Connecting our Lives

Masterclasses + Workshops

Transforming Crisis to Consciousness

How can we use design to engage in the profound nature of paradigm-shifting and the pragmatic work of problem-solving—beginning with ourselves?

Our immersive masterclasses dive deep into the nature of crisis as both an invocation and an imperative. The unrelenting, escalating mega-crises we face require simultaneous shifts in many domains. As we transform our personal, intimate relationship to a crisis, we help shift it on all levels.

We begin by exploring the sanctum of inner sea changes to surface insights that reach from our souls to the global fulcrum of this transitional era. To discern the wisest, compassionate course, we attune to both incremental and miraculous possibilities that translate into concrete, inspired action. The butterfly effect of each blessed one of us amplifies the reckoning and reconciliation that’s urgently needed today. When consciousness shifts, so do the crises in our world at all scales and complexities.

What crisis are you called to transform? In past masterclasses, participants experienced profound breakthroughs involving environmental crises: ocean fisheries and watershed restoration; social crises: healthcare, technology, dehumanization, and patriarchy; and spiritual crises: separation, death, and belonging.

Our live, guided sessions provide a workbook along with lectures, storytelling, and immersive experiences. You gain practice with the power of Design Consciousness and Design Being, two powerful states of awareness at the heart of transformation. And you design a Crisis to Consciousness Intention and learn streamlined techniques that can be implemented as triage responses to the intensity and velocity of change. Throughout, you gain experience with advanced systems thinking, an integral part of Sea Change Design, our living design system.

Lauralee has designed a way to enable us to transform who we are as human beings at a pace equal to the urgency of the moment.

Bonnie DeVarco
Curator, Writer, Researcher

Designing Resilient Leadership

Our Designing Resilient Leadership workshop addresses this time of chaos, complexity, and crisis. Those who are willing to be pathfinders and pioneers—not only in response to physical events, but in concert with their true being—are the ones who will help our world consciously evolve.

In this Great Transition, we need leaders who can design sea changes—positive, profound, and lasting transformations. All sea changes begin with intention. Resilient leaders are intentional. We face what is perilous and presence what is profound. We recognize what is precious and inspire the promise of new ways of being. We are radical and responsive; compassionate and creative.

In this workshop, you design an intention for your own resilient leadership, which provides you with a ground of being and ongoing guidance. Through the Sea Change Design Process℠, you engage in design thinking; find inspiration in the ocean; invoke wisdom from spirit; and move meaningfully across time. We share and support each other in courageously choosing to serve as leaders.

My key insight: Resilient leadership stems from an intention to serve. When we connect authentically with others by offering our innate gifts, everyone progresses.

Elva Castañeda de Hall
Managing Director, Values Technology Inc.

Designing Work Worth Doing

Is your creativity ignited or suppressed?

Creativity sources from a calm, creative center within each of us and informs our actions and commitments. At the creative intersection of ourselves, our work and the world, we find our calling. How do your deepest passions meet today's urgent needs?

In this three day workshop, you design your calling and clarify what “meaningful work” means to you by engaging in Sea Change Design. You learn innovative techniques like Rippling℠ to envision products, services, projects, or initiatives that can inspire and influence sea changes. These won't originate from market-driven mania or top-down management directives. They'll spring from a deeply authentic place within you that compels you to create viable alternatives to a competitive, crowded market based on commoditization and consumerism. Through lectures, visualizations, writing, and storytelling, you begin to design work worth doing.

This workshop is designed for those who are looking inward at enhancing their own personal creativity, as well as entrepreneurs and business leaders who know creativity is the lifeblood of all organizations. It's ideal for colleagues, teams, and partners who want to explore their work together; or for those who are interested in experiencing the core of our consulting services for Fortune 500 companies, startups, B-corporations, and non-profit organizations.

The workshop includes a Designing Work Worth Doing workbook and a DVD of Designing a Life Worth Living: Stories of Integrity, Innovation, and Sustainability by Lauralee Alben. As a special gift you'll receive Born to Create, a Sea Change Design manifesto on creativity.

Lauralee’s expertise and enthusiasm are extraordinary, and the results she creates in Sea Change Design workshops speak for themselves. Fabulously.

Mark Dixon, Co-founder and Producer of the award-winning feature film,
YERT (Your Environmental Road Trip)

Designing a Self Worth Celebrating

Are you living your life on demand or by design?

In response to today’s frenetically-paced world, it becomes vital to transform the challenges you face into coherent, meaningful actions that source from your true sense of purpose and passion. Then you thrive instead of merely survive.

In this stimulating workshop, you begin to design and align your inner self so you can start creating sea changes—positive, profound, and lasting transformations in your life, organizations, and the world. Using the Sea Change Design Process, you apply design thinking and techniques to help you act, think, feel, and be a whole person living a life of integrity. Through lectures, visualizations, writing, and storytelling, you start to shape your own deeply inspiring life design.

By focusing on the power of personal change, you inquire into an essential question at the core of being human: What does it mean to live an intentional life? This orientation workshop gives you a north star and sets the coordinates of your life. You learn how to define your center and connect, direct, and guide energy in the direction you desire.

The workshop includes a Designing a Self Worth Celebrating workbook and a DVD of Designing a Life Worth Living: Stories of Integrity, Innovation, and Sustainability by Lauralee Alben.

In this workshop, I learned that when we trust ourselves and each other, we strengthen our resolve to create a sustainable world. I feel optimistic, empowered, and a lot more connected to personal and collective potential.

Francis Battaglia
Green Rocket Digital

Events

Lauralee Alben inducted as AIGA Fellow

The AIGA Fellow Award recognizes seasoned designers who advance excellence in design as a discipline, profession, and cultural force. The areas of leadershop, reputation, education, and writing, as well as the practice of design are given equal consideration in measuring a Fellow’s significant contribution; along with their noteworthy and positive impacts within their local or regional design community and local AIGA chapter. As the largest professional association of designers in the world, the American Institute for Graphic Arts advances the value and impact of design, locally and globally. Its members practice all forms of communication design, including graphic design, typography, interaction design, and branding.

To each of our lives there is a beautiful arc, a unique pattern of evolution that forms from filaments of influence, inspiration, and fascination. Eventually this arc comes full circle and the whole of our precious lives comes into view. For me, design continues to be a powerful beacon that has inscribed the arc of my calling. From my vantage point now, I can see design as an interstitial space of transformation and a cradle of becomingness that holds all life as sacred.

Lauralee Alben
Founder and CEO, Sea Change Design Institute