Towards Actionable Plans.. Dear Committee Members; The focus of the next working meeting will be on implementation of the stage plans of the various subgroups. [currently 11.11.2014] We are now at the point of developing an implementation of each of the goals. Come join us. We want you to join us.
This is being sent this out to all so you know what the Shifting Cultural Attitudes Subcommittee is working on. This 'Cultural Group' is working through a process of creating a Strategic Plan so we can take all the wonderful ideas we have been banging around and create an actionable plan out of them. Find attached an explanation of writing SMART goals and a template for the team leader to fill out for the goals your group were working on during Tuesday night's meeting. When the team leader has entered the information into the actionable plan template, please forward to Ken Daley for inclusion in the Strategic Plan. At previous Alliance working meetings two working subgroups formed and met — the “MUM/MSAE” group and the “Outreach and Education” group. Those two groups met again last week. Thank you to everyone in those groups for stepping up and contributing in this way. Please contact your group liaison to check on if you are meeting this coming week, and on what work needs to be done between the sessions. Template Explanation: Writing SMART Goals STEP 1: Understanding the nature of SMART goal writing There are several variations of the mnemonic SMART. For the purposes of our Mental Health Alliance exercise we will use the following. S pecific M easurable A ttainable R elevant T ime Bound Specific: The more specific and detailed your description, the greater the chances of realizing your goal. Measurable: In the specific statement from above you stated the outcome you were hunting for. Now is your chance to find measurable steps to attain your goal. Attainable: Calculate your ROI (Return On Investment). Are the effort and time you devote to the execution of this goal worth it? Relevant: Will the achievement of this goal puts you closer to your even larger scale goals? Is this important to our mission? Time Bound: You need to put deadlines and a linear sequence on the tasks needed to reach the goal. Nothing will kill a project quicker than not being able to see an end point to achieving the goal. STEP 2: Writing SMART goals To help guide you in writing SMART goals for our Mental Health Strategic Plan we will use the following template. After you write the goal using the template and all the columns are filled out, go back to STEP 1 and see if your goal meets the SMART criteria. If yes, move on to writing more goals. If no, you know what to do ;-) Work in Progress... If you wish to be part of one of the other groups that were listed (still being developed and waiting for more people), or if you want to create a group that is not yet listed, please let us know. - Fairfield Mental Health Alliance FF Mental Health Alliance Tuesday, 10/28/14 Working Session: Agenda: Yes, let’s use Tuesday’s meeting to identify our specific points of focus: We will be primarily focused on following-up on the great work that Ken did last week on culture and this community. We will be checking in with everyone if there are other announcements or issues that need to be addressed. We will also look at some of the website updates, as well as other projects that need to be addressed. Other past areas that we will also address, as time permits: Updates and recommendations/action steps from the groups? Fairfield Mental Help website — content gathering and assembling? Ideas for follow-up community meetings? Progress from Mental Health First Aid meeting? Any residual dissuasion from last Sundays big meeting on campus that needs to be addressed? What do we create now from this work? Next event on, or off, campus? Check in on how we’re doing on the whole. Are we headed in the right direction? Any course corrections needed? Any further suggestions? Hear from each of the small groups on their progress. See if we have enough people to form the Resources group we planned on, and enough professionals to form the Professionals group. Meet again in small groups — since this is where the action is at this point. Individually check in as to what you are up to in creating a difference our community, and if you need any support from the rest of the group, or find out if you have suggestions and ideas for the rest of the group. "Let’s do think of the most interesting, useful, practical, informative, behavior-and-attitude-changing topics we can." Craig Let me know if there are any agenda items that you personally have that you want to develop at this meeting, please let me know. If you are not on Atrium, or have not been on there since last week, please log on and contribute your thoughts. We want to hear what you are thinking. Looking forward to seeing all of you again. The Fairfield Mental Health Alliance October 5th Meeting Notes You asked: What did you think about (the Oct 5 meeting) last night? Look this has been about creating change and that meeting was a timely showing of some progress of change. The meeting was not the conclusive meeting but it does show the movement has changed some and all the people on stage help show the integration this is taking. On the left hand of the stage as the audience viewed it were all these different practicing clinical professionals who also have integrated alternative modalities in to their practices as they are useful and have basis, and then Pat on the right side clarifying and holding up the movement's franchise. Pat did quite a deft job clarifying on behalf of the movement and Maharishi. Afterall, it was a movement community meeting. Pat is really quite controlled smart, homey, funny, and theatrical all at once. I enjoyed watching him. It was really quite brilliant. This is the second meeting where he has spoken for our collective practical concern as to compassion and our working to help people solve mental health issues being essentially compassionate.. [very buddhistic? ] It will be very interesting to hear when that language of compassion gets picked up, adopted and used by spokespersons up the chain of TM command. That actually is extremely interesting that he is changing the inside by leading with that idea. It has always been said that TM is without heart, well then if it is not a trick then we see this movement of the movement from the upper level around this whole mental health thing is showing some heart, even though it took boxing them in to a corner to help them show it. This is quite a change. Question of course now is the carry-through. There is more work to do to figure out the practical delivery of policy. The clinic, type of credentialed staffing, and how they are going to administrate those trip-wire questions on their forms. That MUM student who spoke in the Q and A was very effective at holding their feet to the fire once again in public. They got to come up with more compassion to show on that one for people to believe them. It is about showing change on their part. Compassion? Their administrative banishing of Tom Allen was not the timely example of any change there. Opps. An long-time old meditator and yes with criticisms of the organization which they were soliciting to hear, but an apostate? No, not then. Hurt now? yes. Not great timing for the handling of one of the poster persons of Fairfield Cares. Incrementally the meeting was an important meeting strategically. It will be another step when they have the confidence to post the policy to point to on their webpage. -Buck in the Dome Okay, things change. Git ready for change. Things are changing inside TM. There yet are a lot of good people in TM for good reasons and the organizational model and processes has changed since the demise of the founder. There is a lot more transparency and process. We'll see if you can change around this. -Buck on the Ground in Fairfield mjackson74 wrote : The fact that they had that ['Explicative Deleted] Bob Schneider, a cardiologist, doing a lecture on Vedic psychiatry which was primarily more Movement bullshit of think sweet thoughts, don't think negative thoughts, read Hindoo scriptures and do TM - that says what the Movement really thinks and is doing about TM suicides than the community meetings they are participating in ONLY to save face and put on a good show until they can get the people suffering from depression alone to tell them its their fault, their karma, they just aren't pure enough yet, so more TM Siddhi practice and some yagyas as well as a good big fat donation to the Movement will cure them. salyavin808 asks: So, what happened at the meeting, who said what and what are they going to do about it? Dateline Fairfield, Iowa. The Oct 21st meeting? It was one in a continuation of working meetings held about mental health in the community that have been ongoing for months now most every Tuesday going under the working banner of the Fairfield Mental Health Alliance. These are working meetings of people who are interested in being activley involved in helping with communal mental health. On alternating Tuesdays are working committee meetings while on the off Tuesdays is the large group meeting where the committees bring their work. The larger meetings are very business like organized by agenda. A lot has been done [accomplished in very tangible ways] over several months to facilitate mental health in to the community. The meetings are open to interested people who would be actively involved. They are not gripe sessions where people just hate, bitch and complain, but working meetings looking for action steps to work on and facilitate. Different aspects have been focused on and worked on within the ongoing previous meeting process. Last month before this last meeting the other night was the presentation and distribution of the campus guideline for psychological health treatment. That was a historic meeting and showed the work of a lot of people. This current meeting the other night was a facilitated meeting getting down to the cultural things that may underlie meditator communal mental health. Everything came on to the table. It was really well facilitated. Evidently it is now time in the process to really consider elements of our culture. There were about 40 people around the room of various ages and rank in the community. The meeting had a cross-section representation of students, graduates of the whole school system, long-term community meditators, campus people, and movement leadership. It was extremely well facilitated lasting within and hour or so such that everyone was asked to speak and participate in a series of rounds around the room where everyone was asked by the facilitator who ran the meeting to respond to particular questions in short and those comments were captured on whiteboard and poster boards by scribes in front of everyone to be kept and read through out the meeting. Starting with a question something like, in only a few limited words and without statement what do you see the problem is here in the community culture with mental health? 5 or so words. It went around the room. Then once everything was on the boards in front of everyone came the next question, in a word how do you feel now about all that was said? It went around the room to everyone including movement leadership. 'Hopeful' was a common comment among a range of feelings. Last large question of the group was something like, in five words what should be done to effect change in the communal culture? Again time was taken to go entirely around the room and the answers were recorded by scribes on boards in front of the whole group to read. That went around the whole room and everything was said without comment or discussion. It just moved around the room to everyone. These were pertinent action points. In the end of the meeting then everyone was asked to come forward and physically vote with a limited number of hash-marks to what they felt were the most important points offered in the meeting. That data then will subsequently generate a report with priority for a future meeting about what it might take to change the culture of the movement around mental health. It was all very open and very well done. Communal process to continue,, # # Now, as the science evidently does seem to indicate do take some quiet time for effective transcendent meditation for the welfare of your mental health and go forth and have a better day. Jai Guru Dev, -Buck in the Dome ? “..the role of principle Barry hater - and you have to admire the gusto!” No, we all rate posts as we may read them on spectrum; from posts that make: Observations, to suggestions, to criticism, by negativity and tone, to apostasy, thence to active anger and hating. In reading these posts I feel Ann through reading the individual postings here simply lost some faith more in Turq by her better understanding of his writing and approach here after reading the Lenz book that was posted here. It is that simple also. I always read the Turq and feel he has a valid perspective from having 'been there' at a time, by his contrast with spiritual experience like Fleet's, and now I feel I have an even better understanding of him as a critic from this recent Freddy Lenz/Rama thread on FFL. Context often is everything. That is something that is particularly good about the writing on FFL, that it often can render down what is truth. Judy was very much part of that process when she was here. Ann also helps with that by virtue of her mind about things and by life experience as context about things here. Some here have been pricks and Ann may be prickly towards people at times. Rick seems to welcome almost everyone contributing to the related topics of FairfieldLife. I thank Rick for that. Public forum is often one of the best checks against theocratic tyranny. There was an amazing open meeting last night in meditating Fairfield where everything was on the table in front of a bunch of the higher-up apparatchiks of the new TM movement. For upward pressures on the organization being beyond theocratic control, FFL has long been a part of the calculus of the meditating Fairfield communal culture. There is a lot of change going on inside right now by virtue of the attention of public forum. Turq in his way has been part of that for years by force of his experience, personality and writing. I would miss him if he gets entirely hounded or completely embarrassed off of this forum. In the same way I feel it was really mean the way they hounded Judy personally off this list and out of this community. Rick and the moderators should have stopped that before the end. I would hope we could all be kinder with one another in process. Jai Guru Dev, -Buck in the Dome Om, Dear MJ; under a theory that ethics is a leading economic indicator of organizational life, could your vitriolic level as to TM, the Maharishi and the meditation he promulgated and some of TM's past leadership be malleable if the new TM movement has changed its ethical code and behavior? Or, are you locked in to your feelings and opinion? Just wondering. I am seeing quite a lot of change [movement] in the new TM movement. Does that kind of healthy change dismay your position? Kindly, -Buck
