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Shifting Toward Joy, Shedding the Stress

While Clay Stelzer had built a successful career by most standards, holding notable positions with great companies, few aspects of his life felt like a success. After years of doing his own inner work, and recognizing that each of us fall prey to similar challenges, he decided to dedicate his life to creating space for leaders and their teams to lay down their armor and step into their lives and their creativity more fully. Since building a global team coaching practice for Salesforce and seeing the massive impact these practices had on the business, he launched 15sixty to bring these practices to other organizations. "15sixty exists to help people like me," says Clay. "We help leaders and the organizations they manage begin to 'wake up.' In our view at 15sixty, 'waking up' simply means creating awareness of what’s driving our behavior, what’s keeping us stuck, and what’s in the way of us living and working with more ease and joy." On August 7, Clay will host a special event specifically for the goal-driven RISERs we know to make up our community.

Read on to find out more about how Clay is helping his clients navigate the world today and find their joy.


We have a lot of early-morning RISERs, who are very success-driven and hold full-time jobs. What type of workplace challenges could 15sixty help these clients with?

Working with individuals and teams from all different industries, the most common thread I see over and over is a lack of willingness for people to share what’s really on their mind. It’s just too scary for most people. When human beings sense any type of threat to their financial security, peer approval or control, we engage in unhelpful behavior, including withholding. You’ve all heard of fight or flight. Well, in business, that manifests as cycles of blaming, being “the biggest victim”, finding ways to check out and most commonly, silent suffering. Over the past four years, I built a team coaching practice for Salesforce. Now, their teams all over the world have made intentional sharing part of their culture. The quality of work has improved and people feel more connected with their colleagues. 15sixty helps organizations, large and small, begin practicing more helpful ways of “being” together as a team. As we all emerge into this post-pandemic life, what type of challenges are you hearing from clients? How does 15sixty help clients navigate?

Most people find uncertainty stressful. As organizations begin to define the new normal, not having clear rules of engagement can make us feel uneasy. “Is it ok if I start work at 9 if the rest of the team is starting at 8?” “Will people think I’m not a team player If I leave work at 3PM to pick up my kids from school?” “Will people judge me if I choose to stay home and work instead of coming into the office?” This is the biggest challenge I’m hearing from my clients. At 15sixty we help teams eliminate this uncertainty and move forward with intention. We help teams do what’s called “designing a team alliance.” This process engages individuals on a team to disclose their wants, needs, preferences and boundaries. Once all of those cards are out on the table a team can create a set of principles or rules to guide how they navigate this new chapter. It doesn’t matter what a team agrees to in their alliance. What does matter is that everyone is aligned to a single set of agreements. With that certainty, people eliminate the stress of not knowing how their decisions and actions are going to be received by their colleagues. As we merge back towards "normal", life is getting busier, people are returning to work and, like with any change, good and bad, stressors are rising. What are your best tips on handling these changes?

Whenever we’re stuck in stress, we’re either focused on the past (fixated about what already happened) or focused on the future (fixated on what we don’t want to have happen). We’re never present. So while 15sixty offers lots of great techniques and tools for combating stress, the simplest (and maybe the best) advice I can share is for all of us to take time each day to pause and ask, “What’s here right now? And, as best you can, can you welcome the body sensations, emotions, and thoughts that you notice?” Seems too simple right? I challenge all you RISERs to practice this daily for a week and see what happens.

Join in on a RISE Special Event

Finding yourself in constant drama with your teams, executives, families, kids and friends? Relying on conditions outside of your control to be happy? Come to the "Wake Up" Workshop at the RISE Studio on August 7th from 1pm-4pm, facilitated by Clay Stelzer - founder of 15sixty, and learn to shift out of "victim consciousness" to create something different.

Tickets: FREE - compliments of Rise (20 seat limit - bring friends, but act fast)

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