Walk the change

Walk the change

24 July 2015

walk the change-DSC_0290We put together a program that combines walking with more traditional ways of personal transformation. It is indeed a practice that has nothing to do with trekking, nor with the achievement of results in a sport or competitive context.

With Walk the Change, walking becomes a tool of evolution: it increases our introspective ability, sets us in a context with others and with the surrounding environment in a different way than we are normally used.

While new perspectives, certainties, behaviours open up new ways within ourselves, walking becomes a powerful metaphor of this transformation.

“Walking met my counseling passion even before I realized that I would be a Walking Counselor. Born in the same year and from the same personal search, in the beginning they used to live apart: one, the counseling, in a work context; the other, the walking, was a personal space where freedom, balance, well-being lived together. One morning, I was enjoying the sunrise along the Aragonese path, somewhere between the Somport pass and the flat land South to Pamplona, when the thought suddenly came. All of my clients – executives and managers who were drowning with responsibilities, trying to make sense of being in this world and looking for new ways of living – would have found that time and that space highly beneficial! I thus decided to practise the Walking Counseling, initially receiving curious interest, and then increasingly positive comments from more and more convinced clients.

Walking, in a Corporate environment. Executives and managers often experience an unnatural separation between the over-developed and exploited cognitive world and the emotional, relational and bodily sphere. In the corporate world, we rarely allow ourselves to manifest areas of the self that, instead, are more fully recognized in the private life: feeling emotions, listening with all our senses, empathizing with others.

With Walk the Change, a pleasant and easily accessible activity such as walking, fully integrated in the company as a leadership development tool, the cognitive and the physical spheres are connected through an unusual and pioneering collaboration.

Thinking with the Body. Working with the body is not a prerogative of outdoor activities. Many bioenergetic and systemic techniques, focusing on the body and its perceptive abilities, can be efficiently practiced indoors. However, walking in the open air is an important and impactful facilitator: it puts the body at the centre of focus, making it easier for us to feel and examine it, reconnecting our self-perception with the truth that our body gives back to us. Activating the body, we have a stronger capacity to divert ourselves from the overly intense activity of our minds, thus suspending judgment and empathizing with our surroundings. Listening to our body, we can better understand ourselves. Alongside the thought of the mind, we discover and integrate the thoughts of the body.

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