This e-course has ended. We thank everyone who participated and hope to see you again in another Spirituality & Practice Zoom retreat or e-course.
If you are drawn to this program, you may be wrestling with a confounding question: Why is it so hard to change? More specifically: Why can’t I eat more healthily? Why don’t I speak up when I have something to say? What is stopping me from getting out there and showing people what I can do? Why is it so hard to forgive people? Why?
Maybe you’ve tried lots of things that were supposed to solve your problem, like joining a support group or poring over advice books. Maybe alongside that, you have prayed, asking God for strength or wisdom or self-control. Maybe you’ve given yourself more than one good talking to, counting on sheer willpower to drive you over the finish line. And after all of it, you’re still stuck right where you’ve been all along.
If so, you are in good company: St. Paul, a giant in the history of the Christian Church, author of much of the New Testament, significantly responsible for the spread of the Gospel — and definitely a Very Big Deal in the Christian tradition — famously wrote in his letter to the Romans: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” (Romans 7:15)
Thanks to the work of Harvard researchers Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, there’s now a good answer not only to the question of why it is so hard to change, but to the follow-up one: How can you actually make that big change happen and stop doing those things you hate — once and for all?
It turns out that not all improvement goals or personal challenges are alike. Some of them — experts call these “technical challenges” — basically require us to get sharper and better informed. They push us to learn new information and acquire updated skills. When we prepare to meet a technical challenge, we become a container that gets filled with wonderfully helpful new material — information, tips, techniques, recommendations on best practices. For many very important challenges, that’s exactly what we need.
But if you’ve bought every book you can find on contemplative prayer and you never actually commit to those twenty minutes twice a day, if you’ve promised yourself you’re going to start a new project and you never do, or if you’ve taken any number of workshops on relationship building and you’re still having difficulty with how you communicate with others, most likely you have learned that some changes require something more than fresh information and good ideas.
Experts call these “adaptive challenges” because they require us not to fill ourselves but to stretch and to become, somehow, bigger. Jesus offered a vivid image: “And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but one puts new wine into fresh wineskins.” (Mark 2:22) Here’s the takeaway: To meet an adaptive challenge, you need to burst the limits of who you currently are and become a bigger, more resilient version of your current self.
That’s exactly what our one-month program “A New Heart” is designed to do. It will help you make adaptive changes and give you the skills to identify how and why you do what you do.
Our leader in this process will be Maria DeCarvalho, who designs and delivers programs for Minds at Work, an organizational development consulting firm with a global reach. She counts among her international clients key executives and their teams across sectors and industries. A former U.S. Senate staffer and global banker, she is also an ordained Episcopal priest and has presented elements of this program to congregations and their leaders. She uses the Immunity to Change method developed by researchers Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey.
You will learn what keeps you stuck and get the help you need to make that critical, transformative adaptive shift that you’ve never been able to make before. The project is not just the change you want to make. The project is actually YOU. This work will help you grow into a bigger, stronger version of yourself, with more capacity to do what you need to do. It will grow your heart.
Here’s how we will work together:
- On Saturday, July 9, we’ll all meet together over Zoom from 10 am – 3 pm PT with a one-hour break at noon. Maria will take us through the Immunity Map exercise, which functions a little like a spiritual x-ray: you’ll look deep inside yourself to see what has kept you from making the change that has eluded you for so long. You’ll finally “understand your own actions.”
- Then on Monday, July 11, you’ll receive the first of three weekly emails. In Week 1, you’ll work on your own and with an optional small group to look back over your life and experience. Maria will share questions to help you trace the roots of the mindset — the limiting belief — that has kept you frozen in place.
- In Week 2 (July 18) and Week 3 (July 25) you’ll dig deeper into the cost of that limiting belief and its truth or non-truth. You will start conducting small, safe, specific experiments to support lasting change.
- The program will conclude on Monday, August 1, with a two-hour Zoom gathering from 10 – 12 am PT for a wrap-up, questions-and-answers with Maria, and sharing of your experiences with other participants.
Join us to find a path to powerful personal change, a.k.a. a new heart!
Friday, July 8 - Monday, August 1
$80.00
