Don’t miss Dorothy!

Clients and testimonials, , ,

Over the years it has become increasingly apparent to me that the people in the field of human development (trainers, consultants, facilitators, coaches…) who have most to offer their clients are those who are most committed to their own learning.

Attending The Skilled Facilitator Approach programme with Roger Schwarz and his colleagues in December last year was a reminder of this on many levels. I noticed, for example, how much I felt drawn to Roger, to Matt Beane and to Annie Bentz who facilitated the programme with such commitment and skill. I am delighted to have been able to offer recommendations to Matt and to Roger on LinkedIn.

As a learner I experienced both joy and pain in my own learning. How wonderful to find adjustments I can make that bring me closer to communicating in ways which are true to my values! How painful to have invested so much and still to have so much to learn! I have chosen this path and tread it with full commitment – and still, sometimes it’s a hard path to walk.

Something of this is reflected in the recommendation Matt Beane was kind enough to write for me which you’ll also find on LinkedIn. This is what he wrote:

Don’t miss Dorothy! In the little time I worked with her, it became clear that she is a truly dedicated professional, constantly seeking to improve her clients’ condition. She demonstrated courage, skill and talent as she examined how she had been unintentionally contributing to her clients’ challenges, and she helped us all laugh whilst we learned. Dorothy attended an intensive workshop on Group Process Facilitation that I co-led with Roger Schwarz, author of “The Skilled Facilitator”.

Matt Beane
Principal Associate and Head of Sales and Marketing
Roger Schwarz and Associates
January 25th, 2010

A special offer for International Coaching Week

Coaching

It is International Coaching week next week, when coaches around the world do something to raise the profile of coaching. This annual event recognises that coaching is still a young and growing profession and reflects the commitment of coaches working in a wide variety of fields to share their passion for coaching and what it can do for clients.

This year I have decided to invest time and energy into an initiative to raise money for the relief efforts in Haiti and in recent days I have been wondering what I can do to make International Coaching Week work for the people of Haiti. I decided to make a special offer to anyone who, during the week beginning 8th February 2010, confirms and pays for coaching with Learning for Life (Consulting). The coaching itself doesn’t need to take place during that week – just the booking and payment.

This offer is available both to corporate and to private clients: whilst most of my clients are corporate clients I do reserve Mondays to work with private clients by telephone. It also applies to anything you choose to book, from a two-hour session to take stock to a coaching programme for your organisation’s senior leadership team. And just in case this offer proves overwhelmingly popular, I shall of course be taking care not to confirm more coaching than I can possibly deliver: it is, as they say, “subject to availability”.

You get to choose from one of the following possibilities:

  • Perhaps you’d enjoy a discount to make it easy to book that coaching you’ve been thinking about for a while. If so, I’m offering a 10% discount on our normal coaching fees provided you book and pay during the week beginning 8th February, 2010;
  • Perhaps you’d like to pay the full fees and know that some of the money will go to Coaching for Haiti. If so, I will pay your 10% and add 10% of my own to Coaching for Haiti at www.JustGiving.com/CoachingforHaiti. That’s a full 20% of the full coaching fees to Coaching for Haiti. This is, again, provided you book and pay during the week beginning 8th February, 2010.

If you’d like to take advantage of this offer, please drop me a line at dorothy@learningforlifeconsulting.co.uk with ‘Special offer for International Coaching Week’ in the title. And please feel free to pass this offer on to anyone you know for whom this might be the right opportunity at the right time.

And if you’re also a coach and would like to make the same offer to your clients, please do.

Coaching for Haiti: what’s it about?

Coaching

In recent days I have been watching news of the terrible aftermath of the earthquakes in Haiti and I found myself wanting to do something that goes beyond putting my hand in my pocket – something that goes beyond anything I can do alone. From this thought the bare bones of an idea – which I am calling Coaching for Haiti – was born.

For a few days I have been watching the to’ing and fro’ing of my thoughts. What if I put the idea out there and nobody responds? What if the response is so overwhelming that it takes over my life? What if…? What if…? Today I have decided to share it and to let you know how you can, if you feel moved to, get involved. This way, I get to see if the idea does indeed have wings.

What’s the aim of Coaching for Haiti? The aim is to leverage the power coaching has to do good in the world in order to raise money for the men, women and children of Haiti. As the ICF’s International Coaching Week (7th to 14th February) approaches I am also aware of the potential for Coaching for Haiti to raise the profile of the coaching profession.

How might it work? I see Coaching for Haiti as a time-bound (one-year?) project that could capture the imagination of coaches, their clients, their friends, family and many other contacts: the essence of Coaching for Haiti is to leverage the support of many people who, like me, are moved by the plight of the people of Haiti and recognise the long road ahead. I imagine there may be a key sponsor that provides practical support (setting up a website, managing receiving funds for Haiti and passing them on, helping to raise interest in the media etc.). I also imagine many ways in which coaches might help to raise money using their coaching and other skills.

How can you contribute? If Coaching for Haiti is to take flight it will need a wide variety of contributions. These range from offering ideas, through helping to find a sponsor or sponsors right through to offering coaching in exchange for sponsorship for Coaching for Haiti. Right now, more than anything, Coaching for Haiti needs your ideas.

Over time, I imagine different ways that coaches might set about raising money. Some of them may be in exchange for coaching (writing to offer coaching to five people you’d really like to coach in exchange for a donation to Coaching for Haiti, for example). Some of them may involve coaches rather than coaching (going on a sponsored walk with members of your coaching supervision group, for example). Some of them may involve people other than coaches.

What can you do if you are interested to learn more? Coaching for Haiti is an opportunity to follow your heart and to make the contribution that suits you. At this stage, it is an idea that may or may not have wings. If you would like to belong to the community of people who are interested to support this idea, please sign up as a member of the Coaching for Haiti group on LinkedIn. This is a place where you can get involved and contribute ideas. You can also follow the progress of Coaching for Haiti at http://coachingforhaiti.blogspot.com/. I look forward to seeing you there.

An authoritative and professional consultant and coach

Clients and testimonials, Developing as a leader, , ,

I had an e-mail recently from a potential client who had been referred to me by one of my coaching clients. His questions made me wonder if I am offering information about my work as an executive coach at the expense of sharing information about my broader offering in the field of leadership development. In truth, I have played a role over the years in helping many organisations to build their leadership bench strength as well in helping individuals to develop their own capability as leaders. I made a note to balance the referrals that I am sharing to give a broader view.

It made sense to ask my friend, colleague and client Alan Roach, Executive Principal of the Basildon Academies, for permission to reproduce a referral which has already been published elsewhere, not least because Alan has seen the breadth and depth of my work since we first met in 1999. Before I share Alan’s words, I offer some background information about our contact over the years.

Our first meeting took place when Alan participated in the national Leadership Programme for Serving Headteachers, when I was responsible for accrediting the trainers delivering the programme. Over the years, I have known Alan in a variety of contexts. I have been Entrepreneur In Residence at the schools which have recently become the Basildon Academies, a role which often involves acting as a sounding board for Alan. We have been fellow national judges for the Teaching Awards. Occasionally, the Academies have been my client – last year, for example, I conducted some work to help clarify roles and responsibilities in the newly formed Academies. Occasionally, I have conducted work on behalf of other organisations as a result of Alan’s referrals.

This is what Alan had to say:

Dorothy is an authoritative and professional management consultant and executive coach. Dorothy’s intellect, clarity and experience have enabled her to make a strong contribution to developments in the world of education. Her influence and support over the years, through consultancy and through her voluntary work have helped our schools to build social capital and to succeed in transformation. Her ongoing commitment to supporting us as our schools become Academies will ensure that our new systems are robust and that our aspirations are met.

Alan Roach
Executive Principal
Basildon Academies

The anatomy of an action

Emotional Intelligence, ,

Currently, it seems that all sorts of snippets are coming my way about the way the brain works and the impact on such things as emotional intelligence. I am reminded of the French phrase jamais deux sans trois – receiving the brief description below, it’s as if all the buses have turned up at once.

I was curious about the following brief description of an experiment by Benjamin Libet, who died in 2007. Libet’s experiments challenged our traditional view of how we make decisions. This description was part of an invitation to a talk this evening which, sadly, I am unable to attend.

Benjamin Libet (1916-2007) was a pioneering scientist in the field of human consciousness. His classic experiment showed that when subjects were asked to press a button, prior to their decision to do so, their unconscious brains had already started getting them ready to act. This implies that things happen in the following order: first comes automatic brain activity, then a conscious decision, then the action itself.

These findings seem to challenge our common sense idea of ourselves. ‘We’ seem to be nothing more than conscious decision-makers with the occasional power of veto over unconscious forces.

The role of the unconscious mind has been the subject of exploration and conjecture throughout history. Freud stands out in the twentieth Century as having made attempts to understand the unconscious mind, for example, and many therapeutic approaches explore the unconscious.

I think of neurolinguistic programming (or NLP) as one area in my own experience which engages with the unconscious mind on an ongoing basis, recognising that it’s possible to speak directly to the unconscious, and also inviting the unconscious to speak. As I write I recognise how many questions in coaching are addressed directly to the unconscious mind.

We live in an extraordinary era in the science of the brain, an era in which, increasingly, scientists are able to understand what is actually happening in the brain that creates the behaviours we observe. I regret that I shall not be hearing more about this this evening.

Connecting – via the written word

Clients and testimonials, Coaching, , , ,

Recently I have wondered whether to put my name forward to join the published list of NVC (that’s nonviolent communication) trainers in the UK. I am not a certified trainer and don’t plan to become one – at least for now. And still, I’d enjoy having some coaching clients coming my way who are interested to develop a compassionate (‘nonviolent’) approach. Equally, since I work extensively with clients in corporations, I’d enjoy having someone – an HR Director, perhaps – contact me one day and ask to talk about the use of nonviolent communication in organisations.

What better way, I thought, than to seek the view of people who are already listed? So I put out an invitation to my colleagues to share their thoughts. One e-mail touched me deeply – I had the sense of being seen at my very best. It also reminded me of the power of social media, coming as it did from someone I have yet to meet and whose impressions of me come largely via the written word. With her kind permission, I share it with you.

This e-mail came to me from Jo McHale, whose business (at http://www.talking-truly.com/) focuses on converting conflict into connection. Here’s what she wrote:

Dear Dorothy

We haven’t met yet – and I trust we will before long – yet I feel moved to respond to your e-mail about joining the NVC-UK trainers list.

I have read your contributions to the NVC-UK group’s discussions. I have heard your voice on the conference call. I have read your response to a thread on the LinkedIn Coaching At Work group in which you commented on something Bill Tate wrote (Bill is my partner). I’ve also read your website/blog. And let’s not forget I first encountered you in the UKHRD Forum [now the Training Journal Daily Digest].

From each of these I have a sense of someone who is grounded, compassionate, passionate, thoughtful and wise. I find it easy to listen to what you say with an open mind and open heart, and to trust the place you’re speaking from.

It would indeed gladden my heart if you were to join the list. My understanding of the procedure is that you need the endorsement of three (not sure of the number of) people who know you and are prepared to ‘speak’ on your behalf. If my words contribute to this, I’m very happy for them to be used.

In anticipation of future connections,

Jo

Jo McHale

When science proves ancient wisdom: the empathy neurons

Emotional Intelligence, ,

In the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century, our understanding of the brain has accelerated to an extraordinary degree. Some of this work has been brought to a wide audience (if you like, ‘popularised’) by Daniel Goleman in his books on Emotional Intelligence.

Sometimes, the new brain science helps us to make sense of things we already knew. Why is it, for example, that to visualise something ahead of time (from having a baby to winning the Olympics) is to make it far more likely that it will happen? How is it that we are able to empathise with others? To what degree is the Eastern philosophical idea that we are all connected (and that any idea that we are not is an illusion) an objective truth?

Today, I enjoyed watching VS Ramachandran sharing just 8 minutes’ worth of new science, in which he describes the role played by ‘mirror neurons’. You can find this clip at http://www.ted.com/ under the heading The neurons that shaped civilization.

I am grateful to Gina Lawrie for sharing this clip. Gina is one of the UK’s foremost trainers in the field of Nonviolent Communication – and happy to see more and more examples of science proving ancient wisdom.

To be or not to be

Emotional Intelligence, , ,

Shona Cameron, one of my colleagues in the world of Nonviolent Communication (or NVC) sends through a link to a fascinating article in the Guardian about something called e-prime: This column will change your life: to be or not to be…

The article, by Oliver Burkeman, refers to an idea I had not come across before. David Bourland, proposes – in an essay about something he calls e-prime – to eliminate the use of the verb “to be”. Burkeman references one of Bourland’s teachers, Alfred Korzybski, known especially for his assertion that “the map is not the territory”.

It seems to me that Bourland’s idea, put forward some 45 years ago, reflects Korzybski’s teaching. For if you can no longer say “John is lazy”, you are obliged to find some other way of putting your idea forward, perhaps a way that reflects you own responsibility for reaching this conclusion (“It’s my view that John does not work as hard as some of his colleagues”, for example). This new linguistic turn of phrase does more to highlight the gap between the map and the territory it seeks to represent, making clear the role of the viewer in the viewing. Perhaps this different turn of phrase might even highlight this gap to the viewer and invite greater self-accountability. How many performance appraisals might be transformed by such a fine distinction? How many family arguments might never take place?

The article’s author asserts that e-prime never really caught on and yet the distinctions made by Bourland and Korzybski have found their way into many schools of thinking. Our ability to distinguish between what we observe and our response to what we observe is an essential part of Nonviolent Communication, for example, whilst Korzybski’s phrase “the map is not the territory” has been adopted as a core presupposition in the world of Neurolinguistic Programming (or NLP).

How widely understood is the gap between the “map” and the “territory”? Not very. One might even observe that in any relationship in which one party wishes to expercise power and influence it can help to obscure the distinction. If, though, we aspire to honest open relationships in which people make free, informed choices, we might find that e-prime’s elimination of the verb “to be” invites greater transparency of thought.

Mmm… before I press the “publish post” button, let me just check this posting for my use of the verb “to be”…

NVC and the Skilled Facilitator Approach

All articles, Alternative approaches,

This posting is for those people in my network who are interested in Marshall Rosenberg’s work in the area of nonviolent communication and/or Roger Schwarz’s Skilled Facilitator Approach (SFA). How do they compare? And because this is a blog posting rather than a full article I’m sharing – for now at least – my first impressions.

Let’s start with values. A core value amongst practitioners of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is compassion. As it happens, compassion is also a core value of the Skilled Facilitator Approach – amongst others. As I look down the list of values on my SFA card – transparency, curiosity, accountability, informed choice, compassion – I wonder whether the Skilled Facilitator Approach doesn’t make explicit some of the values implicit in NVC. None of them seem at odds.

In the Skilled Facilitator Approach, the mutual learning cycle begins with something which is also at the heart of NVC – making an observation. In NVC this may be noticing your own thoughts and actions or noticing someone else’s. It may also be noticing the voice with which you are speaking – with compassion (called speaking in giraffe) or from a place of non-compassion or anger (speaking in jackal).

There are some similarities here and some differences between NVC and the Skilled Facilitator Approach. In NVC our attention is on the needs we have or the needs we think the other person is expressing, together with the feelings that give rise to those needs. In the Skilled Facilitator Approach, the same focus is reflected in a rule: focus on interests, not positions. At the same time, the Skilled Facilitator Approach places a great deal of emphasis on checking our observations (“I think I heard you say…”) and our inferences (“I’m thinking you might be thinking… What do you think?”) This seems to me to be at odds with the view held by Marshall that to focus on thinking can get in the way of understanding needs. Whilst the goal of each approach is the same, the route seems to be different.

There’s a rule in the Skilled Facilitator Approach that seems to me to add something to the practices of Nonviolent Communication: explain reasoning and intent. According to this rule, you might add to a question an explanation (“the reason I’m asking is…”). In NVC, we share the needs that might be met when we make a request – again, a different route to the same end – so I wonder what it is this different approach adds. Perhaps it’s a different way of expressing the same thing – and perhaps it’s the language in which an intention is expressed. Sometimes in NVC the language of needs can be a barrier to easy understanding because it is so foreign in our wider culture.

I notice that I could go on – making comparisons – and yet the more I do the more I encounter a challenge. For it seems that for every aspect I identify of the Skilled Facilitator Approach I find an equivalent in NVC. For now, I am left with a belief that engaging with both approaches is adding each to the other and yet, I don’t know what.

I wonder if you, my reader, have thoughts? If you do, I’d be glad to hear them.

Memories of Elektra

About Dorothy

Nowhere in my life is the way we lay down memories more apparent than in my role as a member of the London Symphony Chorus. For with 120 members of the choir singing in any one concert, we lay down 120 versions of our experience. Different members of the chorus notice different things about the experience. Different members of the chorus respond to those different things in different ways. Years later, when we compare notes, these differences are highly apparent. Were we at the same concert?

Talking with my friend and former chorus member Jenny Tomlinson in the run up to last week’s two performances of Elektra, it’s clear that Jenny laid down a few memories I had forgotten about our performance in 1989. She reminds me how one of our fellow sopranos, Eileen Fox, stood in for Christa Ludwig to do her scream in the role of Clytemnestra. Now, it isn’t normally seen as a compliment to describe someone as a ‘screamer’ in the context of the London Symphony Chorus, but hey! When you’ve deputised for Christa Ludwig, well, that’s an altogether different matter.

Once again, in 2010, Eileen is asked to offer her scream and draws the admiration and respect of fellow Chorus members. The stage staff who open the door for her make jokes after her first attempt (“honest! We could barely hear you!”) and are spotted wearing ear plugs next time round.

Helen Palmer, whose sister Felicity is utterly magnificent in the role of Clytemnestra, will no doubt lay down a few memories of the way eager audience members asked her for her autograph and Valerie Gergiev, too, did a quick double-take before realising that no, this was not Felicity Palmer.

James Mallinson laid down a particular kind of memory, laying down the tracks that will become the LSO Live recording to be issued in a few months time. The critics laid down a variety of highly positive memories in their reviews (not one of them about the chorus – though what can you expect when we only have a handful of bars to sing?). I would add my own “quite right, too!” as I think of the fine array of soloists and the orchestra’s exciting performance. The chorus as a whole may well lay down a memory of the various places we were instructed to sing from before finally gathering near the stage door.

Personally, I lay down one memory amongst the others which is personal to me. Standing at the back of the little group of “servant wenches” by the stage door I have barely enough light to see my music. Noticing this, one of the stage door staff takes out his mobile phone to shine the light over my music, following my finger as I highlight where the light needs to go. A small act of kindness which I treasure.