You Are Enough

It’s a question that’s remained largely outside of my conscious awareness, lurking in the shadows of my shame, for years. What’s the question?

Am I enough?

Am I enough for my clients? Do I know enough? Am I smart enough? Do I have enough experience? Am I a good enough coach? Do I know what my client needs from me? Can I be that? Deliver that? Bring that?

These questions get triggered when I feel like I’m failing my client. When they are struggling and our sessions don’t seem to help. When I don’t know the questions to ask, the words to say, the feelings to express to help them feel better, move forward, see a new perspective, find their way.

Am I enough?

(more…)

Read More  |  No Comments
Posted in: Coaching|Emotion: Sadness|Emotional Intelligence

Coaching: By Design or By Default?

I’d rather listen to this than read it.

A number of years ago, I began to see a pattern in myself that I could no longer overlook.  Whenever I coached an older female client, I experienced an internal dialogue that was critical of them. YIKES! That’s a big f-ing deal!  

The foundation of my work as a coach is in seeing the hero in every client. My internal disparagements were infecting me and my client relationships and souring our results. Oh, I could always justify or explain away my criticism. “She’s being a victim.”  “She’s just wanting attention.” But when I looked at my default patterns and the results they created, it was clear. I was the problem.

Default Patterns

We all have patterns. Patterns of thinking, feeling, and wanting that reflect experiences from our past and how we’ve been shaped by them. Not metaphorically or figuratively shaped, but literally, neurobiologically shaped. Our brains, our minds and our bodies have been shaped by the events of our lives and the meaning we’ve made from them. And if we are not aware of it, we bring that pattern of being into our present moment experiences with our clients.

The perniciousness of these patterns is that they tend to be invisible to us. They are our “default settings.” They lie outside our conscious awareness. And because our patterns are largely hidden, we will tend to cling to, explain and defend them, even when they don’t serve us or our clients.

We will experience a given moment and believe that our internal reactions are reasonable and responsive to the unique situation at hand. And yet with help from reflection and self-examination, we can see that we’ve had many moments just like this one, with different people, in different circumstances, that yielded similar results. And we are the common denominator. (more…)

Read More  |  1 Comment
Posted in: Coaching|Emotional Intelligence|EQ Assessment

FREE Podinar: Mindfulness Coaching: The New MBA – Mastering Being and Awareness

APRIL PODINAR: MINDFULNESS COACHING – THE NEW MBA – MASTERING BEING AND AWARENESS

Learning in Action’s Live Monthly Podinar Championing Transformative Change

FRI. APRIL 26, 2019. 800-9:00 am PT / 11:00-12:00 noon ET

MINDFULNESS COACHING:
with guest Dr. Steve Romano
Executive Coach, Managing Director of Olistica and the Center for Sustainable Leadership

Join Steve Romano and Alison Whitmire, president of Learning in Action, for discussion and Q&A around mindfulness coaching, and how a proven methodology for this expansive way of operating is critical for 21st century leaders and coaches.

This podinar (interactive podcast+webinar) will cover topics like these:
– What Being and Awareness is, and the outcomes or results they produce
– The 5 components of Being: breath, energy, investigate, navigate, generate.
– The Triple Loop Listening Model
– The Six-Point Transformational Coaching Model

You will leave with tools and new ideas of how you can use Mindfulness Coaching to help your coachees to experience a new level of leadership that leads to deeper, more transformative change.

(more…)

Read More  |  No Comments
Posted in: Coaching|Mindfulness & Meditation|Podinar Series

FREE Podinar: Coaching for Distributed Leadership / Developing Connected Leaders at All Levels Who Think Strategically

MARCH PODINAR: COACHING FOR DISTRIBUTED LEADERSHIP – DEVELOPING CONNECTED LEADERS AT ALL LEVELS WHO THINK STRATEGICALLY

Learning in Action’s Live Monthly Podinar for Executive Coaches

WED. MARCH 13, 2019. 11:00-12:00 noon PT / 2:00-3:00 pm ET

COACHING FOR DISTRIBUTED LEADERSHIP:
with guest Dr. Simon Western
Founder of the fields of Eco-Leadership & Analytic-Network Coaching, developing leaders who are connected and think strategically throughout organizations

Join Simon Western and Alison Whitmire, president of Learning in Action, for discussion and Q&A around coaching for distributed leadership, what it is, and how you can use it to more fully facilitate transformative change in others.

This podinar (interactive podcast+webinar) will cover topics like these:
– How leadership paradigms are changing
– How coaches must coach differently to it
– How and why to shift thinking from individual behaviorism to leaders as connectors in networks

You will leave with tools and new ideas of how you can use Analytic-Network Coaching to help your coachees to experience a new level of leadership that leads to deeper, more transformative change.

*** Ask your questions when you register or during the live event. We’ll get to as many as we can! ***

(more…)

Read More  |  No Comments
Posted in: Coaching|Emotional Intelligence|Leadership Development|Podinar Series

Once Upon A Time: The Power of Story in Coaching

Last Friday, I was delighted to be joined by some amazing coaches for an impromptu meetup to discuss the power of story in coaching. (I was reminded of how very much I love this work we do, as well as this community we get to be a part of. 🙂 )

In this blog, I share with you some of what I’m coming to believe about the role of my coachees’ stories in our coaching. I’m no authority, and though I’m in the Narrative Coaching certification program, I’m a novice. So what I share here is what I’m coming to believe and integrate into my own work. And I offer it as an invitation for you to consider what’s possible and what might be available if you were to look at your own coachees’ stories in a new light.

How We Can Minimize the Value of Coachee Stories

When I was first trained to be a coach, I was taught the technique of “bottom lining.”  Bottom lining was a way of encouraging coachees to “get to the point” when their stories went too long. When a coachee showed up to coaching with a big, long, detailed story, we were to interject with a question like “What’s the bottom line to your story?” or “What’s the CNN version of your story?”  

At the time, bottom lining made sense to me. We coaches didn’t need all that detail. After all, we only have so much time. And long stories can take up a lot of it. We needed to achieve the coachee’s stated desired outcome by the end of the session to be successful. Right? So, helping the coachee “get to the point” in any way we could, was in the service of the coachee, in the service of the coaching.

But what if the story WAS the point?

(more…)

Read More  |  4 Comments
Posted in: Coaching|Narrative Coaching