Category: Resources
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…
Back to the Garden
The myth of the Garden of Eden is so brilliant and powerful because it expresses our sense of having profoundly lost something essential and elemental from our lives, something we need. We long to return to the peace and beauty of the garden. It’s a place we feel we once knew but from which we’ve been exiled, and we…
Episode 2: Why Does Coaching Matter?
In our second episode of Stepping In, we explore the topic of coaching itself. What is it to create a safe space for a client? Why is the coach’s own self-development so important? What makes the Integral Coaching methodology effective? We dive into these and other questions with our special guest Lizzie Winn. Want a…
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…
How and Why to Get Better at Failing
The ability to “fail well” is a skill we all need if we want to accomplish what we set out to do. Failing is really a cornerstone that all other skills are built on. Of course everyone has failed. Sometimes in highly visible ways. It is hard to get through this life without major setbacks.…
The Importance of the Body
I Love You More Than You Can Know
My grandfather had chaired an English department for many years and had watched me attend his alma mater for my first graduate degree. When I came home, he would sit back in his recliner, tapping his fingers on the arm. He would quote a line or two from Shakespeare or talk about how mad he…
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…
Letting Our Differences Have Their Way With Us
In my experience, any time we engage in a conversation about our differences with an intention to prove the other side wrong, we’re heading for a dead end. When we take a right-wrong stance to any conversation about difference — whether it’s about race or gender, politics or religion — it reveals that we’re more…
Integrating Rigor, Compassion, and Creative Design
The Promise of Integral Coaching® and New Ventures West’s Professional Coaching Course by James Flaherty and Amiel Handelsman What becomes possible in coaching when we treat clients as marvelously complex beings who live in language and moods, inhabit bodies and physical environments, and possess both wisdom and blind spots? What opens up when we coach…
50,000 Life Coaches Could Be Wrong: The Importance of Development in Coaching
by James Flaherty 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…
Three Levels of Coaching
by Pam Weiss Introduction If you ask a dozen coaches what they do and how they do it, you will probably get a dozen different answers. These days you can hire a coach for just about anything—from finding a job to finding your voice; from balancing your checkbook to creating balance in your life; from losing weight or finding…
Learning Again How to Trust Ourselves
Rene Descartes’ method for discovering what’s true starts with a bold and radical move – distrust everything until it can be proven. It’s not hard to see how powerful a way this is to cut through superstition and confusion. By starting from first principles, and using step-by-step logic, he gives us a way to prove things for ourselves, doing away with…
Courage vs. Generosity
Life takes courage. Well, I’ve always thought so—but recently I’ve been wondering if we call on courage too hastily… How so? First, I’ve observed a very fine line between courage and stupidity. I realize that when I summon courage, there’s a good chance that stupidity might show up instead. Second, the mere mention of courage…
None of Our Business
However life chooses us to be of service in it has absolutely nothing to do with us. Calling is not a choice. It’s not what we think we like or prefer or have aptitude for. Our egos have plenty of ideas about what we’re supposed to be good at: what we excelled at in grade…
A Conversation with Sarita Chawla
Sarita Chawla’s first career spanned over twenty years at Pacific Bell in management, where she gained experience in total quality, facilitation, dialogue, diversity and leading organizations. Since beginning her second career, she has edited a best-selling anthology about learning organizations, led a three-year race dialogue initiative in the Bay Area, initiated women’s dialogues in the…
The Neuroscience of Leadership
Breakthroughs in brain research explain how to make organizational transformation succeed. By David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz Re-posted from Strategy + Business, Summer 2006 / Issue 43. Mike is the CEO of a multinational pharmaceutical company, and he’s in trouble. With the patents on several key drugs due to expire soon, his business desperately needs…
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…
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…
The Importance of Props
I recently had an extended consulting project with a company in Silicon Valley. As I was frequently onsite, I developed a rapport with one of the receptionists, whom I’ll call Barbara Lara-Johnson (not her real name). She brightened my day every time I went there. She was fun to interact with, was a huge 49er’s…