Eddie Turner:

Hello, everyone! Welcome to the Keep Leading!® Podcast, the podcast dedicated to leadership development and insights. I’m your host Eddie Turner, The Leadership Excelerator®. I work with leaders to accelerate performance and drive impact through the power of executive coaching, masterful facilitation, and motivational speaking.

Some leaders think leadership is about communicating top down. Is top-down communication the most effective form of communication as a leader? My guest today says no. My guest today says leaders are more effective when they use a coaching style for communicating. Using a coaching style is more effective and provides a whole new structure for communication that enriches a company’s culture and employee-leader relationships. My guest today who explained to us how to communicate like a leader is Lisa Spinelli. Lisa is a senior content manager at the Association for Talent Development. Many know that as ATD. And she’s also the host of the Accidental Trainer Podcast for ATD. Here with me today, I’m super excited to welcome Lisa Spinelli to the Keep Leading!® Podcast.

Hi, Lisa!

Lisa Spinelli:

Hi, Eddie! How are you doing?

Eddie Turner:

I’m well. Thank you for being here.

Lisa Spinelli:

Thank you so much for having me. It’s a real pleasure to be on here.

Eddie Turner:

It’s such a pleasure to have you. Can you tell my listeners a little bit more about you, Lisa?

Lisa Spinelli:

Oh, my goodness, where to start. Okay, I have worked at ATD for about three years. I am a reformed journalist and content manager for business to business type of organizations. I created and managed the transitioning service member workshops Troops to Trainers and because apparently, I’m kind of redundant in my titles for things, I’m also the editor and main contributor for the book Teachers to Trainers and that published in October 2020. So, I’m working towards my ACC Coaching Certification and I’m just trying to be a part of this great career development talent development community.

Eddie Turner:

Wonderful. Well, I absolutely am passionate about the field of talent development and you working for our premier organization in the field is what makes me want to talk to you. That and you’re just pretty cool. I’ve enjoyed some of the work that you’ve been doing – your show, your podcast, and then also you manage the content. So, a lot of what we’re seeing comes from you.

Lisa Spinelli:

Yes, me and a whole team of content managers are putting together that wonderful ATD content that you’re seeing that could be videos or conference speakers or webcasts, blogs, books. So, there’s a team definitely and I’m not the only one but, yes, I do love being a part of ATD and all things to do with their content.

Eddie Turner:

Yes. And I know that oftentimes we see those who are managing social media channels or … it’s just nice to peek behind the lens a little bit and to meet the person who’s making it happen because you also are the face of the ATD career portal.

Lisa Spinelli:

Yes, thank you. Yeah, I am there front and center.

Eddie Turner:

Yes. And so, folks who are looking for their next opportunity, folks who are looking to develop, it’s not just about necessarily content but Lisa publishes daily new opportunities that organizations have posted and made available.

Now, your background as a journalist, you just aren’t any journalists. Tell us where you received your journalism degree from.

Lisa Spinelli:

Yes, I went to Columbia University, the Graduate School of Journalism, graduated in 2004, which really dates me and now I’m going to have to go do something cool and fun to make myself feel younger.

Eddie Turner:

Well, the young people on campus that I coach are telling me that I’ve got to put on a Tik-Tok video if I want any kind of …

Lisa Spinelli:

Oh yeah. I don’t know how to do that. Definitely don’t even know where to start with that one.

Eddie Turner:

I haven’t figured it out either and I’m reticent to even think about it. So, I’m still officially not cool according to them.

Lisa Spinelli:

That’s too bad. I think you’re pretty cool.

Eddie Turner:

Oh, well, thank you, Lisa. Yeah. So, I love the fact that you are a journalist by training and I will tell you that I have a lot more respect for the field, the profession of journalism because of my mentor. He was an accountant by trade but he spent a lot of time in journalism classes. When he was younger, he was the editor of his college newspaper and such. He talked about the value of the training you receive as a journalist to his work even today as the partner of a prestigious firm. He writes and communicates far better than any of his peers so much so he actually teaches a writing course as a result. And so, when I went back to school as an adult, I took maybe two or three journalism classes because of what he told me. He’s absolutely right. Any time spent in a journalism course is truly life-changing and beneficial for leaders everywhere.

Lisa Spinelli:

Yeah, it’s really amazing to me. The skills that I’ve learned from interviewing and listening and researching in journalism, it can be applied to so many other professions like trainers, instructional designers, leaders, managers. I mean, yeah, there’s coaches. There’s definitely a lot of overlap in those areas.

Eddie Turner:

Indeed. And now, you’ve used your expertise to work for magazines and you’ve done a lot of very high-profile work in addition to what you’re doing for ATD but you now help other leaders to understand that communication is crucial to how they show up. So, tell us about that.

Lisa Spinelli:

Right. I kind of try to marry, like we said, the journalism skills and the communication knowledge and just put it out there not necessarily just for what people classically think as leaders because I think there’s maybe a misconception a lot of the times that leaders are only people in positions of power in an organization but you could be a leader as a team member. You can be a leader in your community. You can be a leader in so many different aspects of your life that you don’t necessarily have to be an executive, let’s say, or in the C-suite to be considered a leader. And communication, I mean, you can’t find an instance where communication is not key towards the development and the furthering of relationships, right? So, it’s definitely a big passion of mine to relay the more constructive ways to communicate.

Eddie Turner:

Would you say that communication is one of the most overlooked skills for leaders today?

Lisa Spinelli:

I think that it’s definitely not emphasized enough. I think people are starting to talk about it a lot more nowadays especially after COVID hit but are they doing it right? I don’t know that they’re doing it right. I don’t know that I’ve heard “Wow! Leaders are just really nailing this communication down with their team members.” I don’t hear that. I don’t know, Eddie. Are you hearing that?

Eddie Turner:

No, I hear that more is needed.

Lisa Spinelli:

Definitely, definitely. We talk a lot about how soft skills are really being emphasized nowadays, the empathy piece, adaptability, resilience. And I feel like communication has to be at the core of all of those. So, yes, I think maybe we’re not talking about communication enough when we’re talking about the skills development for leaders.

Eddie Turner:

What are two types of communication we need to be concerned about?

Lisa Spinelli:

Oh, there’s so many. Yeah, I think none of them are necessarily evil in and of themselves. I think not having the self-awareness around your communication style is what trips people up, right? So, if you have a very bold communication style or you have an aggressive communication style, it’s not that you can’t be blunt, you can’t be a little bit more up in people’s face than perhaps a more passive communicator but knowing your audience, knowing your limits knowing, the situation is going to definitely spin that style in a way that’s going to be more appealing and effective and productive rather than shoot yourself in the foot.

Eddie Turner:

So, you’re talking about the interpersonal communication. You’re talking about the self-awareness component. So, sometimes that involves what we say as communicators. Is there any area about what we write to be concerned about in our communication?

Lisa Spinelli:

Oh, sure. Right now, I think whether you’re writing or you’re talking to people, during COVID everybody’s become very transactional, right? We’ve seen this a lot more since people have started working fully remote. So, people are not going down and just walking down the hallway and reaching out to their staff members, hanging out with their team. They’re just becoming super transactional and short. And so, we’re losing that personal touch, that emotional connection to people. And there’s not a lot of open, honest co-active listening and learning from each other. So, that’s definitely an area of growth that we need to get back to and we need to grow in that area as well.

Eddie Turner:

What would that look like?

Lisa Spinelli:

Well, you pulled a coaching move on me right there, didn’t you? See? You know what I’m talking about. Yeah, what would that look like? That would look like more thoughtful check-ins. That would look like engaging your employees and your staff and your colleagues honestly more often. I know people, they’ve got virtual fatigue, right? We all are getting that but even if you’re not picking up the phone, even if you’re just checking in over whatever chat function your organization has, just to say hi, I know it’s crazy because right now nobody is basically reaching out to non-family and close friends anymore to just say “Hi. Hey, checking in. Haven’t talked to you in a long time,” see what’s going on with that whole person, be your transparent and authentic self and just reach out and foster those lines of communication so when there is a problem that it’s not “Oh, I haven’t heard from you in two months” and all of a sudden you’re knocking down my door with something that you need or an issue that you need addressed.

Eddie Turner:

Yes, very good, very good. Yeah, I asked that because for those who may be listening, they genuinely may wonder “Well, yes, what would that look like and what steps can I take?” So, thank you for identifying that. Those who have a lack of self-awareness as a communicator, they may not know what that first step should be. So, you’re right. Checking in on people, dialing up our empathy a little bit more, post COVID we need a lot more communication and a lot more self-awareness perhaps than we’ve ever needed.

Lisa Spinelli:

Definitely, yeah. And I think because we are working in this remote environment, it is so much easier to fall into the trap of blunt transactional type of communication and emails and meetings and then you have to run to the next thing, you got to go pick up your kid from camp, you got to go you know run and take care of another meeting that’s going to happen over Zoom or whatever it is. You just don’t have the time, it feels like. I know people think we got back like all this time but I don’t really feel like I have all this time anymore.

Eddie Turner:

Yes, it seems as though we have more time because we’re not commuting to work but we’re using that time we would have commuted to still do more work. So, it isn’t as if necessarily in some cases we gained more time.

Lisa Spinelli:

No. Yeah, I feel like now the lines have been so blurred which I know this is a big pain point for a lot of people but, yeah, we don’t have any more time. No more me time, that’s for sure.

Eddie Turner:

So, leaders need to be more aware of how they’re communicating verbally and in writing and to use the power of communication as a leader to inspire their people and support their people now and post pandemic.

Lisa Spinelli:

Yes.

Eddie Turner:

I’m having a fantastic conversation with Lisa Spinelli. Lisa Spinelli is a senior content manager at the Association for Talent Development and she’s the host of the Accidental Trainer Podcast.

We’ll have more with Lisa right after this.

Eddie Turner:

All right, we’re back, everyone. I am talking to the amazing Lisa Spinelli. Lisa is a senior content manager for the Association for Talent Development and she’s the host of the Accidental Trainer Podcast.

Lisa, before the break we talked about communicating like a leader and now I want to switch gears a little bit. You aren’t just a journalist. You have taken things to a new level. I understand that you just completed your coach certification training.

Lisa Spinelli:

Yes, Eddie, you’re right. I just finished my George Mason University Coaching Program, so on my way to getting my ACC Certification.

Eddie Turner:

That is absolutely fantastic. The world needs more coaches and I know you’re going to be a phenomenal coach.

Lisa Spinelli:

Oh, thanks.

Eddie Turner:

Everyone who goes through coach training tells me that they’re never the same afterward. How did coach training change you as a communicator?

Lisa Spinelli:

Well, it definitely made me stop and think before I jump right in. I’m a very energetic type of personality. So, I definitely just jump right in a lot of the times when I feel like I have something to say or add to the situation. It really helped me to learn to take a pause, let people really say what they need to say and use those coactive listening skills. So, I think that that was definitely one aspect. And then trying not to because we all do have a lot of assessments in our heads, we have a lot of attachments and triggers and trying hard not to get triggered and have those emotional reactions and things like that pop out immediately after a trigger has happened when you’re talking to somebody. So, really taking different perspectives and taking a step back, I think, has definitely helped in my communication.

Eddie Turner:

It makes a big difference. I’ve been an ATD member for years but full disclosure, I guess I should say I’m not an ATD employee like you are but I am a contractor. So, ATD is one of my big clients and I facilitate the Global Coaching Certificate Program and I did that this week and I love that program. And when working with leaders who take it, they’re not necessarily people who want a coaching certification, they want the certificate but they want those coaching skills to use as leaders. And I always say in the program that the number one skill that a coach brings is their ability to listen. And, of course, we talk about the different layers of listening. So, it’s good to hear you say how that has impacted you and your ability to communicate as a leader.

Lisa Spinelli:

Yes, definitely. And I think that the core competencies that ICF really lists out, there are eight of them, and I really thought about this and how they kind of translate to communication and I think they really do. If you really stop and think about it, we’re talking about transparency, authenticity which a lot of people think “Oh, you’re being authentic and transparent” when you’re just basically telling all but no, it’s really about just being honest about who you are and staying true to your values, leading with heart. I think there’s a lot to all of the competencies. So, I don’t want to like go through maybe every single one, there are so many, but providing that safe and trusted environment, I think, right now is one of the biggest things that leaders could do. There’s so much uncertainty right now and providing that psychological safety to your employees and letting them know that they can come to you with any concern, I think, is going to be one of the best parts of these kinds of core competencies that ICF lays out that could be translated over to leadership right now.

Eddie Turner:

I love the fact you’re making this connection because I don’t know if I necessarily looked at it that way but you’re absolutely right. The ICF competencies really are underpinned by communication skills, both verbal and non-verbal, because a lot of times, of course, when we’re talking about listening, we’re talking about listening to what the client has not said.

Lisa Spinelli:

That’s right. Those somatic cues and their expressions and reading between the lines and paying attention really to that whole person, I think, is so key, especially now because we’re virtual, we don’t know what’s going on with people in their lives and what they’re dealing with. There are so many different boats that people are in. We all went through this together but we all went in very different boats. So, I think everybody’s coming across to the shore on the other side and some people are a little bit more wrangled than others. So, yeah, I think providing the safety that that we just talked about and really putting some of these competencies into play is going to help a lot of organizations out there.

Eddie Turner:

Absolutely It’s so true and, again, now more than ever as we’re at the end of this pandemic, hopefully, and coming out trying to get to the other side. I saw a meme that said it beautifully. It says “People begin to heal once they feel heard.”

Lisa Spinelli:

That’s beautiful. Yeah, I like that.

Eddie Turner:

And so, it just really underscores using the communication skill of listening and not necessarily the communication skill of speaking.

Lisa Spinelli:

Definitely. Yeah, it reminds me of this study that I had looked at back but when I had started the coaching program. I think, it was in like 2015 or 2016. It was a pretty small study, to be honest, but they had these evaluators that were looking at MRIs of people’s brains and seeing when someone was coactively listening to them, what was happening. And the reward sections of their brains were firing off. And I thought that was just so interesting that when someone is listening to you, you actually feel rewarded almost like it’s a treat.

Eddie Turner:

Isn’t that special?

Lisa Spinelli:

Yeah. It’s really beautiful that all you have to do is just really be there, you just be there, listen to somebody, actually listen, and they feel respected, they feel valued, it’s crazy that they feel rewarded by your gift of time.

Eddie Turner:

And it is a reward. It is the biggest gift I say in the program. It’s the biggest gift that we can give to another human being because in our 24×7, hyper-stimulated, digital technological society, people very often do not give themselves the gift of silence and they certainly don’t necessarily get the gift of having someone listen to them and give them their full presence. And so, it truly is a gift.

Lisa Spinelli:

Very, true.

Eddie Turner:

Now, Lisa, you are also the host of the Accidental Trainer Podcast for ATD. Tell us about the podcast.

Lisa Spinelli:

Oh, yeah. I enjoy doing the podcast. As you know, it’s so much fun. One of the reasons why I got into journalism is just that I love to meet people, I love to hear their stories, I love everything about stories and people. So, getting to interview people that I would never maybe have come across otherwise and learning their stories and, of course, we list out expertise that they have, tips and tricks for people who have fallen into this wonderful world of training and talent development. So, we have people that come on from all walks of that field. We have e-learning professionals and brain scientists all the way to instructional designers and coaches. So, yeah, Eddie, we’re going to have to get you on there so that we can fulfill the big circle of life here.

Eddie Turner:

Well, see, I was trying to just keep you on the other side of the mic this time since you’re always conducting the interviews. We’re kind of flipping the script on you today.

Lisa Spinelli:

Yeah, it’s fun. I love it.

Eddie Turner:

Well, you’ve moved from the Accidental Trainer Podcast to also adding author to your list of titles and accomplishments. So, tell us about your new book.

Lisa Spinelli:

Oh, thank you so much. Yes, the Teachers to Trainers book, we started to look at people who were entering into the field of talent development. And naturally there are a lot of teachers because, as you can imagine, K through 12 teachers have a lot of transferable skills to teaching adults. So, we put together a list of people that are contributors for different chapters of the book and reached out to them and got their stories, their transitions, what they wish they had known. And so, it was put together and published in October of 2020 and just really, I’m hoping for it to be a good resource for teachers out there. We know a lot of teachers are leaving the field right now. They’re looking for new and different opportunities but looking to keep their skills. And there just honestly aren’t a ton of resources for teachers who are looking to make their exit.

Eddie Turner:

Well, you’ve provided a fine resource for them. Again, the title of the book is Teachers to Trainers: Apply Your Passion and Skills to A New Career, available on paperback form as well as Kindle and amazon.com and the Association for Talent Development’s bookstore.

Lisa, I’ve enjoyed our conversation. What’s the main message you’d like our listeners to take away from our time together?

Lisa Spinelli:

I would say that the main message is that if you’re not sure if you’re communicating effectively with your team and you’re not really sure if there’s room for improvement there, there probably is. And if you’re looking to learn more about a coaching communication style, I would direct everybody to look at the ICF Core Competencies and, of course, check out ATD and find out more about how they can communicate effectively.

Eddie Turner:

Indeed. And ATD and ICF are different organizations but sister organizations and collaborate in a lot of ways and on different programs.

Wonderful. Thank you for sharing that. And as a leader, is there a piece of advice or quote you use that helps you to keep leading?

Lisa Spinelli:

Oh sure, yeah. I really love, I mean, she has a million followers, so it’s not like this is going to be original here but Brené Brown. I love her quote on “Integrity is choosing courage over comfort.” She also has a great one about “Being passionate about listening as much as you are about being heard.” So, I think that really fits right here in our communication really. Be passionate about listening and it’s amazing the rewards that you are giving people just by being there.

Eddie Turner:

“Be as passionate about listening as you are about wanting to be heard.” I love that. Good. Lisa, where can my listeners learn more about you?

Lisa Spinelli:

Well, you can definitely find me at ATD.org and I have my podcast also on the website at ATD.org but it’s a little bit tougher to find on the website now that we went through redesign. So, it’s ATDPodcast.Libsyn.com. And, of course, you can find me on LinkedIn.

Eddie Turner:

Excellent. I’m going to encourage everyone to follow you on LinkedIn, also go to Apple Podcast and just type ATD and you’ll find her podcast there. Listen to her podcast, follow Lisa and stay connected.

Lisa, thank you so much for being an incredible guest and helping us understand how to communicate as a leader so we can keep leading.

Lisa Spinelli:

Thank you so much, Eddie. It was such a pleasure to be here and you’re such a fun host.

Eddie Turner:

Thank you. I appreciate you, Lisa.

That concludes this episode, everyone. This is Eddie Turner, The Leadership Excelerator®, reminding you that leadership is not about our position or our title. Leadership is an activity. Leadership is action. It’s not the case of once a leader, always a leader. It’s not a garment we put on and take off. We must be a leader at our core and allow it to emanate in all we do. So, whatever you’re doing, always keep leading.

Eddie Turner:

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Keep Leading!® Podcast, the podcast dedicated to leadership development and insights. I’m your host, Eddie Turner, The Leadership Excelerator®. I work with leaders to accelerate performance and drive impact through the power of facilitation, coaching, and professional speaking.

On today’s episode, we’re going to talk about conscious living mastery. We’re going to talk about what that is, why it matters, and why as leaders we want to master this skill. We’re going to talk about this with Dr. Patrick Williams. Dr. Patrick Williams is a Master Certified Coach and a Board-Certified Coach. He’s one of the early pioneers of coaching and is often called the Ambassador of Life Coaching. He’s a licensed psychologist and has been in the executive coaching field since 1990 with companies such as Hewlett Packard, IBM, and Kodak. Dr. Pat is a co-founder and past board member of the International Coach Federation, known ICF. He co-chaired the ICF Regulatory Committee and Ethics Committee. He’s the past president of ACTO, the Association of Coach Training Organizations, and an honorary VP of the International Society of Coaching Psychology. Dr. Pat was introduced into the inaugural class of the Circle of Distinction, a global award from the International Coach Federation. He’s written multiple articles and has co-authored seven books. His latest book Getting Naked: Emotional Transparency with the Right Person at the Right Time in the Right Place is what we will discuss today.

Dr. Pat, welcome to the keep leading podcast.

Dr. Patrick Williams:

Thank you, Eddie. It’s a real pleasure to be here.

Eddie Turner:

I am just excited to have you because you and I have a mutual friend. I call him Sir Robert, Robert Stack. He kept telling me “Eddie, you’re getting really serious into this coaching world. And since that’s the case, there’s someone you must know.” And he kept telling me about Patrick Williams. He said “You got to meet him. He is one of the leaders in the industry. He co-founded ICF. He wrote most of those competencies you’re studying.” And he said that you and I just have to meet. So, he made the introduction and we met digitally but my oh my, what a treat it was to finally meet you in person at the Institute of Coaching’s Leadership Retreat in Boston.

Dr. Patrick Williams:

Yes, that was.

Eddie Turner:

That was pretty special.

Dr. Patrick Williams:

Yes, it was.

Eddie Turner:

So, now we want to talk about this concept of conscious living mastery and how that relates to the title of your book. Your title Getting Naked is actually quite provocative. Tell us the meaning and the message of that, please.

Dr. Patrick Williams:

Well, it’s about being honest and being real. Let me let me go back to something you just said. I was one of the founding members of the ICF but I wasn’t the person who wrote the competencies. We had a Language Committee back then. There were many of us that wrote what they still are today. And I was part of that early process. So, in the spirit of being nakedly truthful right now, I wanted to say that.

Eddie Turner:

I appreciate that.

Dr. Patrick Williams:

What I think this is about, the book I wrote on that topic and the new program I have for coaches is really based on my life work, even why I became a psychologist and why I got into coaching. I think people can live more fully and more completely and beyond mediocrity if they find a certain group of committed listeners, maybe it’s only two or three people, where they can really share their truth. We all hide stuff. Things happen to us. Things have happened to us. Some of us had a traumatic upbringing. Some of us did things we’re not proud of or we’re ashamed of or we’re guilty of or we’ve given up on dreams that we had because maybe we got married, got pregnant, gave up too early. And so, this is about having a place to get naked emotionally. And the reason I use that title is because it feels like disrobing yourself in public, which is a common theme in dreaming. People often dream of being naked in public. Well, this is what that feels like. So, it’s not about nudity. It’s about personal honesty and sharing but with careful choosing of when and where and how and with whom you do that.

Eddie Turner:

So, getting naked and getting real, which means honesty, which means laying bare who we really are without the mask. And I like what you said about living more fully and living beyond mediocrity. That’s quite intriguing.

Dr. Patrick Williams:

Yeah, I just think all of us human beings shouldn’t settle. We shouldn’t settle for just living an okay life. Now, some people do but some people are drawn to personal or vocational or relational development. And that’s where coaching comes into. It helps you live beyond your okayness. It helps you not just settle. And I think getting naked is my metaphor for having a place where you can really share what is it you really want or what is it you gave up on that you want to revisit or what is it that you don’t even know what you don’t know. There’s something missing. And being able to share that out loud with a committed listener like a coach is where magic happens.

Eddie Turner:

Precisely because that’s what I was going to say. Some people may not even realize they are living a life of mediocrity. They may not even realize they’ve settled in. They’ve gotten comfortable.

Dr. Patrick Williams:

Right.

Eddie Turner:

It seems normal for them. And it’s not until a coach or someone else comes into their life and starts to challenge their assumptions, challenge their current state and, to your point, the fact that they even have stopped dreaming.

Dr. Patrick Williams:

Yeah. I think the value of coaching. I mean, you mentioned that I was a psychologist since 1980. And I started doing coaching in 1990 with corporations back then. We’ll talk more about that but that was back in the days when it was remedial coaching. People were set to coaching to get their act together or else – executives that were having problems or executives that were adjusting to new things, maybe there was a team building thing that went on with the staff and they had to kind of get on board. Nowadays, people get coaching for high-performance opportunities – how can you get better at what you’re doing, how can you move to the next level – but all of that requires a certain level of, I guess, I call it emotional vulnerability. There’s a lot written today about emotional courageous vulnerability. Susan David wrote a book on emotional agility. You’ve got all Bernie Brown’s book. The recent CEO of Goldman Sachs said he wants his managers to be more transparent. So, leadership in today’s world has become a place where you need to be more real. You don’t need to totally disrobe; you don’t need to totally share every truth but we have to know when and where we have a mask on and why we’re wearing it because that makes sense. I mean, we don’t share ourselves totally nakedly everywhere but we have to be aware of what we’re not revealing.

Eddie Turner:

Yes, I was going to ask you to give us a little more clarity on that because for some people, they may feel you must wear a mask in the world we’re in because, otherwise, if we expose ourselves too much, then folks will gobble us up.

Dr. Patrick Williams:

Yeah, you do. And today, I mean, in coaching, some people talk about different roles we play or different masks we wear or internal family systems, which person are you being that’s in your internal board of directors but it’s like as long as you know that you’re wearing a mask at, let’s say, the Christmas party or the board meeting, I mean, you just can’t be naked everywhere, emotionally. And so, that’s why the metaphor fits for me.

Eddie Turner:

Very nice. So, you talk about a lot of very interesting things in this book that can help people understand the power of being authentic, being themselves at work, at home, in relationships, and in life. And in the end, you give a series of life skills, you believe, everyone must know and master. And one of those really stood out to me because of something I’m starting to see in many of my clients. I often use the emotional intelligence assessment, and one of the aspects of emotional intelligence is this idea of impulse control. And so, when it comes to impulse control, I will have a client talk to me about the reasons they’re struggling and how they can get control of themselves. And so, your book and that list of life skills, the last one you give people, this Number Six, and you say “We must learn the difference between responding versus reacting.” Can you talk about that?

Dr. Patrick Williams:

Yeah, that’s something I learned in my coach training many years ago and it just fit what I learned in my psychology training early on. We as human beings are programmed to react. We talk about fight, flight or freeze. They’ve added freeze nowadays. The fight or flight response; fight, flight or freeze. We want to run away but we want to fight or we want to just freeze. We don’t know what we’re doing. In coaching, we help people have a conversation about “Well, what’s stopping you?” or “What do you want?” or “What needs to happen?” or “Who do you need to be for this to happen?” So, responding means you have choices, right? When things happen, our immediate human response is to react but we can react internally. We can have that internal reaction and stop and be mindful for just a few seconds or a few minutes and then think of the various responses we can have to this opportunity. Instead of a challenge, I call it an opportunity. And that helps people make choices. Rather than be at risk, you’re at choice. And that’s a big distinction.

Eddie Turner:

Very nice, very nice. And how does this idea of conscious living mastery fold into this?

Dr. Patrick Williams:

Well, everybody comes to coaching or to leadership training or to personal development to become more aware, really. Nobody comes to coaching and says “Yeah, my life’s great. I just wanted to share that with you. Nothing’s wrong.” People want something different. They want to have less of something, more of something. They want to stop something or start something but we in coaching eventually get to who you need to be for that to happen. And, I think, the concept is to be more real and in the moment have a conversation with somebody who’s a committed listener that helps you think what you’ve not thought, say what you’ve not said, dream out loud with a committed listener so you hear yourself differently and you get that new perspective of what it is you’re contemplating or thinking about.

Eddie Turner:

Very nice. Now, you’ve been a psychologist, as we talked about, for more than 40 years and a leadership coach. So, what are you up to these days?

Dr. Patrick Williams:

Well, boy, that makes me feel old. I consider myself a wise elder rather than an old geezer. It’s hard to believe that I’ve done all that but my path has always been about personal development, no matter what I did, psychology, and I was trained in humanistic and transpersonal. So, I embraced Sigmund Freud. I was always about “Let’s not diagnose you. Let’s find out how you want your life to be different.” Then coaching came about and that’s the avenue that helped me. So, what I’m about today, I’m going to turn 70 in March, I’ve written all those books, I’ve done all the things that I have accolades for but that’s not what’s important to me. What’s important to me is the legacy that I’m leaving now for the coaching profession, my clients, my students, my friends, my colleagues. So, what I’m up to is a new program, it’s kind of the culmination of my life’s work based on my book Getting Naked, but it’s a new program called Getting Naked with Your Clothes On that’s housed under Coaching Living Mastery which we’re having this conversation about. And so, that plus having fun being a grandfather and all that stuff is what I want. I want people to access my new work so they can use it with their clients, smooth out the rough edges of their own life because, as coaches, we know, we teach and coach what we need to learn. We’re coaching people on what we’ve just overcome or evolved into or whatever. And we’re never perfect. We’re not realized beings chanting on a mountaintop but we are coaching people on what’s next for them. And if we don’t know what’s next for us, then we’re not being very authentic. So, what I’m about is this new program to help experienced, and I would even say new coaches, learn to smooth out their rough edges and work through a program that they can then use with their clients, whether it’s corporate, leadership, personal development, relationship, whatever you want to call it. It works for everybody.

Eddie Turner:

Very nice. So, you’ve got the book Getting Naked: Being Emotionally Transparent at the Right Time, the Right Place, and with the Right Person and you have a new workshop based on the work in the book.

Dr. Patrick Williams:

Yes, it’s an online course that people can take and then there’ll be live sessions with me twice a month as well.

Eddie Turner:

Outstanding. Thank you, Dr. Pat.

We are talking, ladies and gentlemen, to Dr. Patrick Williams, a Master Certified Coach and a board-certified coach and we’re talking about his book Getting Naked as well as Conscious Living Mastery. We’ll talk to Dr. Pat a little bit more right after this.

Eddie Turner:

Okay, we’re back, everyone. We’re talking to Dr. Patrick Williams. We’re talking about Getting Naked and Conscious Living Mastery.

Now, one of the things that makes you so special, Dr. Patrick, is not just the fact you’re one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met but also, I find you very intriguing. I read some interesting things about you in your book, about some of your early work, and just the amount of people you’ve impacted even before going into the world of coaching but being one of the co-founders of ICF, one of the few people, less than 1% of all coaches in the world, to be a master certified coach, that really puts you in select company but there’s something else about you that I find very intriguing and that is you are the Ambassador of Life Coaching. And I find that intriguing for this reason. When I studied and became a certified coach, I had to pick which area I wanted to focus on my settled in on Executive Coaching and later on added Leadership Coaching. At the time, I thought about Life Coaching and I did do Life Coaching initially but I kind of would give that away. I would do that for nonprofit organizations or presidents and such like that but one of the things I started to discover also was that Life Coaching was starting to get a bad reputation. There’s a lot of programs where a person can run off to a certain city and two days later, couple hundred dollars, you are a certified official life coach. So much so has that impact the industry and the branding and what people consider about a life coach, that the International Coach Federation stopped calling the practice life coaching inside the ICF world and now refer to it as Personal Development Coaching. What is your view on life coaching, being its ambassador, and what has unfolded in the industry?

Dr. Patrick Williams:

Well, first of all, I didn’t create that title. Somebody started calling me that because I wrote a book in 2000 called Therapist as Life Coach: Transforming Your Practice. I was a psychologist. I moved to coaching. I got a lot of therapists to add coaching to their business or moved to that arena. And I knew it would get a bad rap. I mean, Psychology got a bad rap. Look at the shows a Bob Newhart and the guy on Sheers. Kelsey Grammer later did whatever his radio show was. Psychology has always been made fun of and life coaching got made fun of too but when I wrote the books on life coaching, all of which had been bestsellers, I still get royalties today, so I’m thankful to say, I felt no matter what you call yourself up in parentheses, I would not put ‘Life Coach’ on my card if I wanted to get a gig with the federal government or IBM or Hewlett Packard today but Life Coaching is what I do. I coach the whole person. I don’t just coach what they’re having struggles with in their workplace. We coach their relationship or their parenting with their kids or their health. I mean, any conversation can take place. So, it’s a whole person approach. I happen to like this shift toward Personal Development Coaching. And that’s what I would call myself today. If I was renaming myself, I’d actually call myself Transformational Coaching because it’s not just about your job. We’re not human doings. We’re human beings. So, I think the term Life Coaching probably needs to take a seat to the back of the auditorium and we need to call it either Whole Person Coaching or Transformational Coaching or Personal Development Coaching. And then there’s, as you know, Executive Coaching, Wellness Coaching, Health Coaching, Relationship Coaching, on and on and on.

Eddie Turner:

Yes,

Dr. Patrick Williams:

But it’s always about our life, whether we call it that or not.

Eddie Turner:

Excellent. Thank you for getting that in there. I wanted to get your perspective as one of the vanguards to be able to share that. And, yes, the idea that you are the ambassador, what other people are saying about you, even as I was saying that.

Dr. Patrick Williams:

Yes, I wish I had an island in the Caribbean where my embassy was.

Eddie Turner:

And, yeah, all of coaching has really grown and much of that is due to organizations such as the ICF that have really done a lot to professionalize coaching from what it was considered not a real industry. And, to your point earlier, in the ‘90s, I remember working at GE at the time and anytime I heard that someone had a coach, it was almost a thing of shame and they kind of whispered it. It was remediation but these days, it’s a badge of honor.

Dr. Patrick Williams:

Exactly, exactly.

Eddie Turner:

People proudly say they’re meeting with their coach at 2.

Dr. Patrick Williams:

And that was my goal. When I was a psychologist, I wished more and more people would see the benefit of going to see a psychologist but there was something about that, especially for men and for teenagers. Women have never had a problem. 70% of therapy clients are women and I think 70% or 60% of coaching clients are women because they do have a general tendency to share more honestly with somebody as opposed to males and teams generally. I think that’s changing. I think there’s a meme today about being more honest and real, as I talked about, but I will say if we were to create a profession today and we wanted to call it Psychotherapy, I’m not sure that would sound any better than Life Coaching.

Eddie Turner:

Yeah but, to your point, some things have a stigma attached to it.

Dr. Patrick Williams:

Yeah, exactly.

Eddie Turner:

So, people shy away from it for those reasons. They say “Hey, I don’t need help. I can’t admit a weakness. The only coach I want is the one on the football field.”

Dr. Patrick Williams:

Right.

Eddie Turner:

And so, this idea that as corporate athletes, we need a coach.

Dr. Patrick Williams:

Well, I love your term Corporate Athletes because that’s the thing. If you want to play your best in life, in work, in relationships, in health, whatever it is, in your whole life, coaching is not a stigma. It’s a sign that if you could have done it by yourself, you already would have. And nothing in my life worthwhile has been done in a vacuum. It’s all been in some sort of collaboration or co-leading.

Eddie Turner:

Indeed. And, I think, the other reason why I always use that analogy is the idea that even the greatest athletes realize that, well, most do, not all, but most realize that they need a coach to help them see their blind spots.

Dr. Patrick Williams:

Oh, beautiful. Well said. Yes.

Eddie Turner:

Because there are some athletes that feel they don’t need anyone, that they are the greatest gift to humanity. And there are those, and I think about Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, folks like that who have their coaches, they work with their coaches, they actually believe in practice and work ethic and not this notion that “I don’t mean any of that.” And so, the corporate athlete or the daily person in their life who recognizes that “I may be great but I can even get to a greater level if I had someone to assist me and help me see those blind spots and shore them up.”

Dr. Patrick Williams:

Right. Well said,

Eddie Turner:

Thank you.

Now, as someone who’s got deep roots in this field, you’ve seen and experienced a lot. What’s the moment or the achievement that you’re most proud of as a coach?

Dr. Patrick Williams:

Well, it’s not all the accolades that you listed. It’s not the titles and the awards I’ve gotten. It’s not about me. And, I think, the biggest thing, to tell you the truth, is when I started my nonprofit Coaching Global Village, we started doing training in a federal prison as a donation. And I thought I was going to make a video about all the benefits that coaching did for the prisoners and they had great benefits but the Bureau of Prisons, BOP, wouldn’t let us use the material even though it was all positive but I have continued to have a relationship with many of the men that I coached in a federal prison and mentor now that they’re out as returning citizens. And then I also co-sponsor a program for women to get out of prison. That’s the most meaningful for me. I’m glad to work with executives and leaders and all the different people. I’ve gotten students, I’ve trained them in my university, and I had for a while my coach training school but the biggest impact for me is the prisoners got out and took time to take the training behind prison walls. And, frankly, their essays and their test results were better than some of my graduate degree professionals that I’ve trained over the years. And I told them once, I said “You guys, these essays and these tests and stuff, you really get this material.” They go “Well, we got nothing else to do.” They said that laughingly but it’s like imagine yourself behind prison bars and waiting to get out and make a difference in life and reclaim your life. So, that’s what I’m most proud of.

Eddie Turner:

Yes, I can relate. I did a little bit of that. And there’s something to be said for, there was this phrase “The richest place was the graveyard because of all the untapped talent, talent that was unrealized” and, I think, I started thinking about that in my fourth tour in the prisons because so many of these folks either had troublesome circumstances or circumstances that if they had been just a little bit different, what could have become? And then someone like you comes into their life and it makes a difference. What role have you seen coaching play in the recidivism of these folks?

Dr. Patrick Williams:

Well, I wish I could be bigger but I think if we can allow coaching to become a common strategy in prisons, when people get out or return to their citizenship, it will help them make a difference because they find out who they wanted to be before they made the bad decisions that got them into prison. I mean, stuff happens. I could have been in prison. I could have in college. I could have been driving home drunk and killed somebody. There are all kinds of reasons. I could have been there where they are. So, we’re all fortunate that we’ve never been in that incarceration and the Justice Department. So, I think there’s so much resource for people that have learned their life’s mistakes and want to make a difference that we can use as an ongoing resource for better living for lots of people.

Eddie Turner:

Excellent, excellent. So, given your history in the field of coaching, given all that you accomplished, what’s next? What’s on the horizon? What do you see as the future of coaching?

Dr. Patrick Williams:

Well, I wish I had a crystal ball but my fantasy is I knew it would become big and I knew it would become your [inaudible][29:16]. So, we’ve got lots of coaching institutions and certifications and organizations, I’m a member of many, but that’s true of anything that strikes a chord with society. What I love about coaching … And, I think, the ICF is really growing into itself. There was a time when I thought “Oh god, they’re becoming just money for this and money for this and membership for this and certification.” I think that what we’re coming on is a recognition by the citizenship around the world because we’re Global, 180 some countries’ coaches and maybe more, 48,000 members of the ICF, I don’t know what it is today, but it’s a big impact. And I think it’s got a possibility to create an opportunity for coaching for those who can’t otherwise afford it, which is why I created Coaching Global Village. My big vision was if coaching’s so great for executives, why can’t we take the value of the coach approach to those who are underserved, underdelivered, underfed, underhoused, whatever. And there’s a little bit of that going on but I think it could become bigger. And maybe the ICF or the European Coaching Council or the Association of Coaching in Europe or whoever, maybe we need to form a consolidated union that says “We’re going to make sure coaching reaches those who can’t otherwise afford it” because the changes that will happen will affect humanity at a big level, big level.

Eddie Turner:

Wonderful.

Dr. Patrick Williams:

And I think that’s what’s next.

Eddie Turner:

All right. Well, we will see what the future holds. Thank you so much. How would you summarize our conversation today?

Dr. Patrick Williams:

Well, Eddie, it’s a great conversation like if I have conversations with my coach, I hear myself say things I wouldn’t have otherwise said, think new things but the bottom line for me and why I’ve created my program and why I’m on here as an interviewee is coaching right now is a mechanism for people coming to a conversation to find out what it is they don’t know, to be comfortable what it is they don’t know and to ask and to hear questions that stimulate them to think new thoughts, to feel new feelings. My work today is all about emotional learning. You mentioned emotional intelligence earlier in the program. Well, if we’re going to have emotional intelligence, we ought to know what to do with it. We ought to learn how to be more emotional appropriately. I call emotions energy in motion – e-motion. So, coaches need to learn that emotions are a big part of coaching but you don’t need to do personal archaeology like a psychotherapist. You just “What are you feeling? What are you experiencing right now? What needs to change? I can see you’re sensing some things. Don’t be afraid of it.” Emotions will change when the energy is expressed.

Eddie Turner:

Wonderful.

And on the Keep Leading!® Podcast, we like to give leaders ideas, quotes that they can use to keep leading. Do you have a quote that you can share with our leaders today?

Dr. Patrick Williams:

Yeah. First of all, I think leadership is an activity, not a position. So, whether you’re in a position of leadership or not, you need to be in the activity of leadership and encourage those who are around you to be in that but I think Thomas Edison’s quote that I live by is “There are no failures. Only results.” So, experiment, be curious, try things. That’s what it’s about. And when your employees come to you or those who are under your supervision as a leader, really embrace them for experimentation, within limits. We all know corporate limits, I mean, real rules and regulations, etc. but the best things happen when people try new things. So, encourage those that you work with. Also have a stance of leadership because everybody’s a leader when they step up to solve a problem.

Eddie Turner:

Indeed. “There is no failure. Only results” from Thomas Edison.

Dr. Patrick Williams:

Exactly.

Eddie Turner:

Thank you, Dr. Pat. Where can my listeners learn more about you?

Dr. Patrick Williams:

Well, there are two sites. DrPatWilliams.com Calm is my main website. And we’re launching right now, it’ll be brand new when you hear this podcast, ConsciousLivingMastery.com and that’ll be a program that’s available to coaches, therapists, consultants, helping professionals and those who are on a track of extreme personal development. ConsciousLivingMastery.com and DrPatWilliams.com.

Eddie Turner:

Wonderful. Well, we will be sure to put all that into the show notes so that folks will have easy access and be able to follow you, connect with you and keep up with you and all the great work that you’re doing. And thank you for helping us understand what it means to develop Conscious Living Mastery and to get real by Getting Naked. Thank you for being here on the show.

Dr. Patrick Williams:

You’re very welcome.

Eddie Turner:

And thank you for listening. That concludes this episode, everyone. I’m Eddie Turner, The Leadership Excelerator®, reminding you that leadership is not about our title or our position. Leadership is an activity. Leadership is action. It’s not the case of once a leader, always a leader. It’s not a garment we put on and take off. We must be a leader at our core and allow it to emanate in all we do. So, whatever you’re doing, always keep leading.

Eddie Turner:

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Keep Leading!® Podcast, the podcast dedicated to leadership development and leadership insights. I’m your host, Eddie Turner, the Leadership Excelerator. I work with leaders to accelerate performance and drive impact through the power of facilitation, coaching and professional speaking.

When I coach leaders, I pull from a well of experience and training. That part of my experience in training was shaped by the International Coaching Community. It is one of the largest coaching organizations in the world. It has a global presence of 13,000 coaches in 67 countries on five continents. It was co-founded by my guest for today, Joseph O’Connor and his wife, Andrea. Joseph O’Connor is an international executive coach and coach trainer. Joseph has written 19 books or 20, if we count his latest one that we’ll talk about today, and they’ve been published in 30 languages and have sold over half a million copies worldwide. He is one of the few certified trainers in the world of Deception Detection and Emotional Intelligence approved by the Paul Ekman Organization. Joseph’s latest book that we’re going to talk about today is Coaching the Brain: Practical Applications of Neuroscience in Coaching.

Joseph, welcome to the Keep Leading!® Podcast.

Joseph O’Connor:

Thank you, Eddie. Great to be here.

Eddie Turner:

I am excited to have you. Please tell my listeners a little bit more about you.

Joseph O’Connor:

Whoa! Where do I start? Okay. Well, let’s start many years ago when I was a professional guitarist, I gave concerts, and I taught guitar. And I taught a lot of very good guitarists how to play the guitar. And I used to play a trick on them. I used to get them get their guitar out. I say “Well, you know, practice what you’re going to play.” Then I’d go out and say I’d get some water or a cup of coffee. And I’d listen at the door. And invariably, they would play beautifully. It was beautiful to hear. Then I’d come in and I’d sit down and I’d say “Okay. Now, can you give me the piece of music you were practicing?” And surprise, surprise, it was a lot worse with a lot more mistakes in it than when I was listening outside the door. And it always intrigued me. Why was that? What was going on inside my students’ heads that was sabotaging them when I walked in the room because I’m a reasonably looking sort of person? I don’t think I’ve frightened them yet. Their capability was exactly the same. That didn’t change. They had exactly the same skills as they had 10 seconds ago and yet they couldn’t employ them. And this, I think, really started me down the road of coaching to find out what stops us from giving our best because I believe that people have fantastic potential and their best is wonderful. And yet somehow ideas of consciousness, all sorts of things, stop them. And I want to know what it is and to help them.

Eddie Turner:

So, from your music career of seeing what was happening with students who performed one way in your presence and then another when you were not around, you started to discover that something was getting in the people’s way in their performance.

Joseph O’Connor:

Yes, it must be something in their own mind, some kind of nervousness because it wasn’t me. I mean, their skills were the same. So, what was it? How can we help someone get rid of those limiting beliefs? Okay, it’s very clear when you’re playing the guitar but, I mean, this applies to people standing up giving sales presentations, giving business presentations, pitching for their company, pitching as an entrepreneur, leading people, everything. And how is it that people can give their very best? And this is what I’ve devoted myself to as a coach.

Eddie Turner:

Wonderful. And so, this led you to a journey of not just becoming a coach but becoming one of the premier thought leaders in the coaching industry. And you’ve written about this quite extensively. The book that I first read that you wrote is Coaching with NLP which gets behind the thought pattern of behavior as well but you’ve got a newer book. So, I’d love to hear about this new book. Tell us the title again, which I mentioned in the intro, but tell us again and tell us why you wrote it.

Joseph O’Connor:

Okay. Well, the book is called Coaching the Brain: Practical Applications of Neuroscience to Coaching. And it kind of came from my thought process a few years ago that’s something like, look, we have a lot of psychological models as coaches and we apply these and we want to help people think. And yet, to try to do that without knowing something about what it is that’s doing the thinking, seemed to me rather strange. It seemed to me in the same sort of way as classical economics used to make laws and predictions about what people would buy and sell based on the classical economic person who was perfectly rational. Now, of course, we know that people are not perfectly rational. And, therefore, a lot of classical economics didn’t work very well. It needs to be behavioral economics. And in the same way, I think that when we really look into how the brain works and not how we think it works or how we would like it to work, we get a lot of insight into really what happens, how people think, and how we can help them much more. And it came, actually, when I was in New York few years ago and I thought “Well, if I’m going to really look at the brain carefully, I need to look at my own.” So, I went to a place in New York, it was great, and I had a brain scan. It was all incredible colors. I was just really interested in what was going on in there and how you could tell what was happening. And it taught me a lot about myself.

This really resonated down the last two or three years and set me off on this path together with Andrea, my wife and partner, of writing this book Coaching the Brain. And for me, it has to be practical. It doesn’t help for people to learn Latin terms for the brain. It doesn’t help coaches. It’s got to be practical application. You’ve got to be able to use it. And I hope that’s what I’ve done in the book. That was my intention.

Eddie Turner:

So then, this examination of your own brain led you to an interest of how the brain works. And I like what you’re saying there in terms of it can be a little bit difficult for some when you start to think about “Let’s have a conversation about the brain because now I need to be able to speak the scientific language and use the Latin terms and such.”

Joseph O’Connor:

No, no knowledge of Latin is needed. What happens, how it functions, all the ways. In particular, I’ve been fascinated by some of the ways that our thought processes can be twisted and turned by factors that we have no knowledge of at all and yet can significantly change your decisions.

Eddie Turner:

Yes. And so, you’re saying that in your book you’ve done away with that and you’ve simplified it so that everyone can benefit from this knowledge.

Joseph O’Connor:

Well, I hope so. The reason I write a book is to learn about something that I’m interested in. And to make it easy, I do all the hard lifting myself so that when people read the book, they don’t have to wade through lots of stuff that’s hard to understand. Hopefully, I’ve done the work for them and, hopefully, they get the useful stuff that they can use straight away.

Eddie Turner:

Wonderful. So, how is neuroscience transforming coaching, from your perspective?

Joseph O’Connor:

Well, if we think about coaching as kind of having three different principles that we look at. One is goals – what people want. The other is values – what’s important about anything to a person – because there are thousands of possible goals, things that we could want, but we only have time for some. So, we make priorities and we make priorities based on our values. So, goals, values, and then what we would call beliefs or mental models. And a mental model is basically an idea that we have about ourselves or other people’s situations built on our experience. We then predict what is going to happen if we do something and we act according to our prediction. Now, what’s interesting is that there are many, many different, shall we call them, tricks that the brain can play in terms of, first of all, not getting very good information to start with in all sorts of ways like only paying attention to information that we agree with, the well-known confirmation bias to priming being affected by our surroundings, our furniture, would you believe, what I call our psychogeography, in other words, the distances and ways that we relate to other people, distance as a metaphor for relationship and where we are with people and you can see this play out in companies with a great big desk and the people behind it and other people further away. So, there are sorts of things like that but, I think, what’s really interesting for me is, first of all, goals and our cognitive process, particularly creativity because the neuroscience of creativity, I think, is really, really interesting. Values which is backed by emotion because values are basically what we feel strongly about. And this is backed by our emotions. So, you need to know about emotions. You need to know how they work and how they’re created and what they do. I don’t think you can be emotionally intelligent unless you have some knowledge of that. And then in terms of our mental models, our beliefs, and if we can understand how we gather the information, how we put it together and construct something that we then act on, which can be limiting or it can be empowering, I think, this is really important not just as coaches for our clients but it’s physician heal thyself, use it first on yourself. It’s the old story about airplane. When you get in an airplane, they say “In the unlikely event of dropping cabin pressure, oxygen mask will drop from the ceiling and please fit your own mask first before you fit anybody else’s” because it’s no good trying to fit somebody else’s passing out and then you’re both no good. So, I look at it from both points of view. These are tools for coaches to work on themselves and also for coaches to help their clients.

Eddie Turner:

Thank you. So, when we look at the idea that there are three foundations, as you said, that typically when working with a client, we’re looking at first of all their goals, their values and their beliefs and the idea that we bring into play the mental frameworks that exist and the emotions and all of that combines together and emanates from this idea of the neuroscience, what’s happening in the brain, and that will affect those three options that we’re talking about in working with the clients. And that is why it matters from a coaching perspective. And then also the coach must work on themselves first.

Joseph O’Connor:

Yeah. Just to add one more thing, there’s a picture on the cover of the book which is a candle with a flame. And I think this is a beautiful metaphor for the way the brain works because candle is material, it’s solid, but the flame is not. Flame is immaterial. It’s ethereal, it’s beautiful, it’s flickering, it’s luminous. It’s like our subjective experience, like our consciousness. And yet, it comes from the material of the candle. And so, if you’re going to understand it, you have to understand them both together. And what is so amazing is that the flame affects candle, right? So, thoughts affect the material of our brains. If you keep repeating thinking certain thoughts, they will get more and more entrenched, they will become habitual, and they will be much more difficult to budge. And it doesn’t matter to the brain how stupid or limiting the thought is. It will faithfully reproduce that thought if you keep thinking it. So, I just think it’s amazing what goes on in our mind in terms of thoughts can affect the material and then the material in turn affects the thoughts that we have.

Eddie Turner:

Very intriguing. And thank you for explaining the cover because when I saw that, I did not make the connection as to what that meant to coaching. So, for those listening to us have this discussion, you’ll be able to see the cover in the show notes that’ll be posted to the KeepLeadingPodcast.com website where I’ll have a page there for Joseph, O’Connor and this show.

Well, thank you for explaining that. And, indeed, just as the flicker of the fire affects the candle, so the flicker of those thoughts that we have affect the entire brain, our mental imagery, and our pattern of behavior which is affected by the pattern of thinking. Very intriguing.

We’re talking to Joseph O’Connor, the co-founder of the International Coaching Community and the author of Coaching the Brain. We’re going to pause now for a word from our sponsors and we’ll be right back with Joseph O’Connor.

Eddie Turner:

Okay, we’re back, everyone. We’re talking to Joseph O’Connor, the co-founder of the International Coaching Community and he is talking to us about his new book Coaching the Brain: Learning a Little Bit About the Importance of Neuroscience for Coaches and he believes every coach should understand neuroscience, not just coaching.

Now, I’d like to shift gears a little bit. Joseph, since you are the co-founder of International Coaching Community, I’d like for you to tell my listeners what that organization is because they may not have heard of it and what led you to co-found it.

Joseph O’Connor:

Okay. Well, Andrea and I co-founded the ICC in 2001 when I was living in Brazil, in San Paolo. And we we’ve since moved back to London, we live in England now, but at the time we were in San Paolo, in 2001 coaching wasn’t nowhere near as well developed as it is now. And we wanted to make something from our experience, first of all, that will help coaches with skills and, secondly, that will help coaches with ethics because the skill base and the ethical base was really and still is really important to us because I think if coaching is ever going to be a profession, it needs to have an ethical base. I mean, professions are almost defined by the fact that they have codes. So, we were thinking about this and we chose International Coaching Community. Those three words, I think, sum it up. First of all, it is international – Andrea is Brazilian, I’m English. The first ICC Certification training we gave was actually in Poland. Second was in Rio de Janeiro, I think. The third was in [Inaudible][19:15]. In other words, we started international. Many companies, of course, they start national and then they expand. We seemed to go the other way around.

Eddie Turner:

Interesting.

Joseph O’Connor:

It was very interesting. So, it was international. And also, I think, coaching is international. And human beings are the same all over the world. And we know that the ICC training which, as you said at the beginning, has trained over 13,000 coaches in 67 countries, it goes across cultures, it works in every culture. We know that now. And so, international. Coaching, of course, helping people to be the best that they can be. And Community, and we chose this word quite carefully because as community has a focus on values. A community is a group of people that wants to be together, not a group necessarily of people who are thrown together or happened to be together or anything like that but they want to be together. They’re united by shared values. And this has been extremely important for us all the way through. And I think that we have, through the ICC, put values quite strongly into coaching. And, certainly, at the time, back in 2001, I don’t think it had the same kind of prominence as it does now. So, that was the ICC. And we certainly succeeded beyond our wildest dreams, I think.

Eddie Turner:

I’d say.

Joseph O’Connor:

To now on five continents with coaches and everything else, as you say. So, we’re very happy with that and we’re very happy that we’ve made a difference to coaches and through coaches to people. And for ICC, it’s kind of mission statement, “Coaching the world” because we feel we are so international. And I think that coaching the world, where do you start? Well, you got to start with yourself but then you coach other people. It’s like dropping a stone into a pool. The ripples just go out and out and out. And if you drop a big enough stone into the pool, the ripples will go out a very long way. So, you start with yourself and then to your clients. Then if your clients are people in business, then it will affect their business. And so, in the end, we hope that we can have an effect on the world and help the world because helping the world is helping yourself.

Eddie Turner:

Indeed. What a powerful mission statement – “Coaching the world.” Now, what’s been the biggest surprise to you or the biggest delight in all that your organization has accomplished these almost 20 years.

Joseph O’Connor:

Oh, wow! It’s a hard question to answer because there’s been a lot of things as we’ve gone along the way. And I think that many people, perhaps they look at international organizations and they think “Oh, lots of planning, very careful planning and analysis. And then you go through, you do this step one, step two, step three and you arrive at an international organization.” That hasn’t been our experience at all. It’s been one step at a time in the best way that the next step seemed to be. There’s a saying, I can’t remember who said it first, but “You can drive a thousand miles in a car in the dark with one set of headlights because you don’t need to see the thousand miles. All you need to see is the piece of road with your headlights.” And I feel like that’s what we’ve done. So, I’m really happy that so many great people who have joined the ICC, our trainers for the ICC continue to work for the ICC to make a difference in the world.

Eddie Turner:

Wonderful. I just was wondering as I listened to you talk about the far-reaching, your beginnings and what you’ve been able to accomplish and the number of people. And so, I just was thinking “Wow, it must be fascinating for you and your wife to look back all these years later and see just what you’ve accomplished.” Beautiful, very nice to see what you’ve done.

What would you say, as you’ve built this international organization of coaches, in many of the most common languages in the most popularly visited lands, when an organization is thinking about maybe not building an international organization but just in their local cooperation building a coaching community, building a coaching culture internally, what advice would you give to business leaders?

Joseph O’Connor:

Building coaching culture. Well, I would say, first of all, that it needs to be supported right at the top. The top management, CEO, Board of Directors, they got to sign on. Otherwise, people get cynical and they think “Well, if coaching is so great, why aren’t directors having any?” So, it’s got to start at the top or it’s got to be endorsed from the top. Sometimes it can start in other layers of management but it’s got to be supported from all the way up. Coaching culture is creative. Coaching culture asks questions, which is not always very comfortable at the beginning. That’s the idea of being a coach. You ask questions and you push people out of their comfort zone but you also support them when they’re out of their comfort zone until they find another zone that is beyond that first comfort zone but better than the comfort zone. It’s like moving up the floors of an apartment. You start on ground and then you move up to the fifth floor and you get a better view and you move up to the 10th floor and you get an even better view. So, you continue moving up. So, to go back to that question, it’s about asking questions. It’s got to be supportive from the top. It’s got to be about questions. I think it’s important to train coaches internally, that they have good training that just kind of started from nothing. At the same time, we’re not trying to make managers into coaches. We’re simply very often giving managers new skills and coaching skills that make them better managers. And I’ve had some managers come to me and say “I haven’t got time to learn this coaching.” And I say to them “That’s exactly why you need to learn the coaching. It sounds like you’re doing too much yourself. And with a bit of coaching, your people will be able to take over things.”

Eddie Turner:

Isn’t that interesting?

Joseph O’Connor:

Like I said, the best leaders are the people who recruit people who are smarter than themselves so they don’t have to do it all. That’s the whole point. Sometimes people think of leadership as top of the pyramid, the hierarchy doing everything for everyone around. Another thing, I think, about being a leader in a coaching organization is that you have to go talk with people. You can’t be remote. And I remember a great leader in one company that I coached with and it was amazing. He was really, really effective but he always had time to listen to what we had to say. And I was involved in kind of creating a coaching culture in that organization. And one of the best feedbacks that came out of that was that other departments would say “That department that had the coaching culture. If you want to get something done, go to them.”

Eddie Turner:

How about that!

Joseph O’Connor:

Anyway, I’ve kind of gone around the subject. The subject is leadership in coaching and coaching culture.

Eddie Turner:

Yes.

Joseph O’Connor:

I’ve gone around a bit but, hopefully, I answered the question from different points of view.

Eddie Turner:

You did. You gave us a couple things there that every organization would want to consider. Start at the top and make sure you have executive support and ensure that you are building a culture that fosters asking questions, which is something that is seen as a weakness in some organizations, but building that kind of comfort where people are asking questions and then getting proper training for managers. And it’s not that we’re trying to turn managers into coaches but, in fact, to the point that you made, if managers were trained to be a coach first and a manager second, they’d actually be a more effective manager. So, very nice.

Well, Joseph, you’ve seen a lot in starting an international organization, you’ve been in coaching for a very long time, you’ve written 20 books. So, clearly, you have a point of view. What do you see as the future of coaching?

Joseph O’Connor:

That’s a difficult one. This is just my point of view from what I’ve seen. Coaching seems to be fragmenting a little bit into executive coaching, so there’s a number of executive coaches. And using organizations for top executives, that’s fine. That’s one niche. There’s also a lot of coaching training going on inside organizations so that they can take the skill in house rather than bringing in outside coaches at every level. So, there’s a lot of coaching training going on at mid-level organization. And there’s also a big growth in team coaching as so many organizations are looking to see small teams as the unit by which they get things done, rather than the whole thing of individuals in cubicles. It’s now cross-functional teams. So, there’s a lot of team coaching going on. This is something that interests me a lot because coaching a team is not the same as coaching a person. It’s actually quite different. It’s a different system. You’ve got to be, I think, systemically quite different. So, this is coaching training. The ICC does have team coaching. In fact, I’m going to be doing one in Russia. And I’ve done it all over the world. It’s very interesting. So, team coaching. And, of course, I got to say the other thing that’s coming into coaching much more is neuroscience. And I think there’s going to be a time coming in the next few years when it will be mandatory that coaches know something of neuroscience because without it, they will lack some credibility in terms of how they go about the coaching and what they know about the coaching. So, I think that coaches need to know some things, of course, in psychology and they’ll need to know some things in neuroscience and any other things. What I personally think is that coaches ought to know lots about lots. I think that the more well-rounded the coach is in terms of just living and experience, the better coach they are.

Eddie Turner:

Very interesting. Thank you, Joseph. So, when we think about the future of coaching, you’re seeing more of a clear line being drawn in terms of executive coaches inside of organizations and what that means and then more training for others so that other people are doing the coaching of those inside the organization and not necessarily going external as much. More team coaching is in demand, big growth around the world in that so much so that you’re going to be doing a program in Russia and you’re running several across the globe. And then back to what we started on neuroscience, more coaches need to know about neuroscience and more coaches need to focus on being well rounded. And the more well-rounded they are, the better coach they are.

Very nice. Thank you very much, Joseph. I’ve really enjoyed talking with you. And how would you summarize our discussion that we’ve had today?

Joseph O’Connor:

Well, I hope that it’s been interesting. It’s been interesting for me. I hope it’s been interesting for you. I hope it’s interesting for all our listeners. There’s one little quote perhaps to finish off and I really like this quote. It’s from Carlos Castaneda in his book, I think, it’s Journey to Ixtlan, about a Mexican kind of mystical or wise person. And the quote goes like this. “All paths are the same. They lead nowhere. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good. If it does not, it is of no use.” So, I’m always looking for a path with a heart of what I do next. And I hope everybody listening will find their path with a heart.

Eddie Turner:

Very nice. “Does this path have a heart? If not, it’s of no use.” All right. Well, we’ll definitely share that with our listeners in the show notes. Where can my listeners learn more about you?

Joseph O’Connor:

Are we talking website here?

Eddie Turner:

Yes. So, we’ll direct people to your website then, the InternationalCoachingCommunity.com. We’ll put that in the show notes. We’ll put your LinkedIn profile so people can reach out to you, connect with you, and be able to see all the great things that you’re doing.

Joseph, thank you so much for being a guest on the Keep Leading!® Podcast.

Joseph O’Connor:

Thank you, Eddie. It’s been a pleasure.

Eddie Turner:

And thank you for listening. That concludes this episode, everyone. I’m Eddie Turner, the Leadership Excelerator, reminding you that leadership is not about our title or our position. Leadership is an activity. Leadership is action. It’s not the case of once a leader, always a leader. It’s not a garment we put on and take off. We must be a leader at our core and allow it to emanate in all we do. So, whatever you’re doing, always keep leading.

Eddie Turner:

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Keep Leading Podcast, the podcast dedicated to leadership development and insights. I’m your host, Eddie Turner, the Leadership Excelerator. I work with leaders to accelerate performance and drive impact.

Would you like liked to have more meaningful conversations even when they’re difficult. If that is the case you’re going to want to pay attention to this episode. I this episode I have the honor of interviewing the top female coach in the world, a true pioneer in the field of coaching and emotional intelligence, Dr. Marcia Reynolds. She’s a global expert in holding mind-changing conversations. So she will explain to us how to have meaningful conversations even when they’re difficult. She’ll do that in and whole lot more right after this.

Eddie Turner:

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Keep Leading Podcast, the podcast dedicated to leadership development and insights. I’m your host Eddie Turner, the Leadership Excelerator. I work with leaders to accelerate performance and drive impact.

Would you like to learn how to have more meanwhile conversations even when they are difficult? If so, you want to listen to my guest today. I have with me Dr. Marcia Reynolds. Dr. Reynolds is a master certified coach. She has provided executive coaching and leadership training programs in 41 countries. Dr. Reynolds was the fifth global president of the International Coach Federation. She is also visiting faculty for the International Coach Academy in Russia and Create China Coaching in China. She is recognized as the top female coach in the world and number three overall. Interviews and excerpts from Dr. Reynolds’ books Out Smarter Brain, How To Manage Your Mind When Emotions Take The Wheel, The Discomfort Zone, How Leaders Turns Difficult Conversations Into Breakthroughs, and Wonder Woman: How High-Achieving Women Find Contentment And Direction have all appeared in many places including Fast Company, Psychology Today and the Wall Street Journal. Dr. Marcia Reynolds is truly an amazing person and this is why I’m so excited to have her on the show today.

Dr. Reynolds, welcome to the Keep Leading Podcast.

Dr. Marcia Reynolds:

Thank you, Eddie. Thanks for asking me to be here.

Eddie Turner:

I’m just thrilled. Please tell us a little bit about you.

Dr. Marcia Reynolds:

Well, as you were saying, I’ve been involved in coaching for a long time but I’ve been involved with leadership development for nearly 40 years. And it was my constant quest to find how people change their behavior that I finally found coaching and I think it’s the best technology we have for changing people’s minds, helping them to change and grow, and to build better companies.

Eddie Turner:

Wow! I’ve never heard anyone refer to coaching as a technology. Interesting word choice, I like that.

Dr. Marcia Reynolds:

Well, my doctorate was in organizational psychology with an emphasis in neuroscience. So because of the powerful way that coaching impacts the brain differently from telling people what to do, giving them advice, mentoring them that we activate their brains in such a powerful way with coaching that it is definitely a technology.

Eddie Turner:

I like that. I am going to be using that, Marcia.

So I should probably share the fact that you are more than just a regular guest. You are somebody who I’ve watched from afar. I’ve read your work, I’ve seen you speak at conferences but later on I had the great fortune of meeting you in person as a client to speak at conferences for my own association when I was the president of the Association for Talent Development but also I have recently hired you to be my mentor, be my coach. And so I’ve enjoyed learning from you directly. And I completed a Coach Mastery Program with you and Dr. Dorothy Simonovic recently as well. So I want to just be able to share your wisdom with my audience. So I’m really excited to have you.

Dr. Marcia Reynolds:

That’s great, Eddie. It’s been really a pleasure working with you too because you’re so eager to be the best coach there is.

Eddie Turner:

Well, I figured if I’m going to be the best coach there is at the start by being coached by the best. So there we go.

Dr. Marcia Reynolds:

Thank you.

Eddie Turner:

So you are known as a global expert not just in coaching but in holding mind changing conversations. That’s pretty impressive. How did you develop that reputation?

Dr. Marcia Reynolds:

Well, as I told did you, Eddie, since I’ve been working with leaders for so many years, it was always the difficult conversation that they struggled with. And so, I spent years teaching different techniques like conflict resolution and assertiveness and fierce conversations but it was always focused on what the leader said. And when I found coaching, it was more about how leaders listen. And I said “That’s how you change your conversation.” So what leaders are always wanting to do is have people do things differently and to think differently but, again, you can’t do that by telling them “You must think differently” or coercing them. They always say “Well, I’m influencing them” when really it’s just manipulation and most people know it and they resist it. So finding a way that leaders can have impactful conversations that can really in one conversation change people’s minds and their behavior forever, that’s what impressed me and that’s why I went into studying it as a science and becoming an expert in how we do this because that’s what I do. I’m obsessed with learning how does this work and how I teach it. So I’ve spent years figuring that out.

Eddie Turner:

Now, when many people hear the phrase “mind changing conversations,” some might confuse that with manipulation. So can you tease out for what you mean in what you do and why this is not the ladder?

Dr. Marcia Reynolds:

Well, that’s kind of to get them to see how can I do this. Even though they may think that that’s what they want to do, how can I change their minds? I mean that’s what we’re doing all day long, right? It’s all over social media. It’s all over our interactions. I write for Psychology Today and I’ve had quite a few posts go viral and one of my viral posts is How To Read People’s Minds. And, no, I’m not trying to make them be psychic but when you’re curious and you notice their emotional reaction and ask really good questions to help them think for themselves, it helps you understand them, which in essence is reading their mind. So when you say how to change people’s minds, what I mentioned to you before, Eddie, is that when we practice coaching, it actually impacts a different part of the brain than when we tell people what’s best for them or try to mentor them. And it hits the middle brain. This is our source of creativity and seeing things in a whole new way. And when you share reflections to get people to think about their thinking and then ask curious questions about that, it actually goes deeper into their brain and they start shifting their frames and their stories and their perceptions in a way that they see themselves and the world in a broader format. It was limiting before. Now they see new things about themselves in the world. That changes their mind forever. You can’t go back once you have a new perspective. And so it does change people’s minds. In one conversation you can do this and that’s what I write about.

Eddie Turner:

That’s powerful. So you can change people’s minds by changing their perceptions and the power is it comes from within them and that’s why it is so much different than manipulation and that’s something that is equipping them for further growth and development.

Dr. Marcia Reynolds:

Absolutely. I mean when you tell people “You need to see it differently,” well, you know that doesn’t work.

Eddie Turner:

No, not at all, not at all.

So you discuss some of this in your work entitled The Discomfort Zone. Can you tell us what the discomfort zone is and why it matters?

Dr. Marcia Reynolds:

It’s interesting because some people, without reading the description of the book, I had somebody on Amazon write a review and said “I bought this book because I thought it was going to teach me how to be more comfortable in these conversations and instead, she’s teaching me how to make people uncomfortable.” And I’m like “Well, if you would’ve read the description, you would’ve known that what I have found in mentoring coaches for years and working with leaders that at the moment that a conversation gets uncomfortable, it’s like they mentally runaway, sometimes physically, they don’t move in to the discomfort to find what’s inside of this, what is this representing” because really it takes a moment of discomfort for us to be open to learning. If we’re not uncomfortable, we’re just like building on what we think we already know but when you reflect back to me the story I just told you and then you ask me a question about my belief around that story and what other elements am I missing, that might not feel comfortable for me in the moment because I’m starting to look at myself but if I don’t look at myself, I’m not going to learn and grow. If I don’t look at my stories, if I don’t look for the gaps in my logic and the limiting beliefs that I have framing my stories, the story can’t change.

Eddie Turner:

I’m glad you said that because when I read in your book that you said leaders have to be comfortable with disruption and tension and a conversation rotation because this creates the discomfort zone in which new ideas are birthed, when I read that, I exclaimed “Wow!” For many people I know, this would actually trigger the fight or flight response that we hear so much about rather than staying in that discomfort that was created. So you touched on that a little bit but can you tell me a little bit more about the importance of what you mean in that statement?

Dr. Marcia Reynolds:

What I had said about how many times people run away from a conversation that’s starting to feel a little bit uncomfortable, that there’s some tension, the person might be defensive and that’s the moment we need to stay with it. This is where emotional intelligence comes in to recognize when I’m uncomfortable with their discomfort and then just to breathe it out and come back and be present with the person to ask them “So what’s making you uncomfortable in this moment? Where’s the conflict for you?”

Eddie Turner:

Are you saying to ask the other person?

Dr. Marcia Reynolds:

Yeah, you ask the person those questions but you can’t if you’re stuck in your own discomfort. Again, you notice when you start to feel uncomfortable as a listener, breathe because you’re probably holding your breath and remember that the person, if they’re uncomfortable, then this is a fabulous we list learning opportunity. So if you really want to help them, you got to get comfortable with their tension, with their discomfort so you can help them process it so they can see new possibilities.

Eddie Turner:

So I found myself kind of holding my breath before you had that. So I had to hold myself.

Dr. Marcia Reynolds:

Yeah, right.

Eddie Turner:

So step one is recognize your own tension.

Dr. Marcia Reynolds:

Yes.

Eddie Turner:

And then when you’ve recognized your tension, ask the other person about their tension and what’s making them feel that way because of the response that they’ve elicited inside of you.

Dr. Marcia Reynolds:

Yeah. I mean it’s so powerful just to say “Wow! You seem to have tightened a little a little bit and you got quiet. Can you tell me what’s going on?” Just as simple as that, to get them to be looking at “What is making me feel this way in this moment?” So we notice there experience and then just be curious about it.

Eddie Turner:

Very nice.

Dr. Marcia Reynolds:

I want to say, Eddie, too when you mentioned about disruptions, many of the neuroscientists and the people who write, the behavioral economists like Daniel Kahneman say people get really stuck in their thinking patterns even if these patterns don’t serve them but they can’t undo that. They need an external disruption in order to rattle and free themselves from these patterns that they’re stuck in. That disruption generally comes in a form of a reflection where I just share with you what I heard you say or saw you express and a question. So we have to get comfortable with doing that kind of disruption of their thinking to help them think in a different way.

Eddie Turner:

Now, I’m glad you said that as well because that leads to something else I read that I want to ask you about, the Idea that you just talked about the external force that will trigger this via reflection and allowing the person to hear or see what they just gave to you, the recipient. You said your book for the same reason you can’t tickle yourself, you can’t fully explore your own thoughts.

Dr. Marcia Reynolds:

Right.

Eddie Turner:

Is that what you mean what you just explained on that?

Dr. Marcia Reynolds:

Sure. Your listeners, I want you all to try tickle yourself. Your brain says “I know what you’re doing. I’m not going to let you do that” but if somebody else comes at you, they only have to touch you, they just have to wiggle their fingers, you’ll probably laugh. So it’s the same thing when we try to analyze our own thoughts. It’s our ego. Ego is just definition of who I think I am and how I see the world. The ego throws up a wall and says “No, I’m not going to let you do that because this is how I navigate your day. I take care of you. So we’re not going to evaluate thinking.” So what happens when I start to analyze my own thoughts, I rationalize my thinking, but if somebody else outside of you, and usually I’m thinking of a coach or somebody using a coaching approach, shares a reflection and a question, then it breaks through that ego barrier and we can then stop and question our own thinking. So that’s how that works.

Eddie Turner:

Thank you, Marcia. So, would you say that this is one of the reasons why senior leaders in organizations have trouble analyzing their behavior and sometimes end up in their own echo chamber, as some might say, because other people aren’t going to tell them the higher they get in an organization what the truth is perhaps about their behavior. And so they just have their own confirmation biases because they continue to get rewarded with higher positions because they are the way they are.

Dr. Marcia Reynolds:

Well, there are two things. One, the main reason is we have assessments, 360 assessments, engagements, surveys. It’s an external source. And then when we give them feedback and coach them with this information, then it’s far more powerful than them trying to figure out “Why is what I’m doing not working?” but you’re absolutely right, there was a great article written by a guy named Hal Gregersen, it’s a Harvard Business Review article called the CEO Bubble, and he says that especially at a CEO level people aren’t going to tell you the truth. They’re not going to tell you what you’re doing wrong. So you have to go out there and seek people’s input and what is it that they need from you differently and what challenges are they facing that you can help them with because you’re just not going to see it and people won’t be honest with you. So that’s why I love using some assessments when I coach higher level leaders or do live interviews with their leadership team and other people that are impacted by them.

Eddie Turner:

What is your favorite assessment?

Dr. Marcia Reynolds:

Well, I do a lot of emotional intelligence work. So I’ve been using the EQI 2.0. And it was different when I started using it 20 years ago. So I do that but most companies I work with have 360. So I’ll just use whatever they have. I don’t like things that are too complex. I like simple things. Even if it’s communication, I’ll use the DiSC assessment but honestly I like doing live interviews, doing like five or six interviews with, if they have a boss, with their boss, a couple of their peers, and a couple of people who report to them and then I just gather it together and create a generalized report because people don’t always trust assessments but it’s interesting when you have a conversation with them and they know it’s confidential and that’s going to be a generalized report, they will be open to you. So I prefer just doing interviews for my leaders.

Eddie Turner:

Very nice, very nice. So we’re talking to the top female coach in the world Dr. Marcia Reynolds and she is helping us understand how to have meaningful conversations. We’ll continue this conversation right after this.

Eddie Turner:

Okay, we’re back everyone. We’re talking to the top female coach in the world Dr. Marcia Reynolds and she’s helping us understand how to have meaningful conversations and she’s able to do that because she is truly the authority when it comes to conversations. She is a global expert in holding mind changing conversations.

So we were talking before the break there, Marcia, about emotional intelligence and some of the assessments that you use but is there a way that you would say that people can use their emotions to influence and inspire people as a leader?

Dr. Marcia Reynolds:

Well, as a leader you set the emotional tone of any conversation. So the brain tends to align itself with the emotions of what it determines is the socially dominant person in the room and hopefully that you if you’re the leader but whatever you even walk in the door with, they’re going to sense and either they will align with that or they’re going to resist it if it’s a difficult emotion that scares them. So to be very conscious of the emotions that you bring in with you, not just when you sit down with the moment you enter a room, is vital to whatever success you think you might have in a conversation. So you have to set the emotional town before you do anything else.

Eddie Turner:

Indeed. And one of the things I heard you say is that your emotions are even more powerful than well rehearsed words when it comes to these conversations.

Dr. Marcia Reynolds:

Absolutely. People will trust what they’re feeling in the moment much more than whatever words you’ve chosen to say to them. Again, I go back for years when I was teaching leadership, it was always “Well, here’s what you say in these moments. Here’s how you give feedback. Here’s how you delegate.” And when I found coaching, I’m like “Oh, well, that’s why none of that worked” because it’s really, as I said before, not so much what you say but how you listen. There’s not just paying attention. There’s a how to listening that people feel comfortable with you.

Eddie Turner:

Now, along those lines of how you listen, how you pay attention, as I mentioned earlier, I had the opportunity to be a part of your inaugural Coach Mastery Workshop and it was a phenomenal experience and I have used a lot of what I’ve learned since the completion of that program but there’s one thing that you said get that I continue to repeat. In fact, I was interviewed for a program in Asia just yesterday and I cited this. You said that when we were talking about mastery, we were all thinking about the skills and different techniques and whatnot, you said that mastery is not the perfection of skills. It is the deepening of presence. How does one deepen their presence? I know the answer because you already told us but for my listeners, how do we do that?

Dr. Marcia Reynolds:

Well, it’s not just in coaching, Eddie, that being very present with people so we can truly hear what they’re saying and what they’re expressing and what they’re not saying but when you think about any sport, the best know how to shift into the moment and be fully present and not be distracted by anything else. It’s called in the zone. And it was years ago I was working with a sports psychologist where I was asked to come up with a formula for anybody to be in the zone no matter what it is they’re doing. And so in order to pull yourself into the present moment, the first thing you have to do is relax your body. Most people think it’s about self talk and none of the top athletes that I worked with for that program said that they used self talk. They said “If I say to myself “Oh, you’re a winner, you’re a winner,” then the back of my brain goes “No, you’re not. You’re a loser.”” And that’s when they choke. They said they had to breathe out, release the tension in their body so then they can access their brain, go to their brain, clear their mind and quickly put their awareness in the center of their body. In martial arts they call this your point of strength. It’s just below your navel. And all of the athletes said that “When I’m aware of what’s going on in my body is when I can do my best.” So that awareness of our core, that center, the bottom of your breath, that if you keep your awareness there and stay out of your head, you’re much more control. So you relax your body, clear your mind, put your awareness in the center of your body and then I add in that we don’t stay in our center that long so you anchor your thoughts with one or two words. So in coaching it’s often “I’m curious and I care.” It could be “I’m common courageous.” It could be “I’m determined.” Whatever it is that you want to feel in that moment, you choose as those words so every time you start going back to your chatty brain, you just think “How I want to feel and you breathe in curious and care. And it brings you into this present moment with the person that you’re with. And what’s so powerful about that? Not only will you listen to them better but when you’re present, they feel safe with you. And creating psychological safety is the most important thing we can do in our conversations in order to have them be effective so people feel that they can open to you, they can discuss things that aren’t comfortable. They have to feel safe. So being present helps people to feel safe with you.

Eddie Turner:

Excellent. And thank you for that point of clarification as well because, yes, you taught us that in a coaching context but I thought it was also apropos here in the conversational context that we’re discussing. So thank you for outlining that. In fact, I felt a moment of Zen almost come over me as you were explaining that. My way back too because that was the first time I heard it, 1993 or in the ‘90s I should say, with Michael Jordan and The Bulls because that that was my hero growing up from basketball perspective. So Michael Jordan had a game there against the Portland Trailblazers. He was not known for shooting the three-point shot but at that game he broke the finals record for three-pointers because he hit six three-pointers. Michael Jordan was not known for shooting three-pointers but he went on to set the finals record by hitting six three-pointers and he blew away the Trailblazers in that first game. And there’s this moment they play all the time where he kind of shrug his shoulders. You can’t see me doing this but he shrugs his shoulders as if to say he looks at the sideline and says “I don’t know what’s going on.” And they asked him afterwards and described being in the zone. It was a similar ability he talked about in the game against the Celtics when he went off for 63 points. And so, yes, that context is the first time I heard it. And so seeing how we can get into the zone, not just in the sports world or in a coaching world, but in our daily conversations where we want to have an impact as leaders.

Dr. Marcia Reynolds:

Right. Yeah, they’re good teachers.

Eddie Turner:

Very good teachers, yes.

So, Marcia, we’re having this conversation and many of these points have come from your book Outsmart Your Brain and The Discomfort Zone but you’re working on a new book. Can you tell us about that?

Dr. Marcia Reynolds:

Right. It doesn’t have such a catchy title as the other two. It’s called The Coach’s Guide to Reflective Inquiry.

Eddie Turner:

The Coach’s Guide to Reflective Inquiry, okay.

Dr. Marcia Reynolds:

And I’m very proud of this book. I’ve been teaching coaching skills for over 20 years and I can now say that there are certain things missing that when people learn coaching is like they think it’s all about the question. It’s not all about the question. I call it the cult of the powerful question, that there’s far more to coaching than just asking questions. In fact, my favorite quote from a guy named John Dewey who wrote a book called How We Think that defined coaching in 1910. He said that questions seek answers but inquiry provokes insight.

Eddie Turner:

Say that one more time. I want to just isolate that.

Dr. Marcia Reynolds:

Questions seek answers but inquiry provokes insight.

Eddie Turner:

I love it.

Dr. Marcia Reynolds:

So inquiry is not just about asking questions. There’s a lot more to it. And he’s the one who defined reflective inquiry. So what is the reflective part in how are we missing that and what are some of the coaching myths that are out there? And this is for coaches but it’s for leaders as well because using a coaching approach to your conversations are going to be far more effective in getting the results you want.

Eddie Turner:

Well, I am so happy to share that and I will also say this, that you don’t know that I’m going to say, is you have an article on your website entitled Stop Trying To Ask Good Questions and it’s in the blog section and OutsmartYourBrain.com. And I share this with people because one of the things you were working with me on is getting out of my head and to stop trying to ask good questions. If people would like to get a little bit of a sneak peek into some of your wisdom and what you’ve taught around this, you’ve written a wonderful article that everyone has access to.

Dr. Marcia Reynolds:

Absolutely. Well, actually, my last few blog posts were directly from the upcoming book. It was helping me sort through what I was writing. There’ll be more to come.

Eddie Turner:

Isn’t that a nice teaser? So that is a book written by a coach for coaches, it sounds like. And can other leaders benefit from this if they’re not a coach?

Dr. Marcia Reynolds:

Well, absolutely. I teach leaders coach to leaders around the world and it’s becoming accepted. I mean even Google has coaching skills as their number one leadership skill.

Eddie Turner:

How about that?

Dr. Marcia Reynolds:

Yeah, and leaders need to know how to coach. I actually think this simplifies coaching. I think so many leaders, they don’t have time to do that but what I’m giving them is this is not going to take much time. If you follow what I write in the book, you’re going to find that coaching is much easier than you think, especially if you’re not sitting there thinking “Oh, what’s the question I should ask you?” It’s not about that. It’s just about “I’m listening to you. I receive what you give me and I just give it back to you.” So I’m going to simplify coaching for leaders in this book.

Eddie Turner:

I love it. I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy of that. And I agree with that premise, obviously, and I also teach a program that is not directed for folks who want to become a certified coach. They’re just leaders, managers, HR folks who are interested in having coaching skills and that program is for the Association for Talent Development, their coaching certificate program. So it is an important skill. And to your point, organizations at all levels are seeing that this is an important skill set to have. Interesting to know that Google considers it number one. I didn’t know that. So, thank you for sharing that tip.

Dr. Marcia Reynolds:

Yeah, in their oxygen study they came up with that was the number and skill and I think emotional intelligence was number three.

Eddie Turner:

How about that? Two in-demand skills that a lot of folks are talking about and a lot of things are being written about but it still seems to be an invasive skill that folks have yet to attain to the level they’d like. So certainly people like you, your work both as a practitioner and also as a thought leader who’s putting these things down in writing go a long way in helping us all improve.

So, Marcia, tell us, if you would, what is the main point you want our listeners to take away from our conversation today.

Dr. Marcia Reynolds:

Well, I think you and I have discussed a number of times the importance of being present, that people won’t even listen to you if they don’t sense that you’re fully present with them. So whether it’s setting your emotional tone, remembering who you are as a leader to put the person in high regard that you have to create this what I call a safety bubble where they feel safe with you and that’s based in your presence.

Eddie Turner:

Wonderful. Thank you for sharing that, Marcia. And since this is the Keep Leading Podcast, we like to give leaders a quote that they can reflect on to help them keep leading. Do you have a quote you’d like to share?

Dr. Marcia Reynolds:

They want you to be present more than they need you to be perfect.

Eddie Turner:

Okay, wonderful. They want you to be present more than they want you to be perfect. What a nice thing for us to remember as leaders as we keep leading.

Marcia, where can my leaders learn more about you? I’ve enjoyed this conversation. I hate to stop.

Dr. Marcia Reynolds:

Well, of course, my website which, thank you, you’ve mentioned because I do have a blog there. The website site is OutsmartYourBrain.com. So they can go there. They can find all my books I’ve written there. There are a lot of free resources other than the blog. There are videos. And if they look under The Discomfort Zone, they’ll find all kinds of tools and resources that they can use. Of course I’m on LinkedIn. I write for Psychology Today. So they can find me around the internet.

Eddie Turner:

Excellent. Yes, you are available everywhere. There’s something else I want folks to know and that is that you recently delivered a stellar TED Talk. And so we want folks also look for How To Use Anger As A Force For Good and this will be in the show notes and a link to that will also be on the page I create for you on my side as well.

So, Marcia, thank you for being a guest on the Keep Leading Podcast.

Dr. Marcia Reynolds:

Thank you, Eddie, for having me. I truly enjoyed the conversation.

Eddie Turner:

And thank you for listening. That concludes this episode, everyone. I’m Eddie Turner, the Leadership Excelerator, reminding you that leadership is not about our title or our position. Leadership is an activity. Leadership is action. It’s not the case of once a leader, always a leader. It’s not a garment we put on and take off. We must be a leader at our core and allow it to emanate in all we do. So, whatever you’re doing, always keep leading.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Keep Leading Podcast, the podcast dedicated to leadership development and insights. I’m your host Eddie Turner, the Leadership Excelerator.In the world of leadership development, there are many options for developing leaders. Today I want to talk about how leaders can support leaders using an approach pioneered by Dr. Dorothy Siminoivtch – Gestalt Coaching And Awareness IQ. Dr. Siminovitch is one of the few Master Certified coaches in the world through the International Coaching Federation. So she truly is an authority on this subject and she will talk to us about this subject right after this.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Keep Leading Podcast, the podcast dedicated to leadership development and insights. I’m your host, Eddie Turner, the Leadership Excelerator. I work with leaders to accelerate performance and drive impact.In the world of leadership development, there are many options to help leaders develop. Today, I want to talk about leaders supporting leaders using an approach pioneered by Dr. Dorothy Siminoivtch – Gestalt Coaching And Awareness IQ. Dr. Dorothy Siminoivtch is an author, a speaker, and an international leadership team and organizational coach. She is also an International Coach Federation mentor coach. She is the founder and director of training for the Gestalt Coaching Program and a co-owner of the Gestalt Center for Coaching. Dr. Siminovitch is the author of the book we’ll be talking about today – A Gestalt Coaching Primer: The Path Toward Awareness IQ. She’s also coauthor of the Awareness 2020 Leadership Awareness Instrument.

I am so excited to have with me today all the way from Canada Dr. Dorothy Siminovitch. Welcome to the Keep Leading Podcast.

Thank you so much, Eddie.

Please tell my listeners a little bit about your background, Dr. Siminovitch.

Thank you again and please call me Dorothy. And to everybody, hello. So I am from originally Montreal, Quebec, which is eastern part of Canada and is considered the French part of Canada. And somewhere early in my adulthood I got married and moved to Cleveland, Ohio, did my graduate training there and started my professional career. And it really is in Cleveland at the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland that I had the wherewithal, this moment of true inspiration to blend Gestalt Thinking which was mostly used in the world of therapy or consulting to marry it to coaching as a vehicle to serve leaders and those people that really wanted to add better quality to their life. So for the past 20 years I would say that I’ve been really going around the world, a lot in Istanbul, Turkey, and teaching Gestalt Coaching to those who want to learn how to be an executive coach and also an applied coach but mostly those who want to learn how to be executive coaches to leaders who carry so much importance in our world and also mystery about how to serve them. It’s a little bit about me. I live part time in Toronto, sometime in Cleveland and a little bit in Istanbul.

All right. Well, you get around.

It’s quite lucky, I think.

Well, I feel quite fortunate to have met you. I met you just a short time ago because you and Dr. Marcia Reynolds ran a coach mastery workshop there in Canada where you live. And it was one of the most transformational events of my life. And I don’t say that lightly.

Thank you. It honors me to hear you say that. And it was a wonderful workshop. It was our inaugural version of those people really wanting to take their coaching to a higher level of mastery. We were thrilled that you came and the group that arrived. We say that those that came were the right people. Thank you.

It really was and we are all still connected and still meeting and messaging each other and helping each other continue to grow that level of mastery and it was a fantastic workshop. And so got a chance to meet you. And you are truly not only a global thought leader in coaching and one of the premier experts, especially in gestalt, but you’re just a down-to-earth, warm genuine person. And so you really melted our hearts and you really gave us outside of your expertise deeper reasons to feel connected to you and model ourselves as executive coaches and leaders after your leadership.Now, something else I neglected to say that is pretty important about what you do is you’re not just a regular executive coach. Can you explain to my listeners the level of coaching credential you hold?

Yes, I’m glad to be able to say that I’m a Master Certified coach through the ICF, which I think is designed to stand for the best that we can do with level of certification.

And so for those who may not know, ICF is the International Coach Federation, the largest and the most recognized credentialing organization in the world. So to hold the MCC, that’s not a light credential. It is the top credential. And not only do you hold an MCC which less than 1% of coaches in the globe have, how long have you held that MCC?

Well, you’re asking the big question. 2004. Actually, I applied in 2004. I think I got it in 2005. Every three years you have to renew your credential. And to do that you need to take 40 hours of coach training. And, again, I think that’s a commitment to ongoing learning. They say the expert sees but the novice always sees with fresh eyes. And I think no matter what level of mastery we have, we have to keep asking ourselves “Am I still learning?” I’ve renewed four times since getting the credential and I have a PhD and I think I’m just as proud, if not prouder, of the MCC. Isn’t that interesting?

It is very interesting and I says a lot about the rigor and the prestige that credential holds for you to say that. So, yes, not only are you one of the top coaches in the world but you’ve held that credential almost as long as it has existed. And so that’s not something to take lightly. That’s a pretty powerful thing to be able to say and all the more so why that workshop you and Marcia Reynolds held was so important and so pivotal for those of us who are privileged to attend because we were able to learn from to the best in the world but there’s something about you that stretches outside of just general coaching and your credential as a coach. You took things to another level and you’ve pioneered something where you married two worlds – coaching and, as you mentioned in your introduction, the practice of gestalt. So can you tell us what is gestalt coaching?

Well, in some ways you gave the answers. It’s two worlds that come together. The first world is really this new world, it’s now some 20-22 years old basically within coaching. What is coaching? It is a collaborative encounter between the client and the coach in service of the client’s learning agenda, very democratic learning experience, which is very needed in today’s very demanding world but gestalt thinking has been around for actually some 80 years, even a little longer, with the early studies in perceptual psychology. And gestalt thinking has been mostly used in the world of therapy or consulting. And I had the kind of moment of, I would call it, entrepreneurial rumination, where I truly envisioned gestalt married to coaching because gestalt thinking allows us in the coaching experience to understand the person and a whole system approach from an analytical approach, from the emotional approach, from the heart-centered approach, and also from the somatic approach. So it’s a way of being able, literally as a coach if you have gestalt training, to see the client in multiple dimensions. You see them from what you’re noticing but you also use yourself as an instrument to kind of get a sense of “What am I noticing about the client that’s standing out?” based on perceptual cues, somatic cues, emotional cues, and behavioral cues. And all of that has actual conceptual theory and tools from the Gestalt approach that assists us in reading the client. That’s pretty powerful. And when I say reading the client, Eddie, I don’t play cards but those people who play cards, think really about poker, it’s kind of an analogy, people that play poker are able to read other people whether they’re holding good cards or holding bad cards. This is kind of something they called a tell. I love those stories about that but that’s a very kind of interesting way of understanding the gestalt approach. We get trained and begin to understand ways of reading our clients based on the tell which could be perceptual, which could be emotional cues. The face, the eyes, the mouth, the movements gives us a sign what’s happening that we can read the kind of are they interested, we can read that, are they not interested, we can read that. Something just happen, no matter what they’re saying that we need to pay attention to because something shifted for them. Again, it’s something very small but we can be actually reading that based on these kind of cues that we get if we’re really trained from gestalt systems thinking.

Thank you. Now, there’s a couple of phrases you used I’d to break down just a little bit for our audience. Can you tell me where the word ‘gestalt’ comes from?

Yeah. No, it’s that question everyone always asks, Eddie, because it’s a German word. Gestalt is a German word that means the whole. And it’s pretty mainstream. People always use this phrase “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” When we think of a face, you see the face, even if maybe you’re missing some feature of the face, you’ll be able to recognize someone’s face based on their eyes, the whole from a feature, or you just see the outline of a person’s face, the whole, you may not even see the mouth, you go “Okay, that’s Eddie’s head” because we actually think in wholes. So isn’t it interesting? You hear a little bar from music and you’re able to name that tune. Some people can name it in a very short bar. Some people need a whole cord because we actually fill in what we think is missing to get the whole. And gestalt is that concept that really describes that. So if you think of this phrase “Give me a picture of what you’re talking about,” that’s a gestalt. So when we say “What’s your gestalt?”, we’re saying “What’s your picture of this situation? What’s your gestalt of this issue? What’s your picture of this issue?” If you think about a picture is more than 1000 words, the idea of “What’s your gestalt?” means there are so many parts. It captures the so many parts of the whole. And the reason people keep saying “What does it mean?” is because the word gestalt stays German. So people keep saying “Well, what is it?”

Yes, yes. So I wanted to make sure we just gave a little bit more clarification around that. And I love your illustrations on how you brought that to life.And then another phrase you were using, and for those who may not be in the coaching world, they may not readily recognize it and that was ‘Somatic’.

Yes. Well, the idea of being able to read a person’s kind of relevance of what’s happening in the moment or even their character based on the way they’re standing and moving. We know that the way a person stands already conveys a lot about their life story. Do they stand a little bit forward and slouched over? Do they stand backwards and kind of apprehensively waiting? Right there we can already tell a story. They say that biology, the way that you’re feeling about something becomes biography. So somatic gives us kind of the eyes of being able to recognize what’s going on with a person just by how they are embodied, how they’re standing, how they’re sitting, how they’re eating, how they’re looking. It’s the embodiment that we start reading or I would say this, the lack of embodiment. Someone says to you “I really care about something” and you hear the voice and you go “Okay” but then they say “I really care about something” and you think “Where are they?” Because you don’t hear that in the voice, they’re not embodied in their voice. The somatic tells us kind of at a visceral level what’s happening.

Yes. And so as coaches we’re trained in that and it’s something that benefits our client. How can that benefit leaders? If they’re not a coach, how can they benefit from this discussion that we’re having?

Wonderful. I think that in the last probably, really it’s been about since the ‘90s when Daniel Goldman wrote his Emotional Intelligence, and many people would always know emotions are important but in organizations and leaders emotions were considered to be troublesome in the way. And in the last 25 years there has been a paradigm shift of really recognizing that those soft skills, the soft cues, the emotional intelligence which is the intelligent use of your emotions, being able to become more self aware of that is so critical in being able to both manage yourself, be self aware, and also understand and work with people. So that’s where if I can read my emotional cues, then I understand what’s going on with me. And not only that, I will then be more able, if I can read myself, I will be more able in reading other people. And if I can read other people, it’s kind of like a line. I can then talk with them about where they are and more thoughtfully. And this is the awareness intelligence piece. If I’m aware of myself and I can read you, I then can use my awareness to maybe deliver my message with more understanding if they want to ask you to do something but I am aware that something about you either looks tired or distracted, instead of just giving the order or they request, I may even say “I’m going to ask you for something I’m not sure if this is the best time but I’d like to ask you given everything that’s going on. Would that be okay?” I might deliver my message as a leader with more thoughtfulness and more understanding of what’s happening in the moment that nothing else could give me except my emotional capacity to read the situation. And, Eddie, for so many business leaders, that really is the underdeveloped side. What do we notice in business leaders? We notice that most business leaders arrive at being a leader because they have analytical skills, they have strategy skills, they have deliverable skills, execution skills. And where do they need to develop themselves? The soft side of being able to read people, and here’s the other thing, read themselves.

Yes, yes.

And they have not really gone to school for that. And as a person becomes higher in their leadership status, what we know is that syndrome of more and more people telling them less and less.

Yes.

Yes, lonely at the top is an old syndrome that we know about but we see it enacted all the times where people would say, and I have clients who tell me, “Well, nobody tells me.” Well, they’re afraid to tell you. And also are you aware of your signals? Are you aware of your emotions? And this is where I think that we as coaches particularly, how do we co-create a very safe learning environment for our leaders, because leaders have so much pressure put on them to be strong and to take risks but not fail. Well, that’s a very impossible situation.

Yes.

Where is a safe environment for them to have kind of a dress rehearsal of “How could I look at that in a second way so that I don’t feel so naked publicly?”?

Very interesting. Wow! Thank you for sharing that and getting us off to a great start here, Dorothy. I’m enjoying this discussion with Dr. Dorothy Siminovitch and she’s talking to us about gestalt coaching and how we use this to help leaders support leaders.We’re going to pause for a word from our sponsors at this time and we’ll be back right after this.

We’re back. We’re talking to Dr. Dorothy Siminovitch and she is telling us about gestalt coaching and how leaders can more effectively lead other leaders.And so before the break, Dorothy, you were explaining the details about what gestalt coaching is, where it comes from, and why it matters for leaders and how it really is a leadership competency that you’re building in the folks that you run through your organization. And so we talked about the definition that your book was based on but there’s something else that you share in your book that I’d like to talk about. And you have come up with this phrase about Awareness IQ. What is Awareness IQ?

Well, thank you. I think, again, I’d like to identify what I think is happening as a paradigm shift in the world where it’s always been important to get knowledge and it still is but one of the things that we understand today that drives knowledge is in the moment we may have to be adaptive because even existing knowledge presumes history, something that we know and it’s already kind of formed and we have knowledge about something but the knowledge that we have may not have met the current circumstances that we are facing. And the current circumstance in the moment may have some emergent issue that the only way to recognize is through this phenomena called Awareness. Awareness is a knowing in the moment of something that is emerging that maybe we know something about or we recognize as something. And one of the pieces about awareness now is how do I recognize something in the moment and use that to deliver the knowledge or adapt the knowledge to meet the moment. And so, the example I could give is let’s say a business leader goes into a meeting and he or she has a message to deliver. Communication is one of the key deliverables of any leader, how to deliver this message, and they have the text really identified. And as they go into the meeting, what they kind of get a sense of is they can feel something is perhaps not quite right. They notice that people have a look on their faces, no one’s really looking at each other, and people aren’t even asking questions. That doesn’t seem to be the same strong greeting that he or she typically gets. And one of the cues that are coming is “Something is going on.” Now if time is tight, many leaders with good cause would say “Okay, this is the message I’m going to give” but later on they can go back and say “What was I missing? Why didn’t I ask “Okay, guys, let’s take a moment. I feel something is happening. Could everybody make a statement what’s going on here like an awareness statement?” And the reason I say that is it may be later on we realize something was going on in that meeting. And if the business leader didn’t ask or raises kind of sense of “I’m picking up some data in myself” or “I have a feeling. I’d like to check it out,” they may have missed a moment that was very authentic, it was very important, and perhaps creates more safety for the team to ask that question. So Awareness IQ is being able to recognize the kind of awareness cues that you’re getting either in yourself or something that you scan for the environment and acting on it. And when we don’t act on a cue that we have a sense of, later on we will feel regret like “Why didn’t I ask her? Why didn’t it offer?” And there’s a saying that it’s the things that we don’t do that we felt strongly about that we most regret later more often than what we did do that we’re sorry for.

Now, is there a way for me to identify my level of Awareness IQ?

Yes, actually. Well, I joined ventured with Barbara Singer of Executive Core and we created an inventory called the Awareness 2020 which I’m so proud to say was created off of the dimensions that I articulated in my book, Eddie. I’m almost embarrassed to say I’m talking about my book before you asked but the book that I wrote, Gestalt Coaching Primer, one of the reasons why I wrote it was most authors who had written about gestalt thinking, and they were always brilliant, they always wrote in a very intense style. And one of the things that I wanted to do with Gestalt Coaching Primer was to make it very easy to read because the material of gestalt thinking is actually there’s so many dimensions that are happening at once, people can get confused. And so I wrote this chapter on something called ‘Presence and Use Of Self’ and that is “Who am I and how do I use myself in the moment?” And how I use myself is kind of a response to your question. How I use myself has to do with my own sense of “Do I know what my gifts are? Do I know what my limitations are? Can I recognize awareness across what I say seven dimensions?”The first dimension is the dimension of values and recognition of what’s important for me and for others. The second dimension of awareness is the dimension of creativity. We see things that are novel. Can we recognize what’s exciting and novel or do we just closed down? That’s an awareness dimension. The third dimension is the dimension of emotional intelligence which we’ve been hearing about but we keep hearing about it because it’s so important to recognize. A lot of people, when it’s too emotional, they go “Oh, too much” is a phrase I often hear but I say to people “Can you handle that? Are you able to hold the space for emotion?” The fourth dimension of awareness is the capacity for caring. Do you recognize when you need to care for yourself or other people need maybe more support and care? A huge issue that we’re hearing about in organizations today is the need for compassion, compassion around the things that we can’t change but a stance of compassion is so supportive to people. And so many people actually go “No, I’m going to save that for my family.” We say that really great leaders have emotional awareness around the need for compassion. The fifth dimension is the capacity for communication, recognizing the moment where something needs to be said or acknowledged. Communication is a critical awareness competency. The sixth competency is the issue of intuition. Can we recognize just a flash of intuition which is data that you have arrived at without hard work? And it’s interesting there’s new recognition of the need for intuition. You know why, Eddie?

Tell me.

Yeah, intuition is this sense of something that we need in an high age of uncertainty. So intuition was not something people really wanted to hear about in the ‘30s, the ‘40s, and the ‘50s. And lately we’re hearing a lot about your intuitive sense because there’s so much uncertainty in the world. And there’s actually intuition training that people can take, which is important because if people are trying to say “I have an intuition” but really is an agenda, that’s an opportunity for dishonesty. How’s that for interesting? I know that’s a huge sentence right there.

No, that’s very interesting because some people might argue or may wonder is the gift of intuition unique to one gender over another. You said there’s training but has your research shown that one group has stronger intuition than another?

I can’t answer that one but I can tell you something else. I can tell you that it seems to be something with birth orders. So my colleague Belleruth Naparstek wrote a lovely book called Your Sixth Sense and it turns out the middle or youngest child can be more intuitive than the oldest child because the oldest child typically has to follow the rules. And when you have to follow the rules, you don’t listen to your inner voice as much.

So that explains why my sister is so much more intuitive and smarter than me. I get it now, okay.

By the way, I’m not sure if she’s smarter but right now I am sure that you see her as more intuitive.

No question about it.

Isn’t it interesting that that’s behind your question man-female because your sister you already knew is more intuitive? Thank you.

No, that wasn’t behind the question but I know that at times when you were talking about certain skills like this and we’re talking about emotional intelligence, there’s been different research showing that one gender might exceed another but also that’s like the number one question that we get in our coaching process. When I’m talking about emotional intelligence or the ability for empathy and some of the different components of emotional intelligence, people always ask “Well, as a man, can I still do well in this area?” or sometimes “Is this only something that I can do if I’m a female?” So I asked that from that perspective of what genuine questions I’ve received as a coach.

Well, first of all, I so appreciate that you’re asking and I do think it’s already, I know something about you and your sister, but I would say something to add to that is I do think that the challenge for men to use themselves in this way, I would just say, even though I’m not a man, my dissertation was actually on male generativity. So I must have been very interested in male leadership because at the time when I was coming up and doing my research, there were more male leaders in the world and I was just really fascinated. And I do think that the shoulds that men receive about allowing yourself to be vulnerable which is this new wow in the world, Renee Brown who talks about vulnerability is courage, well, for many men it also feels uncomfortable like there was no support for it. And yet that’s what the new call for that is because we know that it communicates authenticity to people. It says “I am like you. I also suffer if my child is not well, if there’s illness in my family.” And yet for men that’s probably a challenge. For women there is a different challenge about how to maybe package our emotional cues without this kind of stereotype that puts out “Well, it’s female thinking.” In fact, when someone says “This could be me. I’m a female,” I always say “Stop.” How do you frame it as an opportunity but once we start focusing on the gender, what happens is we get sometimes exclusionary. How do we become expansive and say “Yes, I know this is maybe I’m speaking as a female.” And what do all the men think or how do the men access? One of the things we know from the great Carl Jung is he said that as people get older at midlife that men tend to kind of bring up more of their feminine energies or they allow themselves to bring forward their softer side. And interestingly enough, as women come into midlife, they go the other side and pull up their more male forces. And it’s interesting as women come more into the work world, the male forces really help them manage and negotiate the world. So I would just say for the men and the women, we learn so much from each other’s genders, rather than exclude we include.

Yes, very much so. And to the extent that we can do that we become a better leader and certainly a better society.There’s something else that I learned a lot about in your program, your workshop. You talked a lot about presence and you talk about that a lot in your book as well. Can you tell us how presence helps leaders?

One of the things about it is everybody has a presence. You, me, anyone listening, we all have presence. The question is how embodied in our presence are we. So, so often as we review the day and we think about how we were somewhere and we think “What was going on with me that I was so distracted, that I wasn’t there?” And so one of the aspects about presence is “How am I here embodied in all of my strengths and responsible for my limitations but available to this moment?” And one of the things that we know when people are really present, they are more available to use their resources in the moment to support, and we like to say, what is wanted, needed or missing. And so this is the real reason, Eddie, that mindfulness now as a phenomenon is really growing in the world and particularly in the business world. Some five years ago there was a World Economic Forum in Davos, global business leaders come there, and there was a workshop on meditation and mindfulness. It was kind of well attended but the next year nobody could get into that room because leaders now understand that actually someone by the name of Anthony Grant says “It’s not efficiency that we’re really after. It’s the management of attention.”

Yes.

And the job of a leader is to help people focus on something. And so the management of attention is a management of focus. And presence is the embodiment of focus. And how can we be in the moment in a way that we are present? When we are present, people will feel more engaged with us. When we are distracted and not present, people feel like “Hey, you’re not there. Why should I be here?”

Absolutely.

Absolutely. So presence is this ability to be here and now and more available to be engaged with you. And here’s the other thing. There’s this phenomena called Mirror Neurons. I won’t get into the whole neuroscience of it but basically it means that people are always picking up the cues in themselves about you. If you’re present, they will be more present with you. And right there that is a business case for presence.

There you go, I love it. And it shows true leadership when a person is able to do that and incorporate that into their leadership style.You talk about so many wonderful things in your book. So that definition that we opened up with, Awareness IQ, Presence, all of those things are applicable to anyone in a leadership role and certainly for those who are leaders trying to help other leaders but, specifically, if you are individual listening to this episode and you are a coach or you are thinking of become a coach, specifically certified through the International Coach Federation, you want to have a copy of this book because I believe that there are several tools in here from Coaching Agreements to Coaching Competencies to Markers that you need to look for if you’re trying to pass your certification. Dorothy has packed it all in here. This is just a phenomenal resource. And so I enjoyed it and I think that anyone listening will enjoy it as well.

Thank you.

So how would you summarize our conversation today, Dorothy?

Well, first of all, I think you’re a great speaker, let me just say. I would say that for the record, and very inviting, but I would add in terms of where and what relevance does awareness and Awareness IQ and being more mindful and present mean for the leader and for the executives who coach leader because choice happens in the moment. And our challenge today is to know how to use the moment. They say that history is past and future has not arrived at the moment we have is where people feel more awake and have choice. The great Maya Angelou, poet, said “I may not remember what you said but I will remember what you made me feel.” It is our capacity to use the moment that allows us to support people’s feeling and remembering – Were we engaged in the moment or were we distracted? And I say that because all of us can really learn to be mindful and stronger and being able to use the moments. And the moments are what our lives are created out of. So I would just say there’s a good case to be made for that.And the takeaway, if you may allow me, for today, Eddie, may I offer that?

Sure, please.

The takeaway is many years ago Carl Jung said that everybody was going to become more psychological. I would say that everybody needs to understand themselves and each other and more urgently because the world is so intensely demanding but I think that there is a case for awareness because awareness is what drives choice. And when we know that we have awareness, we know we have choice. So my mantra is awareness without action can lead to regret. And I would say for anyone listening what are the awareness moments that you would like to commit to taking action on that lead to more satisfaction.

Awareness without action leads to regret. Well, thank you for sharing that. It’s been such a pleasure talking to you today. Where can my listeners learn more about you?

They could know more about me at GestaltCoachingWorks.com. We are redoing our website but that would be a lovely place to get in contact with me or at DorothySiminovitch.com. And I thank you for the invitation.

Well, thank you. We will put that in the show notes so that folks can reach out to you, connect with you, and follow you in all of the great things you’re accomplishing across the globe with the different communities that you are helping develop their credentials and spreading the power of coaching around the globe.Thank you for being on the Keep Leading Podcast.

Eddie, thank you for the invitation. And to all of you listeners, I thank them for their attention and their awareness. Thank you.

Thank you.And thank you for listening. That concludes this episode, everyone. I’m Eddie Turner, the Leadership Excelerator, reminding you that leadership is not about our title or our position. Leadership is an activity. Leadership is action. It’s not the case of once a leader, always a leader. It’s not a garment we put on and take off. We must be a leader at our core and allow it to emanate in all we do. So whatever you’re doing, always keep leading.