learn how to rest the mind.
Unwavering Attention. Building on pillars 1, 2 and 3, learn to establish a steady and stable flow of concentration. Get over common pitfalls that create frustration by establishing a middle ground of relaxed effort, allowing for easy and accessible one-pointed focus.
The Depths Of Being. We all knew how to ‘be’ when we were young children, yet as adults, we’re not taught how to value the art of doing nothing. Break down self-judgments and ideas about time and value and rediscover your most rested self.
Pillar 2
Bulletproof Resilience
Stress Triggers. Stress is defined as a perceived inability to cope. By exploring what our personal triggers are, we can unravel from learned helplessness and gain self-mastery.
Upside of Stress. Explore how nervous systems are wired to cope with certain amounts of stress. Find strength through harnessing stress. Explore a counterintuitive and little know approach to transform stress into an advantage.
Reprogram Overwhelm. Too much for too long can leave us feeling flooded and unable to cope. Beliefs that we hold to be true about this further disrupt our natural coping mechanisms. Explore psychology and the use of opposites to instill a new belief system. You can cope.
Stepping Out. Cognitive problem-solving has its limits. Taking moments amidst overwhelm to gain perspective, gives room for new insight. Learn science-based micro-meditations that build neural plasticity.
Uninterrupted Core. Whilst our bodies, minds, and nervous systems can feel overwhelmed, there’s always part of our experience that is utterly at peace, in every moment. Discover the part of you that’s never stressed!
Pillar 3
Positive Intuition
Self Trust. Build a set of personal affirmations that are touchstones amidst moments of doubt and uncertainty. Create strong psychological foundations on which to build inner knowing and conviction.
Objective Thinking. Learn to manage thoughts and break thinking down into neutral, negative, positive, and instructive. By taking perspective on the thinking mind, learn to gain distance and choose response over reactivity.
Interrupting Self-doubt. Negative thinking and deep-rooted beliefs can interrupt our access to self-trust. Unlock core beliefs through a 5 step system of personal inquiry.
Emotional Intelligence. Emotions fall into two camps, positive and negative, yet all emotions are instructive. Learn to listen to and distill the wisdom from feelings and move from overwhelm to integrity.
Intuitive Knowing. Our rational mind makes up - at best - 10% of our mental processing. Accessing deeper knowing comes from relaxing our cognitive processes and getting in touch with this huge information storehouse, that lies just beyond the surface of thought. Trust in your hunches!
Pillar 4
Visionary Genius
Learn from the masters. Throughout history, both creative and scientific geniuses have consistently exploited contemplative traditions to gain insight and creativity. Find out who, and how.
The Best-kept Secret About Genius. Our minds produce different bio-rhythms depending on our state: waking, sleeping, and dreaming. The hypnogogic state bridges all of these. Learn how to quickly access this and upgrade your genius.
Hypnogogic Phenomenon. Our bodies and minds produce certain responses to this state, such as waking dreams, images, sounds, and bodily reactions. Learn which is friend and foe, and how to distill insight.
Developing Insights: Tricks and tips on deepening moments of insight and keeping your ‘aha moments’ close, so you can build and foster them into big ideas.
Piller 5
Steadfast Fortitude
Discover your Superpower. The same recognition lives at the heart of every contemplative tradition - our deepest experience is untroubled, calm, quiet and at ease - in every moment. Accessing this can be challenging. Learn simple yet profound ‘pointing out’ instructions that take you immediately and effortlessly to this deep well-spring of stillness.
Beyond Activity. Learn how you don’t always need to take action to be at peace. Having built your way to resilience and deeper creativity, you now know how to ‘do this’ without doing anything at all. Set yourself free of technique for the deepest meditative experience.
Open Hand. Let go of acquiring a certain ‘state’, in order to discover it. By losing expectations and surrendering all outcomes, paradoxical deep rest arrives.
You Don’t Need to Know! Give up knowing and figuring anything out. By letting go of thinking and developing ‘not knowing’, return to innocence and be fresh and present.
Regaining Time. By releasing the need to be anywhere: the past, the future, or the ‘now’, discover a super-charged meditation practice that’s easy and effortless. Leave all those other ‘meditators’ behind!
No Self. The most constant and perennial thought is that of ourselves. Yet, it is only a thought. Deep moments of meditation can spontaneously arise as we challenge and go beyond this narrative and discover our true selves as free of any self-talk and identity.
Additional Resources To Support The Program
Recommended Reading:
The Book Of Rest, 2019, Harper Collins:
Available in Hardcover or Paperback from Amazon, or Harper Collins
Also available on Audible (recommended, as you can practice laying down and doing nothing!)
Recommended resources:
If you don’t have some already, we recommend a good pair of headphones, ideally, the kind that blocks the noise out as well as adds sound in (so over-ear headphones, rather than in-ear)
Set yourself up with a Rest-Nest! Start looking out for places at work or at home where you can take a cheeky cat nap or sit quietly and practice. You’re not looking for perfect, just somewhere that lends itself to rest. You could decide to convert your office, get a new comfy chair or simply lie down on the floor where ever you are (that’s hard on the bus or train, but still possible!)
Get the support from the people around you: we’ll be covering this in the introductory module in more depth, but for now, consider letting the people around you know that you are taking a new personal development program and it will require you to find parts of your day to be quiet and practice. Share with them your heartfelt reasons for engaging in this program and get their buy-in, helping you to surmount one of the first hurdles of rest: guilt!
