2021 was quite a year. Let’s start this review post by listing off a few significant events in my priority areas of family and coaching: Our second child was born in the spring. She exhibits intense curiosity, with a desire to be where the action is – she has serious FOMO! Meanwhile, our first child […]
Category: coaching
Creating Alignment with Others
I’ve described leadership as the art of identifying gaps between what is and what could be, and mobilizing others to address them. In the alignment series thus far, I have been addressing the identifying gaps part of leadership in identifying your own gaps for personal development, identifying an aspiration to orient your actions, and identifying […]
The Present Moment Is Everything You Need
“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” — Viktor Frankl “Be present now” was one of the maxims I included in my personal operating system a few years ago, and I’m starting to think it […]
Spiritual debt
If we have a short-term cost to cover, we sometimes take on a loan to spread that cost over a longer period, and then make regular payments to pay off the monetary debt we owe. Engineering organizations have the concept of technical debt, where a feature is coded in a slipshod way to get it […]
Alignment to Reality
“Are you able to be with this exactly the way it is with no agenda to change it?” I learned this powerful question in Steve March’s Aletheia Coaching training, and it continues to knock my socks off as a tool to help me discover when I am not fully present and accepting of reality as […]
Alignment with Aspiration
Find out who you are, and do it on purpose. — Dolly Parton In my ongoing series on alignment, I’ve described how I think alignment can be more powerful than hierarchical power, and why it can be challenging to find alignment within oneself. In this post, I want to expand on finding a purpose for […]
Alignment to Self
Following up on my last post introducing the alignment model, I want to share how this model applies to personal development. When I first met Jerry Weinberg in person in 2009 at the Amplifying Your Effectiveness conference, he talked a lot about congruence, and I had no idea what he was talking about. Admittedly, that’s […]
Thinking in Systems, by Donella Meadows
Amazon link This is a remarkably readable introduction to systems thinking, a method to understand the inherent behavior of a system, and design appropriate interventions to change what the system is doing. Meadows starts by defining a system as “an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something. … […]
Clarity and Focus
People occasionally ask me what I’ve learned in my first couple years as a leadership coach. The unspoken question is “What is the secret to being a better leader?” And while there is no secret per se, there is a formula I see consistently among people who have more impact: Clarity plus Focus. As context, […]
What You Do is Who You Are, by Ben Horowitz
Amazon link Ben Horowitz is best known at this point for being half of Andreessen Horowitz, a leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm. He wrote this book to answer the question: How do you as an organizational leader create and sustain the culture you want? As his book site summarizes, “To Horowitz, culture is how […]
