Mendful: An App to Scale the Empathy Movement Through Our Mobile Devices  
Speaker: Jill Nagle    (10 min) 

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Jill Nagle, founder and CEO of Menful, introduced an app designed to provide on-demand human conflict resolution. She emphasized the need for empathic support during emotional entanglements, noting that 85% of employees face impactful workplace conflicts, and 25% of people are estranged from family members. Menful offers human coaches and an AI coach named Mendy, along with a library of conflict resolution videos. The app will use technology to deliver empathy-based conflict resolution 24/7. Nagle highlighted Menful's guiding values: internal reference, cultural relevance, right livelihood, and timeliness, aiming for a soft launch in June 2024.

Action Items

• [ ] Start an accelerated training program in February to train mental conflict-resolution coaches to staff the Mendful app, preparing for a soft launch in June

• [ ] Host four January introductory workshops for prospective mental conflict-resolution coaches and invite attendees to register using the guest code

• [ ] Respond to attendee questions sent via chat or placed in the main chat following the meeting

• [ ] Send an email follow-up to Jill Nagle after the meeting

Outline

Introduction of Jill Nagle and the Menful App

• Speaker 1 introduces Jill Nagle, founder and CEO of Menful, an app providing on-demand human-forward conflict resolution.

• The topic of the meeting is "Menful: An App to Scale the Empathy Movement."

• Speaker 2, Jill Nagle, begins by describing a common scenario of emotional entanglement at night and the need for empathic human help.

• Jill emphasizes the lack of infrastructure to scale empathic conflict resolution compared to other services like ride-sharing and food delivery.

Personal Journey and Inspiration

• Jill shares a personal story from her childhood, discovering the book "Between Parent and Child" by Haim Ginott, which sparked her interest in empathic communication.

• She recounts her attempt to coach her father using examples from the book, which did not go well.

• Jill discusses her dual career in tech and conflict resolution, highlighting the increasing need for empathy in today's world.

• She introduces Menful as a solution to provide on-demand human conflict resolution using technology.

Menful App Features and Benefits

• Jill describes the Menful app, which will offer human coaches and an AI coach named Mendy, along with a library of conflict resolution videos.

• She explains the potential impact of witnessing conflict resolutions on users, using an example of a gay son and a conservative religious father.

• The app will have a freemium model, offering the first 20 minutes free, followed by a charge.

• Jill highlights the importance of cultural relevance in the app, with coaches specializing in various niches based on their life experiences.

Guiding Values and Approaches of Menful

• Jill outlines four guiding values and approaches of Menful: internal reference, cultural relevance, right livelihood, and timeliness.

• Internal reference involves empathy and body-mind-spirit-based practices to help people move from reactions to a heart-based place.

• Cultural relevance aims to train a diverse range of mental conflict resolution coaches to provide empathy and resonant perspectives for different demographics.

• Right livelihood offers opportunities for empathic people to earn supplementary income doing meaningful work.

• Timeliness emphasizes the need for accelerated training and a soft launch in June to address the long-overdue need for mental conflict resolution.

Call to Action and Closing Remarks

• Jill invites participants to join intro workshops in January to explore Menful and see if they resonate with the work.

• She provides a code for participants to register as her guest for the workshops.

• Speaker 1 reminds everyone of Jill's information and the code for attending the workshops.

• The meeting concludes with Jill offering to address any remaining questions via email or chat.

Transcript Preview

Speaker 1  0:00  

It is my pleasure to introduce Jill Nagle, the founder and CEO of menful, an app providing on demand human forward conflict resolution. Today's topic is mindful, an app to scale the empathy movement through our mobile data devices. Over to you.

Speaker 2  0:19  

Thank you so much, carotene. So I would love for you all to imagine for a moment that it's nine o'clock at night and you're settling in and you want nothing more than to get a good night's sleep. It's been a long day, and you got a long day tomorrow. However, you find yourself in an emotional entanglement with someone that you care deeply about. You really would like to get through it quickly and peacefully, get a good night's sleep, but you're both really activated and somehow stuck in this place, this place where before, when you've been in this place, resolution has not come quickly or easily, even though you're both really smart and skilled empathy has somehow left the room, and not because you don't know how, and not because you don't care about each other, but because some less resource, maybe younger parts of you, are now running the show. Do you know anyone who's ever had a situation like this, maybe you have so this is an all too human circumstance, and sometimes the more deeply we're connected to someone, the harder it can be to get out of an entanglement. My fondest wish for the world is that when this occurs, and it does occur that we have help. We have empathic, human help available right then before the situation escalates into lost sleep, estrangement, despair, polarization, violence or worse. The Empathy movement has no lack of people who care and want to show up for each other. What it does lack right now is infrastructure to scale to meet moments like these, moments of disconnect. Right now you could if you wanted to summon a human for ride share, psychic services, food delivery and even webcam entertainment, 24/7, but not empathic conflict resolution. Doesn't our world need that even more, and especially right now, I have been interested in humans having more empathic conversations for a very long time. Let's go back for a moment together, if you will, even if you won't. I'm eight years old, and I'm looking through my parents bookshelves, and I'm very precocious, and I'm more than a bit of a know it all, and I see a book called between parent and child by Haim ganat, and I leaf through it, and I'm awestruck by example after example of empathic dialog. Wow, you really felt angry when I made that comment to you. Says a parent to a child, whoa, this was a whole new world. Something in me awakened. No one had ever talked to me that way, and certainly not a parent. So I ran to my father, and I showed him the examples, and I tried to coach him and how to talk to me. It didn't go over very well, as you might guess. He said, ganaut doesn't have any kids. Actually, I found out just a couple days ago that Heim ganaut did have two children, but it sparked my lifelong interest in how people communicate, how things go awry, and how we can use empathy to bring ourselves and others back into connection. I've led a bit of a double life, on the one hand, with these many decades of learning and developing and refining practices of healing and conflict resolution, and then the other hand, building a career in tech, specifically user experience, for how we optimize human interaction with the digital world. And right now seems like a really good time to bring these together, because conflict in our world is unfortunately, getting worse, 85% of employees report impactful workplace conflict. More than a quarter of us are estranged from a family member, and the divorce rate still hovers at around 50% and younger generations need help to replenish the human skills lost to tech dependency. All this is why I am so passionate about creating menful, an app to scale empathy by providing human conflict resolution on demand 24/7 and to make it as natural as to reach for a glass of water, menful will leverage the same technology that helped divide us to deliver a. Empathy based conflict resolution, exactly when and where it's needed most, anytime, anywhere from any device for almost any type of conflict. Let's take a look at a couple of early screens that we've developed and see what they can show us and tell us about the app.

Speaker 2  5:28  

So this is roughly what men fool will look like when you download it, and you'll get a choice. You can talk to a human coach, or you can talk to Mendy, our AI coach, who is being developed. Or you can browse our library. Here's where it gets interesting. You know, Edwin, when I met you in 2009 it's kind of when that was during my non violent communication mediation training, I had the idea that if people could witness other people having a conflict resolution, especially people who share the same points of view, they could get a vicarious hit of the resolution, and that was one of the seeds that led me, you know, over the years, to developmental so we'll have a library of conflict resolutions where, let's say, a gay son has recently come out to his conservative religious father, and since then, it just hasn't gone very well their relationship. Maybe Dad won't come on to this app because he thinks it's He's scared of it for whatever reason, but maybe dad will surreptitiously browse the videos and find a man just like him with a gay son, and get a vicarious sense of being heard and understood, and maybe that will impact his relationship with his son. So that's one of the things that we're hoping for. We're still working on the business model, but basically it's going to be a freemium. First 20 minutes is free, and then it's charged, whether it's the human or the AI. And here's roughly what it will look like. So we're going to have trained mental conflict resolution coaches on the app. This is me, and I created something generic, just as placeholder. Here's where the value of cultural relevance comes in. That when you train as a mental conflict resolution coach, we encourage you to develop whatever niche reflects your life experience or your passion. For example, Jamal is a tender of friendship, and people call him the friendship whisper. Michael runs men's groups and helps men reconnect with their hearts. Sandra's specialty is is connecting Asian moms and daughters through the intergenerational rifts that can come with the immigrant experience. When you drill down, you can see, you can see people's bios. You can meet them in a video. And here's a chance to build a niche platform right within the app, with blog posts, session recordings and so on, and feedback so you can get a sense of who you're talking with. Or you can just say, match me with the first available conflict resolution coach, cuz they're all going to be trained in helping. And then the session itself, we're still playing with what it will look like. We want to soften it beyond these squares of the you know, the squares, the Brady Bunch type squares you see right now in the zoom. So let me stop the share and go back any questions about that before I go on, I'll have a little bit of time for questions at the end too. Was that a chef's kiss? Karen? So I want to share with you four of men fool's guiding values and approaches, and one of them is what we call internal reference. The word empathy means feeling into and by internal reference, we mean not only empathy, but also the body, mind, spirit and emotion based approaches that Hone and dimensionalize how we deliver empathy to help people in conflict move from their reactions and their stories into a heart based, empathic place with themselves and the person they're in conflict with. We use non violent communication, a linguistic practice of internal reference. Oh, I saw that leaf flying up. That was really sweet. I never seen that before. And we also use somatic or body based practices, so mental coaches can silently transmit and model a way of being that gently invites people from conflict back into connection with themselves and each other. I'm sure that all of you on this call are already doing things like this, and we'll share you know how to do that with everyone. The second is cultural relevance that I mentioned, we want to train a diverse range of mental conflict resolution coaches so the people, any demographic, can find not only human empathy, but also relevant and resonant perspectives that reflect their own lived experience, whether it's religion, age, gender and so on. We want to be. Able to help people feel seen and heard. The third is right livelihood. We want to provide Right Livelihood opportunities to empathic people who may not fit into traditional job environments or who want supplementary income doing something they're good at that makes a difference to others, or both, whatever the circumstance. And the fourth is timeliness. We're starting an accelerated training in February to train mental conflict resolution coaches to staff the app for a soft launch in June, because we think mental is already long overdue, and there are many ways to get involved. And we invite you if you're interested, to start with one of our January intro workshops and see if you resonate with the work, we have four different intro workshops in January before we start the first training cohort in February. And if anyone here is interested, please come as my guest, using the code mendful guest to register mendful dot world, where you can also find out more about medfold. So that's all I have prepared to say. But I wanted to leave a couple of minutes for questions or thoughts, in case anyone has anything alive

Edwin Rutsch  11:09  

question, we're out of time. So we have we're right on time right now at 915 so

Speaker 2  11:21  

if you want to chat me, text me in the chat. I'm happy to address or put it in the main chat, whatever Edwin

Speaker 1  11:26  

says, I'll send you an email. Thank you. Okay, I love that. This is a perfect time to remind everyone that it all of Jill's information. Naggle like bagel is in the link. Also, if you want to show up as her guest. Menful guest@minfill.org You had me immediately at dysregulated to resourced and on demand in your pocket, conflict resolution. I live in an eco village, and that is community gold. That's where that Chef kiss came from. We're going to have to talk. I love this. Yeah.