Tag: Advanced Training
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Navigating Complex Systems
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Intersection of Family and Philosophy
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Bringing the Wisdom of the Heart into Coaching
James was interviewed recently by Joel Monk, co-founder of Coaches Rising. This interview one of a series leading up to the Coaches Rising Summit, a month-long online seminar featuring many lumiaries in the coaching field including Otto Scharmer, Jennifer Garvey Berger, Richard Strozzi-Heckler, James, and others. This half-hour interview covers: Why relating to our clients as…
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No One Is An Island
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Working with Our Trauma Stories
There is much trauma in the world, and I mean Trauma with a capital “T”. After our NVW Book Study Group visited with Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, the author of The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma, I felt grateful that he shared his story of working to…
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The Relationship Between the Enneagram and Integral Coaching
Listen to James Flaherty discuss how Integral Coaching® uses the Enneagram to support clients in expanding their ability to self-observe, thereby opening the possibility to self-correct. This interview was part of the Enneagram Global Summit 2016, a free online event which featured today’s top teachers who brought together Enneagram wisdom and experience from around the…
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The Importance of the Body
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Adjusting to a New Corporate Culture—Case Study: Executive Coaching in a Complex Environment
by James Flaherty It seemed like a perfect fit: Dr. Chris (not her real name) had the exact and unusual talent and experience necessary to solve the very expensive and potentially disastrous dilemma. She’d been hired by an insurance company that was responding to competitive pressure by following an unusual strategy: they had recently purchased several hospital groups and…
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How Tuning In Can Change Our Lives
I have been continually presented of late with the intermingled concepts of authentic and intuitive knowing. Most of us raised in western culture have been indoctrinated into a way of being that rewards abstract thinking and an orientation towards pure logic. We are trained to listen and process cognitively, in very limited ways, the experiences…
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Cultivating Coaching Guidance
I don’t think anyone can learn how to deeply powerfully, lastingly coach someone solely by watching others do it. Here’s why: it’s like watching a skillful, experienced chess players or masterful jazz musicians and trying to determine why each is taking the action they are. In these examples, each observed person is freshly responding to…
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Is Change Really Difficult?
I suppose that the whole discipline of coaching wouldn’t exist if the assumption didn’t persist that change for us humans is quite difficult. The notion seems such common sense that many of us have never challenged it or even given it much thought. But I wonder if it’s the case? Or to be more exact,…
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Limitation and Infinite Possibility
As Integral Coaches, we don’t have to leave out any parts of ourselves … just as we don’t leave out any part of life in our client work. This is, of course, easier said than done since we live in culture that has strong public standards about what it is to be a “good person.”…
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The Model Is Not the Person: Warnings About Assessments
The following is an excerpt from James Flaherty’s upcoming book, Coaching Now. Integral coaching employs three central models. Before I begin talking about them, I’ll give you the warnings that all model-givers provide but that are often ignored. The first warning is that the model is not the person. We know this more broadly as…
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A Manifesto – Beyond Coaching: What we Really Bring to the World
At our enormously exciting, inspiring and developmental UnConference last week in San Francisco, we came together as a worldwide community for the first time. Being in each other’s presence connected us to who we really are as a community and let us hear our true calling in a deep, resonant, unifying voice. I, for one,…
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Forever Jung
Just this week I read a quote from Carl Jung that shifted my way of understanding him—and brought fresh clarity to understanding people. First, a little context: Jung’s central commitment was to the development of people and not to their individual happiness. He thought each person was called to a particular destiny, and he did…
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The Agony of Conscious Incompetence
I was recently introduced to a learning model that’s opened up a lot of space around my own development and my work with clients. It’s known as the four stages of competence, the stages themselves being: (1) unconscious incompetence, (2) conscious incompetence, (3) conscious competence, and (4) unconscious competence. Unconscious incompetence is when our blind…
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Change in the world is more obvious just now
It started in Tunisia, moved to Egypt, then to Bahrain, Yemen and Libya. I’m not quite sure what the “it” is—maybe the use of social media and the wider world’s lack of tolerance for brutal suppression are providing a method, an opening and support for fundamental change that will bring greater humanity, justice and possibility…
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Living in the Question
A potent question is a portal to infinite creativity. Socrates introduced us to a type of pedagogy in his method of questioning. Rilke implored his young poet to live in the question. Artistry lies in lingering with the curiosity that transforms our narrative. For years I lived in the question: What work is worth doing,…
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How is coaching distinct from therapy?
Someone asks me this question every time I do a public talk about coaching. To continue the dialogue, I’m writing this piece. As will quickly be grasped, I cannot resolve the question once and for all. That’s partly because there’s not common ground as to what would constitute a satisfactory response and also because both…