Tag: Leadership Development
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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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Story People
As well as living your life, you’re always in the midst of a story about it all, though perhaps it doesn’t often seem this way. Our stories quickly become transparent, invisible, in the living of them. But one evening, reading a book or watching a film, you find yourself deeply touched by the situation of…
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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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The Heart of Mindfulness
This article by faculty member Marina Illich first appeared in the Huffington Post. A Sioux saying has it that the longest journey we’ll ever make is the journey from our head to our heart. As an Ivy League-trained academic, some part of me still winces when I hear this kind of adage, thinking it sounds…
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Life as a mirror
A few weeks ago, chaos had been tracking me through my days. I felt it chugging through my veins alongside my blood cells: Urgency. Insanity. Nonsense. Annoyance. Rushing. When I get this way a particular part of me takes over: a manic, starving, prowling hyena. I am at her mercy, bending to her frightened, angry,…
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Affordances
What’s your understanding of the source of your actions and other people’s actions? Mostly we’ve been taught to think that it’s something within that produces what we do. We talk about motivation, or goals, or drive, or inspiration. We think of ourselves as separate from the world and that our actions and relationship to everything comes…
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The Power of Coming Back to Joy and How it Can Help You at Work
This article originally appeared on The Shriver Report. As an executive coach, I work with women across the professional spectrum from high tech and bio tech to finance, hospitality and start ups. Many of the women I coach report how joyless they feel. Their calendars brim with activities, juggling product launches, organizational audits and transatlantic…
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What are you steering your life by? (Part 2)
What makes a good day? Pretty much every moment we are asking some form of these questions: “how’s it going?”, “how am I doing?”, “am I getting what I want?”, “am I safe?”, “are people liking me?” … It doesn’t matter if we feel we are in a powerful position or an inferior position; these…
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What are you steering your life by? (Part 1)
Having goals, having intentions, having plans and preferences are all well and good but, for the most part, they do not affect how we live moment to moment, day to day. In order to bring life to our intentions and aspirations we must discover what is shaping our actions, our thoughts, our speaking right now.…
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Bringing your voice to the world
Too many of us are waiting. Waiting until all our concerns and worries are resolved, we have financial security, our stock options vest, our children are settled, we have a strong relationship. Are you waiting for something? Meanwhile, life speeds by, gaining momentum as we grow older. Let’s get over our waiting and start now.…
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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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Allowing The Mystery Back In
I recently spent a week meditating with 90 other people without talking. We ate, slept, walked and sat next to each other, the whole time in silence and avoiding eye contact, like peaceful zombies. I had no information about my fellow zombies. But by the week’s end, they each had a persona in my head,…
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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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Let’s end violence now
While listening recently to a recorded course called Philosophy, Religion and the Meaning of Life (yes, that’s a real title—you can check it out at The Teaching Company), I heard an amazing quote from Simone Weil: “To define force: it is that X that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.” I…
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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…
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Needing to be needed
The other day, a brilliant colleague likened self-care to the oxygen mask drill on airplanes – specifically, the part about always affixing our own mask before assisting others. In other words, if your own ability to take a breath is compromised, how in the world can you be of service to anyone else? “Basically, if…
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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…
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My new quest – dissolving busyness
I am going to spend the next two or three years working on what I take to be the central issue facing most of my family, friends and clients. Way too many people, when I ask them how they are, say “I’m busy.” You’ve noticed this no doubt and perhaps you say it. At first…