Gnist Consulting is a consulting agency built on trust, openness, and transparency between employees, customers, and partners. Once a year Gnist organizes a Gnist Day with various topics within personal development and management. This year the topic was inner sustainability, where Awake facilitated a 3-hour long workshop for their employees.
Inner sustainability is a topic that is rising up as a global movement. This is great news for us at Awake, because part of our work is to help clients integrate inner sustainability and learn them our tools. Still, it is a new movement and the few that have taken it in as a part of their organization are still considered as frontrunners in the movement. Gnist is a frontrunner company that has a high focus on inner development and wanted to learn more about the topic through our inspirational workshop.
Why is inner sustainability so needed in this world?
It’s not just the planet that is burning. Burnout is at an all-time high and there are many indications that it will increase.
Gallup's survey "State of the Global workplace 2022" reveals that we have never before been more worried, sad, or in pain than we are today. The survey is based on responses from 154,000 employees from 145 countries. Studies show that in this stressed-out state, we are not capable of being creative, and innovative, think new thoughts, or even show compassion for others.
In addition, we are not moving fast enough to reach the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. And how can we speed up the process when most sustainability strategies are not even implemented or understood by employees? In the Arthur D. Little report "Overcoming the challenges to sustainability from 2022", where 85 large and medium-sized companies from all over the world participated, we can see that sustainability strategies are either not in place or are not understood by staff within 71% of companies. Even among those with a strategy in place, nearly two-thirds admit its impact and direction are not clear to employees. To drive positive change we need to start from within, we need our inner resources to be thriving to have the energy needed to take care of our planet.
Last year the new global inner goals was launched, Inner Development Goals. A framework with 5 qualities and 23 skills needed to speed up the process towards reaching the SDGs. As an official IDG hub, we in Awake are excitingly watching inner sustainability increasing as a movement through the IDG initiative.
At the Gnist Day, we talked about what inner sustainability is and gave an introduction to the Inner Development Goals framework. And then the participants got to experience the practice hands-on through Awake's meditation, innovative exercises, energy exercises, playful tasks, and challenging questions to reflect on in groups.
"Awake held a creative workshop for us. We got a good introduction to what inner sustainability is and why it is important to succeed with our own sustainability strategy, and to achieve the UN's Sustainable Development Goals." says Rachel Lossius Enstad in Gnist.
"Inner sustainability is very important in our work as tech leaders and coaches. The sustainable way of thinking helps to increase awareness of our own values and actions and gives us tools that make us stand stronger in our missions. After Awake's educational workshop, some of the Sparks shared their personal stories and experiences from their missions. Through these stories, it became clear that having inner resilience is not only important for achieving a good balance personally, but also for leading others and building outstanding teams." Concludes the Gnist team.