Barri Harris

Are you a toxic manager?

For Barri Harris, transformation coach and founder of The Eureka Project, answering this question begins with a single step toward abiding self-awareness. Barri understands that bridging the seeming chasm between high dysfunction and high performance requires leaders confront their own blind spots and foster trust among their teams. Her vision is brave and inspiring: to create a community where leaders can discuss challenges, share stories, and offer information with a focus on best practices — collectively, to become the “tipping point that ends toxic workplaces” and leads to lasting legacies.

Barri knows a thing or two about workplaces. Guided by the motto “live by design, not by default,” she helps a vast array of organizations embrace and move through difficult transformations as smoothly and effectively as possible. Holding a CMA, an MA in international economics and finance, and several strategic management facilitation
certifications, and having excelled as a high-level human performance improvement consultant for 15 years, she can easily recognize the systemic and cultural challenges that hamper workplace progress when people have neither full awareness nor the right tools. Barri also gets why many managers struggle: she has travelled that road herself.

Read more.

My Journey by Barbara Wellborn

I am grounded in a way that I have never been before.  I have learned to recognize my body's signals and to embrace the lessons she is asking me to learn.  I can stand in a place of clarity and neutrality that allows me to be the observer and no longer the reactor, but it wasn't always that way.

When I was in my late 20's, my world was quickly unraveling.  On the outside, I presented well, but on the inside, my life had reached a crossroads of epic proportions - my marriage was dissolving, my first business was failing because the market changed and I failed to adapt and bankruptcy was imminent because of crushing debt.  I desperately tried to cling to what I knew, but every joint in my body was screaming out for change - literally, I was in unbelievable pain that kept me awake at night - endlessly allowing me to mull over my many failures.

Read more.

Stay Positive, Stay Asleep by Bonita Kay Summers

As you’re scrolling through your social media, how often do you come across profiles full of quotes on staying positive? There can be the temptation to “keep our head above water and paddle like mad” rather than allowing ourselves to feel the full extent of our emotional range. Thinking that being positive is a better choice can give us the idea that it’s somehow a failing if we don’t eschew the uncomfortable emotions for staying in our “happy place”. Happiness and optimism have their place in our lives, but we lose a great deal of our self-awareness if we exercise too much control over our emotions, preferring one feeling over another.

I often think about my 10-day stay at a Vipassana retreat in 2014, where we were encouraged to feel everything with “equanimity”. That meant accepting ALL the feelings, including rage, grief, fear, boredom, and every little spinal ache and muscle pain from sitting for prolonged periods while practicing Adhiṭṭhāna (determined sitting). This involved not moving a muscle while I observed the intense emotions that such stillness was bound to bring to the surface.

Read more.