Mindfulness in the Workplace with Cindy Van Eeckhout

**SPEAKER_2** (0:05)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:19)
Welcome back to The Bliss Business Podcast, the show where we explore how empathy, connection and purpose transform business from the inside out. I'm Stephen joined, as always, by my co-host, Mike.
Before the show, Tullio was mentioning, talking about our bliss methodology, building love into scalable systems and how we implemented it back in 2018 formally. Today, we're named one of the finalists for the Thanks Applied Gratitude Business Awards. One of five finalists. My thanks and gratitude to all of our teammates at Zero Company for their efforts daily to make that happen. Go to thanksthnks.com and vote for Zero Company. You'll see Applied Gratitude Business Award on there. We certainly appreciate all the votes there. We're doing all this podcasting and everything, trying to get people to definitely have more gratitude and joy in their lives, which we're going to talk about a bit today.

**Mike Liwski** (1:22)
Thanks to you, Stephen, really. You've changed the trajectory and the journey that the agency and we as people have been on.
Congrats to you.

**Stephen Sakach** (1:32)
Thanks, Mike. Thanks. Appreciate it. So a report from the American Psychological Association found that 89% of employees who feel their company supports their well-being are more likely to recommend it as a great place to work. And today, we're diving into how mindfulness can transform not only our workplace culture, but our personal well-being. Mike, introduce our guest today.

**Mike Liwski** (1:59)
And we do have a very special guest with us today, particularly for this topic. So our guest today is Cindy Van Eeckhout. She's a certified mindfulness coach and the founder of Alegria Coaching. And I learned not too long ago as well, the founder of three other companies. So maybe we'll hear a little bit about those today on the show as well. Now, Cindy really brings with her the expertise in helping individuals, but also teams to integrate these mindfulness practices into our daily lives, as well creating environments where focus, clarity and compassion thrive. And her approach is quite interesting because it blends neuroscience, emotional intelligence, as well as some practical tools for the sustainable change to take place. So Cindy, we are so grateful to have you with us on the show today. Welcome to the show.

**Cindy Van Eeckhout** (2:57)
Yeah, thank you for this beautiful introduction, Michael, and congratulations to both of you for the nomination. This is beautiful news and I will go and vote for you after the show.

**Stephen Sakach** (3:07)
Thank you.

**Mike Liwski** (3:08)
Thank you.

**Cindy Van Eeckhout** (3:10)
Yeah, sorry, thank you for having me in this beautiful podcast. And yeah, I'm completely ready for it. So yeah, let's make it an interesting, loving and joyful conversation today.

**Stephen Sakach** (3:21)
Yes, indeed. So speaking of joyful, so Cindy, I had this week and I had a friend call me up and he wanted to go on a hike and talk about work. And he said they were getting amazing results, but the joy was minimal because of the environment he was in. And I feel like this is a very common scenario that we see today. What type of situations are the people you work with in when they come to you?

**Cindy Van Eeckhout** (3:51)
This is really depending on the client, but what you're just giving me there as an example, this is happening a lot. In one hand side, people are successful. They sometimes really love what they're doing, sometimes a little bit less. But anyway, they do like the job they're doing, but then they don't feel this joy. And sometimes because it's a toxic environment, sometimes it's other things, but they don't have this joy and happiness anymore. And they're sometimes quite even ashamed to say it out loud, saying like, I've got so many things that are great and that I need to be grateful for, but at the end, I can't really say that I feel happy and joyful. So these are the typical clients that come to me, and this is where I help them.

**Stephen Sakach** (4:41)
So you've worked with a variety of leaders, organizations. Can you take us back to what inspired you to focus your life's work in this area on mindfulness?

**Cindy Van Eeckhout** (4:51)
Yes, of course. I will tell you a bit more about my story. I'll go back in time. And I'm originally from Belgium, and when I finished my master's degrees, I started in business engineering, I started to come directly to work in the corporate world. I was a sales manager, I had a team of 10 people, focusing on the top 100 companies. And I did it for eight years. So I was growing, learning, thriving. And most importantly, I met my husband there. And so we decided both after eight years to leave Belgium and to follow our hearts, to go to Provence and to build a life in a business really aligned with our dreams. So in the meanwhile, we are already for 23 years here in the south of France and we have created four different businesses. And these businesses, they're all soul led businesses. And there are two things that are quite special on them. All of the businesses, they contain the word Alegria, which Mike, you know, it's in Spanish, it means joy of life. And other thing is that they represent an other expression of joy. So I quickly go through them to give you an idea about a little bit the background that I have there. So first of all, when we started in 2003, we started with Alegria B&B. So this was a B&B where we're happy to share like connections, beauty and just presence as well. And for me, this was really the pure joy of life that we felt that we shared with other people. Then a second company 10 years later was Alegria Art Boutique. And this was all about decoration, jewelry and art of local and international designers. And this for us was the joy of giving. And then all of a sudden COVID hit. And in 2020, the world stopped and our two businesses as well. So this was for us quite a challenging time.