Human Sustainability At Work, with Rosina Geiger (SAP)

Speaker 1 · 0:00Hi everyone, welcome to the Mindfulness Exercises Podcast. My name is Sean Fargo. Today I'm really happy to be joined by Rosina Geiger, whose work sits at the really meaningful intersection of sustainability, mindfulness, nervous system awareness, and what she calls human sustainability. Rosina works at SAP in sustainability customer adoption, helping people and organizations move toward more sustainable ways of working and creating impact. She's also an SAP Global Mindfulness Ambassador, a role that she's held since 2020. And she's a part of SAP's Mindfulness Teacher Training Program. She also does a lot of work coaching people internally at SAP with a mind-body connection. So she brings a unique perspective from inside a global organization, not only looking at sustainability as something that we measure externally, but also as something that we live internally in how we work, relate, lead, recover, which a lot of us could do more of, and care for one another. Rosina also offers mind-body coaching and support for people navigating long COVID, especially through German language resources for people who may not have access to the same depth of English-speaking mindfulness and mind-body material. I appreciate Rosina's work and that she's helping widen this conversation around human sustainability inside and outside corporate contexts. It's not only about the planet or our systems or our business goals, it's also about whether human beings inside our organizations are able to keep showing up with clarity and care, resilience and compassion without burning themselves out. In this conversation, we're going to explore what human sustainability really means, the power of human connection, the power that we have in just showing up in the workplace, and how we can listen more deeply to the body in a world that often rewards pushing through. Rosina, thank you so much for being here. I'm really excited to dive into these things with you. And in my experience with SAP and their mindfulness program, I know that they often start things with a one-minute check-in, starting meetings and events with a one-minute check-in. So, in that spirit, would you be willing to start us with a one-minute check-in before we start with our little meeting here?

Speaker 2 · 3:02Thank you very much, Sean. Thanks for this beautiful introduction. I hope we're gonna bring everything across what you just mentioned. And of course, I'm super happy to guide you or guide also the listeners through this one minute to arrive, which is very famous indeed in our company. And as I'm now in the teacher training for being a global mindfulness teacher, it's something which I try to practice everywhere I can. And it also helps us to stay focused. And maybe also for the listeners, it's gonna help you to listen even deeper to this conversation.

Speaker 1 · 3:39Beautiful. Thank you.

Speaker 2 · 3:41Okay, then if you're ready, I would ask you to just please put things away and find a way to sit in your chair that feels both relaxed and alert. You may close your eyes or keep them slightly open, unfocused, looking downward. Start by taking a full deep breath in and then a long slow breath out, letting go of whatever you were doing before, feeling yourself seated on the chair, noticing contact, sensation, sensing your feet on the floor, your hands on your thighs, bring attention to your breath, noticing the sensation of the breathing in and breathing out, allowing attention to rest on the breath. If you notice your attention is wounded, simply returning this kindness to this awareness of the breath, thoughts coming, thoughts going, remaining connected, awareness of the breath, like an anchor for attention, breathing in, breathing out, close, take a full deep cycle of breath when you're ready, allowing the eyes to fully open and returning attention to the room, stretching in any way you would like, and then come back. Yes.

Speaker 1 · 5:35Thank you. What a wonderful way to start any conversation or any transition in our day. Thank you for sharing that. It's a wonderful way to start the podcast. Can you

Speaker 1 · 5:55tell us a little bit about your work at SAP? Maybe just briefly describe what SAP is for those who may not be familiar with it. It's one of the biggest organizations in the world, I think. And how sustainability and mindfulness became a part of your path.

Speaker 2 · 6:14Yeah, I'm super happy. SAP is a company which runs often kind of in the background. It's called B2B, business to business, this area we cover. And we support flows in companies like digital supply chains or finance flows, and we digitize. Obviously, it's an IT, a software company, and we help the real big companies and also mid-sized companies run and digitize their business. Currently, I've been working for SAP almost 10 years. I work in sustainability solutions, which is fairly new. And with these sustainability solutions, we help companies to comply to sustainability regulations or measure their carbon corporate footprint or the carbon footprint of their products. And when you think about huge companies, consumers want to know what the impact is of these products. It was not such a popular topic, but we at SAP we believe it's here to stay. And sustainability is something which is really important for the world and also for us humans. We help companies looking into regulations like plastic taxes or compliance topics around sustainability. I'm a yoga teacher for many, many years now. I was then so lucky to come to SAP, which is very famous for mindfulness training. And we have also four full-time employees who just work on the topic of mindfulness and emotional intelligence. I jumped right into that and offered also my help there. And we have a huge community. They started before I joined SAP. They started in 2013, I believe. And I find it still amazing that we have colleagues working in mindfulness at a huge business corporation, right?

Speaker 1 · 8:03Yeah, yeah. Before we started, you mentioned your colleague Peter Bosselman, who I met, I think, in 2013, actually, right when he was starting the mindfulness program at SAP. We were doing a mindfulness teacher training together through Search Inside Yourself. And it's really inspiring to see companies and organizations adopt this. And SAP was one of the first ones. I sense a lot of heart in your work with the environmental sustainability part where you're helping companies, but you're really helping the environment. And when you saw the mindfulness program and the emotional intelligence trainings, how you segued into more human sustainability work and bringing your heart to the people rather than systems and the environment. How did that transition go into human sustainability? And

Speaker 1 · 9:02what is human sustainability in your own words?

Speaker 2 · 9:05I've always been in this human area. I studied sociology and literature. So I'm in that field where you connect to people and also as a yoga teacher. So this people business was always my thing, environmental also, because I grew up at an organic farm and my parents they were always about environmental stuff and sustainability. But when you asked me about this human sustainability thing, it's not something I made up so much. The UN brought a couple of years back something which is called ESG. And what does ESG stand for? It's environmental, social, and governance. This is how businesses are supposed to look at their activity. And environmental is like obviously the impact on the environment. And then there comes the S, the social part, and the Q stands for governance. So how do you actually govern it? The S, that's the human sustainability. A few weeks before you reached out to me if I want to be part of the podcast, I was in the mountains having a nice holiday in the middle of a great like nature, also doing yoga there. And then I met this sustainability lawyer, also from Berlin, because I'm located in Berlin. She asked me, Where do you work? And said, like, ah, sustainability. She was like, ah, me too. And then a few days later, she said, like, hey Rosina, you have so many followers on LinkedIn. Why are you not posting on this topic? You're a yoga teacher, you're a mindfulness ambassador, and then you work in sustainability. It's like you're connecting this whole ESGs thing. That's how she inspired me to go out to the world and talk about that. Because I kept it a lot to myself. I told you before it's my first podcast interview. And it's this first step going out and sharing with people and saying, hey, here I am, and you can do it the same way. If you stand for this topic, you can also go out and talk about it.

Speaker 1 · 11:01Yeah. Like, what do you want people to know? Like this topic feels really important in the world, but also in the business world around human sustainability and human connection. Why do you feel this topic is so important these days?

Speaker 2 · 11:20What I see in the business world, especially in sustainability, a lot of people are very intrinsically motivated about KPIs, about numbers. And if you not take care and practice this human part and the emotional intelligence part, then it's easily getting lost. So when there's stressful times, we forget about it. And this is why I keep talking about and say, like, hey, we can reach KPIs, making great products, but at the end of the day, I think it's not gonna be sustainable if we are not connecting on a human level and if we are not looking after each other. I myself am a very intense person. So even now in the teacher training, in my teaching pod, I'm the one who has done already three times more than the others. And I'm very pushy, and I always think I need to do more, I need to do better. And this intensity I also see in a lot of colleagues, we want to achieve something, we like the topic, but it's important also from a biological point of view because we are biology, our body and our brain. We need to pause. And I like kindness.

Speaker 1 · 12:37I like kindness too. Yeah.

Speaker 1 · 12:41I saw a Instagram reel the other day that the number of Google searches for burnout has skyrocketed like 20 times more than it was even just a few years ago. And especially since COVID. But like, are you seeing a lot of more burnout these days? And how is that showing up for the people around you?

Speaker 2 · 13:04I do not really have numbers, but since I'm in this mind-body coaching for a year now, I have a personal story to that. In 2022, I was diagnosed with slung COVID. And since then I've tried a lot of things and I found that nervous system regulation and specifically this mind-body medicine, which works with the connection of mind and body, and that we have the symptoms in the body. But if we look at the mind-body connection, we can recover. People I coach, they're not just in that field and suffering from the same idea, but also in burnout. What I do see obviously in the IT world is people are scared. There's a huge transformation on the way. And I think SAP is really well said because we have something like a mindfulness program, we have internal coaches. This also improves the culture and also makes people more resilient. I cannot say if the burnout rate goes up, but if you ask me, I believe that also something like long COVID is an illness of our time. It has to do with nervous system dysregulation.

Speaker 1 · 14:14Yeah.

Speaker 1 · 14:15I'm wondering with your role SAP, if it how has it felt to step into a role of say mind-body coaching, mindfulness teaching, talking about emotional intelligence. Coming from a different background, SAP, as we've said, is a massive organization. It's B2B, it's German. There's systems and intensity and drive, and a lot of really hardworking people are there. One of my best friends worked for SAP for like 20 years. And then we have mindfulness, these softer skills that some people may not really know what it means to be mindful, or like, why are you asking me to slow down and watch my breath or sensitive emotions? So I can only imagine being internal at SAP, like stepping into a role of soft skill teaching. How has it felt to you to show up in that way more and more? And how is it being received from others as you step into this role?

Speaker 2 · 15:31I have a million answers in my mind right now. It's so funny that you mentioned this German SAP's 100,000 employees, and it's so global. And also now in the teacher training, we also brought customers in. So I tell you, this teacher training is like there are people in Sao Paulo, there are people all over Europe, there are people in China, in India, it's so international. But this German thing, I mean, I'm German, so I don't know how any other nation is. But my last yoga teacher training, which was actually the Chubamukti teacher training, I did in 2022, just before I got sick, and it was mainly so 80% Germans. And I tell you, this intensity of this training was level 300. So afterwards, other ones who have done this Chuba Mukti yoga teacher training told me, yeah, your year was really, really intense because of all these Germans. I feel like we Germans are sometimes a bit intense. For me, going towards the softness, this is uh practice. Also, because my identity is more intense. That's how I think I fitted very well into the business culture, and that's how I ended up at SIP. Also, a lot of engineers, quite a lot of male colleagues. But my illness did teach me a lot. It did teach me the intensity doesn't help. You're not gonna recover with intensity. The softness, it also feels good, right? This is something I experienced. I sometimes feel a bit cringe at the business context. I have to admit, also when posting on these topics on LinkedIn, I multiple times asked my colleagues, can I really post this? And they're like, yeah, yeah, go on. Because my colleagues, most of them, they are way younger than me. So it's another generation. I'm 47, so they are like 15 years younger. They encourage me, so it's really, really good also to have these colleagues. I see the benefits. I don't really doubt it anymore so much. And even though it sometimes feels strange, I just believe so much in it. And as I told you this story before, you cannot change people, but the way you show up, that's how you influence people. And that's my goal, you know. I try to show up with these topics and with a bit more softness wherever I can. Also tell my story that I'm very intense and you can change.

Speaker 1 · 17:53Thank you for sharing all that, and then stepping into a role of a coach and a teacher.

Speaker 1 · 18:00I know you've been a yoga teacher for quite a while. A lot of people in our community are learning how to teach mindfulness. And a lot of people fear of judgment from others. Like, what are they gonna think of me? And am I good enough to be a teacher? Because I want to sound like my teachers and I want to inspire people, I don't want to say the wrong things, I don't want to hurt people, I wanna be a positive influence. And there's lots of fear of judgment, which holds a lot of people back, and it held me back for a while too, especially in the corporate context. Can you talk about the power of showing up in helping people internally? How people are receiving these teachings, and what kind of influence can you have at a corporate environment that's German or not German, but can you talk about how you can influence others for their well-being?

Speaker 2 · 19:01When you teach mindfulness in a company or as I do, I mean have just this one example. The people who are interested come to you. You're not straight away gonna teach to the person who is not interested or who finds it strange or whatever. I mean, there are different reasons why people do not practice. In the IT area, there is a lot of people neurodivergent, and they have difficulties. If you do not offer the practices in a right way, they would have kind of okay, I'm not going there. But you find your communities, and amongst 100,000 people, there is everything. You find every kind of person with a lot of different trainings in these areas, also. And at SAP, the beautiful thing is what Peter built up is this community. So we as mindfulness ambassadors or teachers, we already step into a community. We have, for example, regular short meditations in the mornings and evenings, which is of course in different time zones different. And then we have sessions like mindful movement or I also teach journaling. And also then we offer the trainings, and people who do the training come to these regular practices. So that's this one thing that you have community where you don't need to prove yourself. But then you have also the examples like joining a new team and you want to bring these practices to your new team. It can be that the one or the other person says, like, well, we haven't had this before, and we do it now, but not sure if it's so impactful or not. This can hurt, but you can also say, Well, this is the opinion of this one person, and many other people like it. And I find showing up with what you find helpful for yourself has the most impact because I cannot change anyone anyway. So I'm offering. And the teacher of my first yoga teacher training always said when we were nervous teaching, people, the stuff itself is good. So don't worry. Even though when you're like teaching and make mistakes, trust in the power of the teachings. This is also the same for mindfulness and slowing down. It's what I always keep in my mind. Because it's really funny. Like Peter in our training, he told us that he did teach in front of executives, and one of the executives started laughing, and then Peter felt like getting angry. But we as teachers, we train all our emotional intelligence. I mean, I wouldn't have gotten angry, I would have gotten super afraid. That's my personality. But this happens with human beings, different emotions, and you never know why this person had to laugh. You don't know why, and it doesn't matter.

Speaker 1 · 21:38What a beautiful teaching there, that we can trust in the practices and trust that there's power in the practice, and that if they just do the practice, that will take care of itself, and it doesn't matter who you are, per se, as a teacher, or that you don't have to say things perfectly, that it's really just about the practice. And inviting them to practice. Thank you for sharing that.

Speaker 1 · 22:04And then at SAP or elsewhere, I'm just curious which practices have you seen to be very helpful or practical in the workplace for people to do that has an impact on their human sustainability and human connection?

Speaker 2 · 22:24They're not so much of a mindfulness practice. I would say it's like this, it's coming more from the new work area. It's like a check-in where you ask everyone in the team to either answer a specific question on what's your favorite ice cream flavor. So you get to know each other, or you just ask how you're here today, because this fosters a feeling of community and team. You get to know each other better. So I find like on a level of team, this is like a micro practice, which is super helpful. I mean, I'm just thinking on a study which was done by Google. It's part of the Search Inside Yourself teacher training I'm doing right now, where they wanted to find out what an effective team is. And the assumption was they all need to be super smart, but at the end of the day, it was not so much the smartness of the people, but more the way the psychological safety, right? And this showed up, and you could talk about whatever you wanted. There was a lot of chit-chat also before and after the meeting. And I think this practice fosters it. I myself am a really bad one for micro practices. I believe it's very helpful, like this minute to arrive, or like three breath, you do remind each other to just take three breaths. But what I love a lot and what I also teach at SAP is journaling, which how I teach it is we have four prompts, we have a half an hour session, we start with a minute to arrive, then we have these four prompts. The people write three minutes on each prompt, and afterwards they read through it, and then we have a little conversation on what came up for everyone when they want to share. I myself am a big journaling fan. So I hope this was a good answer. I mean, I'm not sure if I can answer it on such a global level because I believe for everyone something else is different, and that's the job to find what helps you.

Speaker 1 · 24:22Exactly. I know in Search Inside Yourself, they teach a wide variety of practices, partly for that reason, because everyone benefits differently from different practices based on personality, intensity, their mood, their practice level, there's heart-based practices, somatic practices, journaling, walking, etc. So I think that as mindfulness teachers, if we're teaching groups, that's a great takeaway. Or teaching individuals that everyone's different. And there's no one practice that's the best practice. Usually the best practices for each person is the one that they'll actually do. Yeah. So I think you offered a nice variety, you know, with taking three breaths. I love that human connection question of like what's your favorite ice cream, or just sharing a little bit about the person underneath the suit. Like, who are you? What are you like? You mentioned psychological safety, which is inherent with mindfulness in the sense that mindfulness is this present moment awareness where we're not judging this to be good or bad, right or wrong. And the more that we train that skill of non-judgment and our ability just to be with this experience, that enhances our psychological safety with ourselves. And then that radiates outwards too. Like, can I be mindful of you and you and our group right now? And when that judgment softens, it becomes much more safe to be ourselves and free to express ourselves. You know, I think that just fosters that human connection and sustainability because we're not living in fear so much. So that's a beautiful answer. I'm really glad that an organization like SAP is fostering these practices, but also teaching people internally how to share them with our colleagues rather than bringing in these gurus from America or France or something. Can we teach this internally in our organization so that it's a little bit more peer-to-peer? There's the workplace culture already established with each person. I think that makes you much more effective at feeling relatable because you're already at SAP for a long time. So just a few ideas for other organizations and leaders to sense into how you might want to bring mindfulness into your organization too.

Speaker 2 · 26:57Yeah, what I find is important to add here is that it's not just about mindfulness, it's this emotional intelligence part. And neuroscience is like the huge word I would say, because if you go into a company and say mindfulness, they would imagine it like that. They're just sitting around meditating and then something spiritual and strange and weird. But in neuroscience, there have been such great findings the last 30 years on neuroplasticity. And I think this plays really into the hand of mindfulness. How we teach mindfulness at SAP, it's very connected to neuroscience. And also the training I'm going through now, and I mean you know it search inside yourself. There are so many studies quoted. And where I am with my yoga background, I'm sometimes like, okay, well, I do not need a study for everything. I'm very interested in neuroscience because of recovering from long COVID. It has a lot to do with this topic, how the brain works. But there's a lot of business-driven and engineers in a company. So to also convince them and give them proof. So it's a little bit different than teaching mindfulness, I guess, at a yoga studio.

Speaker 1 · 28:11Absolutely. A lot of people find learning about the neuroscience and neuroplasticity super helpful because there's more trust that these practices are actually doing something in the brain and the body, that it's not just some mystical woo-woo stuff. It's actually researched and that these things are actually working biologically and in the brain. Rosina, thank you so much for sharing about your background and

Speaker 1 · 28:41your work. I'm wondering if there's anything else that you'd like to share with our community that you would like for them to know, either as practitioners or mindfulness teachers or people in the workplace. What would you like people to know?

Speaker 2 · 28:57I think an important one I would give to everyone is do not underestimate your power and the way you show up in the world, it does make a difference. It makes a difference. It's not so much that you want to change something with intensity, it's more what you do and what you practice with your authenticity. This comes across and travels to other people and to the hearts of other people. And I also had colleagues who inspired me and helped me every day to go on with these topics. And if there wouldn't be this huge community of my company also supporting me, like executives who want to talk about meditation with me, or colleagues who also practice and then inspire me again, then I don't know if I would be doing it. So the way you show up in the world matters and it makes a difference.

Speaker 1 · 29:49Yeah, don't underestimate your power of how you show up. Beautiful. Well, Rosina, it's a pleasure meeting you today. I'll be following you and rooting for you for years to come. And thank you for stepping into your path of helping others and sharing these practices of mindfulness and emotional intelligence internally at SAP and then out into the world. Thank you for sharing everything. I'll be sharing your LinkedIn profile in the show notes for anyone interested in connecting with Rosina. Thank you again, and thank you for your good work in the world.

Speaker 2 · 30:32Thank you so much, Sean.