The Lead Well Development Process
Our approach to your development privileges your strengths, draws out your potential, and takes into account the many systems in which you live and operate.
Drawing from the human sciences, we consult, facilitate and coach your growth and development from an integrated, ontological perspective. This is a joint effort. We work together to discover how you think about an issue, how you feel about it, how you currently act toward it. And to explore your alternatives for change.
We favor active engagements: you will generate a list of To-dos during our conversations for immediate action to support your developmental objectives.
We also prefer relatively short-term engagements, not dependency. Our objective is to help our clients develop capacities and skills they can draw on for a lifetime.
Our Approach to Development
Clients often ask, “What’s your philosophy of coaching?” Our approach to your growth draws on our commitment to five central tenets of human development:
- Idiosyncratic Interpretations. Based on the findings of cognitive science, we know that each person perceives, and acts out of, a highly individualized perspective on the world. In light of this, no standardized assessment/profile/inventory can reveal your depth. That’s because no such standardized instrument can capture the complexity of human sense-making. To fully understand a person’s actions requires understanding, through dialog, of how they construe their world. Through our conversations, you will understand both yourself and your take on the world with greater clarity –– as well as perceive more choices for yourself –– than ever before.
- Potentialities. Each of us enjoys multiple possibilities for growth and development over a lifetime. There is no one ultimate potential. One’s personal potential is a product of individual biology, their particular circumstances, the developmental opportunities they encounter, and the choices they make. Each developmental goal should be selected intentionally, informed in the fullness of rich self-understanding and by the context of current circumstances. Your potential, and your goals for its realization, may shift through the course of your life. Development, therefore, is always conducted in the context of at this time.
- Systems. Each of us participates in the dynamics of the multiple, complex social systems of which we are part. We cannot stand apart from, nor act independent of, those systems. At the same time, we exert influence on those systems. Our actions, therefore, are both functions of and contributors to the systems in which we operate. That means that you affect your world; the changes you make in yourself inevitably will affect your environment. When you change, the world changes.
- One-Life. In the course of daily life we move from environment to environment (such as from home to work and back), and from role to role (such as spouse, boss, son or daughter, community member, and so on). However, these variations do not exist in isolation from each other. As we move, we carry inseparable influences from one domain to another. Our identity is in part a function of this holism. Any intentional personal change is most effective when it encompasses a full recognition of the whole Self.
- Strengths. Intentional, volitional development is most effective and most meaningful when it builds on a person’s inherent strengths. The opposite of one’s personal strengths is not weaknesses. It is limitations and absences: every one of us lacks some capacity. We only “have a weakness” when we pretend to harbor a strength that we lack. In development, focusing on strengths tends to provide greater leverage than striving to redress one’s deficits. (Should Yo-Yo Ma set aside his cello to spend more time practicing the tuba?)
Our developmental conversations build on who you are so you can discover and develop who you are capable of becoming.
To arrange a convenient time for your complimentary, no-obligation coaching consultation, please send a note to Info@LeadWell.com.