Belonging Training for Leaders
Your managers were trained to lead meetings. We train them to lead belonging. Belonging is the skill that turns cameras-off into contribution, disengagement into loyalty and a room full of individuals into a team that feels excited to be a part of something bigger than themselves.
The problem is rarely your people.
It’s how the room is facilitated.
You can feel it before you can name it. Cameras off during every meeting, the offsite that looked great on paper but got awkward fast and the hybrid policy that nobody wants.
Disengagement is quiet, but expensive. Only one in five employees worldwide is engaged at work, and low engagement drains an estimated $10 trillion from the global economy every year, close to 9% of global GDP (Gallup, 2026). At the same time, one in five individuals feels lonely at work, and the US Surgeon General now ranks chronic loneliness as a health risk comparable to smoking. Most leaders attempts to foster social wellness at work miss all of this because they treat belonging as a perk rather than a crucial condition to create.
A feeling of belonging at work is the difference between teams who enthusiastically engage and those who contribute the bare minimum. The good news is, belonging isn’t as elusive as we think. It can (and must) be designed by someone who makes spaces safe enough for it. That someone is the leader.
Usually, leaders are taught to deliver information. 
We teach them to embody a room.
Roughly 70% of the variance in team engagement traces back to one person: the manager. Your leaders are already setting the emotional temperature of every room they walk into. The only question is whether they know they’re doing it. The good news is that this is learnable. In fact, a Gallup study found that manager training can cut active disengagement close to in half.
Most leadership training hands your people more to administer (i.e. frameworks, talking points and information to deliver). But belonging is not delivered. It’s cultivated through how a leader holds space. How they stay grounded when a room gets tense, move toward conflict instead of around it and ask the kinds of questions that make integrity inevitable.
We call this leading with belonging, and it’s the skill we teach. A leader who can do this doesn’t have to beg for engagement. They create the conditions where it arises naturally
The Business Case
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The Business Case /
Belonging is the infrastructure under the numbers you care about.
BetterUp's research puts hard numbers on it: employees with a strong sense of belonging show a 56% jump in job performance, a 50% drop in turnover risk and 75% fewer sick days. For a 10,000-person company, that adds up to more than $52 million in annual savings. The flip side is just as real. Around 40% of people say they feel isolated at work, and a single moment of exclusion can cut someone's performance on a task by 25% on the spot. Teams without belonging leak talent, energy and customers, usually quietly, usually long before anyone traces it back to the culture.
You are already spending on engagement. The surveys, the perks and the offsites. What is missing is the belonging-trained leader in the room who can turn all of that into something truly impactful. Train your leaders to facilitate belonging and you stop borrowing short term engagement and start building it for the long haul.
How It Works
Belonging Bootcamp
The core training runs on-site over roughly two and a half days, built for the leaders and managers who set the tone for their teams. We tailor it to your culture, your challenges and the outcomes you are measuring.
Want it to target what is really going on in your organization? We can run a culture survey first, so the work aims at your actual pressure points. Want the whole team to feel it, not just leadership? We can pair the training with social wellness experiences for the wider group.
What Your Leaders Learn
Our Belonging Bootcamp training walks your leaders through the P.L.A.Y. Method, the belonging framework at the center of everything we do. By the end, your leaders can:
Navigate conflict as a doorway to trust rather than a threat to avoid
Embody belonging themselves, which is what gives everyone else permission to engage in something bigger than themselves
Ask better questions that invite honesty and pull people off the sidelines
Regulate their own nervous system, so they stay grounded and present under pressure
Hold space instead of filling it, so people feel seen rather than managed
Design connection into the work they already do, without waiting for the next offsite
A method build in live rooms with real humans
Hi! I’m Eli. Founder of The Uplift Center. I trained as a theater artist at NYU Tisch and spent a decade teaching yoga before building Drunk Yoga® into a global experience. Scaling it taught me that the magic was never the yoga…or the wine, if you can believe it. It was the recipe: the way a skilled host facilitates a room so people want to participate and connect.
To scale Drunk Yoga®, I had to teach this recipe (which grew into the P.L.A.Y. Method) to my yoga teachers. Theater training for presence. Mindfulness for nervous system regulation. Facilitation and conflict resolution for tricky interactions. All of it backed by the science of what makes a person feel safe enough to belong. It is the same method we now bring to your leaders, and it’s the reason The Uplift Center exists: to teach humans and those who lead them how to build belonging on purpose any time, anywhere.
“Eli is my go-to expert for creating belonging & building community. She has a rare ability to bring teams together.”
- Maybar Durst, CEO, TeamUp
A note from Eli:
Ever since the pandemic, I’ve been mildly…(okay majorly) obsessed with the structure of belonging. When quarantine began, I was full-time CEO-ing Drunk Yoga®, and needed to quickly pivot our corporate events to virtual. But, because the nature of our interactive yoga game is just that…a game, in order for us to play, it was vital for participants to turn on their Zoom cameras. This was a problem. Doing yoga, especially in front of coworkers virtually from their living room, can feel vulnerable.
So, I got to researching. What makes humans want to engage in community (i.e. turn on their Zoom cameras)? After trialing a variety of strategies, I unlocked these three fundamental truths that remain consistent across all industries and demographics:
1) A feeling of belonging can only be sparked within live experiences.
2) Community engagement occurs when belonging is felt.
3) Breaking “the rules” sparks belonging; structured play deepens it.
From there, I developed my P.L.A.Y. Method as a recipe to help all leaders (not just yoga teachers) lead more engaging gatherings. And, with a newfound appreciation for the incredible power organizations hold in shaping a greater sense of belonging in our modern, isolated world, I created the Uplift Academy for forward-thinking leaders like you.
Let’s P.L.A.Y.
Your leaders are already holding the room. Let's teach them how to do with belonging.