Pre-Rendezvous Workshop: The Mindset and Spirit of Service

We all offer our talents, skills, and knowledge to others in our personal and professional lives. In this workshop, we will focus on invigorating those offerings by examining the essence of service using some unexpected processes and thoughtful reflection. For example, we will explore and embrace the value of lightening up and loosening up in order to level up our emphasis on service.

If you are doing the same things today as you were a year ago or even six months ago, no matter how successfully, perhaps there is room for enhancement. If one foundation of true service—plus of a meaningful life and authentic mastery—is continuous improvement, recognizing the seductiveness of well-worn, perhaps worn-out, ways of doing, being, and serving can be stimulating. A fresh look at what we are doing and how we are doing it can create for us in this workshop an interlude that invigorates.

HOW? Together we will innovate, invent, alter, combine, dare, discover, reflect, dig, play, seek, try, loosen, turn, question, conspire, admire, improvise, imagine, lighten, discard, and alter.

And flowing through our time together will be WATER. Leonardo da Vinci saw water as the driving force of all nature. During our workshop, the five components, the quintet, that make up our acronym WATER will be the driving force of our time together.

• W-onder (along with its cousins awe and enchantment giving us a different sense of self and clarifying our vision and purpose)
• A-esthetics of art (appreciation of beauty and art leading us to the art of care, the art of serving)
• T-rust (confidence even in what we have not yet seen and moving forward without formula, recipe, or system)
• E-ngagement (remembering how, why, and when we need to come together with others)
• R-ebellion (breaking up and through patterns, expectations, and restrictions)

We will look at the science behind, the benefits of, and ways to increase, each of the five.

Throughout we will be focusing on a few themes including the triad of Process, Patterns, and Playfulness.

And we will participate in a few novel exercises including but definitely not limited to:

• Expanding modes of improvising and quickly adapting (including a deeper practice developed in the early 20th century by the mother of improvisation Viola Spolin, not the technique-y improvisation so popular today),
• Remembering and memorializing our focused mini-stories
• Using flashcards for cementing our desired changes and leaps
• Demonstrating through various methods the value of trusting in the process without attention to the product (i.e., focusing on the sea and sailing, not the port and mooring)
• Truly seeing patterns and everyday details all around us and choosing some for imitation and inspiration
• Fully fleshing out the style we use with others and imagining other styles

“Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.” – G.K. Chesterton, “The Eternal Revolution” in Orthodoxy

So can we!