psychotherapy, counselling, business coaching, organizational consultation, entrepreneurship, family business consultation
- Career Anxieties
This is how she remembered what her husband had said: ” Your preoccupation with work is destroying this family. We can’t take how wretched you’ve become.”
And as she told it, she’d successfully kept her underlying depression at bay for years. But 18 months of unemployment— which were the busiest months of her life as she [...]
- A New Transition: Rethinking Career
“It is exhausting?” (Yes it is)
“Is it necessary?” (Yes it is)
“I’ve never worked harder in my life” (Probably true)
“Is there a “There” there?” (Barring unforeseen circumstances, of course…)
Questions and answers between clients and psychologist: reporting back on the work necessary to create the successful transition between “what was” before unemployment, underemployment, the current savings-account spend-down [...]
- Executive Coaching, Greek Sovereign Debt, & Market Bubbles
This week’s mighty global market turbulence gripped both our attention and stomachs. Naturally, it entered consulting discussions as clients reflected on their relation to markets.
Some thoughts:plentiful and current over-supplies of information, facilitated by technology, allow market participants to react more quickly (also helped by technology) than ever before
while we react to momentary market shifts—for example, [...]
- Becoming a (Professional) Executive Life Coach
Perception is everything. And sometimes, it takes a bit of questioning for our own perceptions to align with others’.
Recently, a client informed me that I was an Executive Life Coach. She of course, was the executive. And it was her life that I was coaching.
She recognized too, that while she might otherwise call our work [...]
- SWOT in Psychotherapy and Executive Coaching
SWOT analysis is a familiar tool in strategic management. Typically, it presents 4 scenarios: 1) the strengths of the organization as it surveys the world; 2) the weaknesses of the organization as it surveys the world; 3) the opportunities in the world as surveyed by the organization; and 4) the threats that the world poses [...]
- The Corner Bank or Saturday Night Live?: Getting a Loan, Part 2
The saga of the business loan continues. The wise bank branch manager has explained to me that the bank is looking for any reason to turn down loans, “we’re now in the loan denial business.” So I thought I’d listen to her “creative” idea for securing small-business bank money. Just another neighborhood banking service. Here [...]
- Case Study: Uncertainty and the Questionable Productivity of Certainty
Certainty is a momentary phenomenon of rootedness in the passing of time. The certain is the unchangeable, the fact of the present as it recedes into history. Beyond the unchangeable, looking forward, is the highly probable. Given what we know in the present, what do we see coming next?
With slightly more uncertainty, we enter the [...]
- WKI: Charles Handy’s Corroboration
Here is the link to Charles Handy’s Marketplace podcast. Definitelty worth listening to– though I may be biased; but the world we’ve been describing is the one he is describing, too.
The time has come for invention and innovation: especially if you’re over 50!
- WKI: Minding the Reluctant Entrepreneur
Entrepreneurship is as old as time. Its rules of engagement are as culturally embedded as Monday Night Football. For late-comers to entrepreneurship, our municipalities sponsor public entrepreneurship centers, our universities sponsor executive MBAs, and mini-MBAs or “boot camps” proliferate both as private enterprise and through grass-root outreach.
The Working Knowledge Initiative approaches entrepreneurship under a very [...]
- Working Knowledge Initiative: Entrepreneurship is Making Use of Reciprocity
A question from a client who’d worked in the non-profit sector throughout her professional life got me to thinking. She was adamant that entrepreneurship meant exploitation. And committed to community building, she was concerned that personal gain meant diminution of the common good.
On reflection, what she’d left out was reciprocity. The only way that community [...]
