Canterbury Coaching

I just came across an interesting book that has the same title as the subheading for my coaching site: “The Art of Possilbity:  Transforming Professional and Personal Life”  by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander.  It was the title of the book that grabbed me initially and the guts of it that kept me reading.
This is a book about changing the way you think about things and using a new framework for the assumptions you make about life’s circumstances.  The book is organized around a ’set of practices’ each with stories and examples that furnish the reader with easily remembered ‘catchphrases’ that help them stay or return to the land of possibility vs. the land of desparation and gloom.

This book helps the reader uncover and then examine the assumptions that may be at play in guiding their life and uses the approach of true inquiry to boldly look at those assumptions, assess yourself and be encouraged to try on a new way of thinking and a new set of assumptions that really make all the difference.  Check it out from Penguin Books.  You might genuinely be ‘lighting a spark’ which is the ninth practice introduced by the Zanders in the book.

I’ve had an interesting set of experiences this last year that combine my love of horses with leadership and coaching. Whether you are a horse lover or not, working with horses can be a powerful medium in your coaching and consulting work.

One organization that uses horses in their work is Participative Designs in Canada. Check out what they’re saying at their site.  Very intriguing.

Just yesterday,  I met with a horse trainer and a coach who do work with individuals and groups based on emotional intelligence.  Their approach is that to gain self-awareness, the first of four sub-sets of emotional intelligence, interacting with a horse and paying attention to your thoughts, emotions and body can quickly help you tune into patterns you may be unaware of. Without self-awareness (as a leader, a coach, a trainer, etc.) you can’t begin to move to self management.  I experimented with this approach under their tutelage and it was a profound learning experience.