I met Amanda Hemmingsen at the Yogahealer Mexico Retreat in Feb. 2017. I knew Amanda as a member of Living Ayurveda Course. She’d impressed me with her unique digestion and expression of Ayurveda. She was perhaps one of the high ether element types I’d even met, who also had the gift of being able to put the formless into words.

Seeing her natural tendency to isolate (as is common for high ether Vata’s), I felt a strong desire to get to know Amanda and draw her deeper into the community.

When Amanda posted the following on Facebook – about her new job and the friction and chaos involved in becoming part of a team – I wanted her on the Dharma & Dollars Show.

“After 20 months of navigating the turbulent waters of organizational chaos, I think I can finally say that my job has been fully integrated into the team.

I have learned so much about personal and organizational chaos and about developing a kind of creativity that knows when to pick herself up from defeat, when to set a battle aside, and when to immerse in the celebration of small victories.

To everyone out there who has uncomfortable, life-affecting friction with their job…there is hope and possibility to influence things to the better, if you take the long view and find a support network that doesn’t tolerate empty venting.” Amanda Hemmingsen

• Understanding how to be a leader up echelon and laterally
• Understanding that every situation we are placed in is an opportunity to shed light on the inner reality
• Understanding the energetics of a bureaucracy and how to navigate culture and personalities to get something accomplished
• Thinking as an empath: understanding the difference internally between one’s individual identity and one’s group identity.
• What is anger before its anger? Fire. Learning to rechannel the fire rather than alternating between smothering it and watching it burn out of control.
• “In order to make correct decisions in your life, you must gain objective self-knowledge. This is not accomplished by exploring one’s own dreams, attitudes, and opinions. These are useless in self-examination. Instead, contemplate your effect on the world around you. There you will find yourself.”

What you’ll get out of tuning in:

• Letting go of the millennial need for quick fixes.
• Learning to speak one’s truth and refining the process of effective communication in professional settings with people who don’t think like me
• Developing a judicious understanding of how to tap into one’s social support structure. The energetics of complaining.
• How the more we reject something, the more we end up clinging to it. (i.e., I used to reject being ‘smart’ and therefore needed lots of compliments to prop me up)

Links:

• Ammanda Hemmingsen

Related podcasts:

• Building Your Influence + Your Team with Your Values with Nor Franco
• Exponential Growth + Collective Leadership: A conversation with Tracey Duncan
• Lessons Learned In Strategic Planning For Personal Growth
• How to Build Dynamic Groups with Cate Stillman

Show Highlights:

• 3:40 – For the most part, modern jobs no longer consist of laborers performing their own separate tasks: most jobs today require a certain degree of teamwork. Therefore, in order to live your bigger dharma, it is important to learn how to collaborate in a team setting.
• 7:00 – For many companies, and especially growing ones, new positions are added frequently, and won’t have an exact onboarding process. So, it’s imperative for the new person to be able to listen to the group and adapt to it while also contributing fresh perspective.
• 10:55 – By actively listening to and learning from the dynamics of an already established team, you can figure out how to communicate with each person in order to create leverage for whichever task you need to accomplish.
• 13:35 – Learning to let go of your personal attachment to results allows you and your company to become more efficient: by delegating tasks instead of doing everything yourself, you can get more done with less stress.
• 18:00 – In many business settings, the personal and the professional are strictly separate. But bridging the gap of the personal and the professional can actually bring much more clarity to the capacities of a company based on its team members.
• 25:00 – When you get a new job, or adopt another role in your current one, you go through a shift in identity, which is inherently disorienting. But by aligning with the habits of yogis, even while being in this inner chaos, you can still be relaxed, accessible, and connective at the same time.

Favorite Quotes:

• “That needs done, but it’s not efficient for me to be the one to do it. So how can I help find the person who needs to do it?” – Amanda Hemmingsen
• “We can start to see the threads of our own dharma, and the more we can articulate that…, the more that becomes an asset to the organization. If everyone’s doing that, we’re really not in chaos at all any more: we’re in higher systems collaboration.” – Cate Stillman
• “In the professional world, you have your separate parts of what you can and cannot talk about, even though some of that other stuff matters.” – Amanda Hemmingsen
• “What are ways that I can bring a little bit more of the whole person in?” – Amanda Hemmingsen
• “For me, I need the stillness. When I have the stillness, whatever the next piece is will come out.” – Amanda Hemmingsen
• “Chaos is opportunity!” – Amanda Hemmingsen
• “How do you create a much more resilient nervous system? You can be in chaos and still be relaxed, and accessible, and available, and open-hearted, and connective at the same time.” – Cate Stillman

BIO:

Having dived deep into her own core being, Amanda has learned to build channels for her emotion energies to flow through her being and express in the world. An empath working for government bureaucracy, success has come from being the change.