25DW: More Ideas – Windcall Institute

25 Days of Windcall: Health

Take a brisk walk outside in the middle of the day.
Schedule a massage.
Move! Shake your head, shake your fingers, stretch your arms up over your head, skip for a minute instead of walking.
Find a yoga, tai chi, qi gong, pilates, or dance class – and go!
Say out loud several times: “I am a vibrant and healthy human being.”
Identify 1 to 3 healthy foods you will eat more of during the 25 Days of Windcall.
Configure a standing workstation and do all emails standing up, preferably in your stocking feet.
Spend time in a sauna, hot tub, jacuzzi, or flotation tank.
Hula hoop in the office.
Cook a healthy dinner.
Schedule a healing session such as Reiki or acupuncture.
Investigate the de-toxifying ayurvedic practice of oil pulling and give it a try.

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Find a flotation center (Soak in a tank of Epsom Salt water for a relaxing and healing experience).
Go kayaking or hiking.
Ride a bike.
Get a Manicure/pedicure.

25 Days of Windcall: Contemplation

Meditate for 20 minutes
Say prayers silently or out loud.
Ask yourself: “What do I love to do, what brings me joy? What is my heart asking for? What practice will bring connection to what my heart wants?” Take note of the answers.
Build an altar as visible and tactile reminder of something or someone important to you.
Practice journaling with a pen and paper. Just do free writing and let whatever wants to come out on the paper express itself.
Notice at least 5 things throughout your day that you are deeply appreciative of.
Buy yourself flowers every Sunday and put a flower in every room to remind you all week long to stop and smell the flowers
Do vocal meditation and/or chanting for 21 minutes.
Do a slow walking meditation, breathing in with one step and breathing out with the next.
Try the Buddhist meditation practice of unconditional loving kindness (metta).
Before you start work, focus on your breathing for 3-5 minutes.
Write down (or think of) at least 5 things that you are grateful for right before you go to sleep.

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Practice restorative yoga.
Go through old letters and photos to remember beautiful moments.
Start keeping a journal of your night-time dreams.
Get a coloring book and use colored pencils or crayons to contemplatively color.
From Windcall Alumnus and consultant Joy Hutchinson, “Practice vocal meditation and chanting, either with a simple drone instrument (like a sruti box from India), or with a drone app you can get for your smartphone (tanpura or sruti). With the soothing drone playing in the background (the voice likes support), start with long breathing for a minute or so, then ease into a simple “ahhhhh.” Then gently move up and down the scale and then follow where your voice wants to go. Research has shown that doing vocal toning, chanting, and humming for at least 21 minutes increases the benefits.”

25 Days of Windcall: Creativity

On your way to work, bring a camera and capture photos of whatever catches your attention.
Get paints, clay dough, and/or colored pencils and set aside an hour to play around. Play with art without worrying about how it looks.
Watch a funny movie and just start laughing. Laugh your a** off.
Take old magazines and cut out images and/or words to make a collage.
Make up a new movement song with a friend. All the better if you end up laughing at your own lyrics.
Improvise your new standup comedy routine.
Cook with an ingredient you’ve never used before.
Paint a picture with your non-dominant hand.
Re-read a fun book from your childhood, then write the sequel.
Write a poem (or two or three).
Finger paint. Be messy.
Enjoy your favorite music and dance if you want to.

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Write a short story.
Draw a mandala.
Color in a mandala coloring book.
Play with clay.
Build something with old pieces of scrap wood, popsicle sticks, and/or buttons. Use glue.
Play an instrument.
Read poetry out loud.
Take an improv class.

25 Days of Windcall: Quiet

Plan a whole day where you don’t use computers, phones, or other electronics.
Take a walk and practice deep listening to the sounds outside – try to not listen to your own thoughts.
Get lost in a novel today.
Take a day to be in silence; let the words float away.
Enjoy a day on your own in nature.
Take a long bath with soft music and candles.

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Take two days without social media.
Check your email only once or twice today.
Let yourself have a free day where nothing is planned and you let the day unfold and flow as it will.
Bake cookies.
Create rituals.

25 Days of Windcall: Practices for Organizations

Learn about leadership coaching, or call a coach (the Windcall coaches are great) and explore what it would be like to be coached for 6 months
Make one positive change to your office or desk area for 5 days.
Look at your schedule for the next two weeks and try to avoid scheduling back to back meetings. Give yourself time to breath deep and do the followup after a meeting.
Start a soccer or other kind of pickup game during lunch.
Look up a leadership program focused on transformative leadership and encourage someone (or yourself) to apply or check out their tools.
Instead of sitting inside, have walking meetings outside.
Self-care check-ins at staff meetings.
Eat lunch outside.
Write these question on a piece of paper: “What is one thing you’re proud of about this organization? What is one thing you would love to grow more of in this organization?” Pull a colleague aside and share your answers. Then give him/her the paper with the questions to continue the practice and grow this tree of sharing.
Take 20 minutes to draft up your ideal leadership-self care plan in your organization and think about your step to make that the reality.
Create a culture of self-care, mutual support and gratitude in your organization. One way to do this is meet with another staff member to plan more generous sabbatical, bereavement, vacation, and personal days for your organization.
Start meetings with shoutouts, gratitude, and praises.
Call an ally who has access to a place in a natural setting and ask if staff or leaders could use it for a week for a personal retreat.
Tape a large piece of butcher paper on the wall and write “What are you grateful for?” across the top. Put markers out and invite organization staff, members and visitors to share.
Include yoga, long walks, meals and sharing during retreats.

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Get your whole staff to clean and re-decorate the office.
Plan more generous sabbatical, bereavement, vacation, and personal days than other groups your size.
Do not plan Monday meetings.
Consider offering a significant sabbatical to anyone who has worked for 7-10 years for your organization.
Increase vacation and comp time and require people to take time off.
Create a pool of time to offer staff that are facing a significant illness or family crisis. This prevents vacation time from being eaten up by the crisis, instead of being a restorative time.
Educate funders about the real costs of supporting your leadership sustainability plan.
Write these question on a piece of paper: “What is one thing you’re proud of about this organization? What is one thing you would love to grow more of in this organization?” Pull a colleague aside and share your answers. Then give him/her the paper with the questions to continue the practice and grow this tree of sharing.
From Windcall Alumnus Melinda Wiggins: “During staff meetings, we now always have a skill share or a self-care check-in. For example, I shared that another practice I started after Windcall was not to schedule meetings on Monday. We talked about it and now the whole staff is trying to do this; it’s easier to do if we have organizational agreement. The benefit is huge; no one is thinking on Sunday about presenting or facilitating on Monday and everyone, even those who work with farmworkers on Saturdays, has two consecutive days off for sure. We are also working on not scheduling back to back meetings so everyone has time after the meeting to do the follow up, as opposed to the follow up tasks dragging on and becoming a stressful burden. These are big cultural shifts for us that recognize how we work best as people and not machines. Modeling a different way of being and sharing collective agreements about a healthy work culture really make a big difference.”
From Windcall Alumnus Rachel Ebora: “I like our staff to share a meal together, sharing personal stories that provide a little bit of insight about each other. (I use the beginning of all staff meetings for this – I typically start with an ice breaker question that each staff member answers, e.g. ‘What’s your favorite birthday memory?’ ‘How do you spend holidays?’ ‘What’s the best present you’ve ever received?’ – these questions are light but the answers that I get from each staff member really provide insight on who they are outside of their job descriptions. It’s also an easy way to understand the diversity of culture and background we have organizationally), walking together, celebrating together. I am hoping to also institute a quarterly meal with my directors – to celebrate successes and acknowledge the hard work that all of them have been contributing to the organization.”

25 Days of Windcall: Nature

Take a barefoot walk in the woods.
Feed and watch the birds.
Practice building outdoor sculptures with rocks you find on a walk. Take the time to carefully balance them, realizing you need internal balance yourself in order to balance rocks.
Plant a garden.
Create an altar outside.
Take a hike in a brand new place. Enjoy the sense of adventure.
Watch the sunset.
Spend time with animals.
Sit down on the ground outside and create a mandala with the leaves, sticks, rocks and other gifts you find.

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Find a tree that you admire and spend a long time with this tree. Notice all you can about the tree and how it feels to be with this tree.
Weed your garden.
Prune your garden.
From Windcall coach Julia Lau de Guzman: Be One With Nature: “Take time to be in nature whether it’s the sun shining outside your window or the rolling hills on a hike. Breathe in the essence of the nature surrounding you. Imagine you can inhale the groundedness of the trees, the vibrancy of the colorful flowers, the brilliance of the sun, the serenity of the air… and whatever else you’re noticing in the natural beauty around you.” More ideas from Julia here.

25 Days of Windcall: Connection

Have coffee with a friend you haven’t seen in awhile.
Write letters, postcards or short notes to loved ones near and far.
Brainstorm your futuristic novel with your friends Have coffee with a friend you haven’t seen in awhile.
Start a weekly sharing time with your family called “Joys and Concerns.” If you don’t have a group or family to do this with, it also works as an exercise alone but in that case, it’s good to write it down.
Share a lovely dinner with friends.
If you are an Executive Director, start or join an Executive Director’s support group that meets monthly. If you’re not an ED, start a peer support group.
Take a walk with other organizers to talk about self-care.
Set an intention to offer compliments and words of encouragement to at least 3 people. The goal here is to highlight the strengths and positive qualities within others, which in turn helps you to feel more positive about yourself while allowing your own positive qualities to come more to the forefront.
Take one practice for you or your organization from the 25 Days of Windcall, email it to a friend, and ask them to remind you of it two months from now.

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From Windcall Alumnus Chung-Wha Hong: “Start a weekly sharing time with your family called “Joys and Concerns.” Combine it with a big Sunday brunch and it’s even better. The joys and concerns framing helped everyone share the highlights of the past week and what they are worried about more easily than in a regular conversation. As a result, we all felt more in tune with what everyone was going through in their busy lives and made us feel more like a family. If you don’t have a group or family to do this with, it also works as an exercise alone but in that case, it’s good to write it down. If you want to get ambitious, you can also add Hope as an additional part.”
From Windcall Alumnus and coach Alex Poeter: “Set an intention to offer compliments and words of encouragement to at least 3 people. This may include complimenting someone on the way they look, how their smile has an invigorating effect on you, the inspiring effect of something someone else has said, or pointing out something that someone else is doing well. The goal here is to highlight the strengths and positive qualities within others, which in turn helps you to feel more positive about yourself while allowing your own positive qualities to come more to the forefront.” More ideas from Alex Poeter here.