Anchoring Energy

The leaders who work with us who seek to develop their abilities in working with the unseen world learn about anchoring energy. Put another way, they learn about the importance for people to experience a sense of feeling anchored in a constantly changing world. This assists people in orienting themselves in their lives and in their work, providing a sense of stability amidst change.

Leaders can create anchoring energy within the context of the annual, seasonal, weekly, and daily cycles of their organizations. This may take the form of regularly scheduled conferences and meetings, celebrations, and ceremonies to mark beginnings and endings. The people in the organization can count on these events and activities taking place as an organization.

Years ago, I experienced a CEO who opened every celebration of the departure of a staff member with the words ‘there is a time to come and a time to go, and this is your time to go’. When he began, we all groaned, thinking this was so corny and wishing he would be more creative. In hindsight, it was a good way to provide anchoring energy through words and a brief ceremony.

When I was a CEO, I shifted our staff meetings to monthly events, and shifted the seating arrangement to a circle, creating a community circle of all staff on a monthly basis in which we were all equal members of the circle, creating the conditions for us to discuss our issues and opportunities, giving everyone the opportunity to speak. On one occasion, I chose to have the meeting space set up around tables. Staff started to enter the space and stopped at the doorway. They didn’t like the change one bit…not because they disliked change…they worked well with change. They expressed that they needed some things to be constant as it gave them a sense of feeling anchored and stable amidst the change.

Leaders can also create anchoring energy within any meetings that they lead or have responsibility for. With our preferred meeting methods, designed for high levels of participation and engagement, we use a circle configuration for seating in the meeting (sometimes concentric circles if there are lots of people). We encourage the leader of the meeting to choose at least one person to assist them to anchor the energy of the meeting to be a ‘we can do it’ energy, a solution focused energy. This person would sit in a chair in the circle directly opposite to the leader. If the leader selects two additional people, they can then sit equidistant in the circle, creating four ‘energy anchors’ in the meeting. There is a qualitative difference that assists the group in finding their solutions and in having the courage to say what needs to be said along the way to moving along to the solutions they are needing.

In our international Genuine Contact organization, we make use of the benefits of having energy anchors in our meetings, whether the meetings are face to face or online. We also have a minimum of one international mentoring circle per season. Recently, Juergen Bossert, a Genuine Contact professional in Germany has agreed to be the guardian of the anchor energy for our international organization. Those of us sponsoring the international mentoring circles will be in conversations with Juergen as he ensures that we have the minimum of four international mentoring circles, that we maintain our commitments to selected activities within those mentoring circles, and that the mentoring circles take place in various geographic locations throughout the year so that there is better opportunity for the people in different geographic areas to one of these peer to peer mentoring circles.

_{Photo by Alex Holyoake on Unsplash}