Practice Guide — Togetherness Practice

The Togetherness Practice has been designed for people interested in deepening the capacities of themselves and others, designing containers for transformative action, and seeking to drive mindset shift and systems change.

The Practices

The Togetherness Practice is intended to be engaged over and over again as we activate our collaborations as a pathway to develop capacities and shape conditions in service of transformative collective action.

While our research insights identified four togetherness practices (pausing, patterning, trusting & enacting) which we offer as inspiration, the process of determining what practices are most beneficial to a given team in a given moment is part of the transformative power of this work.

The Intelligences

Along the way we are each invited to activate a range of “intelligences” (also known as “centers”) - body, mind, heart, and spirit - helping us expand beyond our “comfort zones” and expose terrain where we are more apt to be empathetic, vulnerable, and to connect with our deeper wisdom and unique contribution.

It is also from this holistic state of being that we have the capacity to recognize at every step of the way that we are making choices in even our smallest actions (and interactions)… and can decide what choices to make and why.

Modes of Engagement

This site offers four modes of engagement which are intended to be iterative and ongoing.

We begin with “quick” practices to disrupt our ingrained habits:

90 seconds to reset
90 minutes to reflect and disrupt

… And evolve to include longer term pathways to develop new ways of being in ourselves and together:

90 hours to internalize
90 days to integrate this and associated practices into our collaborations

….And 90 years, a lifetime of practice

Getting Started

A Guide for Teams

The way into this practice may be a desire for a collaboration to reach its full potential, or when a current collaboration has gone awry. It is not about personal issues or grievances, it is about helping teams get unstuck and reach the full potential of shared work.

As a leader…. start by asking for just a few minutes of your team’s time. Help direct / redirect your team to the purpose of the collaboration, and point out that:

Everyone has an important and unique role to play in this work
Collaboration can get sticky, and we want to make sure we are not getting in our own way (the work is too important…)
We can learn through our collaboration how to meaningfully expand our individual and collective contributions

… and you’d like to experiment with The Togetherness Practice as a way to do that.