Tag: Coach Certification
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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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On Being Unstoppable
Last week, I visited the webpage of a coaching school someone I know is considering. On the school’s homepage, a graduate of the program boasted that the school’s methodology had enabled her to teach her clients to be “unstoppable.” And that stopped me, right in my tracks. The nature of being human is that we…
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How Awe Affects Us
At the University of California, Berkeley, participants in a study were asked to stand and look at the tallest grove of hardwood trees in North America for one minute. Other participants were invited to gaze upon the facade of a science building for the same amount of time. At the end of the 60 seconds,…
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Happiness
This article originally appeared in the Summer 2006 issue of the Distinctions newsletter. Old message, timeless wisdom. Happy reading! “All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in…
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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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The difference between achieving goals and being fulfilled
Rather than helping clients solve problems, Integral Coaches work with them to develop a new way of being: one that has them live in ways that are more effective and useful across all areas of their life. We are interested in deepening our clients’ capacity to be self-generating and self-correcting. Another way of explaining this…
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50,000 Life Coaches COULD Be Wrong: The Importance of Development in Coaching
Entering a six-month coach training program on the suspicion that life coaches are glorified confidantes who charge a lot of money and that coaching is “new-age nonsense,” the author of a recent Harper’s article finds lots of evidence to support her hypothesis. The irony of the piece’s title, “50,000 Life Coaches Can’t Be Wrong,” becomes…
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Meeting the Shadow
In Ursula Le Guin‘s stunningly beautiful novel ‘A Wizard of Earthsea’, the young wizard Ged unleashes a terrifying shadow into the world by mistake. Stunned by his power, he stands paralysed in shock while the shadow’s claws cut deep lines into his face before disappearing. From then on, he lives a haunted life, forever running from…
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Building Competence in the Integrating Stream of Development
One new concept with which we’re working now is how to build a client’s competence around integrating all aspects of her/his life as the primary way to catalyze development. Here is an example of how that might look with a client. Joan works for a high-tech company in a very competitive environment. She feels a…
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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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London Calling
Justin Wise, NVW faculty member and founder of thirdspace coaching, was instrumental in establishing the instruction of our coaching methodology in London in 2010. Upon the graduation of our most recent cohort of students, we asked Justin about his experience leading the course. Q: Having just completed this most recent class’s certification, what are your…
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Movement of Integral Coaching in Asia
We recently asked senior faculty member Sarita Chawla about what moves her to help bring Integral Coaching to her native continent. Q: What about Asia calls to you as both a human being and a NVW faculty member? Sarita: At a personal level, hailing from Asia, I have always had a burning desire to bring…
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Success is only a word
It might seem strange given my profession—being an executive and life coach and running a coaching school—that I don’t believe in success as a worthy or useful pursuit. To tell the truth, I don’t believe in it at all. Success always depends upon our surety about beginning places, and ending places and they both change…
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Stop! Look! Listen!
My six-year old twins learned these three words this past year in Kindergarten. Educators and parents often use them to remind kids to pay attention before crossing a street, or navigating the play yard. In true coach fashion, I have adopted these powerful words as part of a daily mantra/practice for my family and myself.…
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The Shadow of Development
Resistance–gotta love it. It’s something we all have and know, and most often do not like or appreciate. It reminds me of one of those Chinese finger traps, where you put a finger in either end of this tube, and the harder you pull to get your fingers out, the tighter it gets. It’s the…