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Archive for February, 2012
Posted on Tuesday, February 28th, 2012
Tags: Awareness, Change, Coaching, Discovery, Neuroscience, Transition
Categories: Awareness, Change, Coaching, Discovery, Neuroscience, Perception, Transition
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 In the Foreword to David Rock’s Your Brain at Work, Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long, Daniel J. Siegel, M.D., clinical professor at UCLA School of Medicine and Codirector of the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center, succinctly states, “The mind… uses the brain to create itself.” Siegel advocates that learning to live with the brain in mind allows you to regulate the flow of energy and information in your work, allowing you to become more effective and to achieve greater work satisfaction.
David Rock is neither a psychologist, neuroscientist, nor medical professional. He is a consultant, leadership coach and the CEO of Results Coaching Systems. But this work is well researched, clearly written, and highly accessible. I had first become acquainted with the Rock’s writing through his earlier work, Quiet Leadership. One of my coaching colleagues told me that she had been using Your Brain At Work as a reading with one of her coaching clients and I decided to investigate. Keep Reading »
Posted on Thursday, February 23rd, 2012
Tags: Awareness, Balance, Change, Coaching, Discovery, Happiness, Money, Neuroscience, Perception, Relationship, Spaciousness, Transition
Categories: Awareness, Balance, Change, Coaching, Discovery, Money, Neuroscience, Purpose, Relationship, Spaciousness, Transition
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 If you have been following my writing for any appreciable period, you will see that one of the foundational elements of fulfilled living is awareness. I sometimes referred to it as spacious awareness, to emphasize that you frequently underestimate how profound awareness can be and how, once you have the opportunity to plumb its depths, awareness can begin to change your life. Look at the subjects we have covered in recent months – parenting, forgiveness, atonement, learning disabilities, listening and storytelling. All provide the opportunity for richer and more engaged lives. But all rest on the foundation that you are sufficiently aware of yourself, the parties with whom you are engaging and the environment you inhabit in order to produce positive outcomes. Keep Reading »
Posted on Tuesday, February 21st, 2012
Tags: Awareness, Balance, Change, Coaching, Discovery, Perception, Relationship, Transition
Categories: Awareness, Balance, Change, Coaching, Discovery, Happiness, Perception, Purpose, Relationship
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 I am one of those folks who likes to stay really busy. And, for the most part, it works very well. My life is “balanced” because I make room for what is important to me, do that first, then get to the rest, as time allows. But every once in a while, my system breaks down. I saw it coming a few weeks back, as I readied for my winter vacation in Crested Butte, Colorado, which begins shortly. Due to circumstances well beyond my control, I was concurrently negotiating a series of agreements for one of my most valued clients; preparing for the merger of my law firm into a larger national firm as of March 1, 2012; trying to sell my parents home as the co-trustee of my father’s estate; renegotiating three leases on the estate’s commercial property; refining the book outline for my next book, which will be co-authored with my wife, Nancy; preparing my next monthly Daily Journal column; and researching and writing my twice-weekly blog posts, all while trying to keep up with the homework in a year-long professional speaking program conducted by the National Speakers Association. Whew! And, sorry for that extraordinarily long sentence. Keep Reading »
Posted on Thursday, February 9th, 2012
Tags: Appreciation, Awareness, Body / Mind, Change, Coaching, Curiosity, Death, Discovery, Generosity, Grief, Love, Meditation, Narrative, Perception, Relationship, Spaciousness, Spirituality
Categories: Awareness, Body/Mind, Change, Coaching, Curiosity, Death & Dying, Discovery, Generosity, Love, Meditation, Optimism, Perception, Pessimism, Relationship, Spaciousness, Transition
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 Integral Intelligence (II) refers to that state of being in which you are concurrently aware of and able to utilize your other intelligences synergistically. Moreover, II allows you to overcome the compartmentalization, limitations and distortion which may arise from allowing one intelligence or another to dominate from time to time or in certain situations. Here are some simple examples. You may not function well intellectually, emotionally or socially when you are hungry or verging on illness. An astute somatic awareness will alert you to the risks of certain undertakings, such that you either proceed with caution or postpone them to another day. Or, you recently have experienced a death in the family and are grieving your loss. You recognize that your emotional state will impede your somatic intelligence, so this is not the time to go rock climbing. You choose to go for a hike, instead. Or, you’ve worked for twelve days straight, without a break, and are invited to an evening of socializing with friends. You recognize that you lack the physical energy as well as the mental acuity to effectively engage a social situation. So, instead, you take your partner out for a quiet meal. The permutations are limitless. But the higher functioning to be realized from acknowledging the interdependencies of the various intelligences and working with them integrally cannot be overlooked. II is an intelligence not much recognized beyond a small circle of psychologists, philosophers, educators and coaches. It is not been the subject of protracted study, although various authors such as Ken Wilber, Ervin Laszlo, Peter Senge, Robert Sternberg, and others have been building a framework for its definition and wider acceptance. Many have begun to equate effective leadership with high II, all though I know of no metric for its measurement that been established. Keep Reading »
Posted on Tuesday, February 7th, 2012
Tags: Appreciation, Awareness, Change, Discovery, Generosity, Happiness, Listening, Love, Relationship, Separation, Transition
Categories: Awareness, Balance, Coaching, Discovery, Generosity, Happiness, Listening, Love, Perception, Relationship
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 I am wary of the term “spiritual intelligence” for the misdirection it may infer. Spiritual intelligence (SQ) has no necessary connection to religion. There are many humanists and atheists who have very high SQ, while there probably are an equal number of outspoken religious devotees who have very low SQ. I am a secularist. I prefer to reference this intelligence as “more than me” intelligence (MTM), simply to confirm its secular base. This intelligence includes the ability to create a life dedicated to the benefit of all beings, not just you, your family, friends, cohort or clan. It rests on an awareness of and assessment of meaning and value, with which you can place your actions and lives into a wider, richer context. It manifests in your ability to initiate and sustain practices that strengthen your connection to all people and all living systems. It is an intelligence that is suffused with awareness, empathy, compassion, kindness, generosity, and wisdom.
Danah Zohar and Dr. Ian Marshall write in SQ,The Ultimate Intelligence,
Human beings are essentially spiritual creatures because we are driven by a need to ask “fundamental” or “ultimate” questions… We are driven… by a specifically human longing to find meaning and value in what we do and experience. We have a longing to see our lives in some larger, meaning-giving… context we have a longing for something towards which we can aspire, for something that takes us beyond ourselves in the present moment, for something that gives us and our actions a sense of worth… Keep Reading »
Posted on Saturday, February 4th, 2012
Tags: Appreciation, Awareness, Body / Mind, Change, Coaching, Discovery, Fear, Generosity, Happiness, Listening, Love, Meditation, Perception, Relationship, Spaciousness, Trust
Categories: Awareness, Body/Mind, Change, Coaching, Curiosity, Discovery, Fear, Generosity, Listening, Love, Meditation, Perception, Relationship, Spaciousness, Trust
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 Social intelligence refers to your competency to successfully engage others, leading to mutually satisfying relationships. It includes the ability to listen deeply and communicate profoundly with widely diverse individuals and groups. It involves seeing the world from others’ perspectives, the ability to collaborate on problems and co-create outcomes, as well as the ability to effectively compromise, allowing your desires to be subsumed for the benefit of the relationship, all without sacrificing your worth or dignity. Social intelligence generally is not a fixed attribute. Rather, it is an ever evolving complex of information processing skills, which can be modified to alter attitudes and behavior. Social intelligence should not be conflated with social skills, which constitute only a subset.
According to Daniel Goleman, in Social Intelligence: The Revolutionary New Science of Human Relationships, parent-child responsiveness creates the path for parents to help their children “learn the ground rules for relationships — how to attend to another person, how to pace an interaction, how to engage in conversation, how to tune in to the other person’s feelings, and how to manage your own feelings while you are engaged with someone else.” These rules form the foundation for competent social living. According to Goleman, children lacking synchronous parenting are at risk of growing up with disturbed attachment patterns. Children raised by attuned parents tend to be secure; while anxious parenting yields anxious children and aloof parenting produces avoidant children. The attachment style of a parent predicts the child’s social style with about 70% accuracy. Keep Reading »
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In the Foreword to David Rock’s Your Brain at Work, Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long, Daniel J. Siegel, M.D., clinical professor at UCLA School of Medicine and Codirector of the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center, succinctly states, “The mind… uses the brain to create itself.” Siegel advocates that learning to live with the brain in mind allows you to regulate the flow of energy and information in your work, allowing you to become more effective and to achieve greater work satisfaction.
