The essence of all our work at Waverley and Saint George's in Windsor in what we call 'Nurturing Wisdom' is around leaders helping each other nurture wisdom and bring wisdom into leadership or into working life because, nowadays, we need that particularly with so much uncertainty and volatility, the big question we all find ourselves facing constantly is "What do I do when I don't know what to do; when new things are happening that I can't just figure out?"  And this is obviously links to all the work of Otto Scharmer and Peter Senge around what they call presencing.

And presencing is simply being present to what is really going on. Most of the time in business and leadership we don't get it wrong because we're incompetent, we get it wrong because we failed to notice, we failed to see what was really needed from us at that time. Often because our minds are caught with a whole load of stuff, a whole load of problems and issues that have us unable to really notice what what's really going on - whether it's with other people, whether it's in the situation, or, hardest of all often, to notice the real wisdom we're carrying in ourselves that we fail to bring.

And the amount of times people kick themselves and say "why didn't I say that?" "why didn't I do that?" And the answer, time and time again, is that we just weren't present. We weren't available to ourselves in the situation.

So that's the constant struggle really for all of us in busy lives is to stay available so that we can be powerful and effective. Aware and awake. Otto Scharmer calls this presencing, and his mantra is "Go to the place of stillness and let inner knowing emerge".

And so our assumption is there's a knowing that's available to all of us. It's not some sort of mystical thing, it's just a level of wisdom and awareness, that unless we're attentive to it we fail to access it. And and that's why we don't bring our full potential, or indeed release the potential in those around us.

So all the practices we employ at Waverley are ways of coming into what we call our 'Fuller Being', which is the the bigger wisdom, the bigger knowledge, that's flowing through us

And that work, when we speak about presencing, it normally involves what people often refer to as coming out of the mind or the head.  In a way, that's giving the head a bad press. The mind is this incredibly expanded resourceful reservoir of knowledge and intelligence, but there's a smaller part of the mind which is really the controlling, predicting, I'm keeping myself in control and on top of things. It's the more prime "we'll keep myself safe mind" and if we're not careful that just ends up running the show for us.

And when we're in that mind, you'll know it, when you're in that kind of slightly hunkered down way of thinking, then you're not really available to your full potential.

So a lot of our work then is just helping people access knowledge and wisdom that is completely available to us - we just don't let it flow, we don't let it be within us. So that means coming out of the the processing mind and accessing deeper resources. And the two obvious centers of knowing we we have is our heart knowing; And the heart knowing is is a different kind of knowing it's all about relationship and connection and you know when you've got connection with somebody you know when you haven't, not because you've analyzed it because you know in your heart that this is a wholesome high trust relationship where I can be very fully me, or where I have to be protective and closed.  And the heart has that intelligence available to it.

And then dropping down lower there's your gut knowing. So we often say: "I just knew in my gut". And that's sort of instinctive knowing. And the gut is really our groundedness, and our connection to our own deeper truth. It may not be THE truth but actually this is MY truth. And when we're founded in our gut, we'll notice there's a strength, and there's a clarity and a confidence, that again the mind might not be able to work out or explain, but you just know "This is the right thing to do". And that's because it's accessing our instinctive, our sensory, intelligence and that intelligence is about a hundred times faster than the mental processing that the cognitive mind is working on.

So that becomes the interesting challenge: "How do we occupy our being in a way that has us able to draw on our heart knowing, and to draw on our gut knowing, as well as our head knowing?"

And one of the issues is that often we're trained not to trust these thing. And of course no one's saying 'you always trust them', but what we do is make sure that this data is available to us. So that we can then make the best decisions, rather than operating, really, with a third of our capacity.

So how do we work with our fuller presence? And there's a very simple process:  The first step is to bring our awareness out of the mind. And the easiest way to do that is you bring it into the body. So bringing awareness into the body, and particularly to "breath", brings us presence. And you notice when you do that you feel a slightly expanded capacity.

Once we're present in the body then we can access our gut knowing more easily. And once we're present in the body, the heart feels safe, and then the heart can relax and open.

Accessing the intelligence of the heart is one of the hardest things to do, because the heart is so sensitive - it has to feel safe in order to to come online.

So we come into the body, first of all, to become present. That stills the mind to a certain extent, and allows the heart to open. And then these different intelligences become available too.

So, as a simple practice, just coming into the body, just bringing awareness into the body for a few seconds, can completely change your state. And you'll find that a 'stiller' state that allows you to access more of your own resources and to tap into the resources of others much better.

This can be particularly important in team situations.

So we all know in meetings how little time everybody is 'present'. So, we may be there in body, we're certainly rarely there in mind. So again, these practices are really important in group situations, so that we're all present at the same time, together.

And if we are, it can increase the efficiency of meetings massively. We have much shorter meetings because: we're all listening; we're all speaking our truth; and we just get to the heart of things much more quickly.