What are any of us to do with pain and heartache, experiences that feel like they just might break us completely? Especially at work, it can feel difficult to just show up, much less be fully present and engaged in our work when we’re navigating something significant – an aging parent, a struggling child, divorce, infertility, personal health issues.
Enter LifeGuides®, an organization that has created a brilliant service offering that humanizes the workplace by supporting people through the full range of human experiences. LifeGuides® is a public benefit corporation offering a community of trained and certified Guides who provide guidance in over 400 categories of personal growth, lifelong learning, or life challenges.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Carolyn Gundersen, Executive Vice President, Enterprise Growth at LifeGuides® to learn more.
“LifeGuides has created a new market category to not only support people through the ups and down of life, but also support their personal growth and development. This is an unbelievable opportunity for employers to operationalize their values – to really get beyond words and get into action around delivering on a culture of caring.”
The LifeGuides® model offers its clients unlimited access to confidential 1:1 conversations via video, phone, text or chat. Different from the traditional Employer Assistance Program (EAP) in that participants get deeply personalized guidance from certified Guides over whatever duration of time the participant choses. The service is 100% employer-paid (no co-pay) and covers all adult members within a household.
Carolyn brings decades of experience in human development to her leadership role at LifeGuides®. Having spent 18 years at The Ken Blanchard Companies, Carolyn has a deep passion for enterprises that invest in people. “When I was introduced to LifeGuides®, it touched my heart. They really understood something fundamentally different about the way people grow – and that is that you have to meet people where they’re at. This is how we can truly create a culture of care. And if I ask you, what does it feel like to be deeply cared about? There’s nothing like it. And this is part of the value that LifeGuides® provides – we’re helping to create this eco-system of care in your organization.”
LifeGuides® works with any organization that wants to address these 3 things:
1) Help people to lean into their own well-being
2) Offer an ecosystem where employees, as a Whole Person, are nurtured and valued
3) Truly be a culture of caring
Over the past few years, there’s been a lot of suffering in the world. And there has also been a lot of awakening. How are we in organizations becoming better because of these shared human experiences? In Susan Cain’s new book, “Bittersweet: How Sorrow & Longing Make Us Whole”, she offers up a core idea that we can transform pain into creativity, transcendence and love. LifeGuides® is absolutely putting that idea for transformation into action. In Carolyn’s words, “Employee empowerment is here to stay and well-being is at the heart of it.”