Hiring for agelessness is based upon someone’s consciousness, their perspective, their ability to shift from me to we. The individual is focused on how we can create something great together. These are ageless attributes.

You may know someone who, at twenty, is fearful, domineering and stuck in their ways. Or, perhaps you know of a sixty or seventy-something who is as vibrant, vital and eternally curious as your five year old? Passion, wonder, the ability to work collaboratively knows no age bounds.

These are all qualities that are core requisites for working in the 21st century: the age of speed and technology. It’s up to the user how they manage themselves to make the best use of this environment. They either lead themselves to more fragmentation or more wholeness – leveraging their own wisdom and that of the collective wisdom, their teams or families.

Solving our complex problems today requires an integration of different disciplines and a sense of how to creatively bring together seemingly disparate factors or factions. We can’t afford any less of our whole selves showing up to the party. You hire for agelessness first and foremost by paying attention to the individual in front of you, not just what the packaging looks like or what their resume says. It’s a brave new world.

© Copyright 2012 Sage Leadership Strategies, LLC All rights Reserved.               www.sagelead.com

Yesterday I talked about making sure you have accurately assessed yourself – WHY you are putting off action.

Here are some strategies to address the root causes of why this happens:

1. For fear: Identify similar tasks where you have been successful in the past to bolster your confidence. Focus on the present possibility of success and try to stay with that versus jumping ahead to the implications of success. Stay present. Enjoy the ride!

2. For worrying about what others think: ask for support and feedback from your “fans” on what you do well. Remind yourself about what you do well by creating a list of successes, and know that you can only control yourself. Put on mental blinders: It’s not your business what people think of you. Your job is to do the best you can with the matter at hand.

3. For being overwhelmed: work with your boss, coach, peer, spouse or friend to talk out loud to “de-whelm” yourself and make the project or task more manageable: break it down into smaller, step/step tasks; ask them for guidance, coaching, suggestions as to what to do or how to do it; ask for helpful resources (books, articles, websites, training).

4. If you don’t like the task: delegate it, if you can. If not, then find a way to make it fun: play music, dance, doodle, give yourself a reward after key milestones and upon completion.

5. For fear of loss: acknowledge the loss – what you loved about the previous project or team, make plans to (re-) visit if appropriate and/or say good-bye.

These are some brief suggestions to get you started. (I’ve done whole seminars just on procrastination!). The key is to identify one of the above solutions or create your own – and try it. Don’t delay.

© Copyright 2012 Sage Leadership Strategies, LLC All rights Reserved.               www.sagelead.com

We all have moments – hours, days or weeks – where we are putting something off: a task or a project. It could be making a phone call to someone confronting an issue, starting a project, or doing the last step to finish a project.

Considering what “it” is that gets put off, you first need to give yourself a proper diagnosis – to delve into why you keep putting “it” off – before you can create an action plan around it. Today we’ll talk about the diagnosis and tomorrow we’ll talk about how to address it.

Typically there are two root emotions that allow procrastination to grow. They are fear and loss.

1. Fear falls into two categories: fear of failure or fear of success. We have these fears for a number of reasons. To name a few:

2. We are worried about what others think.

3. We are overwhelmed and not sure how to manage or prioritize the project - we don’t know WHAT to do or where to begin; we don’t know HOW to do something; we don’t believe we can do it or have something of value to offer; if we succeed more will be expected of us in the future. We are thinking of all of this at once!

4. We plain just don’t like the task.

5. You might think “loss” is an odd thing to have on this list. But sometimes you could be putting off finishing a project because you love it so much and don’t want it to end. All endings are beginnings and all beginnings are the end of something that came before. You might not want to start a project as it signifies leaving another project team behind or going to a different office building. By putting it off, you don’t have to deal with the loss of that project or group.

If you are frustrated with yourself and want to get yourself to action, ask yourself is your procrastination due to one of these reasons? When you answer yes, then you can start brainstorming how to address it. If it is none of the above, then ask yourself: Am I really being honest? Why won’t I do this task? Keep asking why until you get to the core emotion or reason. If it’s not one of the above, what else is it?

© Copyright 2012 Sage Leadership Strategies, LLC All rights Reserved.               www.sagelead.com

The field of coaching as a structured profession is new and loosely defined. I’m an experienced business and leadership coach. I am also a trained therapist.

I left the field of therapy at 27 to go into business. At that time, one of my clients who had schizophrenia said to me, “Well you are an okay therapist but you are too young. Go out in the world and get some life experience and then you’ll be a good therapist.” When I told my other client I was leaving, she said, “I hope you drop dead.” And then hung up. So goes the life of a therapist! Lol.

Having now worked in business for over 20 years, I found my clients words to ring true – not dropping dead!  I can attest to the richness of my work and life experience making me a better coach, counselor, and consultant.

The clinical training I received has been invaluable in my coaching and facilitation work in terms of:

1. Understanding what is required for significant, sustainable behavior change.

2. Understanding group dynamics and how to best leverage them to facilitate insight and learning.

3. Having an appreciation for how many people are “in the room” when talking with a client.

4. Understanding how to keep boundaries between “my stuff” and my client’s “stuff” in service of what is really helpful for the goals of our engagement and their development.

I have been in many industry discussions focused on differentiating the distinction between therapy and coaching – and have yet to find a clear definition that is accurate and concrete. I heard it said, “While coaching holds that the client is whole, resourceful, capable and creative, therapy does not.” Many therapists would take exception.

When you are working with “the worried well”, the lines are gray. The overlap is both coaches and therapists work in the realm of emotions. Today our problems are more complex so require both head and heart, thoughts and feelings.

While many therapists lead with emotions, they may also work on left brain strategies to heal their clients. With matters of the heart, you can’t always hold the results to a timeline and the cathartic process can be charged and messy. Coaching work is time bound, to monitor and measure results. While coaches may lead with left brain approaches, they need to address emotions in order to get at the roots of sustainable change. All true change takes place in the context of safety and trusted relationships.

To me, the bottom line for coaching is: have the coach and coachee created an alliance of the client’s design that will help him or her achieve their goals? Does the coach have a diverse toolkit that can help his/her client see and feel the possible and make real, measurable progress against it?

Is the coach serving as a safe sounding board. co-strategist and giving their client timely, candid feedback? This is the heart of coaching. Nothing more, nothing less.

© Copyright 2012 Sage Leadership Strategies, LLC All rights Reserved.               www.sagelead.com

If an executive coach is what you seek, first make sure the person has experience working in a business context on business and leadership issues and not selling life coaching experience.

If a life coach is what you seek, the clearer and more narrow you can be on what you want to work on, the more successful you’ll be in finding a coach who can meet your needs. Instead of overall “life” try to focus on one key area such as lifestyle, losing weight, meditation, relationships, or career. Split focus will get you dissipated results and you may not find a coach who really has expertise in your chosen area.

Cedric Johnson, a Psychologist and Consultant, concisely summarized key questions that qualify a person to coach another. Does this person:

1. Have knowledge and skills in behavior change?

2. Deeply understand the world of their clients?

3. Have supervision and direct feedback on an ongoing basis?

4. Have a self-knowledge and self regulation not to get dragged into the emotional morass of the client?

5. Have wisdom and experience not to practice outside of their area of competence?

6. See real lasting change in their clients as a result of their service?

My adds:

1. What is their approach and orientation to the work?

2. Ask for referrals: from your potential coach; from your friends and colleagues who have worked with someone they liked – and got results with.

Once you have screened on competence and expertise, the final cut is for chemistry/fit. You need to develop a trusted advisor relationship with your coach, otherwise you are marginalizing or jeopardizing your success. All true change takes place within a context of safety that will allow you to take risks, search, test, practice and grow. Factor your gut into the equation.

Ultimately you want someone who is willing to share “graceful truths” with you – tell you the truth in a direct way that you can hear it and act on it.

What do you think?

© Copyright 2012 Sage Leadership Strategies, LLC All rights Reserved.               www.sagelead.com

Here is an interesting New York Times article on the controversial topic of what makes a good life coach – and does age matter?

I do executive coaching, focused on a very specific population: Organizational leaders. All work is done within the context of conducting extensive assessments and creating a development plan, which involves the leader’s manager. All actions are behaviorally-based with targets and measurements. Yet I still have people referring to my work as “life coaching.”

Because people are whole creatures, often coaching executives requires that we touch on aspects of their lives that effect and impact their effectiveness as executives – which includes their personal lives – But the focus is on making them a better leader.

“Life” coaching is such a broad and complex topic. Philosophers, psychologists and poets take very different approaches at looking at and solving the most complex of human dilemmas.

I understand life coaching is focused on making someone’s life “better” in a way that the coachee has defined as better. I don’t think someone should be dismissed as a life coach just because of their young age, but they should be suspect. Age should be one of a number of filters. There IS something to be said for age, which implies but does mandate, experience and wisdom.

As Atul Gawande, a surgeon focused on top performance says, “Jobs that involve the complexities of people or nature seem to take the longest to master: the average age at which S. & P. 500 chief executive officers are hired is fifty-two, and the age of maximum productivity for geologists, one study estimated, is around fifty-four.”

The focus of assessing a life coach should be on the quality of their skills, as evidenced by the degree of success they have achieved in their life (however long or short) and the results of their clients. One can have a long life and not have learned from it. One could have a short life and learned a lot from it.

In addition to education and experience, it is ultimately the quality with which the coach has processed their life experience that gives them the competency (skills and characteristics) required for excellent coaching: presence, deep listening skills, quality questions, clear boundaries, and the courage to give difficult feedback.

What is your take?

© Copyright 2012 Sage Leadership Strategies, LLC All rights Reserved.               www.sagelead.com

Einstein said, “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.”

As a Leader a key piece of your job is to clearly articulate your vision and get others excited about it and acting on it. If you don’t have followers, you aren’t a leader.

This task requires you to leverage imagination and empathy. First, you imagine a world that is different than what you currently see and experience. Second, you empathize with your constituents. Empathy requires that, if you don’t have their experience, as JK Rowling says, you use your imagination to empathize with them. This means you “feel with” them and/or create an idea of what you think their experience is. In doing so, you are best able to translate your vision and articulate why it should matter to them.

Rowling says Empathy is the rare gift we humans have that separates us from many other creatures of the world. We can “learn and understand without experience.”

And we are all gifted in one way or another with our ability to refuse to know. When we don’t exercise our empathy muscle, “we become masters at colluding in apathy.”

When you don’t have empathy for your constituents, they feel it and you are disconnected. They are not onboard – don’t get it or don’t care. It is your ability to enter your constituents’ world that will truly allow you to understand what is required of you – and them – to achieve a different world together.

© Copyright 2012 Sage Leadership Strategies, LLC All rights Reserved.               www.sagelead.com

Whether you are a student of life or leadership, be honest, life and leadership are hard work. Don’t you occasionally want the cliff notes or to test out of the exam?

Don’t you want to cut through the heavy lifting, the pain and muck to get to the glory?

True leadership means embracing your failure, strengthening your courage and cultivating your imagination to try yet again to create a better world – whether it is in your organization or at home.

What good is failure? How does it serve us? As JK Rowling says it helps us strip away the essentials that matter. For it is only when you face your greatest fear and survive that you are truly liberated. As Rowling says in her wonderful commencement speech at Harvard, hitting rock bottom is the most solid foundation one can build upon because there’s no place to go but up!

Our outer reality is only a reflection of what we have mastered within our selves.

Said another way by Greek author Plutarch, “What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.”

So you can start outside and make changes – and this will inevitably change something about your internal workings. Or you can begin inside working on your perspective with a dream or vision and the outside world will give you feedback molding and shaping you. Either way the two are inextricably bound. So, your starting point is irrelevant as you will land in the same place. Anything worthwhile has some stones in it’s path. These are gifts to strengthen your resolve to keep going.

© Copyright 2012 Sage Leadership Strategies, LLC All rights Reserved.               www.sagelead.com

Fall down 7 times, get up 8. This is an ancient Japanese proverb. I’ve been told the literal translation is: “Always rising after a repeated fall.” Sticking with it after not getting the results you want, time and again. That is dedication.

Commitment requires you to be resolved no matter what challenges life throws at you.

Meditation requires you go back to your breath or focal point, no matter how distracted you get. Just keep bringing your awareness back. I had many stops and starts for years before I was able to develop a consistent, daily meditation practice. And I was only able to do this with an energy lift from my class while going through an intensive teacher training on the subject. Yep. It took that much effort to get me to stick with it most of the time. Am I perfect at it? No.

Because I am human and I allow life to get in the way, I occasionally miss a practice. The point is to keep trying with the knowing that I can get back to it and it produces results.

Am I perfect at all my commitments? No.

My belief is that if I keep trying, I will achieve my dream or goal.

Ultimately it comes down to expectations and reality checks. Do you expect yourself to get it, whatever “it” is on the first, second or third try? Do you give up? Or do you learn from failing and trying again? Why does our culture not value failure as being the ultimate teacher – if one chooses to get up again? When was the last time you practiced compassion and forgiveness toward yourself?

Commitment, Meditation: off-focus 7 times, on-focus 8. In these times of ADHD, we could all use a little discipline and re-orientation now and again. Perfection not required. Only those with an open heart and willingness need apply.

© Copyright 2012 Sage Leadership Strategies, LLC All rights Reserved.               www.sagelead.com

Many of you are two weeks into your New Year’s resolution – addressing something you want to change about yourself or your life. Merriam Webster’s Dictionary, defines “commitment” as: “The act of answering: solving … a formal expression of opinion, will or intent.”

What problem are you trying to solve – being too heavy, too loud, out of shape, bored? What do you believe about this problem or opportunity? What do you REALLY have the will to address? As Merriam says, are you emotionally “impelled” to do it?

Impelled implies a force that you need to exert. This is key – and why many resolutions are dead by February 1st.

If you really want to stop or start something – you need a lift off to get you going. Shake up the status quo.

Step 1. Enlisting others for a push, pull or support is critical: your boss, peers, spouse, kids, your best friend or a formal support group.

Step 2. Try.

Step 3. Try again.

Step 4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 as often as necessary.

Real commitment to a change implies you are convinced about your decision, belief, direction. Your belief must be unshakeable, despite setbacks or falling off focus. Expect these. They will happen.

As Mary Robinson, the first President of Ireland said, “Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.”

This is commitment – sticking with it – and trying again, and again and again. If it were easy, it wouldn’t require a Commitment. Really. So, yesterday was a miss. What is your “again” today?

© Copyright 2012 Sage Leadership Strategies, LLC All rights Reserved.               www.sagelead.com