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 relationship [...]

Especially given the turmoil in the markets in recent days, it seems to be good timing to return to the subject of how we can leap off the “hamster wheel of fear” — a self-perpetuating negative cycle — and onto our wheel of creative freedom.  Recently, I had the privilege to watch a presentation by certified hypnotherapist, Monica [...]

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 to [...]

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 [...]

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 done, [...]

In my last post, we talked about our personal ”wheel of fear” - how it works, and how to develop awareness of our wheel of fear as a first step in getting off of it.  Organizations, too, have their “Wheels of Fear.” One might be: We are experiencing intense competition that threatens our survival. Therefore, everyone [...]

Think for a moment about something that scares you (not too much!). Now suppose you had the confidence that you could absolutely handle that situation. What happened to the fear?
In this sense, we might notice that our fears of external events and people, reflect our fears about our own abilities to adequately respond to challenging situations. 
Coach [...]

“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 [...]

In my last post we backed our way into a discussion of an emerging way of thinking about leadership and organization: the metaphor of the organization as an organsim. 
 http://www.creativeleadercoach.com/2008/05/01/the-brain-as-a-metaphor-for-organization/
As we talked about earlier, metaphors are maps of the terrain that can yield some useful insights, so we don’t need to hold on to them too tightly (as [...]

In Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World, Margaret Wheatley discusses the metaphor of the organization as self-organizing system.  From a biological perspective, we can see that successful systems dynamically both help shape and adapt to changing environmental conditions: the successful organization and environment evolve together.  Conversely, the unsuccessful organization might be seen as one [...]