About Karen Janes
Welcome to my website and to The KJ way! I am a Certified Workplace Mindfulness Facilitator, supporting organisations, teams and individuals to flourish, by delivering bespoke mindfulness sessions and programmes that both support business outcomes and improve personal wellbeing.
I have 20 years’ experience working in senior and leadership roles within the not-for-profit sector. I understand that stress, pressure, disengagement and high levels of burnout can be commonplace in today’s busy workplaces. The pandemic has brought additional struggles including adapting to change, isolation at home, digital fatigue and the inability to navigate boundaries and switch off from work.
Having personally experienced its transformational effects, following a period of burnout and work-related stress, I am now committed to bringing the benefits of mindfulness to workplaces to increase effectiveness, build resilience, improve mental health and increase joy.
Through The KJ Way, I hope that organisations will flourish by enabling their people to bring their real selves to work and shine every day.
My Passion
Turning my passion into my business
Since leaving my last career in the voluntary sector, and after taking a much-needed career break, I have been on a journey of personal transformation.
A period of ill health, disengagement and burnout made me realise that I hadn’t been equipping myself well for the demands of today’s busy and ever-changing workplaces. I had become over-identified with my professional persona so took very personally any changes, feedback or knockbacks at work. I realised I hadn’t been bringing my whole self to work – let alone by best self – for quite some time. I had also de-prioritised self-care techniques as I “didn’t have time for them” or “I was just too tired” after a day of working in the office and a long commute. Along with balancing all the needs of home and family life – it just became too much.
I had long practised meditation and mindfulness which had helped me enormously through the more difficult times. I began to wonder why I hadn’t brought my mindfulness skills into the workplace with me. Researching my future options, it was with some delight I realised that many organisations around the world, including Google, SAP and Nike, were doing exactly that! They were bringing mindfulness-based tools and techniques into their workplaces to support the wellbeing of their teams – but importantly too – their investment in mindfulness was delivering real business results as they successfully integrated mindfulness approaches into their workplace culture.
To bring my skills and practices up to date I undertook a formal 8-week Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), attended as many courses, conferences and learning opportunities as I could and researched approaches to mindfulness at work. Shortly afterwards I qualified as a Certified Workplace Mindfulness Facilitator and The KJ way was born!
My Goals
I have come to learn that part of my ‘unique genius’ (The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks) is to share my stories, experiences and learnings with others, so that they too can unleash their full potential both inside and outside of work – whilst loving what they do!
My goal is to share Workplace Mindfulness programmes with organisations. Offering them powerful, workplace appropriate, trauma sensitive tools and techniques, so they can harness the power of mindfulness to meet their organisational vision and business outcomes, whilst investing in their people’s wellbeing, and enabling them to flourish at the same time.
Through mindfulness, I aim too, to help people to fully bring their best selves to work every day, showing up as they truly mean to, being proud of their individualism, delivering results, whilst prioritising their own self-care and enjoying a healthy work life balance, bringing success and joy to their day.
Through The KJ way I offer mindfulness-based tools and techniques that people can immediately start using, both in their professional and personal lives, to create positive and meaningful change for themselves and their teams.