Rockwood Leadership Blog

This is what we pass around at Rockwood when we’re giving our “weather reports”

“How are you doing?” can be a tricky question to answer.  If you’re like me, you want to be honest about your current state without oversharing. You want to be authentic without having the other person take on your issues.  And in the work that we at Rockwood do, sometimes checking in can feel like a magazine, issue after issue after issue.

At Rockwood, as a staff, we often use a “weather report” as a way to answer “How are you doing?” Brought to Rockwood by Norma Wong, a wise teacher we’ve have the good fortune to work with, the  weather report is just that, using the weather to describe your state of being.  You can say that “you’re sunny with a chance of showers” or “low fog in the morning with the mist clearing in the afternoon.”

Just like we practice visualization at our trainings, the weather report is a great way to visualize your state of being. It ends up being a succinct portrait of where you are and what your week looks like without going into detail. Along with that, describing your state of being as a weather report allows others to take it in without personalizing. A weather report is descriptive without being judgmental. And it means we can treat a “personal” weather report like a meteorological one – being able to take into account the weather without being responsible for changing it.

A couple of things to think about with weather reporting:

1. The person who calls for it should start.  For those who are new at the weather report, modeling is very important.
2. Keep it short.  A weather report is never an explanation.  Just a snapshot.
3. Give everyone the space to express themselves. At Rockwood, we pass around something round and soft, like the world.

So what does the weather look like where you are?