All posts by Dorothy Nesbit

Peeling away the layers of my “genius”

Coaching,

Recently I wrote about the challenge (one that we all face) of living from my genius.  There is a paradox in this, for we always bring our genius – it’s who we are.  At the same time, if we are unaware of our genius, we are at risk of living in first gear, a pale shadow of our true selves.  If your “job purpose” is to live from your genius, it really helps to know what it is.

This week, I took away a big “aha!” from my Genius Jam teleconference with colleagues who, like me, are working with Kathy Mallary to examine and improve our marketing and the way we attract and serve our true clients.  My big “aha!” (which also had the familiarity of the known – so it was actually a ‘small, big “aha!'”) has helped me understand my genius a little better.

I already understood that a key question for me is “am I living authentically?” When I am, I know that I am having conversations with people (I call these “real conversations”) in which I speak my truth knowing that it doesn’t matter what their response is. Looking back through the filing cabinet of my experiences I know that these conversations give me what I need to move forward and especially to know, do I want to hang out with this person or not?

Today I realise that it is when I am having these conversations that I am stepping into and living from my power. Even as I write I feel the full power of this – or should I say empowerment.  It is not a “power over” anyone else. Rather, it is an invitation to people to live powerfully with me in the world – you could say it is an invitation to “power with”. This concept is pretty key to my understanding of nonviolent communication (ref. Marshall Rosenberg) so there’s no surprise that both are compelling to me.

There’s something about this insight which is both new and not new.  And still, it’s enough to help me to sink a little deeper into my true genius.  If you like, it’s enough to help me embody my true genius – just that little bit more.

Receiving the waves of gratitude

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Do you have people in your life with whom you share membership of the Mutual Admiration Club? These are people you hold in high regard and who hold you in their hearts in the same way. Dorota Godby is one of these. Through our participation in several learning events we have had the opportunity to support and be supported by each other and in this way to witness and benefit from each other’s skills.

In June I observed how Dorota was able to be present to the needs and feelings of others at Vicky Pierce’s Barn – how she took time with people to explore with them what feelings were arising in the moment and supported them in connecting with their underlying needs. This was empathy as a high art and I watched with admiration as well as experiencing the sense of deep peace that can come when I am in a space of such intimacy, trust and presence.

I also benefitted from Dorota’s support myself as I explored some of my own feelings about being single. Dorota showed the same sensitivity, supporting me as I connected with a yearning for the level of intimacy that is possible in a committed relationship. Later, she brought a playfulness to our conversation about the man I would love to meet. I haven’t met him yet though I’d love to.

I was thrilled when Dorota asked me for some support in August, when we were both at NVC (that’s Nonviolent Communication) Summer Camp together. We took some time on the last day of camp to do some work which was deeply personal to Dorota. I felt the same sense of privilege that I always feel when I am both coach and witness to people in support of their progress towards lives that are more authentic, easy and fulfilling. It was a further blessing to receive Dorota’s update to me which I share (with her permission) below:

Now I’m talking to you, I want also to share my joy and gratitude following the mediation space you held for me on the last day of the NVC camp. I hope that you’ve been receiving the waves of gratitude I’ve been sending your way non-verbally but I’ll articulate it here too.

I’ve seen such changes in and around me as a result of our work. It’s been integrating into my normality and making it a richer, sweeter and more satisfying experience compared to previous exhaustion and harshness. The most recent experience of it was on a work project in Oxford last week. In the 4 days of space clearing and emotional support that went with it, I was able to navigate the process with spaciousness and compassion and not a bunch of well meaning but oppressing “shoulds”. It was a big difference for me: instead of the lever being stuck on “maximum performance maximum of time”, it went with what was needed, how much and when and both me and my client were delighted with the process.

Dorota Godby
Relationship communication coach

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old

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They went with songs to the battle, they were young.
Straight of limb, true of eyes, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.

Laurence Binyon
From his poem, “The Fallen”
World War I ended officially at 11am on 11th November 1918.  Remembrance Day is the offical commemoration across the countries of the Commonwealth of the sacrifices of both members of the armed forces and civilians in times of war.  The extract from Binyon’s poem, which has become known as the Ode to Remembrance, evokes especially thoughts of those who died.
As one who was born long after the end of World War I and indeed after World War II it was Sebastian Faulk’s book Birdsong that first brought World War I vividly to life, some years ago.  Later, a visit to Ypres brought to mind the forgotten members of the Commonwealth who fought under the British flag.
Now, though, I wonder who we remember on this day, thinking of the many soldiers who give arms and legs but not their lives and those who give, simply, their mental health as a result of the horrors they witness on behalf of their country and in foreign lands across the world.
It seems to me that as we think of and honour the dead, we are at risk of overlooking the impact of war on those who are still alive. 

Staying connected

Emotional Intelligence,

Popular convention in the world of communication favours such questions as “how is your sister?” or, knowing that the person you are asking has been finding it difficult to communicate with another person in ways that work well for both parties, “how are things going with your sister?”  (You can substitute any number of alternatives for sister – brother, mother, mother-in-law, partner etc.).  This is the question my friend (let’s call her Fiona) asked me over supper the other day.

Quickly, I find I am not enjoying the conversation that follows, with so many questions coming my way about how I feel that we seem to be going round in circles with none of them hitting the mark.  In my head I am thinking judgemental thoughts about my friend which mask my true feelings of discomfort so that it’s only after she has gone home that I connect with my confusion:  what needs was she trying to meet by asking so many questions?  I just don’t know.

I muster my courage and share my confusion, writing in an e-mail:  I pondered our discussion about my sister… looking back I can see I was (am) totally unclear about the needs it was serving to have the conversation… I’ll do my best to remember to ask next time. Answering your questions was a way of trying to stay in rapport – and yet I was finding it hard to stay in the present moment. I also recognise that insofar as we were talking about it I had a need to be understood so that I kept trying to answer your questions. Still pondering – wanting to learn from it.  And later in our correspondence I realise (and share):   I do recognise that when I [responded to your questions without a clear understanding of your needs] I was using an old strategy of staying in rapport with you at the expense of my own needs.

We are two people who are seeking to practise living consciously.  I am grateful for Fiona’s willingness to talk about the way we are communicating and for her request to me to share with her what she can do and say differently that would contribute to me – would meet my needs.  Pondering her question I realise that for everything I can ask of her there is a request I can make of myself or of her so that I, too, can make a difference.  Here are some of the things that I identify and share with her:

  • I’d love you to know what needs you are trying to meet when you ask me questions and to share them with me so that I can respond to your needs (and I recognise that I can also ask you what your needs are and share my confusion when I don’t understand them);
  • I’d love you to ask me an open question about how things are for me – and to show me that you are listening to my answer (and I can ask you to show me that you’re listening by asking you to tell me what you hear.  In this way, I can also know if I am expressing myself clearly);
  • I’d love you to take time to connect with me in the here and now, perhaps by asking how I feel about the thing we’re talking about (and I can tell you what I’m feeling in the here and now – and this includes sharing my discomfort and confusion when your questions leave me feeling less present rather than more present);
  • I’d love you to share your own experience in our conversation – how you are feeling and what needs of yours are being met (or not) (and I can ask you questions so that I understand your feelings and needs in a given moment.  This might also support you in staying connected).

For me, this is about staying connected – with ourselves and with each other.  The more each one of us is connected with our true feelings and needs in any given moment, the more we are able to connect with each other.  I ponder the “how are things with your sister?” question again and notice:  sometimes, talking about what’s going on with another person (someone who is not taking part in the conversation) can divert our attention from what’s going on between us.  For me, living consciously includes noticing and addressing this “elephant in the room”.

Writing about authenticity

Coaching

It’s Friday evening and I’m having supper with Morton Patterson at the Spice of Life – a rare treat.  We are talking about business matters and I tell Morton about the work I am doing with Kathy Mallary to refine and improve my marketing.


Morton asks me where I’ve got to with that.  I tell him about the work I’m doing on referrals – mapping the processes by which I can act to increase the likelihood that people (my clients, colleagues and others) will refer people to me who are well qualified as potential clients.  I also tell him about some of the messages that I am beginning to define for my marketing – most recently what Kathy calls my unique selling point (or USP).


It’s no surprise to me when Morton asks what I see as my USP and I am happy to tell him:  my approach is uniquely effective because I cultivate leadership potential with compassion and rigour, nurturing authenticity, ease and high performance.  He’s quick to ask me where authenticity shows up on my blog, telling me:  “You behave authentically, everything about you demonstrates that;  it is in your e-mails, your manner and communication but your writing does not convey that clearly”.  As I ponder, I realise that my emphasis has been on modelling authenticity in my writing rather than on writing about authenticity.


I make a note to write more on this topic and find myself pondering the questions that need to be asked.  What is authenticity?  What is it not?  What role does authenticity play in leadership?  How does behaving with authenticity change the experience of the leader?  And of those s/he leads?  What are the benefits of authenticity?  What are the challenges?  How do you connect with, nurture and develop your authentic self?


These are the questions I thought of.  What questions would you add?

PS  You’ll find Morton at www.mortonpatterson.com.  Do take a look when you have a moment.

Giving feedback: what do you do when someone just isn’t getting it?

Developing as a leader, Emotional Intelligence, ,

What can you do when you’ve given someone feedback and they’re just not getting it?  This is a common dilemma at work and opens up two possibilities.  The first is to adjust your approach to giving feedback until you’ve been successful in giving your feedback in a way which can be heard and understood.  The second is to take your frustration elsewhere – to share it with your filing cabinet, colleagues, spouse or pubmates, for example.  Often, the first option is the most difficult.  At the same time, when we give feedback we do so for a reason – there’s something we want to change as a result.

Recently a colleague from the world of nonviolent communication (or NVC) highlighted a brief video on YouTube of coaching by Miki Kashtan* in how to say “no” when someone wants your time at work.  Miki’s coaching helps the person wanting to give feedback whilst also helping to preserve the dignity of the person receiving the feedback.  When we get it right, it’s not just that our feedback is heard and understood:  both parties have new insights which they can apply across their lives, they understand each other better and their sense of trust and connection is preserved and maybe deepened, too.

For me, Miki’s coaching illustrates some common ways we use language and their limitations.  One of these is to speak generally when we give feedback rather than to highlight specific examples.  This can have the effect of making it hard for the recipient to hear and understand our feedback whilst at the same time carrying the risk of making a statement about the person rather than about specific behaviours which didn’t work for the giver of feedback on particular occasions.  The person receiving feedback can be left with an uneasy feeling as they absorb the message that they’ve “done something wrong” and maybe even the message that there’s “something wrong with them” without being able to understand the message and its implications.

A second way in which we commonly use language when we give feedback is to mix together the other person’s behaviour and our response to that behaviour.  “You talk too much” would be one example:  you only need to scratch the surface of this statement a little to realise that we don’t know how much a person talks when they “talk too much” though we can infer that the person giving the feedback is not enjoying it.  So common is this language pattern that most of us would not even notice it.

Perhaps Miki’s brief video (just ten minutes long) illustrates something else, too.  Beneath the label “nonviolent communication” – a label that can seem off-putting to some – lie both sound thinking and practical alternatives to aspects of communicating in our culture which limit the results we can achieve.

*Miki is co-founder and senior trainer at BayNVC in Oakland, CA, USA, host of the Conflict Hotline on KPFA radio, and for several years coordinator of the global CNVC project on applying NVC to social change.

A perfect day

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Monday.  Today I am coaching on the phone.  I am tired after a late night – attending the Teaching Awards’ annual national awards ceremony followed by dinner.  I am grateful for the rapport I have with my clients and for the trust that comes with it:  today I may need to call on that rapport as my desire to contribute balances with my body’s yearning for sleep.  I imagine that it doesn’t do to yawn when rapport and trust are absent.

In truth, the activity of coaching is one I love so that my energies quickly rise to meet the occasion.  I enjoy each call and the added value that comes for the client from working in coaching partnership.  (As I write, I recognise how impersonal the word “client” seems to me right now.  These are real people who place their trust in the process of coaching and in me as their coach as we work together to progress the issues and agendas they are grappling with.  Coaching is anything but impersonal.)

Judy, my sister-in-law is staying, too, and has already asked me if I have time for lunch.  I coach until twelve before walking up to Blackheath where I meet Judy and her son – my nephew – Edward at the Handmade Foods Cafe.  We eat outside in the mild November weather, eating our vegetarian curry which is absolutely divine.

Judy asks me if I’d like to walk down to Greenwich and – since I don’t have any calls until the late afternoon – I am free to say yes.  We walk across the Heath and through Greenwich Park.  It strikes me – as it has done already this year – that the colours of Autumn are particularly intense.  Canary Wharf is beautiful in the low Autumn sunshine.  It really is a beautiful day.

We wander around Greenwich taking in a few shops and stopping at Waterstones (there has to be a bookshop involved) before having tea and (in Edward’s case) beer at the Old Brewery.  I am amused – or perhaps bemused – when I find that our common territory (semantics) combines with my own special interests (emotional intelligence and nonviolent communication) as we discuss the finer differences between embarrassment, shame and guilt.  Is it possible to feel these emotions and still have no regrets?

We walk back through Greenwich Park and I leave Judy and Edward to visit the Royal Observatory as I continue home.  I have time to meditate before they return as well as to catch up with some e-mails so that I can start the day tomorrow with a conscience and an in-tray that are both clear.  I also have time to say goodbye to Judy before she leaves to go back home and I pick up the phone for my next call.

Sometimes it helps to balance forward planning with flexibility in the moment if you are to live in the flow of life and to experience the perfect day.

Dorothy Nesbit: About the Author

Coaching

I am thrilled to be writing an article for Coaching at Work magazine, which will be published just in time for International Coaching Week, in February next year.

As part of writing, I have been looking at what other authors say about themselves and in how many words.  Thirty looks like the limit.  I thought I’d share my first attempt with you here on the blog.  How does it land with you?

Dorothy Nesbit, executive coach, cultivates leadership potential with a trademark rigour and compassion, nurturing authenticity, ease and outstanding performance. She is a certified NLP Coach and practitioner of Nonviolent Communication.

http://www.learningforlifeconsulting.co.uk/
http://dorothynesbit.blogspot.com/

Completing my coaching with Lynne

Coaching, ,

Monday, 25th October 2010.  We didn’t set out to do it this way when we scheduled our last appointment and still, later, my coach, Lynne Fairchild, realises this date is exactly five years from the day we first spoke.

During those five years, Lynne and I have spoken three times a month and our coaching has covered every area of my life.  Since I started running my own business in 2002 and started working with Lynne in 2005 she has been a significant source of support for me as I explore what it means to own and run a business – and to have a life in which work and non-work are in some kind of balance.

This year I have chosen to work with Kathy Mallary, who specialises in helping coaches to market their businesses, and this has provided an impetus to draw my work with Lynne to a close.  I am full of gratitude as I think of the work we have done together.  During this time, I have become increasingly self assured, understanding my aims and values and taking steps torwards leading an ever more authentic life.  I have also discovered just how much I enjoy working in a committed coaching relationship and this has served me well with my clients, too:  a number of clients have worked with me over time and I look forward to more and more such relationships.

As an aside, Lynne and I have not (yet) met face to face because of the geographical distance between us.  I am based in London and Lynne is based in the US.  I hear eminent coaches in the UK talk about how coaching is most effective when it’s carried out face to face and I wonder – I confess – if consciously or unconsciously they say this to protect their businesses from the exchange rates which – when it comes to telephone coaching – favour coaches abroad.  In our final (“completion”) session Lynne gives recognition to my willingness to go deep in our work together and without holding back.  It seems to me that working by phone has supported this depth rather than detracted from it.

What do you say when you say goodbye after five years of working together?  In truth, after five years of working together much of what needs to be said has been said already.  We have acknowledged each other so many times.  We know that our deep mutual regard will outlive our coaching relationship.  We know that the completion of our coaching is the beginning of our post-coaching relationship.  I know that I feel confident – no, glad – to continue to refer people to Lynne.

In the run up to our completion I think of our work as like planting a tree.  I know that the tree is planted and has taken firm roots.  I know that there are things outside of our work together that have contributed to the well-being of this metaphorical tree.  I know it will continue to grow long after our work is completed.  And for this I am, quite simply, deeply grateful.  

Singin’ U.S.A.

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“Is it me, or people making a bit more effort than usual with their appearance?”

It’s Sunday, and Mimi and I are doing our makeup at the Barbican in preparation to sing.  We are singing songs from America, from Copland’s arrangement of a number of old American songs (you might almost call them folk songs) to modern songs by Morten Lauridsen and Eric Whitacre.  The choir has been on a journey which is not unusual when we learn something new.  Along the way we have struggled with the challenges involved in learning new (and especially contemporary) pieces.  This is the phase in which we are most likely to dismiss the pieces as being not very good.  Now, though, whilst still feeling a little nervous, we are starting to catch ourselves singing snatches of the songs.  We are ready to perform.

We have been on a journey of another sort with our conductor – and composer of some of the songs we shall be singing – Eric Whitacre.  He is younger than many of the conductors we sing with and brings the kind of beach-blond good looks which are often associated with California, where he lives with his wife and young son.  His compositions, whilst contemporary, are tonal – tuneful – in a way which is not fashionable in the world of new music.  What’s more, in his rehearsals with us, Eric’s manner is quite unlike that of many of the conductors we work with, combining confidence with humility and an unusual dose of openness – letting us know, for example, how it is for him to hear the Songs of Immortality, which will be premiered for the first time tonight, being sung for the first time.  Behind the scenes the chorus “chatter” suggests an ambivalence towards him, both drawn to his good looks and his openness of manner and slightly wary.  This is not what we’re used to.

Whitacre is a modern composer in another way.  His website (at http://www.ericwhitacre.com/) is thoroughly modern in its use of the possibilities of modern social media.  It includes a blog, twitter and facebook page as well as a photo gallery (from which I have taken the photo above) and examples of his music.  After he discovered a recording by a young woman of his piece Lux Arumque on YouTube he invited singers to record their line and created a virtual choir performance.

What of our concert?  This, too, was a thoroughly modern affair.  Whitacre introduced each piece or cycle with his trademark directness, openness and honesty to which the audience clearly responded warmly.  His wife, soprano Hila Piltmann, sang Barber’s Knoxville:  Summer of 1915 with an assurance and simplicity that moved me.  The choir (if I may say so – I am not without bias) rose to the occasion, singing with our trademark gusto and even with a bit of polish here and there.  I loved the challenge of the Songs of Immortality and was moved almost to tears by the rising crescendi in Sleep.

I was moved, too, by Whitacre himself.  For he was never less than completely gracious in his dealings with everyone involved.  For this, as much as for the beauty of his music, I am deeply grateful.