I interviewed Ojai local, Darrell Gooden, who I dubbed a corporate healer. on the Confident Healer podcast He leads a non-profit called the Mountain Institute for Kung Fu and Tai Chi. After talking to Darrell, he told me how martial arts shows up in his life, and how it influences his work, he calls it “peaceful confidence.”
He works as a consultant, in change management, which means that you can be constructive about changes and conflict as it affect your business. It’s a very technical term, I got a kick out of some of the technical terms he used. But he has to be that way, because you don’t just walk into a corporate office and say, “hey, you need to change from the inside out”. Here is what I pulled from the Adizes Graduate Institute, where Darrell got his PhD in Organizational Transformation: “Each one of us will see a situation differently. We think and respond differently. By understanding your own and your colleague’s management styles, you will be better equipped to work more effectively in a team environment.”
This means that when Darrell gets hired by a company to help a company manage change in order to produce and be more profitable, what they are really getting is a corporate healer–he is trained to get staff and management to evaluate their personal values, and how that will affect their values at work. Also, how to deal with personal inner conflicts, he’s basically teaching people who work in an organization to learn how to take care of yourself, and to be more conscious of the decisions you make and how they will affect your clients, or customers and the planet.
Also, I found out that he learned Reiki at the Adizes Graduate Institute, where in the world does THAT happen, learning Reiki to replenish yourself because the work you do in corporations will be taxing on you??? They built Reiki in their curriculum as a way to provide self-care. Amazing right?
It was a fascinating look at an academic application of mindfulness techniques being applied to in organizations. A way for people that work in corporations to look inward to make the world a better place. I’m so glad there are places that have learned how to do that with proven methodologies or in layman terms, techniques.
To hear the interview, go here and if you are interested in learning martial arts or tai chi you can visit Darrell’s non-profit, mountainkungfu.com for more information.