*Virtual Dialog for May* The New Wave of Coaching
Friday, May 9 to 10:00 am EDT
Call Topic: The New Wave of Coaching
About the Call: This virtual dialogue will be hosted by Gordon Clark with guest coach Shirley Anderson. Gordon was one of the first Master Certified Coaches certified by the International Coach Federation. He is a graduate of Yale, a renaissance man with a reputation for integrity and curiosity and a natural as a talk show host. He lives in New York City.
Shirley Anderson was also one of the first people to be certified as a Master Certified Coach by the ICF. For the past six years she has hosted a live program on Monday afternoons at 1:00 pm entitled the Coaching Salon. Shirley lives in South Dakota and is known for her forward thinking feet-on-the-ground wisdom. Some say she is one of the leader of leaders coaching.
For additional information go to http://www.coachmiami.com
This conversation will focus on The New Wave of Coaching. Shirley Anderson and Gordon Clark will explore how the coaching profession has changed in the five years since Thomas Leonard’s death.
Included in the conversation will be a discussion on how the book: “A New Earth” by Eckhart Tolle is impacting the coaching profession.
Listeners are invited to call in 3 minutes prior to 10:00 am EDT. The conversation will begin at 10:00am EDT followed by a short break at 10:30 am. The second half of the call will be open to listener participation. Gordon will facilitate the 30 minute portion devoted to questions and answers.
The call will end at 11:00am EDT
Register below or send a blank email to virtualcallapr@aweber.com
ATTENTION! UPDATE:
The New Wave of Coaching is now a three part series!
Host Gordon Clark and guest Shirley Anderson will continue the conversation
Friday, May 2nd and Friday, May 9th at 10:00 am to 11:00 am EDT.
Each conversation will be original and thought-provoking.
Once you register for the first call, you may attend all three.
It is not necessary to have attended the first conversation
to register for the additional New Wave of Coaching calls in May.
Thanks, Gordon and Shirley!
To listen to the New Wave Of Coaching-Part 1 Virtual Dialog (April 25, 2008) CLICK HERE
To listen to the New Wave of Coaching-Part 2 Virtual Dialog (May 2, 2008) CLICK HERE
To listen to the New Wave of Coaching-Part 3 Virtual Dialog (May 9, 2008) CLICK HERE
Popularity: 56% [?]
Comment by Shirley Anderson on 23 April 2008:
Welcome to our call. I can’t wait to talk with Gordon about “all things coaching.” We’ve been friends and colleagues for nearly 20 years: ever since we were in Thomas Leonard’s first coach training program, The College for Life Planning. We’ll share our “long-view” of coaching, some of things we’ve learned, as well as how current buzz in the coaching world fits perfectly. Register and call in Friday morning at 10 am EDT and let us know what YOU’RE thinking.
Ciao, Shirley
shirley@coachmiami.com
Comment by Marion Franklin on 24 April 2008:
Hi Shirley,
Can’t wait to join you and Gordon on the call. Here is a tribute about Thomas that I wrote on a coaching list to someone who never really knew Thomas. In summary, Thomas got us started and it is now up to us to be the inspiration and leaders that carry coaching forward to bigger and better things. So glad you are incorporating Tolle’s work - it is such an essential part of being a great coach and a human being.
POST:
Thomas was not only an out-of-the box thinker, he took action steps and/or got people to stand behind him. When he talked about ‘arranging confidence’ I was most intrigued. Whenever he felt that he was onto something but wasn’t sure if it would fly, he would connect with his trusted R&D team. The best part was that he really listened to what we had to say. When I complained about the Personal Foundations course needing some help - especially in how it was taught for coaches to use, he immediately summoned a group and we got right to work on how to change it for the better.
More importantly, Thomas once said to me “If you are inspired, you don’t need motivation.” For me, Thomas was that inspiration. He was fiercely afraid of and disliked talking with groups of people so he created the Millennium Tour where he would have to do that non-stop. I’ll never forget when I first met him in person how shocked I was that he wasn’t about 90 years old because he had produced so much material. He got a real chuckle out of that.
When Thomas was alive, there was always something to look forward to - a new program, a new way to market, a new idea around coaching skill, a new form for something, etc. He so lived from abundance because he just kept on giving. Sure, we can get into some of the things he did/ didn’t do that didn’t go over well, but overall, he was a true inspiration that kept on believing and never giving up on what he saw as possible. I loved how he shared some really personal things about himself, showed us personal photos - he kept himself off of the pedestal despite so many wanting to put him there.
Now that coaching is more mainstream (vs. What sport? as we used to hear), Thomas left in place exactly what he needed to and likely what he had hoped for and had a vision of…. I can’t imagine anyone creating as much as he did in such a brief time with an office that never looked used!
In my mind, he leaves a huge void because he can’t continue to create and on the other hand, he is always with us because of all that he did create.
Best regards,
Marion
Comment by Gordon Clark on 24 April 2008:
Hi All —
Welcome to our maiden series of calls. I am hosting this series, and Shirley Anderson is our initial guest. Please come to these calls with an idea in mind of what you’d like to have happen among us in the conversation. We’ll play off each other and hope to develop something marvelous and unpredictable.
If you’d like to reach me personally, you can e-mail me at GTClarkNYC@aol.com or call me at 212-580-1350.
Best, Gordon
Comment by Shirley Anderson on 24 April 2008:
Hi Marion:
Thanks for your comments. There’s just so much to say about what’s happening in coaching right now. It’s been building over the last couple years and between “burning up the house” and “awakening the world,” I almost can’t sleep at night !!! A thousand thanks to Ruth Ann and her team for the Coaching Commons. This truly is the place for us all to connect and exchange ideas from around the world.
Thomas fulfilled his role in coaching: through his genius, he inspired others to expand coaching to reach critical mass, i.e. the Tipping Point. THAT was Coaching 2.0. Now, “burning up the house” and telling the truth about personal transformation in language a 6 year old can understand is Coaching 3.0!! Get ready for the most exciting times in our industry: who else is better positioned, by virtue of their own personal development, than coaches to fearlessly share with CEOs, political figures, teachers, parents, community leaders, global policymakers how simple awareness, practiced in small steps, can change lives for the better. I guess that wasn’t a question, was it. Tolle’s work is just the beginning. Models, methods and techniques we’ve been using successfully for years will take on a new effectiveness with waking up.
Ta Ta for Now !! shirley
Comment by Suzee Ebeling PCC on 24 April 2008:
Dear Shirley and Gordon,
Unfortunately I will not be on tomorrow’s call. The topic is fascinating and I can’t wait to listen to the recording.
When I joined Coach U in 1999, everyone there, no matter how recently enrolled, was immediately deemed “a coach” - because they had presumably been coaching unofficially for years. Coaching was not rocket science, the only requirement for us coaches was to love the client (with love being defined as wanting the best for our client’s happiness and well-being) We were outspoken and didn’t hold back from sharing our personal experiences or applying “the edge” to shift client awareness. Thomas once told me that if I wasn’t pissing people off, I probably wasn’t saying anything worthwhile anyway.
Have fun tomorrow!!!
Your Ally,
Suzee
Suzee Ebeling PCC
Naples, FL
239-659-2685
Suzee@IntuitionCoach.com
Snippets about “New Wave” from Wikipedia
The term New Wave itself is a source of much confusion. It was introduced in 1976 in Great Britain by Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren as an alternative label for what was also being called “punk”.
New artists, such as the Ramones and Talking Heads, were anti-corporate, experimental, and from a generation that had grown up as critical consumers of the art they now practiced.
New Wave fashions were a conscious reaction to the hippie styles of the 1960s, Flares and long hair for men were replaced by more body-conscious clothing and shorter, often spiky, hairstyles. The tight-fitting suits and thin ties worn by Blondie on the cover of their album Parallel Lines epitomise the New Wave look, which harks back to the rock and roll styles of the pre-hippie era.
Another aspect was a desire to embrace contemporary synthetic materials as a protest and celebration of plastic. As a fashion movement, then, New Wave was both a post-modern belief in creative pastiche and a continuation of Pop Art’s satire and fascination with manufacturing. An important offshoot of new wave fashion was the New Romantic movement, which emphasized androgyny and extensive use of synthetic-looking cosmetics for both genders.
Comment by Shirley Anderson on 25 April 2008:
Hi Suzee:
I had to laugh at your post quoting thomas:
“Coaching was not rocket science, the only requirement for us coaches was to love the client (with love being defined as wanting the best for our client’s happiness and well-being) We were outspoken and didn’t hold back from sharing our personal experiences or applying “the edge” to shift client awareness. Thomas once told me that if I wasn’t pi**ing people off, I probably wasn’t saying anything worthwhile anyway.”
Who could have known that this was to be the topic of today’s call !!! You’ll get a kick out of the recording, Suzee, especially for your foretelling. We had a blast. Totally wonderful insights and feedback from callers, and lots of caring for me about my rueful telling of getting fired by a client.
Gordon and I will be talking again next week, and who knows what we’ll cook up. Thanks again for posting. The recording will be posted tomorrow. xxoo shirley
Comment by Shirley Anderson on 25 April 2008:
Here’s the story I alluded to on the call today:
I was learning to fly small airplanes several years ago in Florida and had gone to the practice area to practice stalls. There’s a set procedure to recover from a stall and you must demonstrate this skill to be licensed as a private pilot. The flight training aircraft are pretty stable; I was flying a Cessna 172 Aerobat, which is rigged for aerobatics, so I was able to get it into a power off stall pretty easily. The problem arose when I didn’t catch it fast enough and I went into a spin. I reversed the controls, aileron, rudder, put the power on, tried it the other way, then tried it that way again, and I was of course losing altitude very rapidly and the spin was tightening, and finally I just said the pilot’s favorite curse word, pulled off the power and let go of everything, convinced I was about to auger into the Everglades.
Amazingly, within a few seconds the airplane stopped spinning, and I was able to apply power and pull the nose up. I returned to Tamiami Airport shaken but in control. What happened? I had to let go, the very last thing my instincts told me to do. What made it work? I had lots of altitude and the airplane was rigged to regain stable flight once i stopped fiddling with it.
What’s the lesson? If I can’t immediately fix something that’s gone bad, and I’ve done what I knew to correct it and that didn’t work, let go. If I have enough altitude going into the challenge and I can trust enough to back off manhandling the controls, I can give the structure a chance to work.
This is one way of looking at my client situation today. Of course, I could still splat in the weeds, but I would have anyway.
Cheers,
shirley
Comment by Elizabeth Crouch on 25 April 2008:
What a fun call this morning! What an honest, provocative way to move into Friday and beyond!
I suspect that many of you signed up for today’s call with clear intentions, thoughtful expectations and yes, sheer curiosity. Perhaps you dialed into the call with those things in mind. Or, like me, some of you may have rolled out of bed with bleary-eyed resolve, determined to make certain you really did have the correct bridge number to get to the call on time just to hear Shirley’s laugh and Gordon’s equanimity.
This is not my usual morning routine at 7am pacific daylight time. I linger in bed. I want to feel my breathing, see my hands and know my toes are wiggling. I love those first little movements! Terrific, I am alive — I stand up, well balanced on two feet — in that delicious, well-rested experience where the day’s natural or bizarre stressors have not yet seeped in or pierced any part of my heart, soul or mind.
Now, I do not know how long Gordon, Shirley or any of you were awake prior to the call - that’s not the issue. What I experienced had to do with how we might awaken with each other and the gift of fresh beginnings. Shirley and Gordon shed the mantle of the expert, that posture of ‘I’m-here-to-tell-you-how-it-is’! They even relinquished the temptation to let us know how wonderful coaching might be ‘after all these years’. Uncommonly refreshing!
Was this call raw and vulnerable, generous and accessible, courageous and exposed? Yes, yes and yes!
There is a new wave and a new day, every day! What do you want for your days?
Comment by Gordon Clark on 25 April 2008:
Hi All —
Thank you all who participated in today’s call, both silently and aloud. It was our combined energies that made possible the remarkable conversation we all enjoyed. It is an extraordinary privilege to participate in such a genuine, intimate and heartfelt inquiry. I particularly honor Shirley for laying bare her soul to us, and all of us for making it safe for her to do that. All of us are enriched and I am grateful.
Comment by Shirley Anderson on 28 April 2008:
“OLD, BOLD COACHES” PART 1
“Don’t be a show-off. Never be too proud to turn back.
There are old pilots and bold pilots, but no old, bold pilots.”
E. Hamilton Lee, 1949
I learned to fly small airplanes in the 50s in Mexico, Missouri, and joined the Naval Air Reserve in 1959 when I was working in Columbus, Ohio and going to Ohio State at night. Besides my weekend drills at Port Columbus, the Naval Air Station, I also used to spend a lot of time lying on the grass in the shade of the control tower at Lockbourne Air Force Base outside Columbus. The B-47s and B-52s thrilled me with their grace, their beauty, and the sound of their chest-pounding takeoff rolls. I had entry by virtue of my Navy Reserve credentials. They got me into a lot of interesting places, but that’s another story. I transferred to the Minneapolis NAS when I decided to go to college fulltime in Aberdeen, SD, and while I still got my airplane “fix” one weekend a month in Minneapolis, I didn’t fly private airplanes for a few years. Years later when I resumed flying in Miami, I became involved in aerobatics through an old friend from South Dakota, Bob Schnuerle. He was a member of the US Aerobatic team and i 1970, using my Eastern Airlines flight privileges, I went to Hullavington AFB, England for my first International Aerobatic Contest. As a fan, of course.
“So, what does this mean to me as a coach today?” you might ask. As a young pilot, I was not bold at all; in fact, I got so freaked on my first solo cross-country flight over the Everglades, that I never finished the requirements for my private ticket. That I passed the written with an almost perfect score was irrelevant if I couldn’t figure out how to get over my fear of flying, literally … fear of running into a storm over the Everglades, fear of missing the airport, fear of not calculating the wind correctly, running out of gas, fear of plunking the aircraft down on a dirt road or on a beach somewhere.
As a young coach, I also was afraid to fly. I was afraid that I wouldn’t know what to say, afraid I was pretending to have skill or experience I didn’t have, and that someone would find me out. Also, I didn’t know how to run a business; in fact, I never wanted to run a business. My fear of the mechanics of coaching stopped me, like my fear of the mechanics of flying an airplane stopped me. Then I got a coach and mentor, Thomas Leonard, who was also my trainer. He taught us the first fundamentals of the Coaching Relationship: CLEAR, CLAIM & CHAMPION. CLEAR yourself of any negative judgments about yourself or the client; CLAIM them as someone who can do anything they want to with your help, and CHAMPION the client… think and speak well of them to themselves and, thereby, train them to think and speak well of themselves.
What you don’t know about the situation I spoke of on Friday is that the “coaching” I referred to in my “bold” ultimatum (”take the coaching or fire me’) actually came from the company’s owners to my client in a previous meeting. It was fascinating to me that several of you interpreted what I wrote to my client as meaning “do as I say or fire me,” which is the way my client interpreted it. While he reacted strongly to the written form and jolly well sacked me … those of you on the call somehow trusted me so that even if I HAD MEANT “do as I say, or ….” you still found a way to Clear, Claim and Champion me in a very difficult professional situation.
Ok, now what does this have to do with you? Something happened. You looked beyond the normal definitions of correct, proper, maybe even certifiable coaching … and saw the raw value in telling the truth to strong people. Where does this fit with doing coaching or being coaching. Was this an ego coaching another ego, or was this a being holding nothing back. Or were we just two bozos on this bus? Yes, the answer is (c).
Hamilton Lee’s quote that started off this ramble was talking about the early days of flying the air mail routes with beat-up, overflown aircraft, unlighted fields, nothing but a compass for navigation, open cockpits in storms, but the adage holds for modern pilots with all the tools. What goes up must come down, somewhere. The coach’s environment includes the fifth dimension, and maybe dimensions yet to be created or discovered. For some fun with Hypercubes or Tesseracts, click here:
http://robertinventor.com/software/virtualflower/virtualflower/tesseract.htm
More to come,
love, shirley