I heard US Poet Laureate Charles Simic respond to the question, “What is poetry for?” He reported that the best answer he has heard came from one of his students.
Poetry reminds people of their humanity.
Coaching conversations are poetry, too.
Werner Erhard
The Transformation of a Man:
The Founding of EST
by W. W. Bartley, III
This is the only book I ever found so useful, inspiring, and compelling that, immediately upon completing it, I turned back to page one and read it again. That happened fifteen years ago. I just finished reading it a third time and got just as much benefit again.
I first encountered life coaching and executive coaching in 1992 when I participated in the Forum at Landmark Education Corporation. As for many graduates, that weekend course remains one of the most beneficial experiences in my life. I continued to participate in Landmark programs and I became curious about the man who originated the work.
Werner Erhard founded est in 1971 and “The Training” became a major cultural phenomenon of the 1970s, with hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic graduates around the world, including leading academics, for example Harvard Business School’s Michael Jensen and MIT’s Warren Bennis, and many celebrities such as John Denver, Valerie Harper, Ted Dansen, and Raul Julia. Tiger Woods’ first and most important coach, (more…)
What coach has had the greatest impact on a client? The man with the strongest claim may be Earl Woods, whose famous client is his son, golfer Tiger Woods. How did Earl Woods become such a fantastic coach?
By studying, as I have, with the most important influence on executive coaching, Werner Erhard. Some of Earl Woods’s coaching wisdom is below, excerpted from the 1996 article in Sports Illustrated about Tiger being chosen Sportsman of the Year. It is all pure Werner Erhard.
“What I learned through est [created by Werner Erhard] was that by doing more for myself, I could do much more for others. Yes, be responsible, but love life, and give people the space to be in your life, and allow yourself room to give to others. That caring and sharing is what’s most important, not being responsible for everyone else.
“Which is where Tiger comes in. What I learned led me to give so much time to Tiger, and to give him the space to be himself, and not to smother him with dos and don’ts. I took out the authority aspect and turned it into (more…)
I watched the famous “Gloria” films this weekend, more properly known as Three Approaches to Psychotherapy. Gloria, the patient, generously agreed to have filmed sessions with each of the three great psychotherapists of the 1960s: Carl Rogers, Fritz Perls, and Albert Ellis. It must have been quite a day for her!
Carl Rogers actively worked to wrest control of counseling from the medical monopoly established by Freud and Jung, opening the work to (more…)
On Killing:
The Psychological Cost of
Learning to Kill in War and Society
by Dave Grossman
Capsule Review
I read this book and I review it here not because of any particular interest in sanctioned killing, rather because of my interest in institutional means of getting people to do difficult yet important tasks. I train salespeople and other business leaders.
I first heard the author, Dave Grossman, on a radio interview promoting this book. I heard him say that that in the history of combat from Alexander the Great through World War II only about 15% of soldiers in battle were trying to kill the enemy. He’s not talking about the long administrative and logistical tail of the army. Only 15-20% of the people with guns or swords in their hands, who were facing a threatening enemy, were willing to kill that enemy. I know this is hard to believe. I first heard this statistic from a pacifist and I called him a liar. Then I heard it from this author, a former US Army Colonel and military historian, who references the research of the US Army’s official W.W.II historian as well as many other scholars.
According to the social-brain theory, it was this need to understand social dynamics–not the need to find food or navigate terrain–that spurred and rewarded the evolution of bigger and bigger primate brains.
This isn’t idle speculation; Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist and social-brain theorist, and others have documented correlations between brain size and social-group size in many primate species. The bigger an animal’s typical group size (20 or so for macaques, for instance, 50 or so for chimps), the larger the percentage of brain devoted to (more…)
Marshall Goldsmith, nearly always introduced as “America’s foremost executive coach,” has written some fine books and helped many executives. My only complaint is that what he does, in my experience, is advising and consulting not executive coaching.
The vital difference is evident in his post today at the Harvard Business Review website, How to Spot the Uncoachables. Goldsmith describes his executive coaching clients in negative terms more appropriate to a particularly judgmental therapist than a respectful coach: “wrong direction,” “fix behavior,” and “It’s hard to help people who don’t think they have a problem.”
How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? (more…)
- The discomfort and frustrations caused by the status quo (boss, partnership, promotion, home/work balance) are significant.
- Commitment to the process: seeing the personal, long-term benefits, making the coaching cycle a priority in terms of time, attention and homework.
- The person being coached understands what it means to (more…)
Coaches are in the business of helping people to reflect on their assumptions and behaviors. Then we help them to widen the space of possibilities as they formulate life choices, make interpersonal decisions, set strategic directions and sometimes, simply, know better who they are.
Yet, when it comes to making important long-term behavioral changes, the transformation is often slow to come. Why is it so hard to put knowledge into practice? If real learning means that people transfer knowledge into action, what’s missing? How do we best facilitate this growth for our clients, turning mental states into personal traits?
–Dr. Marcia Reynolds
The Water We Swim In:
A New Look at Cognitive Evolution
[Complete article is here, on page 2.]
Years ago, when I was new to being coached, I experienced a fundamental attribute of transformational coaching. I was completing a fantastic call with my coach, Mary Arzt. I had done a lot of venting and whining. I had seen some new possibilities. I, ultimately, had gotten clear and excited about the steps I would take into my future. A fantastic coaching call. I thanked my coach for the generosity of her listening and the power of her insight.
At which point, everything had been said and there was nothing left to say. The coach let the silence continue and we sort of basked in that rare space of nothing to do and no place to go: just perfect. At some point, my ego started to second-guess the just completed conversation. My ego realized that I had revealed (more…)
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