Chocolate Mindfulness

When Mueller-Douglas feeds her clients chocolate, they report an emotional breakthrough. Courtesy of Myretreat, Inc.

Melissa Mueller-Douglas MSW’11 has a mantra: “Build teams with chocolate, not trust falls.” That maxim has guided her into establishing MYRetreat, a successful business-consulting firm that relies on what she calls chocolate mindfulness.

The logic behind chocolate mindfulness is straightforward: when people eat high-quality chocolate, Mueller-Douglas reasons, they are engaging in mindful behavior. “We use all of our senses,” she says, “from feeling the chocolate in the palm of your hand, noticing its weight, to listening to the sound of the wrapper, unwrapping all the way through to tasting the flavor, and smelling the aroma.”

Mueller-Douglas then encourages her clients to apply that same attitude toward their interactions with colleagues.

But she didn’t always intend to be a business consultant. She comes from a long line of social workers, and when she enrolled at the UW, it was her intention to pursue the family calling.

“At the Thanksgiving table there would always be conversations from the lens of social work, and I just wanted to know more,” she says. “And seeing outside of the traditional therapy setting, where social work can take you, was intriguing enough that I decided to move forward and apply to the UW. And it was the only school that I applied to, the only one that I wanted to go to.”

As a consultant, Mueller-Douglas draws on social-work skills but with offices as her clientele. “What we do for one-to-one or in a [small] group setting is the exact same thing,” she says. “A treatment plan is the same as a business plan.”

The principle of chocolate mindfulness grew out of a realization Mueller-Douglas had with an early retreat group. She fed her clients high-quality dessert, and they reported an emotional breakthrough.

“Everyone who came to that retreat said this is phenomenal,” she says. “ ‘I was in the present moment. I wasn’t worrying about the future or thinking about the past.’ ”

By working with corporate clients, Mueller-Douglas has brought chocolate mindfulness to thousands of people, and she hopes eventually to reach a million. “Who doesn’t want to bring people together,” she says, “and show them how to eat chocolate?”

Published in the Fall 2024 issue