How would you condense the themes and patterns of your life into a short story? What have you consciously worked on to change about yourself? Where are you at with radical acceptance? I love Portia Nelson’s Autobiography:

Autobiography in Five Short Chapters  By Portia Nelson

Chapter I

I walked down the street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I fall in I am lost… I am helpless. It isn’t my fault. It takes forever to find a way out.

Chapter II

I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I pretend I don’t see it. I fall in again. I can’t believe I am in the same place. But, it isn’t my fault. It still takes a long time to get out.

Chapter III

I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I see it is there. I still fall in… it’s a habit. My eyes are open. I know where I am. It is my fault. I get out immediately.

Chapter IV

I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I walk around it.

Chapter V

I walk down another street.

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

Dan Heath quotes a psychological study where two group of people are given different kinds of foods – one cookies, the other radishes. They are then asked to solve an insolvable puzzle. The high sugar group lasts 2 1/2 times longer than the vegetable group. I am a leadership/change consultant and a trained holistic health counselor/therapist so - I wonder if the radish group realized earlier on that the puzzle was unsolvable since they had healthy food in their systems!

I agree that change requires enormous energy and self control. We have so much energy to expend before we need to replenish, and so much self control before we have a meltdown. Individuals (and organizations) have a limited capacity of how much and what kind of change they can handle. You start with your desire, will and some advice/support on how to change. Then you try. If you don’t get the desired results, you either modify WHAT you are trying to change or HOW you are doing it. Change requires will, action and experimentation. To keep trying requires commitment.

Change is hard because energy and attention are finite resources. It can be easier when we realize that it is about creating different neural connections and/or rewiring well-grooved neural pathways in the brain (changing a habit).

Focusing your attention, repeatedly over time, literally changes the chemical circuitry in your brain. True, sustained change is hard because we often don’t “get it right” on the first, fifth or fiftieth time and we need encouragement, support and tools to stick with it until our brain gets with the program!  Staying focused on the positive, the outcome you want, versus what you are not getting, is the key. It’s as simple and hard as this.

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I’m hard pressed to find a difference. Both are focused on what is good and positive and building on this for positive results.

“Positive Psychology is the scientific study of the strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive…This field is founded on the belief that people want to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives, to cultivate what is best within themselves, and to enhance their experiences of love, work, and play.”

This is a departure from the traditional field of psychology and traditional therapy which emphasizes mental illness or what is wrong with us.

The International Coaches Federation (ICF) “defines coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.” This definition was buried deep in their website. This organization is a valiant effort to set up some kind of standards so unschooled or inexperienced people can’t hang out their shingle and declare themselves a coach.

Both disciplines focus on building on what works, what our strengths are. Neither is focused on what is broken.

ICF defines the distinction between therapy and coaching as:

“Coaching can be distinguished from therapy in a number of ways. First, coaching is a profession that supports personal and professional growth and development based on individual-initiated change in pursuit of specific actionable outcomes. These outcomes are linked to personal or professional success. Coaching is forward moving and future focused.”

Therapy can say all this, especially positive psychology-based.

“Therapy, on the other hand, deals with healing pain, dysfunction and conflict within an individual or a relationship between two or more individuals. The focus is often on resolving difficulties arising from the past which hamper an individual’s emotional functioning in the present, improving overall psychological functioning, and dealing with present life and work circumstances in more emotionally healthy ways.”

This is a description of some modalities of therapy. At my last count there are over 250 therapeutic modalities, with positive psychology being one of them.

“Therapy outcomes often include improved emotional/feeling states. While positive feelings/emotions may be a natural outcome of coaching, the primary focus is on creating actionable strategies for achieving specific goals in one’s work or personal life. The emphasis in a coaching relationship is on action, accountability and follow through.”

Both therapy and coaching should focus on insight, behavior change, actionable strategies and outcomes with positive emotional states if they are doing their jobs effectively. How can you heal someone without enhancing positive emotions? How can someone achieve their goals if they are negative?

In terms of coaching, I don’t know how you can help someone have and be more of what they want in their life or work without dealing with their feelings.

In the marketplace of free enterprise – does it matter what someone calls themselves as long as the consumer goes in with their eyes open and is clear on what they are getting and feels that their Coach or Therapist has given them a service of value – has joined with them in their process to help them move their life forward in ways where they are achieving their goals and thriving?

Regardless of your profession – all of life and work is a healing process to help us be more of who we can be – more whole – fulfill our potential. We are all fragmented in some way or not as “good” as we can be. Each professional practitioner has pieces or elements that help us get more of what we want in work and life. They have similar training and toolkits around deep listening, client relationship building. They may have different theoretical models and frameworks, which do factor in, in terms of orientation and approach to the work.

The disciplines use some different language that appeals to different audiences. Does it matter if they are essentially talking about the same thing? Targeted language is important. Could it be that it comes down to what label someone is comfortable with?

© 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

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?

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Yep.

If you’re a star can-do person – then set your sights on higher or different goals that rock your world.  What will really test this attitude so you know where it’s coming from and how strong it is?

To achieve self-mastery, you must be willing to break beyond your current level of success or competency. This is how you get to the next level of success and can only be done by embracing different kinds of challenges. It’s like strengthening a muscle. To lift a weight you actually break down the fiber of the muscle. With a day or two of rest in-between the heavy lifting, this exercise makes the muscle stronger. Rest is key as it allows for integration and a rebuilding.

What do you need to breakdown (eliminate or reduce) or exercise more of to make you a stronger leader – more in control of yourself and therefore better able to influence others?

• Breakdown could be your apathy. What has you numbed or defensive to caring about how others experience a challenge? What buttons do they press in you? Where do they need more of your support? How deep do you have to dig to be present to their perspective?

• Exercise could be a strength that is not fully leveraged. Are you showing your team how you stay positive and can-do despite repeated obstacles or setbacks? How do you transfer this strength to them? A positive team in unison can move mountains.

Ultimately all activity is comprised of exercise, breakdown, rest and build up for optimal results. In leadership development terms, I identify rest as reflection. Stepping back and integrating what you are working (or pushing) on helps you understand if you need to make an adjustment on the breakdown, exercise or rest (let it go) piece of the equation.

© 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