Welcome
Thank you for landing here. No single website can really sum up a career and mine has followed a few interwoven tracks - academic, senior manager, founder and executive director of a couple of non-profits, and consultant and coach.
This website is very much about coaching for individual and organizational development. It very much reflects our current situation of living through an evolving pandemic and negotiating the unknowable. This website is an opportunity for me to share with you some of the ways in which I can be of service as you, personally and professionally, or your business, as you traverse these complex and up-ending times.
Coaching in the time of Covid-19
In many ways there is not a better time to embrace a coach and the practice of being coached.
This is true for individuals and for those leading businesses, organizations, and community groups, irrespective of their size.
Everything we have taken for granted has been to varying degrees upended. Everyone is experiencing a tessellation of complex emotions. These include loss, anger, fear, denial, betrayal, anxiety, stress and floundering, to name a few of the more negative ones. There are some silver linings for those not in full personal turmoil and devastation, such as an opportunity to engage more with home, to consider work-life balance, to engage more with nature, self-care and consider values.
This is a significant, if not unique, time of re-appraisal: how will our businesses work in the future, how will we shape our working lives, how will we negotiate more periods of lock-down or isolation, how might working at home be managed if it is more permanent, how can home and work be life made more balanced, what are personal priorities and values and how might they be better honoured.
For those leading organizations and businesses there are questions about personal responsibility as leaders and manager to keep employees and colleagues safe, to attend to concerns and anxieties, to give voice, to be more transparent about changes and developments. All these considerations atop concerns about continuing to deliver on organizational objectives.
Many of us have begun to ask profound questions and this process has only just begun. At such a time of reappraisal and exploration coaching is a safe and structured process of provocation and the provision of times and topics for reflection. Coaching is a process that focuses on the individual and not so much on the issues. It moves the individual towards alternative perspectives and into a place to process what is happening. Moving the individual from stress and stuck helps well-being, more creative and lateral thinking and helps an individual into more considered actions.
Coaching allows for formulating and testing actions in a highly supportive way, to envision personal and organizational futures and to be more daring. It is an opportunity to be heard carefully, to tease out possibilities and alternative perspectives, to focus on ideation, to find some control and to consider futures more optimistically.
Coaching is a way to help people to deal more effectively with change and what life presents, and this novel coronavirus presents multiple changes and challenges. We are required to respond to the unknown, to develop route maps that seem likely to need to be changed and changed again before the ink dries and that we keep mentally and emotionally limber to respond to the unknown.
Coaching done well has tools, strategies and offers the safe and held space to more creatively and effectively work with such complexity.
Coaching Builds
An effective coaching process calls on and develops these skills in a client. The following pages outlines coaching and briefly explores the importance of these four skills and processes.
Thank you
Stay well and safe.
