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A Time To Choose (In Honor Of The Return To Standard Time)

by on October 12, 2004 in Life

This past weekend, I had the tremendous honor of meeting and briefly being taught by Henry Kimsey-House, co-founder of The Coaches Training Institute (CTI) and one of the creators of the co-active coaching model. It was partly because of an interview in Utne Reader last year that I realized that I wanted to be a coach and train with CTI. The article focused on making intentional decisions in life: focusing on what’s important and then taking action. So, in the spirit of this encounter and the upcoming end of daylight savings time, I would like to offer some thoughts on choices and managing time.

If you tell yourself that you’ll start doing something when it slows down, when its a little less crazy…guess what? It will probably never slow down and be less crazy that it is now. As a matter of fact, there’s a good probability that it will be even more hectic in the future. Yet, instead of this being an absolute truth, consider this to be just one story or perspective that keeps you from stepping up to bigger and better things. What other perspectives can you generate that might help you start something that’s really important?

Along with considering other perspectives, take some time to make sure that everything that you’re doing right now is in line with your core values. Are you doing anything that is unimportant (or less important than the other activities), but seems to take up your time anyway? Consider making some intentional decisions about what fits into your life right now.

To borrow liberally from Billy Crystal, “When you finally realize what you want to do with the rest of your life, you want the rest of your life to begin as soon as possible.” What do you want to do today?

By the way, visit http://www.utne.com/pub/2003_117/promo/10492-1.html for the interview with Henry.

There Is More Between Heaven and Earth

by on October 12, 2004 in Work

It’s a little off of what I would normally post here, but I keep coming back to this story and find myself amazed by what happened. It’s the recent story about the 17 year old girl who drove over her car into a ravine in Washington state. Two things are absolutely miraculous: one, that she survived (we learned today that dehydration may have saved her from dying of a blood clot in her brain); two, and the point of my post, is how she was found.

A volunteer searcher who said she had had several vivid dreams of a wooded area found the wrecked car in the trees Sunday…Hatch’s parents organized a volunteer search Saturday, and that night Sha Nohr, the mother of Hatch’s friend, said she had dreams of a wooded area and heard the message, “Keep going, keep going.”

This absolutely amazes me, as well as inspires me because there is so much that we still do not understand about ourselves as humans and our capabilities. What would you call Sha Nohr’s experience? To me, it relates to a second conception of “intuition.” There is a more rational view of intuition which is the mind’s ability to take various bits of information and fill in the blanks on a subconscious level. But this goes beyond rational. Another view of intuition is that it is an act of receiving information from a deeper level of reality. Deepak Chopra might say that it is communicating with the quantum level, that space which exists between physical reality and the spiritual reality of God.

Now, for the wild leap…how does this alternative view of intuition fit into how leaders operate within organizations? Is it possible for companies to entertain the spiritual dimension of intuition and use it to energize their cultures? What are the thoughts out there?

October is National Work and Family Month

by on October 1, 2004 in Career

Last year, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution designating October as National Work and Family Month (more information can be found at the National Work-Life Initiative website). This is a significant step for all who have been advocating for greater understanding that employees do not check their personal lives at the front door of their organizations. We are all whole beings who desire to have full lives in which the personal and the professional are integrated.

Throughout the month, I’ll be blogging on this topic and incorporating resources of value and interest. Anyone with thoughts or questions, let’s hear from you. We’ve come to an exciting time in the history of work – one where individuals have more power to make meaningful choices than ever before.

Percolating Idea – Intentional Grounding

by on September 29, 2004 in Life

Here’s an idea I’m working on for an upcoming article:
I attended an inspiring workshop last week based on the idea of living an intentional life. Many of us experience everyday life as a series of events that the world does to us. We have no control over the traffic woes, the weather, the state of world affairs, the surly salesperson…these things are out of our control. They are external and they can seriously foul up our day or week or even month. So what do we do about them? The easy thing (and often unconscious action) is to allow them to direct our thinking and behavior. The affects can be souring relationships, declining work performance, increasing isolation from others.

It reminded me of a recent personal experience. I needed to get to a meeting and I was running late. I raced out to my car and drove out of the parking lot when I noticed that my wife didn’t replace my SmartTag (a little box that allows us Northern Virginians to move through area toll booths quickly). I drove back to retrieve it and then drove out of the parking lot again when I realized that I didn’t have my cell phone. I let my wife borrow it while hers is being replaced. By now, I was fuming. You can see from the way this is going that I seem to be blaming my wife for being really late to an important meeting. Yet, there were so many other ways to view this incident at the time.

A more powerful option is to decide to live a life of intentional choices. While we can’t control most, if not all, of the external forces in our life, we can control our reactions to them. We have the ability to make intentional choices that, while not always easy, have the potential for great power in our lives.

How My Children Have Influenced Me As A Coach

by on September 26, 2004 in Life

During lunch a couple of days ago, a friend asked how I came to be a coach. As I recounted my winding career path since graduating from college, I realized there was one critical milestone in the journey: the birth of my first daughter. Her coming into this world wasn’t quite planned and it forced some replanning of my proposed future, as well as my wife’s future. Yet, in this period of reconsidering what I was all about as an individual and a professional, I asked myself one deeply soulful question that has continued to guide my life: What kind of father do I want to be?

The answers have provided a foundation not only for my personal life, but my professional life. I remember the first week of knowing that I was going to be a dad; I was terrified by all the changes that were going to need to take place…getting a solid job with health insurance (I was in graduate school at the time), finding a good place to live, etc. Then, this experience was further deepened when I started to consider all the changes that I would need to make as a person. At one point, the anxiety of it all was just too much and I started to run (physically) as hard as I could. I ran out of my basement apartment and kept running along street after street, through park after park, until I couldn’t go any farther and fell into the grass. From this exhausted state, I asked myself what kind of father do I want to be and then the answers started to appear.

I wanted my child to know love, to know integrity, to know playfulness, to know commitment, to know that this world is a good place filled with good people, to know that we can love our work. And the way for her to know these things are to see them modeled.

The process of asking myself this question did not end prior to her birth, but continues to guide me today. As my children grow, so do I as a father. Being a dad has provided another powerful layer of purpose to my life. To wrap up, I believe that my children are an incredible influence on me as a man and as a coach.