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, 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, http://www.creativeleadercoach.com/2008/05/16/trust-as-an-enabler-of-change/ we talked about how fear can both prompt and frustrate change. Presently, macro forces, prominently including global competition and outsourcing, are increasing fear and insecurity, while requiring organizations to become more creative, collaborative and adaptable.  However, it seems the actions we take from a perspective of fear are often maladaptive. For example, one common response [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Below is a link to an awesome video, in which neuroanatomist Jill Bolte describes alternating experiences of the left and right hemispheres of the brain.  This is important because in the West, we have extensively developed the left brain, associated with rational sequential thought, and modern organizations and approaches to leadership reflect this orientation.  However, it is the right side of the [...]