At Origin Active Lifestyle Communities, we believe it is our mission to give you, our team members, a sense of purpose, belonging, and meaning at your job. Our hope is to encourage holistic engagement through Origin’s Soul Cafe.
Each one of us brings who we are into the culture of our company. More than ever before we see the large-scale connectivity that weaves all aspects of our lives together. Modern technology has allowed us access to each other’s lives in radically greater quantity. The lines between professional life and your personal life are often blurred. As an employer, rather than asking you to push aside who you are, we are active in providing opportunity for healing and development for all of our team members.
Let’s talk about what it means to encourage holistic engagement. We know that the physical body is composed of several systems working in conjunction with each other. Our nervous system works in harmony with our cardiovascular system. Our limbic system process emotions and signals from all kinds of external inputs and has a profound influence on our endocrine system. Science is showing more and more evidence of the myriad way in which we are composed of multiple systems functioning interdependently. When one of these systems fails to work properly there is an increase of pressure and stress on the other systems. In a larger sense, who we are is composed of more than just our physical bodies.
To understand wholeness is to understand that we are body, soul, and spirit. Your feelings and emotions have an impact on your physical health. How you process the world around you, the external, will influence your soul, psyche and physical being, the internal. Our wellness is directly linked to the health we are experiencing in each one of these areas. The desire of our Soul Cafe is to encourage you, our team members, to honestly evaluate yourself and to recognize that while we all have different approaches to wellness, we are all human beings challenged to appreciate and understand holistic engagement. Holistic engagement starts with holistic appreciation. We appreciate that you are more than all of your parts combined. The same is true of Origin Active Lifestyle Communities. We are more together than we are individually.
Soul Café encourages holistic engagement in six specific ways. We believe that these six invaluable philosophies help to facilitate growth and overall wellness for every team member regardless of background or experience. Wellness for us is a healthy community cultivating the highest levels of dignity, respect, kindness, and compassion being expressed between everyone. Our six specific ways of cultivating holistic engagement are as follows:
Optimism
Foster creativity and innovation throughout your life by recognizing that optimism gives us the opportunity to see that there are multiple solutions to the problems that we encounter. We encourage you to exercise the muscle of optimism to refresh your personal wellness.
Belonging
Connecting both internally to your true self and also to your team members is of the utmost importance. Modern research in neuroscience indicates that social needs are managed by the same neural networks that we use for primary survival needs such as food and water. Soul Cafe provides an opportunity for a deeper, more meaningful connection to take place at Origin Active Lifestyle Communities.
Mindfulness
Being fully engaged and present in the day-to-day is how we engage in mindfulness. This practice allows for our bodies, minds, and hearts to truly experience our ongoing unfolding lives which in turns helps us to fully embrace both the pleasurable moments as well as understand and navigate the stressful.
Authenticity
Sharing your true self with others around you is an exercise in trust. Authenticity is about being fully yourself, healthy and whole, while developing beyond the familiar and comfortable spaces. While we strive to maintain a professional outlook, we also learn, grow, and prosper when we share our personal concerns and develop a culture in which open communication is valued.
Vitality
Staying strong and active throughout tasks encompasses our holistic approach to wellness. Vitality, or the feeling of aliveness, applies to how our bodies, minds, and hearts process the challenging sense of accomplishment. Our Soul Cafe encourages you with unique opportunities to revitalize the energy of your life.
Meaning
Creating a sense of purpose is an important aspect of our Soul Cafe. Nourishing your potential involves educating our community to the wellness principles that guide us all. By understanding these attributes, we begin to see how extensively we are involved in caring for each other.
Our Soul Cafe is the process by which we communicate and implement our wellness strategy for our family of team members. We recognize that each individual is uniquely important to our whole community. Because of our desire to encourage and uplift, we are implementing our Soul Cafe Day – where once a month we will be providing a day for all of you, our team members, to learn about mindfulness and wellness, to engage in moments of reflection and nourishment, and to spend time sharing and acknowledging areas of growth and development.
You can receive a massage, participate in 30 minute sessions, or engage in other wellness hygiene practices that cultivate our six wellness focuses. Each month we will focus on one of these six areas: optimism, belonging, mindfulness, authenticity, vitality, and meaning. We challenge you to receive all the nourishment that the Soul Cafe offers as a member of our Origin Active Lifestyle Communities family.