Creative Leadership Coaching

Carman writes: Hi Lisa,  I’ll try to paraphrase your questions:
1. Is emergent (bottom-up) organization compatible with goals and direction (top-down)?
2. When is the imposition of limits appropriate?
Morgan explains that “the intelligence of the human brain is not predetermined, predesigned, or  preplanned. Indeed, it is not centrally driven in any way. It is a decentralized emergent [...]

Carman, regarding: your post: http://www.creativeleadercoach.com/2009/01/07/metaphors-of-organization-organization-as-brain/ I completely agree.
This is a good example of how our metaphors can limit our thinking. The mind-body dichotomy, in which mind is usually seen as separate from and superior to the body, has been a fundamental cultural metaphor. Related metaphors include: God-World, spirit-flesh, and the misogynist male-female dichotomy in which men were [...]

In Western culture, we tend to be inclined to believe in and aim towards static and desireable future. In myths and fairy tailes, our heroes’ and heroines’ journies end in a static, experientially eternal state of bliss or pain. This is also a theme of monotheistic religions, which have shaped our worldview over the past [...]

“Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively. I hear them all at once. What a delight this is! All this inventing, this producing, takes place in a pleasing, lively, dream.” –Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Good morning, readers! It’s been a very intense time for me on the career coaching side of my practice, and [...]

As a brief departure from our current discussion, I recently heard that when we are regularly interrupted by ringing telephones, email announcements, and visitors, that our IQ drops by about 10% - the same level of impairment found in people who are under the influence of marijuana. The colleague who shared this information with me joked, “All of [...]

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 [...]

In our last post, we talked about working harder and longer as a mainstream cultural approach to dealing with a threat (or challenging environment). Those who have been reading this blog for a while may recognize this pattern as a common “wheel of fear.” This response is so common as to appear commonsensical. When the [...]

Time has flown, as it does when our schedules are full.  For me, the past three weeks have been filled with a lot of work and a some necessary relaxation, or as some call it, “human being.”  Given that, in this blog, we have been in the midst of constructing our “wheel of creative freedom” [...]

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 [...]