I met up with my friend Gillian yesterday. Like me, she’s perhaps a frustrated introvert – very comfortable being out there in front of a room, but less keen on being the in-your-face face of a brand. As we chatted about the shift from contractor/freelancer to entrepreneur, and being front…
Browsing Category Coaching
Coaching: Three agendas for exploration
This is part of a series of articles derived from my coaching certification assessment. There are numerous coaching models used in certification programs: this particular one focuses on three agendas; presenting, deeper, and transformational. Here’s a brief breakdown of each of those three agendas, along with an example from a…
Group Dynamics: Sitting in Circle
If you’ve spent any time in coaching, meditation, education, mediation, or consulting you may have heard the phrase or performed the activity of sitting in circle. At its simplest, a group comes together to share ideas and experiences on a particular topic. And they do so sitting in a circle….
The Vessel & The Lens
Last week I had lunch with a friend who, like me, is a recent graduate of a coaching certification program. [1] As we compared notes on our various projects, I used a word I’ve been thinking about quite a bit recently with regard to my new venture. The Vessel. I…
The Music Industry’s 73%
This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the top 1% of musicians accounted for 60% of concert revenues – up from 26% in 1982. The top 5% of artists get 85%. Yesterday this popped up on my Twitter feed: In another post, I wrote at length about the challenges…
Book Request: The Coaches
Note: this is an idea I am getting rid of (for the foreseeable at least) Coaching has exploded in popularity over the past decade. Starting in the world of sports, before being embraced by senior executives in the business world, coaching is now a practice utilized across technology startups, the…
Coaching for creative inspiration
A key component of a coaching certification program is to get coaching. Not ‘get’ as in ‘understand’, but ‘get’ as in enrolling with a coach. Becoming the client. There are some obvious benefits to this: learning new techniques and approaches from another coach; putting yourself into the shoes of a…
Overrated Mentors, Underrated Coaches
Mentoring and coaching often get thrown into one bucket. On the surface they sound pretty similar; practices that help people make progress. However, go down a layer or two and there are a host of differences (I wrote about these here). Broadly speaking, mentors are people who have trodden a…
Learning Styles: 3D Mapping a Conversation
One of the learnings from being a student again has been around my own learning style. Other than a few short courses and MOOCs I haven’t done much classroom-based work since university – and that was nearly 15 years ago. The delicious irony here is that much of my work…
What the music industry’s people need next
As the music industry’s resurgence continues, its people need support now more than ever. There’s opportunity to further embrace a contributor to success in tech, sports, and other industries. We’re now living in a world that’s more prosperous than at any time in history. Standards of living are increasing. Extreme…