Speaker 1 · 0:04When was the last time you took a pause while at work, took a deep breath in and out, and checked in with how you and your colleagues were feeling? Chances are your office could use more mindfulness. Unfortunately, though the benefits of mindfulness in the workplace are clear, it can be challenging to convince corporate leadership to set aside time and resources for a mindfulness program. Welcome to the Mindfulness Exercises podcast. May this be a source of inspiration and motivation in your mindfulness practice and teachings. In this episode, Mindfulness Exercises founder, Sean Fargo, speaks with someone who's overcome these challenges, has successfully introduced mindfulness to a federal organization, and continues to help her colleagues cope with difficult times in their personal and professional lives. Dr. Lena Adams Kim is a communications expert with the EPA. She holds a PhD and two master's degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Temple University. And in her research, has been focused on organizational psychology, communications, and how mindfulness intersects with social and environmental justice. She's also a graduate of the Mindfulness Exercises Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training Program and founder of Mindful EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency's nationwide workplace mindfulness program. In this interview, she shares her experience and some of the best practices for introducing mindfulness in the workplace, especially one that takes pride in its skepticism.
Speaker 2 · 2:13Dr. Lena Adams Kim, welcome. Thank you for joining me today.
Speaker 3 · 2:18Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2 · 2:20Yeah, so when we first met, obviously you're working with the EPA and you're still there. I'd like to ask what were some of the stressors for your colleagues at the EPA at that time? You know, with the pandemic happening, the former administration, climate change. I imagine there are just so many stressors happening on a say personal or interpersonal level. And how do you think people were coping with them?
Speaker 3 · 2:52Well, uh, before the pandemic, there was the challenge of working for an administration where the head of the administration, the president, was saying things that were not necessarily supportive of the Environmental Protection Agency. So for three years, we had messaging that you don't matter as much, and certain things matter more than others. Many of those certain things were things that the scientists at EPA didn't agree with. And there was a huge, massive fleeing of a lot of our scientists. So institutional knowledge was gone or leaving. And then near, I forget the date, but sometime before, during, at the beginning of the pandemic, we were told to avoid speaking about words like diversity and inclusion and avoid training related to those topics. And the pandemic forcing everyone to their homes, working remotely. We all know how that felt. You know, it's so it was a global situation where many of us who are lucky to have jobs where we could work from home, that working from home process was really painful and confusing, along with the mixed messages about masking. To add a little layer of horror onto it very early in the pandemic, EPA Region III's office had a very high-profile death of several teenagers, kids of our colleagues, one of them a really horrific bike accident, just left everyone shaken and depressed. Usually you would go to the office and everyone would hug and there would be talking and communal mourning. But what I sensed when I was jumping into Teams meetings was a level of grief, desperation, and lack of certainty or agency that I sensed when training communities in mindfulness at hospice. So with a sort of sense of, oh, this feels the same, I thought I can certainly help. So I approached my region three leadership in Philadelphia with a small group of colleagues who agreed with supporting me, saying, hey, there's a tool that we haven't yet used here in the agency that we think can help. And we have somebody who's comfortable starting the process, Lena. Can we give it a go? And usually things within a large bureaucracy take a little bit for approval. And I think approval took like an hour. And what we did was we just started an organic process of including mindfulness into things that happened within the virtual agency structure, starting regular sessions, most of them starting off with what is mindfulness, like sort of the basic training, and then offering little snippets of here's what practice and mindfulness might feel like. And then when it's really started taking off people starting to approach me, and to this day, actually yesterday, which is a year and a half or two years after this all started, people saying, Hey, I have an event going on, or I have an office retreat going on, or I have such and such going on. Can you join for 15 minutes or half an hour in that event and incorporate mindfulness with us?
Speaker 2 · 6:01It is quite unusual for a large agency or large company to try something like that so quickly. Why do you think they were so open to mindfulness being shared so quickly? Was there anything that you said? Was there like a formal proposal that you shared? Why do you think they were so gung-ho on mindfulness from the start?
Speaker 3 · 6:30Well, so the year before the pandemic, we had had a really fantastic event held that I was part of the planning, teaching people about what is mindfulness. It probably was something in the back of my mind because it's something I did, a hospice. We had a whole mix of people in a three-hour long event. And I was 30 minutes of what is mindfulness and what is the neuroscience of mindfulness, pitching it to a very science-oriented and skeptical audience. So I knew that was what I was gonna do. And they front-loaded me to the beginning so that everything else people would be more receptive to hearing. So we were very strategic about the messaging. We weren't gonna start off with chair yoga, because then all the skeptics and the science-based folks who want to know, you know, what's the hypothesis and how was this proven to help us? And then the pandemic happened, and therefore it really did help that my proposing it was in the background of our regional leadership's mind. Oh, yeah, we remember that event. It was attended by 200 people, it went really well. People said they really liked learning about it. That helped. Another thing that helped is the person proposing it. I'm seen in my organization as somebody who proposes things that are targeting an audience to serve them. There are some people I know who aren't perceived in that way, that don't have that organizational and cultural credibility or capital in their organization. So maybe the things that they would propose that are novel or weird or new, like mindfulness sessions, might not be digested in the same way. So we were very strategic about that. Like if there was somebody else in the organization who that proposal would have come better from, I would have said that proposal should come from so-and-so. And I'll back them and I'll do what I need to do as the person leading the sessions. But you're always thinking about not only the message, but you're also thinking about your audience. How are they going to receive the message based on the channel and who the message is coming from? I'm a trained communications expert, so I'm always very cognizant about that as well.
Speaker 2 · 8:35Yeah. Yeah. Well, speaking of the message and the messenger, maybe the year before the pandemic, and then maybe when you were proposing something like the mindful EPA. How much do you think the neuroscience helped pave the way? How much do you think the actual experiential practices pave the way? And how much of it do you think may have been a result of people seeing the benefits of your own personal mindfulness practice where you can help sort of embody this for others to kind of get a sense for how it looks in real life? There's probably a lot of speculation, but did you get feedback on like what was maybe the tipping point?
Speaker 3 · 9:22I love how you mentioned the feedback. It's sort of like a nice combination being a communications professional who's trained in monitoring how is the message landing, and then getting this fantastic certification and mindfulness from you and learning a lot. Sort of like two skill sets that really helped break through the noise of everything else people were doing. So, related to breaking through the noise, folks at EPA are trained to be scientific and skeptical. The more you're skeptical about, you know, oh, they're telling me that the super fun side is clean, but I'm gonna go dig deeper and see whether it's really clean. You know, their training has them sort of approaching life with a negativity bias and prove it to me. So it was very clear that you need to be, I needed to be much more heavy-handed with the neuroscience aspect. Every single time I mentioned mindfulness at EPA in the early stages, I would always front load it with neuroscientific information. And I'm not a neuroscientist. However, with the training that I learned from you, the massive amount of books I read, and just my high level of interest in how the brain works, I became very, very comfortable with describing, you know, where the amygdala is and the fight or flight and the rest and digest, the prefrontal cortex, all those different things. So anytime I was invited to speak about mindfulness in any space at EPA, I'd front load it within neuroscience. And in addition to that, I would incorporate practices that were very short. They weren't 20 minutes, they weren't 30 minutes, it was always maybe five minutes, maybe even three minutes, and just noticing your breath and then asking people how that felt. So the ratio of neuroscience to practice was very big on the neuroscience, teeny on the practice. Once people started coming to the sessions and realizing, oh my gosh, I love the neuroscience, and oh, the practice that she sort of forced me to do, that actually felt sort of good. And then capitalizing on building advocates, people who come to the sessions, who learned about their brain. We all like knowing about our brains, also felt a little bit more relaxed during the sessions, and then they would tell colleagues, oh, do you know that these sessions are going on regularly? Let me forward you the invite. I knew that those invitations that were forwarded were a more powerful testament to mindfulness than anything that I could have said, because people don't trust necessarily me, but they trust what their friend and colleague tell them has worked for them. And I knew that was all happening. So as that was happening, and I saw more and more people attending, the first session was what, 10 people, the second session was 30 people. We now have regularly maybe 80 people, sometimes 100. I knew people were telling one another. That's when I knew I could start shortening the neuroscience part and lengthening the practice part very strategically. But also knowing once in a while, adding longer neuroscience, shorter practice, knowing that I have newbies in every call. So constantly monitoring, knowing that I don't want to scare off a newbie and have us sitting there doing a mindfulness meditation for 20 minutes. They come in, they hear like five minutes of Lena introducing herself and hi, welcome, and then 20 minutes of listening to their monkey mind, like, oh my God. So I'm still sort of always writing this fine line. I was less forward with my story, less open with my story at the beginning. It was heavy-handed on neuroscience and then practice. But then going through the training that you offered, there was something in that training that said, well, there were two things, sharing of yourself. And I thought, oh, okay. And then you also said something that really impacted me and how I've almost become a better employee and better colleague. It was people are watching you and how you behave as a not only just as a teacher, but as a human being and how you are going to be a credible mindfulness instructor. And I thought to myself, oh my gosh, there are some meetings I jump into when I'm like stressed and acting stressed, and maybe like saying a few swear words. Not terrible, but just sort of like really laying it out there on a bad day. And when I read that in your training materials, I thought, oh my gosh, that's so true that if I'm going to be teaching mindfulness, mindful meditation in a new space where some people don't necessarily know me, I need to start showing them it's not just sitting here for 20 minutes and being mindful. It's me living a life in which I'm behaving mindfully. So at first I was focused on making sure I presented in a way that was mindful. But thanks to neuroscience, the more I acted that way, the more I started thinking I am that way. And the more building those neuropathways to just be that way. So now, five years ago at EPA, if somebody had come up to me combatively in a meeting and said, Why would you say that to me? And it has happened because I'm a facilitator in certain challenging spaces, I would sort of back off, maybe sort of get a little bit more quiet, or I would hit back with, Well, it's this is why. Lena, after a lot of intensive practice and being supported by your expertise recently, where somebody came at me in a meeting because again, I'm facilitating challenging conversations, and this stuff happens, and they said, Well, I don't agree with that, sort of aggressively. It came so naturally to me to move forward and say with curiosity and compassion, like, oh wow, that's so interesting. Can you tell me why? Like, I now move towards discomfort, and it's because of that training, the teachings that you shared. Like, people are watching. People are watching how their mindfulness instructor behaves, both while teaching the sessions and away from the sessions. And what a powerful thing that what was first sort of a presentation of mindfulness, a little bit, became truly how I operate.
Speaker 2 · 15:33Beautiful. Yeah, I think a lot of us can relate to that. And you modeling that sort of non-judgmental, curious awareness can be as powerful as anything and just add to that level of credibility and trust. You're describing my first few months as a monk, wearing these robes, like, oh, I better act like a monk, you know, fake it till you make it. Yeah, thanks for sharing that. So you mentioned how in the beginning you were kind of organically sharing these sessions with folks. Can you talk about the structure of the offerings and maybe what kinds of practices are shared with the mindful EPA now?
Speaker 3 · 16:20Well, during the pandemic, I don't know if things would be different, but people just really love the classic breathing, the practice simply to relax by focusing on the in-breath and the outbreath, maybe a sigh on the exhale. And those are the ones that seem like people love a lot. The people who are more used to coming to the sessions are ready for different things. Again, it's tough because I know there are new people in each session. So I'm always attending to the new people, but knowing the people who know a lot are interested more. So I think about different themes. I like to get people thinking the same way you do, where it's not always about relaxation. It's about becoming a better person by being more present, by being present with yourself, by noticing the breath, and therefore you're a more present person with other people in your family. A recent session that I held was related to caregiving, because I know that that's a huge issue right now with folks at the EPA, we're an older population, as well as everyone else. If you're not providing care for an elderly parent, maybe you have a sick kid or it's a pandemic, so your two kids are at home instead of at school, so you're in a full-time job and taking care of kids, that's caregiving. But then I posited to my colleagues in that session that we were all caregivers, we being in that session because we were tasked with the mission of protecting public health and the environment. And one of the definitions of caregiving is attending to the needs of a vulnerable organism. It was very impactful because I saw a lot of nodding and people realizing, wow, you know, I not only have the burden of caring for an older parent or kids or a sick animal, but I have a job where I know that if I don't do it here in the office of water, who is? So let's breathe. And then I transitioned to a practice that was more simple, paying attention to the breath, keeping in mind I had new people in that session, but I was trying to appeal to the other people who have been to many breathing practices, getting them thinking about why are you breathing? So it's always like a dance because I do think part of mindfulness is the Shana Shapiro has this definition. She says it's intention, attention, and attitude. And I think a lot of people come in to it with attention, like paying attention to my breath. Let me focus my attention. But I like sometimes moving the needle on what's the intention, why are we doing this? So I'm always sort of playing with what's timely in the world at that moment. I think I had read an article in the New York Times that week about caregiving, and caregivers are being burned out. So I'm also always monitoring for what is going on, what's a hot topic, what is the pulse of culture right now that I can weave into sharing a mindfulness practice. So it makes it relevant.
Speaker 2 · 19:34Exactly. That's really common that a lot of people will be drawn to mindful breathing and some of the sort of standard foundational practices. And the more people practice and the more they're open to learning more mindfulness practices, that self-compassion tends to come up where people are so busy caring for others, whether it's family, colleagues, their customers, or the people who they're serving, or the environment itself, we often lose track of ourselves. You know, if we're caregiving all the time to other people, then can we include ourselves in that equation too, or else we'll burn out? It's just so common for people in corporations and agencies to not necessarily ask for self-compassion practice, and you mention that word, and people either run away or give you 15 reasons why that's not for them. But deep down, after they've stabilized the mind and connected with the body and kind of tuned into their own body and their own heart and their own mind, they start to open to, oh, I'm actually needing more care. And you know, mindful breathing is an act of self-compassion. But practices like loving kindness and loving kindness for self, I find people give the most feedback about those practices because they don't do them very much and they're in sore need of it. And a lot of people will report back about how they just crying tears of say regret of not caring for themselves, tears of joy for opening up to themselves for the first time in quite a while. There's a lot of tender hearts out there who maybe have these facades of toughness, and you know, we're gonna get through it through just pure grit, but there's tender hearts underneath, and mindfulness practice can be a nice way to kind of help open ourselves up to self-care.
Speaker 3 · 21:58Yeah, the voice you hear most in the day is the voice in your head, the self-talk and the way most of us have a sort of angry little gremlin telling us we're not doing this right or that right, or they're judging you, or once you get a handle on tweaking that and having it be more compassionate and positive, then the words that come out of your mouth are much more naturally in that direction as well. I'm so much more of a nicer parent to my kids now that I have an active self-compassion practice because I've already built the neural pathways of self-compassion, which are probably the same neural pathways of compassion. How could they be that different? It's so powerful. I don't know whether I led a session on self-compassion myself in this still this new space of mindful EPA, still pitching it to many people who are still newbies. Like some people haven't yet heard about it in the agency. I don't know how they haven't, but some people haven't. So I tend to use sort of like the more safe word of kindness. Kindness, self-kindness.
Speaker 2 · 23:04Exactly. Yeah. Sometimes they don't even use the word mindfulness because people might have different views of what it is. So I'll just say, yeah, present moment awareness, or sometimes I'll liken it just to emotional intelligence. And but yeah, self-compassion. We don't have to use those words because they can seem so scary.
Speaker 3 · 23:25You're saying that reminds me of the one term I realize I'm seeing people at EPA really respond well to training your brain. They love that. Because these are people who got to this career by going to school, getting high-level degrees, doing whatever they need to do to protect the planet. So that really resonates with them.
Speaker 2 · 23:52Training the brain. Yeah, and that's what we're doing. Well, Lena, it's been a treat to work with you, to support you and your efforts. I am just so inspired by your work with Mindful EPA and starting it and getting it to this place where it is today. I hope that you feel good about it and feel fulfilled by all your good work because it's not only impacting the staff and your colleagues, but also obviously the planet, and hopefully, it will provide a lot of inspiration for other agencies, organizations, teams. I think that you walk the talk. You know, I've seen you in action at the mindful EPA with your leadership and how you relate to your colleagues and you walk the talk, you know, you model that mindfulness, that non-judgmental moment-to-moment awareness of yourself and others as you teach and facilitate. I just can't thank you enough for your work with the planet and with your new role. If people want to reach out to you or learn more about you, uh how can they do that?
Speaker 3 · 25:17Well, they could certainly, I'm on LinkedIn by my name. And if there's any question related to organizational mindfulness or the EPA, or if you're somebody who just wants to know more about how we're focusing on equity and underserved communities and underrepresented areas, which is part of the administration's focus, you can feel free to email me at kim.lina at epa.gov.
Speaker 2 · 25:46Excellent. Lena, thanks again for your time today. It's been an honor and a pleasure speaking with you. Wish you well with your future endeavors with the EPA.
Speaker 1 · 26:00An additional thank you to Dr. Lena Adams-Kim and also Sean Fargo for drawing attention to some key considerations for anyone who wishes to bring mindfulness to the workplace. When proposing a program, being mindful of who we're presenting to, how they think, and what they'll best respond to is vital for improving our chances of getting the go-ahead. By applying this same logic to the program itself, we keep it relevant, interesting, and effective for those who are enrolled. And of course, by embodying mindfulness ourselves, we become effective ambassadors for mindfulness, both inside and outside of formal practice sessions.
