kate - Author at AnD Consulting

Author Archive

The ‘and’ in AnD Consulting

Friday, February 12th, 2010

My business AnD Consulting is named to encourage living life in an and/both way instead of the either/or way our western conditioning taught us. I like telling stories to make sense of this rather abstract concept. Here’s one about decision making:

I’ve always done my best to trust my heart and my head when making decisions. I had a good reminder to ‘listen’ to my gut as well during a recent Leadership Coaching session.

My client was exploring the pros and cons of a big decision he needed to make. I invted him to reflect back on a decision that had, or had not, gone well in the past, in the hope this might shed further light on his current situation. “I’m thinking of a time when I ignored my gut feelings and just went with my head and my heart. I’ve been able to well and truly regret that one at leisure,” he said with a chuckle.

We mulled over what causes our gut feelings and decided they are our inner knowing, gathered from a myriad of past experiences, and that we could them our intuition.

So – all in all – my client and I came to the same conclusion; it’s important to trust our head, heart and gut when making decisions – be they large or small.

Can you recall a time when you ignored your gut feelings at your peril?

Tags: leadership coaching, Trusting head and heart
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Titillate your senses at a Learning Retreat

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

A pre-Christmas Learning Retreat client said her stay at Byrongerry left her with a multitude of sensory memories.

She wrote in the Cloud House guest book about the sounds of palm nuts dropping, whip birds whipping, cat birds screeching, parrots squawking and kookaburras laughing. As well as the sounds of Ruby the dog’s barking, Dorothy the cat’s tinkling collar bells and the water pump “paying homage to the great god of water.”

Her sense of sight was stimulated by the vista of trees, palms, hills, valleys – “verde, verde everywhere!” And her sense of touch by the massage she enjoyed.

She wrote of the fragrances of “giant gardenias, frangipanis on ancient trees and the overwhelming scent of blossom on the mimosas down the road”.

And all this as well as creating her vision for the next ten years of her life with the help of AnD’s Vision Coaching process!

Why don’t you think about treating your senses to a similar experience some time soon?

Tags: Learning Retreat, vision coaching
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Leadership Coaching Byron Bay style

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

Yesterday my neighbour Charlie hosted the Monday morning Spin Cycle program on Bay FM – our community radio station here in Byron Bay. His topic for the morning was leadership and he interviewed me about my work as a Leadership Coach. We kept the topic pretty light – January being holiday and beach time around here.

I quoted a piece from the Tao that says When the best leader’s work is done the people say: “We did it ourselves!” Then I told Charlie, and hopefully a few listeners, that I support my clients to be the best they can be; and with those who lead a team, we explore how they might lead in ways that mean their team says, “We did it ourselves”.

Do you agree with the Tao, and me, about this being a measure of an effective leader?

Tags: leadership coaching, The Tao of Leadership
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Chooks and the meaning of life!

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

I’m on chook feeding duties for the next few days while my neighbours are away. I’ve just been shown what to do – take any compost scraps I have and scatter them together with the special chook feed into the chook house, top up their water then check for eggs. There are three nests for the hens to lay in and this morning there was a broody hen covering the middle nest. My friend tipped her off and extracted four warm eggs as she explained that Rocky the Rooster doesn’t seem to be doing his thing at the moment – one hen sat for 3 weeks to no avail not long ago. Wow – I thought – how remarkable are the instincts that drive all sentient beings to keep their species going!

Feeling confident I’ll be able to manage my chook feeding duties OK I returned home where my thoughts turned to the human species. With the help of contraception most of us have learned to curb our sexual instincts and limit the number of children we produce. But I’m now wondering how driven are we nonetheless by our natural urges – just as that broody hen could sit for three weeks with no possibility of hatching some young? We get up, we go to work, we come home, we eat dinner, we go to bed and so the treadmill goes. Unless we choose to function from a conscious place and think about the meaning and purpose of our actions first. My meaning and purpose is to support others as they clarify and live their vision and purpose through my Leadership Coaching and Vision Coaching work – and, most of the time, this keeps me off the treadmill of life!

Do you ever make links between our feathered friends and the meaning of life?

Tags: leadership coaching, vision coaching
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A Women’s Retreat

Sunday, November 15th, 2009

I’ve just had four women on a Learning Retreat here at Byrongerry. I was a wee bit anxious in preparing for it because I’ve only hosted individual people or couples in the past. Would my energy hold up – in my roles of coach, chef and host??

I’m delighted to report that my energy did hold up and, at their final review over a cup of tea on the deck, each woman said their hopes had been met and that they were leaving feeling relaxed and renewed.

The women each had some coaching time with me and also attended a Self-Leadership with a Horse session with a colleague who lives nearby. I used a combination of Leadership Coaching and Vision Coaching processes in the women’s one on one time with me. Those I’d worked with before re-visited and renewed their vision while those who were being coached by me for the first time worked on a range of issues including, for one, that old chestnut of work/life balance.

I’m still pondering whether I will promote the Learning Retreat for more than singles or couples – it was a lot of work – yet, when I remember the happy conversations and laughter coming from the Cloud House building while they were in residence, I know the shared experience for these four women was one of the highlights of their stay.

Tags: leadership coaching, Learning Retreat, Self-Leadership with Horses, vision coaching
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Let’s hear it for the women of Australia!

Friday, October 30th, 2009

I’ve also written about this in the summer edition of my newsletter but I want to blog about it too.

My consulting life began in 1985 as an equal opportunity consultant. Back then I naively thought that equal opportunity and affirmative action law and policy would lead to a gender balance at all levels of the Australian workforce. As we women say, “we’ll know when we’ve ‘made it’ when they promote incompetent women as well as men”.

Yet, to my horror, I’ve just learned that the number of women on boards and in executive positions has declined in the past 3 years in Australia.

My optimism has risen once again since having Frances Feenstra as guest speaker at a recent dinner for achieving women in Melbourne. Frances is a member of the 100% Project, a not for profit company with a vision of “seeing 100% of Australia’s leadership talent, female and male, equally contributing to our social and economic future”. Hurray for them and I wish them very well in their impressive endeavours! If you would like to know more about the 100% Project contact them at [email protected].

Tags: Improving the Status of Women, the 100% Project
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Vision Coaching

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

“What is it?” a colleague asked me while I was in Sydney last week.

“Well, it’s a process my late partner Des created for me a long time ago when I was feeling stuck in my career, and it helped me work out what I wanted to be when I grew up. And here I am over 20 years on still loving being a Leadership and Vision coach!”

Des and I then wondered whether this visioning process would be of value to some of our coaching clients and this is when AnD’s Vision Coaching service was born.

Vision Coaching takes a minimum of 6 hours and, with the help of a work book, clients are facilitated through a process that helps them get in touch with their ideal future and then set action plans and timelines to make this dream a reality. Some clients do their visioning as an intensive during a Learning Retreat at my home inland from Byron Bay while others do it over a series of sessions in their home city.

I have facilitated dozens – maybe even hundreds – of clients through AnD’s visioning process and the feedback I get from people is that it works. Some tell me it reassured them they were already on the right path and enabled them to take the best next steps, while for others it helped them move in a totally new direction.

Here’s what happened for Mary Keely, former Director of HR for Pacific Brands, after she did AnD’s Vision Coaching process:

“With the appointment to this role I exceeded my original career vision because this was the HUGE role in a very large organisation that I once would not have dared stretch for. This is what is possible, this is the power of vision!”

Tags: Learning Retreat, vision coaching
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The power of an and/both way of viewing the world

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

I’ve recently experienced a first for me – I’ve had the privilege of providing a Vision Coaching session for three generations of a family: a mother, her son, his wife, their adult daughter and her partner. The mother/grandmother and the adult daughter and her partner live in Canada. The son/husband is Canadian and lives with his Australian wife in Australia where the session took place. This couple met in Canada, married in Australia and then lived in Canada for ten years. For the past ten years they have been living, together with their three younger daughters, in Australia. At this coaching session they articulated a five year vision of living a two hemisphere life in Canada and Australia.

To help them resolve what was feeling like a geographical impossibility I showed them a Dilemma Resolution model. This model suggests that with a clear vision of the future. we can let go of our western conditioning and embrace an and/both (yin/yang) way of being in the world.

The shift in mindset that this enabled around the coaching table led to some creative planning on how the Australian based members of this three generational family can make their vision a reality and live in both Canada and Australia over the next decade.

Postscript: This is a family of talented entrepreneurs who already share business interests in both the northern and southern hemispheres (see wwwbushmarketing.com) so, in my view, the sky’s the limit for them once they turn their and/both plans into reality!

Tags: Bush Marketing, Resolving Dilemmas, vision coaching
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The power of vision!

Saturday, August 22nd, 2009

I’ve just coached a long term client who told me she has resigned from what all those around her saw as her fabulous corporate role. Between this role and her last equally big corporate role she’d explored her vision and values at a Learning Retreat at my home inland from Byron Bay. The primary focus of her vision was to ‘enjoy the journey’.

Enjoy the journey

Over the past few months, as the scope of her role grew and she found she was being expected to do more and more tasks that didn’t play to her strengths, she told me she began dreading Monday mornings and longing for the next weekend – in contradiction to her commitment to enjoy every day. In fact she said she’d begun to feel she was gathering “black soot on her soul”. She made it clear to me that it wasn’t the fault of the organisation – she was just not a good fit.

Oh “the power of vision,” I proclaimed then added that it takes courage to have a vision, yet once you do it sure helps you be clear about whether you’re on the right path for you! No more “black soot” for this woman – she’s off to Earth and moon explore the possibilities of a portfolio career having thanked me for the clarity she got from AnD’s Vision Coaching process.

Tags: Learning Retreat, vision coaching
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Can women ‘have it all,’ ie motherhood and a career?

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

Work and family At the Byron Bay Writers Festival last weekend I attended a session at which Cheryl Kernot (ex leaders of the Democrats) talked about how hard it was having to commute regularly to Canberra as a Federal politician whilst raising her daughter, and Anne Summers (women’s advisor to Bob Hawke and Paul Keating) said she chose not to have children because she reckoned she couldn’t have been a good mum and fulfilled her career ambitions.

Anne and Cheryl are now in their 60s so ‘praps things have improved for women I thought to myself. But then my mind went back to the piece I wrote in the current Value Adding newsletter about the McKinsey Centred Leadership program for their emerging leaders, especially their younger women. The article about the program suggested that “women more often opt out (of corporate life) because they carry the double burden of motherhood”.

This suggests it’s still tough for women who want to ‘have it all’ in terms of a successful career and being the kind of mum they want to be. Sure there is now parental leave embedded in policy and practice. Sure there are more flexible working hours that makes the juggling act of career and parenting more do-able than in Cheryl’s, Anne’s and my day. But both these women declared, and I agree that, until organisations are led by more women and the kind of men who truly embrace the value of work places that are genuinely family friendly, it will continue to be tough for women to ‘have it all’.

And, just for the record, we AnD coaches support quite a number of executive and high potential women to be the best they can be at work and at home through our Leadership Coaching and Vision Coaching.

Tags: AnD's Value Adding newsletter, Byron Bay Writers Festival, leadership coaching, vision coaching
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