My first special place was the forest behind the house where I grew up.
It was a dense forest with trails and hills. After walking for a few minutes, you could no longer see the houses and felt like there were none around for miles. I felt like it was my second home, just for me.
One question people ask me frequently is:
"What sort of people get the most out of coaching?"
This question is a challenging question to answer and depends on the person. So many times, I have been conversing with people who think things are static until they mention a compelling insight that led to a major decision. In other words, it depends.
I was running late.
I came directly from work to meet my orthopaedic oncologist, Dr. B, to discuss some biopsy results. We had met multiple times previously and were on very good terms. Typically, we joked a bit before we got into things, but today, he ushered me into his office quickly.
I started working with a group that had an issue that was getting in their way.
All team members seemed to get along very well - with laughter and joking.
But something was bubbling under the surface.
We live in a time of constant busyness.
The thing is, we prefer being busy over actually doing less.
In her book Daring Greatly, Brené Brown , describes being “crazy busy” as a numbing strategy that allows us to avoid facing the truth of our lives.
"𝗦𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝘀 𝘄𝗮𝘆 𝗼𝗳𝗳, 𝗜 𝗮𝗺 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝘀𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗜 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗻𝘂𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝘄𝗮𝘆."
As I approached the summer break six years ago, I remember thinking exactly these words.
So I decided to go fly fishing in Yellowstone park with my father and brothers.
“Du är vacker“ (You are beautiful)
When I first moved to Stockholm, I noticed everyone walking fast—on the street and in the subway stations.
After I was amputated, I found this physically challenging as I could no longer walk very fast, even if I wanted to.
We are all in relationship and each has its own language.
Gary Chapmen introduces the concept that people express and receive love in different ways in his book "The 5 Love Languages.” He refers to these terms as “love language.”
When I often work with leaders or coaching clients, I ask if they are aware of themselves?
Most answer yes (the leaders almost always respond the quickest).
I follow that up by asking how they know this?
“If more people that I worked with were more coach-like my work life would have been so much more enjoyable.”
A thought that stuck me when I started my coaching training.
People become more coach-like from being coached.
I was in a Creative Writing class in my final year of high school.
I am trying to understand why I enrolled in this class. Although I struggled with English during school, the creative part seemed fun.
Many of the people that I speak with have clearly defined goals.
Others are less structured and are more playful in our conversations.
I sometimes think of the "junk drawer" I had growing up.
It was next to the 80's beige refrigerator over the bread drawer.
It was a mystery and filled with an assortment of stuff.
When I began working as an internal coach, I knew that to make a lasting impact it needed to more than just the coaching.
The right culture needs to be in place - you need to work to develop a 𝙘𝙤𝙖𝙘𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙘𝙪𝙡𝙩𝙪𝙧𝙚.
Through this process I have begun to sketch out a rough strategy how one can do this.
Describe sometime in the future. You decide how far and the context of this future scenario.
In this future place, you are living a fulfilled life - professionally, personally, financially, and physically - you decide what is important to you.
Describe what you will be doing in the future state. Where you are and who you are with.
A simple ritual for active listening is the ‘listening circle’.
You can make a listening circle as short as 15 minutes up to 60 minutes, or leave it open-ended.
Decide who you want your listening partners to be. They can be your team members or colleagues, friends or family members. With your listening partners, arrange a fixed time during the week when all of you meet in person or online with one intention and one intention only: to listen to one another.
There are good number of coaching books out there. If you are interested in incorporating more coaching skills into you relationships I have put together this reading list to start you off.
You will work a few years with Design in an organisation before you realise a large part of your job is to encourage organisational change.
This observation is something that I share with all of my design students.
They are usually surprised by this at first.
This fall, I started a new job, which means I have re-entered working in a larger organisation. It has been four years since I worked in such an environment, and I spent the last few weeks understanding the complexity that results when 500 people work together.
When I was younger, this created stress for me, but now being curious and okay with not knowing is something I enjoy.
We learn best when we are struggling with something.
How do you keep stepping out to the edge, so you are still struggling and learning?
Recently I was in a situation where I literally had no idea what I was doing. So for much of the engagement, I used my instincts and made many, many mistakes.
I kept moving on.
Management is a business skill.
If you want to become a better manager, read books about it, attend school and think rigorously about it.
Leadership, on the other hand, is a human skill.
To become a better leader, you need to be determined to be a better human. To do this you need to understand who you really are and develop some objective insights and who you really are.
I have always viewed design as a transformational activity.
You are introducing something new into the universe with a specific intent. We need to ‘be’ something new to create something new. While I often focus on the ‘doing’ or the activities of creating something, the real benefit for me has been the deeper understanding of myself through the process.
It is the ‘becoming’ not the ‘doing’ that is key to achieving transformational results.
During the conversations I have with Design Leaders, the question of how to manage difficult discussions comes up a lot.
These leaders find themselves managing many stakeholders and this often results in not satisfying someone, most of the time.
Although there is an individual need to make these discussions easier, I think there is an organisation benefit as well.
Handling difficult conversations well is a prerequisite to organisational change and adaptation.
November is always a very special month for me.
It is the halfway boundary of my year that allows time for reflection and gratitude.
For the last 15 years, I have been doing CAT scans of my lungs to check for tiny metastasis. Your lungs are very vascular organs, and if cancer is swimming around in your body, they typically show up here. The frequency has shifted, and the last few years are now every six months. November and June.
This is a photo from a year ago that I ran across after one of my many online meetings.
It was a good meeting but the angles of this photo summed my perspectives at the time. Living inside screens and speaking into strange devices.
I recently starting to have some in-person meetings and workshops and realised it gave a familiar but very different perspective.
Perspectives can be very powerful things and something that I often use in my coaching.
I’ve always liked to be prepared.
It makes me feel responsible when people say ‘We can always count on you to be prepared.’
When I’m doing something new, my typical plan looked like this:
learn, learn, learn, learn, learn, learn, learn, learn, learn…
A few weeks after I had passed my oral exam and finished coaching certification a close friend asked me a question:
‘What is the single most important thing you have learned from becoming a certified coach?’
I had to think about this a good bit since it was really difficult to distil everything I learned down to ONE thing. A better question may have been
‘What area of my life has NOT been influenced through this process’
When I was first diagnosed with bone cancer in my leg the doctors did everything they could to save my leg from amputation.
I had an excellent Physical Therapist named Suzanne who was 50 kg of pure energy.
One day after a session, when I was happy to be able to bend my knee 5 centimetres more she looked at me and said:
‘You are one of the most resilient patients I have ever had’
For most of my clients, I share a model early on that has been very effective for me to build my mental capacity to manage emotions. This is an important foundation.
Sometimes you need to get MESSy
Manager: “We need more psychological safety in the team”
Me: “How much more do you need?”
Manger: <silence>