Archive for July, 2010

Stacking Questions

Friday, July 30th, 2010

For the past year or so, I have been coached for the pur­pose of obtain­ing an Exec­u­tive Coach­ing des­ig­na­tion that will help Build­ing Cham­pi­ons with some of our cor­po­rate and inter­na­tional work. My coach is very gifted, and has been effec­tive in help­ing me to improve my coach­ing skills.

As part of the process of get­ting this des­ig­na­tion, I have spent time being observed while coach­ing Mas­ter Cer­ti­fied Coaches from the Inter­na­tional Coach­ing Fed­er­a­tion. These are peo­ple whom I have never met or even talked to prior to the ses­sions. These have been pretty chal­leng­ing, and I must con­fess that I com­pletely botched last week’s session.

The con­ver­sa­tion went some­thing like this…

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Can You Feel It?

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

I had a coach­ing ses­sion last week with a client who owns a great com­pany here in the North­west. Like many busi­ness lead­ers, his nat­ural behav­ioral style is on the dom­i­nant side, which means he is a take-charge kind of guy. For those of you famil­iar with the DISC behav­ioral lan­guage, he is a High D.

I know this type very, very well.

Stud­ies have shown that there is a cor­re­lat­ing emo­tion for each behav­ioral style which emerges when that per­son is frus­trated or chal­lenged. For a High D, the emo­tion is anger.

In this ses­sion, my client shared that he feels some very real phys­i­cal changes when he is being chal­lenged or threat­ened. What he expe­ri­enced has every­thing to do with Emo­tional Intel­li­gence, or EQ.

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Things Will Not Fall Apart

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

I am writ­ing this post from a great lit­tle cof­fee house on the Ore­gon coast. This has been a morn­ing of catch­ing up on email. As I men­tioned in my last post, “Some­times You Just Have To,” I spent last week with friends and fam­ily, surf­ing our way up the Cal­i­for­nia coast. It was a fan­tas­tic mem­ory mak­ing time!

Today I am pay­ing the price. I have been knee deep in email for the last three hours.

One of the email mes­sages I just reviewed was from my won­der­ful team­mate, Kit John­son, who runs HR and Account­ing for us at Build­ing Cham­pi­ons. She sent me a report I had requested with our team’s unused vaca­tion hours. I asked for this because I want to make sure I am encour­ag­ing my team­mates to take full advan­tage of their vaca­tion time.

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Sometimes You Just Have To

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

I just returned from a won­der­ful and unplanned road trip from my home here in Lake Oswego down to San Onofre, CA. One of my high school friends, Dave Makela (who now works for Min­istry Coach­ing Inter­na­tional) invited me to join his fam­ily on this camp­ing and surf­ing trip. They have held this beach blan­ket bingo type of reunion for the past 5 years, and it is very well attended. Dave also invited a few other surf­ing friends from our youth.

When Dave told me about it a few months ago, I did not think I would be able to make the trip. I have been away so much this year… I am just too busy…There is too much going on right now…It’s too long of a drive… These thoughts kept me from com­mit­ting, until about two weeks ago. Then the bug bit.

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