The Business of Mindfulness. Board Spotlight: Barbara Geluda Boselli
Barbara Geluda Boselli is the Founder and CEO of BNOW Consulting, a Certified Teacher at the Search Inside Yourself mindfulness program, a Certified Coach by iPEC, and has been a Board Member at MBBI since 2022. She has dedicated her career to supporting individuals and corporations in finding meaning in their lives and creating resilient work cultures. She received a Bachelor’s degree in Business from Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, a MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, and Certificate in Spiritual Psychology from University of Santa Monica.
Path Towards People-Centered Work
Barbara is originally from Brazil and began her business career working for large corporations, which would lead her to working for Google in California. While at Google, she started to realize that the individuals she truly admired at the company were those that developed strong social and emotional intelligence skills she never learned in school. She became very interested in the people management aspects of her work and accepted an additional role at Google as an internal career coach. Her experiences as a career coach encouraged her to reevaluate her career and think deeply about why she was drawn to the more human side to her work. It was around this time that Barbara first heard about mediation and she began brainstorming about how to bring her business skills to an environment in which she’s working to help people achieve their goals and relate to others in a more powerful, productive way.
She attended the mediation training that MBBI’s Ken Cloke offers in Los Angeles and fell in love with the mediation field. She and her family would move across the country to Connecticut soon afterwards, but Barbara found her path teaching emotional intelligence and leadership, all founded in mindfulness. Though she isn’t a mediator full-time, many of the qualities of mediation are present in the work she does now at her consulting firm. Through her professional relationship with Ken Cloke, she met other members of MBBI and was invited to join the organization’s finance committee, and was more recently appointed to the Board of Directors in 2021. “The more I learned about MBBI’s projects, the more I got excited about it. I appreciate how it leverages the work of volunteers, people are engaged because they’re really passionate about the mission and respect the cause. It’s been very exciting to be a part of it.”
The Future of Work
As people are grappling with ‘The Great Resignation’ and remote work during the pandemic, Barbara’s services are highly sought after and support individuals who are making life-changing decisions related to their careers. To help people navigate these changes, she utilizes the training she received in emotional intelligence and spiritual psychology. She encourages people to develop a more nuanced understanding of their lives by taking it out of the physical context. “We tend to see our lives in the physical realm where you want to achieve things such as a promotion, earning money, having a family, traveling, but we often leave outside of the picture the internal development of how we experience the world. Most of us end up realizing that sometimes, you can have everything in the physical realm, but still not feel fulfilled internally.” She encourages people to develop spiritual growth in order to experience the world in a fulfilled way no matter the physical world around them. Thus, as people are feeling these urges to find happiness and fulfillment in the present when they may have formerly postponed those plans for retirement, she helps people reevaluate their career journeys in a time where change and unpredictability are the norm.
Barbara conducts trainings for companies across all sectors and has noticed that employers are starting to invest more in their employees, not only to support them in what they’re going through, but also to help them feel valued. She explains that the costs associated with high turnover rates are also causing companies to rethink the strict model of the five day work week. “Companies that don’t allow for some sort of flexibility are losing talent. Some organizations are experimenting with hybrid work models or even the four day work week and are having a lot of success.I think the current tendency toward flexibility and space is here to stay.”
Following a Life’s Passion
Barbara grew up with three sisters, one step sister, a mother, a father, and a stepmother, and always had a role in the family as a mediator. “People would come to me with their questions and I’d try to make everyone feel okay. I’ve always been the person who brings people together, but for a long time, I didn’t realize that this was a strength of mine.” Recalling her own career path, she encourages others to discover their passions because the sky is the limit. “If you’re doing something with your whole heart, you’ll be successful. I tell people not to get caught up in trying to control too much. We can only make everyday choices and deal with the consequences of those choices. If we make choices aligned with our values and deep desires, then everything will align.”
Article by Chloe Pan, MBBI Writer