Creative Leadership Coaching

In Cultivating Strength (see http://www.creativeleadercoach.com/2008/10/10/cultivating-strength/ ), we discussed how speaking our truth and postive thoughts and words literally make us stronger. In this post, we will talk a bit about a way of understanding the world, so that we can more easily see why this might be true. The science of psychoneuroimmunology, which studies the intimate [...]

In my last post, I succumbed to using the dance analogy for describing how we negotiate what is taking place in any interaction or relationship. We could use the term “negotiation” or “game” but the first suggests conscious “strategy” and even manipulation, and for me, the second invokes transactional analysis, which describes some common scripts [...]

We are all hardwired to respond to subtle social cues. Smiles, laughter, yawning — are all contagious. Studies have shown that when we are in tune with others we unconsciously adapt our body/language to be compatible with theirs. This unconscious mimicry of physical expression tends to invoke a similar emotional or psychological effect: Someone smiles [...]

Because our conversation on vicious and virtuous cycles is multi-part and spread out over time, I thought it might be helpful to briefly recap the previous discussion and look ahead. Earlier we talked about the downward spiral that master coach Rhonda Britten calls the “wheel of fear,” a vicious cycle in which our fears prompt us [...]

One famous experiment that really illustrates how perspective can draw out or diminish human potential is the experiment first conducted in the 1960s by American teacher Jane Elliott, who went on to become an anti-racism activist.  In this exercise, she praised brown-eyed children as ”hardworking” and “intelligent,” and dismissed blue-eyed children as being innately less hardworking and intelligent. In light of that [...]

In my last post, we considered how our perspectives can shape the conditions that reinforce our perspectives — how they help shape our realities.  For those of us raised in a Western culture, this idea can take some getting used to. Our ideas (and hence experience) about ourselves and the world have been strongly shaped by [...]

In my last post, I described how our perspective can shape the very conditions that reinforce our perspective; in this sense, we tend to create our realities. In that post, I used the example of how my fear of being unsafe on cliffy moutain roads actually caused me to become a more unsafe driver; the [...]

In earlier posts, we talked about how our “wheel of fear” (Britten 2001) can lead us to take actions that perpetuate the very conditions we are trying to alleviate with our reflexive actions and the wheel of being (Christie 2008) which shows how both our “wheel of fear” and “wheel of freedom” (Britten 2001) are driven [...]

For many of us, the “wheel of fear” (see: http://www.creativeleadercoach.com/2008/05/30/getting-off-your-wheel-fear/ ) is like a hamster wheel.  The path is well defined; we put one foot in front of the other and … find ourselves somehow back where we started.  So, how do we get off? As Anthony Robbins observes, “If you do what you’ve always [...]

“After so many years of defending ourselves against life and searching for better controls, we sit exhausted in the unyielding structures of organization we’ve created, wondering what happened. What happened to effectiveness, to creativity, to meaning? What happened to us? Trying to get these structures to change becomes the challenge of our lives. We draw [...]