Visual Storytelling
Lark’s Song crew at Mental Health Matters Day - A Family Wellness event!
Visual Storytelling
This September we focused on visual storytelling and the impact this has on our brand as coaches as well as creative ways to incorporate visual storytelling in group and individual coaching.
Choose Aliveness
At our Co-Lab Conference call in September, we had discussion and learning around Visual Storytelling with Will Smith (designer and videographer) and Justine Bunger (LSCC and photographer).
Below you will find a link to the conference call recording - in case you missed it.
This call was filled with practical tips and tricks to enhance your coaching brand (like how to have a great profile photo on social media) as well as tools to use visual storytelling with clients. It’s definitely worth the watch!
Working with the Westminster Preschool staff for Culture Care. They continue to bravely learn and grow as leaders to the next generation!
Discover Purpose
This Visual Storytelling tool was developed by LSCC Justine Bunger to be used for both individual as well as group coaching. With the use of collage, group or individual clients have the opportunity to visually create what their life looks like now and where they want to be. This tool is highly adaptable and can be used in a variety of different coaching scenarios.
See link above for access to this new tool!
Develop Potential
LSCC Matt Thomann introduced us to the Online Random Photo Generator.
We love it so much, that we just had to pass this tool onto you!
Appreciative Inquiry process with a Creative Agency at Lark’s Song.
Lead to Serve
Your Profile Photo Matters
Justine Bunger here (LSCC since 2017 and Lark’s Song Collective Coach) taking over for Megan this month for “Lead to Serve.” As a Professional Photographer and Coach, one of the areas I see the most frequently where coaches struggle is their profile photo on email, social media platforms, etc. The worst part is though, most coaches don’t know that they are struggling and how easy it is to have a MUCH more professional profile photo.
Your profile photo matters. This is usually the very first impression client have of you and your coaching practice, so having a dimly lit, low quality photo makes your professionally quickly lessen in the eyes of client. The great news is this: It’s a pretty easy fix!
Have your headshot taken by a professional photographer or studio. This may sound expensive and time consuming, but here’s my inexpensive trick of the trade: If you just need one photo, go to JCPenney. Yes, I said JCPenney. It’s fast, inexpensive and they usually do a decent job.
Always choose a white backdrop. Always. White backdrops are timeless, classy and modern. It’s also easy to alter your image as you will see below.
Want to jazz up your headshot? You can add trendy flavor to your profile photo by using an app called Pixelcut. Pixelcut will remove anything in the background of your photo and replace it with any color that you’d like (I almost always stick to white, but there are other fabulous, trendy options available (see below) depending on your personal coaching brand.
Additionally, maybe you have a headshot that you really like, but the background is dark or dated. Use Pixelcut to make your background white or something trendy as shown below:
Lastly, make sure to upload the same profile photo on all platforms that you use with clients: electronic business card, your email profile photo, all social media platforms, etc. Having a consistent, professional profile photo goes a LONG way in your professional branding as a coach.
Have questions? Please don’t hesitate to email me at justine@larkssong.com
Reflection Questions:
What can you imagine would be better?
What’s your plan for moving forward?
If your life were written into a book or put on a screen, who would be the B characters that you’d want to be sure played a part?
Affirmation: I am imaginative and brilliant. I empathize quickly and compassionately with a different point of view. I can craft new ideas and plans with ease and joy.
Empathy to Imagination
Wade Brown and Ericka Shelton try art-assisted coaching at their Experience-Assisted Onsite.
Create Courageously
This month we’ve been focusing on the empathy to imagination continuum. At our Co-Lab Conference call in March, we had discussion and learning around this theme with a specific focus on crafting Guided Imagining scripts and experiences.
Here are some favorite guided imagining tools from your fellow LSCCs:
Choose Aliveness
In this skill refresh, we give you access to the latest Cultivating Creativity webinar where Megan describes the empathy to innovation continuum and how you can use that with the Life Gallery Exercise to create new options for reflection and moving forward.
You can find a copy of the Life Gallery Exercises here:
Life Gallery - Part 1
Life Gallery - Part 2
Life Gallery - Part 3
(As a reminder, please do not copy any images or content from these presentations without our written permission.)
Matt Thomann (C18), Megan Gilmore, Erica Eyer (C2), Will Smith (C11), and Torri Williams (C16) at the end of a long but fulfilling day co-leading an Appreciative Inquiry Summit.
Discover Purpose
We’ve been working for the past few years on Guided Imagining scripts and recordings developmentally designed to explore and develop life purpose literacy in children. These guided imagining scripts can be used with children, couples, families or adults to explore a range of topics during coaching sessions or as homework in between.
Three meditation recordings are already available on Spotify with more coming soon. And below are a few of our favorites!
A Safe Space by Erica Eyer
My Heart by Erica Eyer
What Are You Packing? by Anthony Eyer
Bravery Tree by Erica Eyer
Diane Hunter (Miami Nation Historic Preservation Officer) and Anthony Eyer (C7) realize that they’re relatives at the Myaamia Ribbonwork workshop.
Develop Potential
A favorite guided imagining tool for the Lark’s Song staff is the Inner Witness! We love it so much, we have now integrated it into our nature-based experience assisted training day for the LSCC program. If you’ve never done the Inner Witness for yourself, take the time to listen to the recording below, take some notes about your experience and process it with a coaching colleague. The script is available for you as well to use with clients as you think it will serve.
Art assisted well-being session with Westminster Preschool staff.
Lead to Serve
Bottomline: According to the Lincoln Center Institute, imagination is the ability to conceive of that which does not yet exist. As professional coaches, we work with clients every day that are seeking new insight and a clear path of action toward something in their life that has not existed yet. Anything that you can do to bring more imagination, more empathy, and more creativity into your sessions will also result in more insight and innovation.
I was listening to my dear friend talk to my daughter on the phone a few weeks ago about the classic story A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. My daughter has now read the book, seen the movie, recounted the story, and is working her way through the graphic novel. And my friend’s question to her was this: “Did you like this story best on a screen, in pictures or in your imagination?” While it was really difficult for her to decide, she ended up landing on the opinion that the story is SO good in all of its forms, but she liked it first and best in her own imagination - and then, she loved seeing how other people imagined it in pictures and on a screen.
What did you imagine your adult-life would be like when you were a child? What kind of person did you imagine you would be? What did you imagine you would spend your time on and love? What do you imagine your present life looks like to others outside of you? What does your present-self imagine you will be like in another 15 years? What kind of person will you be? What will you spend your time on and what will you love?
In a special edition of Time Magazine called The Science of Creativity, Jeffrey Kluger says, “The imagination network, which allows the brain to do previously untried things with the information the executive-attention network has provided […] has a role in planning and daydreaming.”
I take my plans seriously! So I had never considered that when I make one, it’s really just me imagining a best-case scenario and what actions would be needed to possibly arrive there. I think this is really hopeful! As a professional coach, you may be more stylistically prone to action and planning or maybe more to insight and daydreaming, but either way engages our imagination network. Either way, we’re conceiving of things that do not exist yet based on the limited information that we do have. So what if we made multiple plans and what if we dreamed multiple dreams?
Let’s try this month to imagine a new way of preparing for a coaching session, a new way of implementing it, a new tool that feels brave to use, a new question to ask, a new tool to create, a new way of partnering professionally! Let us know what you can imagine - we’d love to dream and plan with you!
Reflection Questions:
What can you imagine would be better?
What’s your plan for moving forward?
If your life were written into a book or put on a screen, who would be the B characters that you’d want to be sure played a part?
Affirmation: I am imaginative and brilliant. I empathize quickly and compassionately with a different point of view. I can craft new ideas and plans with ease and joy.
Assessment
Justine Bunger and Erin Davis co-leading at Foundations of Coaching (E20) in Phoenix, AZ.
Create Courageously
This month we’ve been focusing our attention on assessment. At our Co-Lab Conference call in February, we had discussion and learning around this theme with lots of great resources and take-aways shared.
Here are some suggestions from your fellow LSCCs on assessments to consider adding to your practice:
Languages of Appreciation
Barrett Personal Values Index
Kolbe A Index
VIA Character Strenghts
Gallup Strengthsfinder
The RHETI (for Enneagram)
Universal Beliefs List (for exposing limiting beliefs)
Choose Aliveness
In this skill refresh, we give you access to the Assessment lecture being used in the LSCC training program. You can also find the presentation slides for your quick review here.
(As a reminder, please do not copy any images or content from these presentations without our written permission.)
That one time that Brooke Corbett (E20) decided she wanted to be “all-in” at the beginning of the day and then got Ursula the Sea Witch during the expanding range activity - during which she and her client (Erin Davis) jumped into the pool with all their clothes on and continued to coach for another 5 minutes.
Discover Purpose
We have been loving using the Barrett Values Personal Assessment for our coaching clients at Lark’s Song. Greg Fiebig (E18) discovered this free assessment and shared it with us. We wanted to be sure you had it in your toolkit too. It’s free, takes less than 15 minutes to complete, and the results include a couple worksheets that integrate well into a coaching session or coaching homework for in-between. Values are especially important to assess if your client objectives are related to their fulfillment.
Ericka Shelton, Traci Renbarger, and Gavin Rulon (E20) learning about values on Day 2 of Foundations.
Develop Potential
A go-to resource for us in determining where a client is and where they want to go are assessment wheels. There is such a huge variety available based on your client needs and your niche. Below are some of our favorites, and you can always create your own! Let us know if you have.
Megan Gilmore and Erica Eyer doing a Settle Your Glitter classroom visit. There were over 100 children that learned about their brains, their emotions, and how to manage them when they became too much in one week with 5 classroom visits for 2nd-6th grades.
Lead to Serve
Bottomline: Assessment is the process of discovering where you are and where you want to go. Assessments can come in the form of tests or tools, but as coaches we only use assessments as tools. And the client is still always the expert on whether or not an assessment tool works for them or doesn’t.
While we often think of assessment tools, as standardized questionnaires that give us a report that take a shot at explaining our infinite uniqueness through categorizing sub-sets of strengths and gifting, those are not the only tools you have at your disposal as a coach.
I wanted to remind you of the following assessment tools in your coaching toolkit and encourage you to grant power to your coaching relationship by co-creating an assessment process that empowers your client and their agency around exploring where they are, naming it, and then clearly envisioning where they want to go.
Here are some options outside the ones already mentioned in this newsletter:
1. Set strong coaching objectives and check-in on them regularly both in and outside of session
Refer to last month’s newsletter for additional details if you’re curious about how to improve in this area.
2. Participate in or Request Guided Imagining
We’ll be focusing on this more in the month of March, but there are a plethora of options to choose from - including House of You, Future Self, Inner Witness, The Tree, and 16 different scripts from our Little Larks Meditations collection.
3. Your Client’s “little a agenda” in Each Session
Are you setting a clear agenda with your client in each session and checking at the end to what insight they’e gained and what action they want to take moving forward? To establish a clear agenda, ask your client what they would like to focus the session on (topic), where they are around that right now (current reality), and where they’d like to be by the end of your time together (desired reality). Then see if there are any expectations or hopes they have for you as their coach as you navigate that topic together (design the alliance).
All coaching assessments should be from an appreciative perspective of the client’s uniqueness, value, wholeness, and creativity. The results should give you and your client more resources for solving complex problems and putting your client in a place of conscious, resonant choice. If that’s not what’s happening, then use a different assessment or conference it with a coaching colleague so you can create a way to approach it more masterfully or bring it to a coaching supervisor for some feedforward and instruction.
Lastly, assess yourself! Where are you as a coach and where do you want to go? What are your assets, strengths, and unique resources and how are you synthesizing those into your coaching practice to serve your clients fully and from your best?
Reflection Questions:
What do you really like about how you do assessment?
What would do you wish you could provide for your clients that you aren’t yet?
When you get really curious, what do you wonder about? What’s out there that you haven’t discovered yet? Or perhaps, what do your clients need that you could create?
Affirmation: I am wise and see clearly where I am and where I am going. I am always transforming, always whole, always ready.
Discovery & Coaching Objectives
We are celebrating the beginning of a new year AND the start of our TWENTIETH LSCC training cohort! What a milestone!
Create Courageously
This month we’ve been focusing our attention on the discovery process and coaching objectives. At our Co-Lab Conference call in January, we had discussion and learning around this theme with lots of great resources and take-aways shared.
Here are some suggestions from your fellow LSCCs on items to include in your pre-discovery client education:
Put coaching concepts into a metaphor that’s easy to explain and easy to understand
Share a bit about yourself as the coach (a written or video bio)
Send a discovery questionnaire (Be sure to ask what prompted their interest in coaching and if they’ve been coached before.)
Send them an example of a coaching agreement
Acknowledge the courage and commitment of a client to participate in the coaching process
Choose Aliveness
In this skill refresh, we give you access to the latest Alliance & Client Management lecture being used in the LSCC training program. You can also find the presentation slides for your quick review here.
(As a reminder, please do not copy any images or content from these presentations without our written permission.)
Example of presentation slides from Alliance & Client Management Lecture.
Discover Purpose
This video was submitted by another LSCC during our monthly Co-Lab conference call, and we thought it was a great resource to share with all of you. If you have a potential client that’s interested in coaching but unsure of how it’s different from other professional roles, try sharing this video that makes clear distinctions between the differences and review our “What is a Coach” handout.
Brittany Ussery (E17) and Anthony Eyer (E7) packing up for Made Wild - Fall 2021.
Develop Potential
Up your coaching discovery by reviewing and refreshing your discovery coaching questions regularly, as well as your discovery forms. Check out some of the form examples in our updated LSCC Toolkit.
(You’ll need to request to be added to the folder once you click on the link.)
And here are some of our favorite discovery questions from recent LSCC grads:
Identify 6 objects or pictures - 2 objects or pictures to represent your past/younger self, 2 to represent your current self, and 2 to represent your future/older self (Elizabeth Sparks)
What song makes you feel on top of the world? (Brittany Ussery)
What is one thing people get wrong about you? (Stephanie Haglund)
Who is in your “fan club”? (Matt Thomann)
What if you were brave instead of perfect? (Tamara Rulon)
Brittany Ussery, LSCC (E17) submitted the most excellent, personalized, and professional discovery process we received in 2021. If you’re interested in an example of how to set up your discovery process with clarity so you and your client both know where you are, where you’re going together, and what it’s going to look like along the way, take a look at this example that Brittany has generously given us permission to share with you. Please do not copy or duplicate without her permission. Her contact info is in the Co-Lab Directory, if you have any questions or would like to connect with her.
Megan Gilmore - doing a lot of coaching work from the home office these days.
Lead to Serve
Coaching is ALL about insight (new learning) and action (new habit creation). The first without the second feels awe-inspiring but lacks any substance that will evoke transformation in the client’s whole person. The second without the first is initially motivating, but ultimately hollow and disconnected from the client’s soul.
The coaching discovery process is the time to set the stage for this kind of professional relationship to happen. If I could say one weakness that I see in our LSCCs, it’s that they err on the side of focusing too much on the insight and not enough on the new habit creation.
Once you’ve gotten over your “fix it” addiction, the cozy place for a coach to land is in the middle of these deep, curious questions. The better you get at them, the better you listen and the more insight comes up for your client. And we want that, but if you ONLY stay in the curious questions, you are amputating some of the most powerful skills and competencies you can bring to a coaching relationship. Things like making distinctions, blurting your intuition, risky requests, bold challenges, championing your client to the unimaginable, and rigorous accountability. This is when it becomes incredibly important to clearly understand your client’s coaching objectives - that “Big A” agenda that’s established during the discovery process.
The two things that must be accomplished during your discovery process are:
1. Establishing a strong designed alliance
The assumptions, agreements, and safety norms that this professional coaching relationship will operate from, a strong designed alliance means that the client and coach know what to expect from each other, what each person is committed to, and what will happen if something goes wrong.
2. Co-creating the client’s coaching objectives
One to three coaching objectives is recommended for each client that you’re working with. These objectives should be clear, measurable, motivating and personal to your client. Whether or not the coaching objectives are met will be your indicator of whether or not the coaching is successful.
Bottomline, if you leave a discovery process without a strong designed alliance OR without clear coaching objectives - you’re not done yet. These are the necessary building blocks for all of the international and national professional coaching competencies to be met, as well as the best way for you to ensure your practicing ethically.
I usually like to set a general theme or category for each coaching objective (often taken from a PERMA+ME Wheel or other coaching assessment wheel), and then establish a clear objective with the client for that category. Below are some examples from a few of my 2021 coaching clients:
Leadership Development (wants to be someone worth listening to): Will craft message and support web in the next 6 months. In three months, will be speaking once a month to 10-25 year olds.
Relationships: In 3 months, managers will be acknowledging progress. Over the next 6 months, will practice and grow in new behaviors like listening, acknowledgement, emotional intelligence, and tailoring communication.
Meaning - Will have 4 clear, viable options for purposeful direction in 6 months. (Metaphor = moving from disorienting, black void where we can't find bearings to mapping the territory)
Engagement - Will feel more confidence (solid 7 - 9 on a scale of 1-10), this looks like walking into a room like I know what I’m doing, being trustworthy to show up as myself
Positive Emotion - On a scale of 1-10, will move from a 2 to 10 on “Joy” and 8 to 1 on “Guarded” in the next 6 months.
Reflection Questions:
What would be gutsy for you in your coaching relationships this month?
Do you find that you err more on hyper-focusing on insight or on habit creation in your coaching practice? What practices and accountability might you need to balance become more balanced?
What skills and competencies do you avoid and which ones do you default to?
How can you stretch your range in service of your clients?
Affirmation: I courageously move toward insight and action to embody and increase flourishing in and all around me.
Why Coaching
Angela Herrington (LSCC E3+15), Megan Gilmore (Executive Director), Cathy Weatherspoon (LSCC E7), Shayona Funches (Well-Being partner), Torri Williams (Intersectional Engagement Director + E16), and Liz Grider lead as breakout speakers for the Bloom Conference in June 2021.
Create Courageously
One thing we keep hearing when former participants come back to assist at current onsite trainings is something like, “Oh my goodness! This is so different.” It’s richer, fuller, more trauma-informed, more grounded in current research, more robust…if you can imagine.
So, we want to be sure our entire LSCC Community has access to the training program content as it is updated. To that end, for the rest of this year, we will be focusing our newsletter themes on the different virtual workshops offered through the LSCC training program. You’ll receive the current lecture, presentation slides, and what we call “next level extras” to go deeper into each topic.
As we explore Why Coaching in this newsletter, check out what Cindy Solomon has to say in her TED talk about Building Courage. Lark’s Song directors Megan and Torri, as well as LSCCs Angela and Cathy were able to lead breakouts at the Bloom Conference this month where Cindy was the keynote. She’s now a big Lark’s Song fan!
Choose Aliveness
In this skill refresh, we give you access to the latest Why Coaching Lecture currently being used in the LSCC training program.
Presentation slides from the updated Workshop 1: Why Coaching Lecture
Discover Purpose
Why Coaching lecture presentation slides for your review and development. Please do not copy any images or content from these presentations without our written permission.
Cohort 18 getting started at Foundation of Coaching June 2021.
Develop Potential
The 2021 World Happiness Report is now available!
The World Happiness Report is a publication of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, powered by data from the Gallup World Poll and Lloyd’s Register Foundation, who provided access to the World Risk Poll. The 2021 Report includes data from the ICL-YouGov Behaviour Tracker as part of the COVID Data Hub from the Institute of Global Health Innovation.
MPowering Youth visiting Lark’s Song and other businesses in downtown Marion to expand their imaginations about what is possible for their futures.
Lead to Serve
Sometimes, I forget. Sometimes I forget about how powerful the work we do is - how much it matters. I forget because this work of transformation can become familiar.
I remember one time after I came home from an onsite about four years ago, my husband, Evan asked me, “How’d it go?” And I said, “It was great.” Then went about getting some food ready in the kitchen. He stopped me and made it quite clear that that was not an acceptable or sufficient answer. Evan had gone through the LSCC training program with Cohort 2, and he said he knew how much it changed people’s lives. He wanted details. I started praying then that transformation would never become too familiar. I prayed that i would always, always be struck or held in awe of that - and to be honest, sometimes it takes some deep intention and attention to make sure that happens.
But earlier this month, we had a group of 22 children from our community come into Lark’s Song because their leader wanted them to tour downtown businesses so they would be inspired to expand their imagination, so they could envision greater things for themselves and their community. I welcomed them in and listened as Torri Williams, our Intersectional Engagement Director, told them what Lark’s Song was and what we do here. Then she bottomlined the whole thing by saying something like, “Lark’s Song is a place where we help people make dreams come true. What’s a dream that you have?”
It took my breath away and tears sprang up in my eyes.
For a moment, I was able to hold in wonder and appreciation the flourishing that has flowed from our office on the corner of 4th and Washington into our community - above our heads, across the street, down the sidewalk, on every side of the square, I could see the dreams we helped come true. And I remembered, why coaching for me!
Reflection Questions:
Why coaching?
How has transformation become familiar?
In what ways can you reawaken wonder and tune your attentiveness to the flourishing around you?
Affirmation: I am a courageous co-creator of transformation - first within myself.
Assessment
Evan and Megan Gilmore doing the day-to-day work at Lark’s Song.
Create Courageously
Assessment is so important! As coaches, we need to have our finger on the pulse of where our client is and where they want to go, and THAT is what assessment is all about. It can expand our curiosity, ground us in this present moment, and give us clarity on how to best champion our clients forward.
We love assessment wheels around here! And we have a new one for you - the Couples Coaching Wheel!
Choose Aliveness
In this skill refresh, Megan explains how to set up each session and your documentation to create a regular rhythm of assessment in each and every session.
Amanda Granger (E14) at Experience-Assisted training onsite 2020.
Discover Purpose
Remember taking the IMAGE (Intrinsic Motivation Assessment Guide & Evaluation) in the training program? For the rest of 2021, we can offer IMAGE assessments for FREE to Co-Lab members, just email megan@larkssong.com when your clients are ready to take it and she’ll send you the instructions. These assessments are $30 a piece to non Co-Lab members.
Cohort 11 being wild and weird.
Develop Potential
One of our very favorite assessments is the VIA Character Profile. The profile is free for your clients with a fully customized landing page for you! You can create your own customized professional link (ex. http://larkssonginc.pro.viasurvey.org) and the assessment has been translated into 109 different languages and standardized across cultures globally. You’ll also find many additional supportive resources with a quick Google search or YouTube query to deepen you and your client’s understanding with the tool.
Megan - still in a pandemic - still doing most of her work from home. Getting ready to record a Skill Refresh for y’all here.
Lead to Serve
Whenever I get to a new place, I do two things: 1) arrange my space and my things so that everything has a home - this could be in a bag, shelf, drawers, wherever and 2) find a map and figure out what’s around me - this might look like a paper map, Google maps, those little binders in hotels or driving around to see where I am in relationship to where everything else is.
If I’m rushed into the next thing before finding my bearings, I become preoccupied with just getting through whatever is happening until I can. I become easily distracted and unfocused, and it’s difficult for me to enjoy my time or show up fully. It seems like this might be a good metaphor for the purpose and impact of assessment in coaching. It’s a way of looking at your map and realizing with clarity where you are, where you want to go/what you want to do, the resources you have at your disposal, and even what some optional routes might be to get there.
While assessment is an essential coaching competency to attend to and practice for your clients, it also serves to assess yourself as a coach. Where are you? And where do you want to be? What resources do you have available to you? How will you get there?
Reflection Questions
If you created your own coaching development and performance wheel, what would be on it? How do you continue to expand your range and not fall into a default coaching style that only relies on a few coaching skills to get by? Where do you want to be as a coach and what supports and disciplines or practices will get you there?
Take a look at the core coaching competencies put forth by the International Coach Federation and be really honest with yourself about where you excel and where you need to challenge yourself toward growth.
Affirmation: I see myself clearly. I am growing and changing daily, and I take responsibility for my development, performance, and impact.
Coaching with the Soul
Create Courageously
So you and your clients are really rockin’ that saboteur awareness and calling out imposters, gremlins and limiting beliefs like crazy! But what’s next? The multiplicity of our internal resources is vast and as we focus on the whole person of our client, we can call in other parts of them to champion, advocate, declare truth, and express compassion toward themselves as they grow and transform.
One of those internal resources for flourishing is what we call the Inner Witness. You can find a script for guided imagining to meet your Inner Witness in the Coaching Resources section of the Co-Lab, and now there is a recording as well. Use this to work through the imagining yourself or share with your clients as homework in-between sessions.
Choose Aliveness
In this skill refresh, Megan explains a definition of the soul and its function and ways that we can help our clients access that dimension of themselves for increased flow experiences.
Team Coaching using the RHETI Assessment in Fall 2020
Discover Purpose
Do you love the Enneagram yet? We’re big fans. There are so many different ways of understanding and using it in coaching! If you’d like to start using the Enneagram with clients, here are two things that will help:
1. The RHETI - This assessment has the best test-retest reliability when compared to other Enneagram assessment tools, and we love the extensive and insightful report that you and your clients receive. You can set up a business login through Enneagram Institute or email assess@larkssong.com and order your codes directly from us.
2. Enneagram Spring Summit - Mark your calendars for April 18th and May 2nd from 1-4 and 6-9 PM EST! Megan and LSCCs Seth Harshman and Christina Crump will be serving up some real Enneagram goodness. Registration starts on March 7th (and you can use your LSCC Co-Lab discount)!
Joe DeGraaf (Cohort 12) at Coaching & Self….gettin’ it. (Jill seems to be having a very different experience.)
Develop Potential
Check out this incredible article authored by Joe DeGraaf, LSCC (Cohort 12) and published in Choice Magazine on using the Enneagram to “dive deeper into awareness coaching” with your clients.
Megan, Aubrey (C12), and Erica (C2) having SO much fun at group coaching and well-being training with the Westminster Preschool staff in February 2021.
Lead to Serve
Awhile back, I was just starting Lark’s Song - and in all my feels! I did not know how to resolve the tension between wanting to serve people by offering exactly what they said they needed by managing myself into something that might be able to deliver that OR following flow and resonance and just creating what I was inspired to create. So, of course, I brought this to a coaching session, and my coach said something that I still have on a post-it note on my mirror. She said, “Megan. What you have done so far is a pilot that proves that what you create serves!”
She was essentially saying that this is a both/and situation, not an either/or. She was also saying that I couldn’t create without serving or serve without creating. And I think that, perhaps, this was when I first started to recognize that I could not sustain this work without offering reciprocal hospitality for my soul within myself.
We work hard as coaches to create spaces and sessions where our client’s souls are safe to show up. Those shy, wild, unique and interdependent parts of themselves. However, it is equally important that we put effort in to creating soulful habitats for ourselves - that as we are triggered by the transference of clients’ topics and working through our own transformation, we make space and time and ritual for grounding, nourishing and welcoming ourselves home within our own bodies and our own physical environments (offices, homes, etc.).
The more space we give our souls to show up, the more we will see them. The more intentional we are about creating physical safety by crafting invitation through our five senses, the more our soul is beckoned forth. Your soul is the part of you that is inextricably linked to your identity and sense of aliveness. It is distinct yet interconnected to all the other dimensions of your self - body, mind, heart, and spirit. Your soul’s function is to organize the other parts of yourself into aligned wholeness. And just like anything else, making sure the dimensions of your self function properly often takes learning, unlearning, relearning and deliberate practice.
So what might practicing coaching with the soul look like for you this month? I bet whatever the practice creates will serve.
Reflection Questions:
What environment(s) make my soul come alive?
What do my senses notice about those environments? What do they look, sound, smell, feel and taste like?
How could I intentionally introduce those sensory elements into the space where I practice coaching?
Which of those elements might I be able to carry with me wherever I go - possibly in my wardrobe or pockets?
Affirmation: My soul is good and whole. I prioritize creating a hospitable place for it within myself and my world.
2021 Reciprocal Hospitality
Cohort 16 prepares for the Rapid Prototype phase of their Appreciative Inquiry process at Coaching & Systems.
Our 2021 Agenda
Our “big A” agenda or theme at Lark's Song for 2021 is Reciprocal Hospitality!
In short, this idea that if we continue to carry our assumptions about humanity into the world through and beyond coaching, we arrive at an understanding that flourishing happens in spaces that generously offer freedom to recreate and transform ourselves in a mutually beneficial give and take. This commitment to giving and receiving hospitality from the places where abundance and ease flows into joy and connection takes a bit more communication and creativity than some other approaches, but it grants power to the relationships we hold instead of structures that we inhabit.
I was thinking about our upcoming staff and board retreat on March 19-21st and thought it would be so cool if it were "hosted" by our LSCCs. This retreat is the time of year when our board and staff come together to reflect and report on the previous year and connect, dream and plan about the one in front of us. Would you be willing to host us?
Here are some ways:
1. Prayer and Encouragement
Could you mark your calendars for March 19-21st and commit to pray for us during that time? Could you send a video message of encouragement to our board and staff? Could you send a written letter or card of gratitude or acknowledgement that we could put on the table that we gather around?
2. Gifts and Care
We will have 14 participants at the retreat. Could you send a small gift for each person's welcome bag based on a unique skill or resource you have? Could you provide a gift certificate for a service that you offer? Could you care for the team in a way that makes sense for you? Maybe a recorded yoga flow just for us? Or those socks you love to knit? ;)
3. Food and Lodging
Our retreat will be in Indianapolis, Indiana and usually costs between $1,500-$2,000. Could you sponsor our stay at a space you have access to? Could you provide snacks or a meal? Could you give toward the cost of this special time on Venmo or CashApp? Could you support our rest and nourishment in another creative way?
I am so confident in the courage, generosity, and abundance in this community, and I am so grateful to be a part of it. I can't wait for us to be able to host you at the Soul Care | Skill Share retreats and trainings this year!
Let me know what you can give that would be just a blast for you to share with us! Can't wait to co-create this with you for our most dedicated folks!
Here are some additional things you can look forward to in 2021 for the LSCC Community. There will be more to come, but take care to plan now for these opportunities for connection and mutual growth.
1. ASSISTING IN 2021:
All of the dates for the 2021 cohorts have been set, and we have the assistants that we need for the first one in Phoenix, AZ. The other 8 onsites for the year are currently up for grabs! Priority goes to Co-Lab members (and you can use the sign-up form in the Portal - your member home). If you're not a Co-Lab member, you can check the dates at larkssong.com/lsccprogram and email me to request an onsite.
All assistants volunteer their time and must be available for both days of the onsite.
2. CONTINUING EDUCATION & PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT:
LSCC Soul Care | Skill Share Retreats: This year our spring and fall Soul Care | Skill Share retreats will be on May 29-31, 2021 and October 16-17, 2021. I am SO excited about these two retreats. The one in May will be in Wabash at our favorite Charley Creek Inn and focus on training in research and evidence-based modalities and interventions in Well-Being. Participants will actually be able to receive the Lark's Song Well-Being Certificate (new in 2021) upon completion. Cost for the weekend is $1,200. And the retreat in October will focus on Embodiment & Equitable Practice and will take place at West Baden Resort in West Baden, IN. Cost for the weekend is $750. May's retreat will also be available virtually. Sign ups for both will be up soon, but I wanted to be sure you save the dates now. Both retreats are eligible for ICF Continuing Education hours, and LSCC Co-Lab members can use their 20% off benefit on either as well. Scholarships and pay-what-you-can options will be available for both retreats.
Neuroscience, Trauma, and Belonging Webinar: In 2020, we added this three-hour webinar as a requirement for LSCCs-in-training. If you have not completed it yet, the next one is on Saturday, March 6th from 9:00 AM-12:00 PM EST. It is a pay-what-you-can with a suggested donation of $25.
3. LSCC CONNECTED COMPLETION:
I started meeting on Sunday afternoons at 2:00 PM EST with anyone that is wanting to finish up their certification but has started to feel isolated, stuck or unmotivated. We've only met twice, but we already have two folks that are finishing their final exams this week and a bunch of progress is being made. We essentially check in around what you still need, brainstorm and problem-solve about how to make it happen, and encourage and inspire each other through relational connection. We're going to do this every Sunday afternoon until February 7th and then reassess what is needed.
Completing 2020
Cohort 16 at their Coaching & Self onsite - December 2020
Create Courageously
At the end of each calendar year, we create a process for clients to reflect on the year behind and move forward into the year ahead. The 21 Questions for 2021 can be shared as a resource with your clients or used as inspiration to create a similar end of the year tool for your own coaching practice.
Choose Aliveness
In this skill refresh, Megan reviews the Perspectives coaching tool and why it is an excellent choice for co-creating with your clients as they transition into a New Year.
Megan being Megan with her Neu Year Calendar.
Discover Purpose
One of our favorite planning tools is the “Year at a Glance” Calendar from Neu Year.
Purchase and use this calendar as a way to intentionally pursue harmonious life rhythms and well-being practices throughout the year by putting it all down on paper.
BONUS: Speaking of calendars, have you tried Calendly, yet? Tired of going back and forth in emails and texts just to set up you a client appointment during an available time? Calendly links your Google Calendar and gives you a customized link to share with clients so that they can go on and schedule for themselves. You can set up email and text reminders, work flows, customized availability and even the amount of time you want between sessions. We’re big fans!
LSCC Cohort 1 - February 2015
Develop Potential
This month two of our LSCCs were published in the European Journal of Applied Positive Psychology! Let’s celebrate Dr. Erin Davis (LSCC C1) and Dr. Levi Huffman (LSCC C1) for their article Positive Psychology During a Pandemic: REFRAME for Well-Being . It is an excellent tool for understanding how to adapt your coaching process to serve your client’s flourishing during this time.
Lead to Serve
So we’re here, at the end of 2020! Well done. You made it! I have officially declared Rihanna’s “Take a Bow.” As my farewell anthem to 2020. The chorus goes something like this:
But you put on quite a show
Really had me goin'
But now it's time to go
Curtain's finally closin'
That was quite a show
Very entertaining
But it's over now
(But it's over now)
Go on and take a bow, oh
Lark’s Song looks very different than it did at the beginning of this year. We’ve persevered through many challenges and losses, and we are incredibly grateful for how each of you that partnered and co-created with us this year sustained us.
We have plans for a new coaching collective in 2021, new cohorts - including one in Phoenix, AZ, new board members coming on, a Well-Being Certificate and Enneagram Qualification Course to launch, a book club, trauma-recovery programming to develop, LSCC Soul Care | Skill Share retreats, Made Wild wilderness excursions, and a new Story Medicine Gathering to launch.
While we have lost a lot in 2020, I know that after death comes transmutation and after transmutation comes rebirth, we might even be so bold as to say resurrection. My hope for you as you release 2020 is that it creates space for hope to run wild in your heart and that you will bear witness to both the death and the resurrection that that is in and all around you.
Go on and take a bow, my dear!
Affirmation: Hope runs wild within me as I bear witness to death and resurrection in and all around me.
New in the News
Participant materials at Experience-Assisted onsite for Cohorts 14 & 15 in August 2020
Create Courageously
We have all spent a lot more time in virtual environments this year, and we have learned a lot about how to co-create those environments as welcoming spaces for individuals, groups and teams to be coached effectively. Use this Virtual Workshop Instructions Template to communicate with virtual group coaching participants how to prepare themselves and their space before your workshop or group sessions begin.
Choose Aliveness
In this skill refresh, Megan describes how to make sure your documentation aligns with ICF’s Gold Standard in Coaching. ICF has been releasing 2020 updates to their Core Competencies, Competency Level Markers, and Ethics in 2020. They have even added Team Coaching Competencies this month! This is great new for LSCCs.
Outside with our equine coaching partners at the Experience-Assisted Coaching onsite for Cohort 16 in November 2020.
Discover Purpose
Usually we’re waiting for people to catch up to scientific discovery. In pioneering fields like coaching, though, we often find ourselves waiting for the research to catch up. The advances that are being made in scientific research to support and sharpen our practice in this era are incredible! (Google “Interpersonal neurobiology” and “positive neuroplasticity” to geek out about it). Check out this collection of articles curated by Dr. Rick Hanson.
Nature-Based coaching completion at Experience-Assisted onsite for Cohorts 14 & 15 in August 2020.
Develop Potential
Last year, CoActive Coaching published a new (5th) edition of its book. In it, the authors make the shift from professional coaching relationships to taking the CoActive Coaching principles into any “coaching conversation.” They also underwent an entire rebranding process and edited many of their worksheets and resources. Login to the updated CoActive Coaching Toolkit for updated forms, checklists, and worksheets.
Len (LSCC E9) and Katie (LSCC E11) demonstrate coaching perspectives tool at Coaching & Self onsite July 2020. So happy to have added them to our training co-leaders this year!
Lead to Serve
This year our LSCC Co-Lab newsletters started by introducing the PERMA+ME well-being model to you and devoted one month to each of the seven facets of well-being. We then focused last month on coaching groups and teams!
At our first staff meeting every month, we start by asking, “What new in the news?” And everyone shares the things that they want everyone to know about. This month, I wanted to share with you my “New in the News” as it pertains to coaching - some of the things that I am most excited about that are emerging in the field of coaching as well as what we are looking forward to for 2021.
First off, we’re going to make it! What a thing. Secondly, in this season of gratitude and preparing for winter, what a perfect time to partner with nature and the season to reflect, renew ourselves, and dream.
Here are some of the things we’re dreaming of implementing in 2021:
- A 16 week Well-Being Certification
- An Enneagram Qualification course
- Audio meditations and guided well-being practices on Spotify
- Virtual coaching groups
- Writing, publishing and presenting
- A new Lark’s Song Coaching Collective
- ICF Accreditation and Continuing Education options
- LSCC Community coaching retreats
- Made Wild: Wilderness Coaching Excursion
We hope to continue blazing trails and becoming better and better at what we do while attending to access gaps and inequities in coaching and well-being across the profession. Mostly, I hope to fall in love again and again with this work.
After an onsite a few years ago, I came home and Evan (my husband) asked me how it was. I replied something like, “Oh. It was fine.” He just stared at me and said something like, “Are you kidding me? Tell me what happened. I’ve been through the program. I know it was more than fine.” Evan completed the LSCC training program with Cohort 2. I realized that day that the content, the process, the energy, the transformation was all becoming familiar to me. And I started praying then a prayer that I pray now regularly, “Please, let me never become familiar with the transformation of a human life.”
As we enter into a new season together, be attentive to what has become familiar to you. Notice the process of transformation within, without and all around you. Be curious about what dreams you have yet to dream for yourself, the spaces you inhabit and this global community we find ourselves in. Assess what is needed for your renewal and nourishment and be audacious about creating space for those things.
Reflection Questions:
What is care is needed for my body, mind, heart, and spirit as I come to the end of this year?
What New in my News that I’d like to share with someone?
If I could only work 2 hours a week on my dream, what would I do?
What if finishing well were easy?
Affirmation: I am healing, whole and ready.
Coaching Groups & Teams
LSCCs partnering for 2018 Fierce Gathering (a group coaching event) created by Katara McCarty
Create Courageously
One way to set the team or group that you are coaching at ease and to make sure that the same thing is being communicated to everyone about why you are working with them and what to expect is by sending out a team memo after receiving their contact information from a team leader. Here is an example of a team coaching memo that you can adapt, edit and use with your team coaching clients.
Choose Aliveness
In this skill refresh, Megan describes how to set up group and team coaching experiences by creating a flow with an icebreaker, deicer, designed alliance, and group coaching activity.
2019 Annual Day of Aliveness community coaching event put on by Lark’s Song in Marion, Indiana
Discover Purpose
Simplify your team discovery process by having team coaching participants complete Team Discovery Questions before starting your coaching sessions. You can use the form provided here as a guide in created your own customized discovery questions for your practice.
LSCCs come together to provide group coaching for student leaders at Mississinewa High School after murder/suicide of fellow students in February 2018.
Develop Potential
When you're coaching groups and teams, it can be helpful to have some supporting resources like booklets, worksheets, structures, supplies and presentation visuals. Here is an example of a booklet that we use when doing Appreciative Inquiry Summits with smaller groups and a presentation deck that we customize for virtual team coaching.
Made Wild Wilderness Coaching Excursion (October 2018)
Lead to Serve
The best advice that I can give as you look to expand your capacity in coaching groups and teams is three-fold:
1) Get a coaching mentor
2) Keep practicing as an assistant at group or team coaching experiences
3) Never do it alone…like ever
Group and team coaching is still a relatively new practice when compared to other group and team approaches historically, and as LSCCs, you bring the added rare element of knowing how to craft an experience-assisted coaching relationship that is incredibly powerful but difficult to find models of in books and podcasts right now.
And if you haven’t joined in our monthly conference calls yet, it is a great place to connect, brainstorm, and connect with LSCCs and the resources that they so generously share. There are so many books written every year on group and team coaching too! So many tools being created and articles being published!
Keep learning! Keep sharing! Keep co-creating.
Achievement
Create Courageously
One of our favorite coaching resources to use for the achievement facet of well-being is the Future Self guided imagining activity. Try using this activity to co-create measurable goals with your client and their future self.
Choose Aliveness
In this skill refresh Megan explains the well-being facet of Achievement, and it’s importance in moving us toward fulfillment and flourishing together.
Megan Gilmore, Vanessa King, Angela Duckworth, Erica Eyer, and Aubrey Baker at the World Positive Education Accelerator in Dallas, TX (June 2018).
Discover Purpose
One of the greatest indicators of success is not talent, but rather grit - this combination of passion and perseverance that keeps us going toward our goals when things get hard. Angela Duckworth is the leading research in grit right now. You can use the Grit Scale that is available on her website to gain awareness around the current level of grit in yourself or your clients.
Develop Potential
Check out Angela Duckworth’s 6-minute TED Talk on Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.
Lead to Serve
I was listening to a coaching podcast awhile back with Amanda Blake, and she shared a quote that a mentor had shared with her about awareness and practice that has stuck with me for weeks. She said, “Awareness creates choices. Practice creates capacity.” What an excellent way to bottomline to process and power of coaching. As we work with our clients to gain insight and new learning, their awareness expands and creates choices. I love how Jami Taylor has made that phrase, “That’s a choice?!” so popular when we run up against options that we didn’t realize were options before. And yet, if we stop at that aha moment without setting goals, crafting practices, and creating new habits, we will never increase our capacity for growth, greater capacity and that satisfaction that comes with more self-efficacy (this belief that we have what we need to overcome challenges and learn new things based on what we know about ourselves).
As someone that has struggled with feeling trapped in my own perfectionism at different times in my life, achievement can be a difficult facet of well-being for me to navigate with wisdom and precision. I love the adrenaline rush that comes with meeting my goals and the aliveness that I experience when I’m willing. I have also experienced the pain and depletion that comes with adrenal fatigue. So let me remind both of us, that we are already worthy. Our achievements do not make us more valuable humans, our performance does not make us more worthy of love, and we do not have to betray ourselves to get some place “better.”
Setting long-term, specific goals for ourselves and helping our clients to do the same with their coaching objectives (Big “A” agenda) is not optional if we also want to meet our human needs of significance, contribution and growth. Start dreaming big! Write it down. Say it out loud. Create your steps and get some accountability in place. The world needs exactly what your soul longs to create for it!
Reflection Questions:
What is the vision of something better that I see?
What difference does my soul long for?
What if I only had to subtract to get to where I want to be?
What practices can I begin that will increase my capacity for my goals to become reality?
Affirmation: I am worthy of all good things without adding anything. I can create good things for myself and for others - even when it gets hard.
P.S. Try creating a “Gritty Playlist” for yourself that you can play to get yourself going toward your goals when the going gets tough.
Mindfulness + Embodiment
Create Courageously
Mindfulness - Excuse me! Did you hear that Katara McCarty, LSCC developed an emotional well-being app by and for BIWOC. It's incredible. Use it for yourself, use it for your clients. The app is call Exhale....and it's incredible. There is breathwork, meditations, daily affirmations that come up as notifications on your phone, guided imaginings (you'll recognize some of them and some of them are brand new), and additional resources for anyone to listen to. You can download Exhale on the App Store or Google Play. And check out her article in Forbes.
Embodiment - There is so much happening in the field of interpersonal neurobiology and Amanda Blake has taken the research and applied it specifically to coaches! Check out her book The Body is the Brain: Leverage Your Somatic Intelligence to Find Purpose, Build Resilience, Deepen Relationships and Lead More Powerfully on Amazon. AND take a listen to her podcast on Coaches Rising (AWESOME PODCAST!) here.
Choose Aliveness
Mindfulness - Refresh! Remember that we have all sorts of resources available for kiddos. Both the script and the audio for a meditation called the Bravery Tree - written and read by Erica Eyer - are available for your use through the portal. Try using alone or alongside some art-assisted coaching.
Embodiment - Remember that equine coaching work that you did? Let's refresh that! Find an EAGALA certified equine learning center close to you and partner with them. You can find all of the EAGALA certified centers here.
Discover Purpose
Mindfulness + Embodiment - You can now use the PERMA+ME Wheel with your Spanish speaking clients or share it with other Spanish speaking professionals. And we're pretty pumped. Both the English and Spanish versions are attached. (We're developing intervention resources for each area for our website too!)
But what about the kids? No problem. We've got you covered (at least in English) there too. Check out the EPOCH Well-Being Assessment for Little Larks here and get your child's overall well-being score.
Develop Potential
Added bonus HERE! Because of the restrictions that 2020 have brought along with it...people have been getting really creative! One of the advantages to this creativity is a higher level of access to informational resources that might otherwise be out of our reach. There are THREE professional conferences that I would highly recommend you participate in in some way!
International Positive Education Festival - Well-Being 360 (Virtual) on October 27-29th. (Hosted by TecMilenio University)
ICF Advance 2020 (Virtual) on Oct 12-Nov 10th
IPPA World Congress (in Vancouver) on July 15-18, 2021
(accepting submissions for research, presentation, workshops and symposiums until October 30th)
Lead to Serve
The note from me is an article that I submitted for publication in this month's issue of Choice magazine. I know it’s a bit longer, but I hope you enjoy it! Please do not share or quote without giving proper credit to me and the publication.
Much love,
Megan
FLOURISHING FORWARD: CONSIDERATIONS FOR TRAUMA-INFORMED COACHING
Submission for Choice Magazine - Written by Megan Gilmore, MA, LSCC, CPCC, PCC
As coaches, it is our joy to partner with our clients toward co-creating new insight and practicing new habits that align with their goals. This way of moving toward fulfillment and flourishing together – it is transformative. But at this point in history, it will be incredibly difficult to achieve our objective as coaches without understanding and carrying a deep compassion for the traumas that both our clients and ourselves bring to a coaching relationship.
The events impacting human lives across the globe in the first half of 2020 have been vast, pervasive and impossible to ignore. In his book, “My Grandmother’s Hands,” Resmaa Menakem says, “When something happens to the body that is too much, too fast, or too soon, it overwhelms the body and can create trauma.” Collectively, we are experiencing states of overwhelm, depletion, unpredictability and threats to our sense of safety that are unprecedented.
On top of the many collective experiences over the last few months, many of us also experience intermittent, repeated or sustained individual traumas due to race, gender, socioeconomic status, ability or additional Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). These intersecting and overlapping factors have a profound and complex impact on our well-being and our ability to flourish as humans. Adjusting our coaching practices to include evidence-based interventions that increase well-being and decrease the negative impacts of trauma is essential to our effectiveness as coaches.
While it is not within our scope of practice as coaches to fix or heal trauma in our clients, it must be attended to in our coaching relationships. As we grow in our understanding of ourselves and the impact that trauma has on our humanity, we also grow in compassion, non-judgment, empathy, wonder and championing for ourselves and others – and those are just the characteristics needed for transformation.
CONSIDER OUR NERVOUS SYSTEM
Our nervous systems are constantly assessing and organizing themselves in response to threat and reward. In his book, “Coaching with the Brain in Mind” Dr. David Rock calls these responses away states and toward states. For effective coaching to take place, both the coach and the client need to be in toward states. This means that they are being motivated by something that they perceive as rewarding and that they are able to look inward because they are safe in their environment.
Our nervous system can be divided into categories – the Central Nervous System (CNS) and Peripheral Nervous System (PNS).
Our CNS consists of interneurons that make up our brain and spinal cord. If we could give the CNS a job description, it might be to receive and process information by conducting signaling and initiating responses – kind of like a command center and information highway.
Our PNS consists of sensory neurons (nerve cells that send signals to the brain) and motor neurons (nerve cells that deliver signals from the brain to muscles, glands, organs, and other parts of the body).
The PNS can be further divided into our Somatic Nervous System that controls our conscious and voluntary movements and processes – the things we are asking our body to do or choosing to do; and our Autonomic Nervous System that controls our involuntary responses and processes – think breathing, heart rate, digestion, etc.
If we focus on our Autonomic Nervous System, it also has two distinct categories: 1) our sympathetic nervous system and 2) our parasympathetic nervous system.
Our sympathetic nervous system controls our stress-response which is commonly understood as our fight, flight, or freeze response. When it is activated, our pupils dilate, heart rate increases, breathing quickens and expands, and among other things, hormones like adrenaline and cortisol are released into our bodies. This is an optimal state to be in if we need to out run danger or if we need to fight to keep ourselves alive and become wounded.
However, in this stress-response state, we do not have access the executive functioning systems in our brain like insight or conscious decision-making – our bodies, specifically, our sympathetic nervous system is already responding to whatever it perceives as a threat and is trying to keep us safe.
Our parasympathetic nervous system controls our resting state which is commonly understood as our rest and digest response. When it is activated, our mouths secrete saliva, heart rate decreases, breathing slows and deepens, and digestive organs get to work breaking down nutrition and secreting bile.
This is an optimal state for our bodies to be in most of the time. In this state, we are able to practice wellness, metabolize difficult emotional experiences, rest and heal, and play and create. We are able to access our brain’s executive functioning and imaginative abilities, because both our bodies and our minds know we are safe.
Here’s the rub – repeated or intense trauma over time makes us feel unsafe in our own bodies. The persistent and recurring activation of our sympathetic nervous system creates a habituated state of being in survival mode. And this actually wears down our well-being all the way to the little pieces of our DNA called telomeres. Numerous studies have shown that the length of our telomeres (these protective short segments on the ends of our chromosomes) are indicative of our ability to fight off disease and live longer lives. When we experience a kind of distress that perpetually activates our sympathetic nervous system, it actually shortens our telomeres more rapidly.
FLOURISHING FORWARD: COACHING PRACTICES
As coaches, we can incorporate specific practices into our coaching relationships that help us activate our parasympathetic nervous system and give our stress response a rest.
These practices help move us and our clients into a toward state where we can then coach using interventions that have been shown to actually lengthen our telomeres and create new neural pathways. By introducing these practices into our coaching relationships, we are quite literally preventing disease, decreasing inflammation, and creating the awareness needed to explore, discover, and move forward from a place of conscious choice.
PRACTICES FOR YOUR COACHING RELATIONSHIPS
1. Take our Sessions Outside
Nature is an incredible regulator. By taking our coaching sessions outside to a nature preserve, park, or other protected space, we can remove many of the threats, distractions and restrictions that trigger our stress-responses.
2. Meditate with our Clients
There are many different options for meditation. Essentially, meditation is choosing to think about and/or focus on the same thing again and again. Dedicating just 2-3 minutes of a session to meditation can increase clarity and decrease anxiety significantly.
3. Start Sessions with Deep Breathing
Practicing deep breathing regularly balances out our autonomic tone, helping us by deepening and expanding our breath, decreasing our heartrate, increasing saliva production, etc. Try “magic breathing” or “box breathing”
4. End Sessions with Gratitude
Practicing gratitude intentionally orients our thinking minds toward goodness, reward, and empathy; rather than what is wrong, threatening, and egocentric. Crafting a ritual with your clients that end your sessions with gratitude, can help move both of you into a toward state around whatever is coming next.
5. Focus on Embodiment
If your coaching relationships are mostly check-ups from the neck-up, consider adding movement and get curious about the client’s embodied sensation. For example: Where is that emotion felt? What is its temperature? How much pressure and weight does it carry? How might you describe the intensity of its energy? What is the movement of it like - tingling, rushing, crushing, gripping, releasing, constricting, etc. What if we move? What is it like then? What if we breathe? What is it like then?
6. Facilitate Exploration through Expression
Introduce art or sound into your sessions. Notice patterns first – naming becomes important when the client is ready to access their agency, choose a way forward, and create memory around their decision. But during exploration phases when we’re growing in awareness and expanding options, what is most important is noticing – remaining present with deep listening, attending to patterns that emerge, and transparently reflecting those patterns without judgment or interpretation.
We have all experienced past individual and collective difficulties that have shaped us and continue to impact our current reality; however, trauma-informed coaching may be just the thing that our brains and bodies need to flourish forward together.
Relationships + Meaning
Create Courageously
Relationships
As always, we've got to highlight Gottman's Research and expertise in Relationship Science. Download the Gottman Card Decks App to use with your couples clients or clients in relationships.
Meaning
Wanting a tool for relationships and teams to use in place of life purpose statement? Try using the mission statement builder from Franklin-Covey as a homework inquiry.
Choose Aliveness
It's impossible to deny the collective emotional trauma our society is experiencing over the last few months! One reason that we want to pay attention to trauma as coaches is because it gets us stuck. While we need to understand our scope of professional practice and not move into the role of therapist or consultant, there are resources that both you and your clients can use by experts out there when we know that trauma is at play - especially if those techniques and methodologies for moving through trauma are able to be self-administered and practiced over time.
One evidence-based methodology to increase physiological health and heal from emotional trauma are the Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) that include tapping. There are a host of articles and YouTube tutorials on how to self-administer this therapeutic technique. We are really loving "Tapping Tuesdays" with @emotionalfreedomcoach, Bianca Gabrielle over on Instagram.
In the last month, she has free instruction through her account on tapping for "White Bodies around Racial Shame & Guilt" as well as for "BIPOC around Racial Trauma//Anger (Rage) and Resistance to Joy."updated video workshops on Vimeo
Discover Purpose
If you're assessment junkies like we are, be sure to check out the additional resources that each one offers for guiding communication and facilitating understanding between different people in relationships. IMAGE has the Salsa Scale for Relationships (now available in the Coaching Resources section) and updated video workshops on Vimeo.
Strengthsfinder has the Team Grid, and there are many many resources out there for the Enneagram and VIA Character Strengths as well!
Develop Potential
Affirmations and acknowledgements are incredible coaching tools to add meaning to any relationship (including the one with yourself)!
We have been loving Alex Elle and Morgan Harper Nichols around here for soul nourishing affirmations and beautiful resources. You can find Alex Elle's freebie writing prompts and meditations here. And you can sign up for daily reminders from MHN here.
Lead to Serve
There are so many things that I could say about the last two months. I feel like time has both stood still and then there are days that I feel like I've completely lost my grounding and sense of pacing.
In the midst of this global pandemic and Black liberation movement, People are calling forth leadership both in myself and in Lark's Song as an organization in fresh ways, and while I don't feel equipped to do that the "right way." I do feel capable - believing that I have the tools that I need to partner well with people toward flourishing and to hold them with immense empathy and compassion.
After talking with the Board of Directors at Lark's Song, they agreed to draft an accountability statement for us. I would encourage you to read it so you know where we stand and the essence of where we are headed. You can find the statement on our blog.
Don't you dare stop shining, my darlings! Keep awakening the courage needed to do the next right thing.
With much love and gratitude,
Megan
Neuroscience, Trauma, and Belonging
Because of some of the challenges and opportunities provided by the "shelter-in-place" (or for the positive ones of us out their "stay-at-home") orders, we were able to offer a 3 hour virtual training on Neuroscience, Trauma, and Belonging that went smashingly well.
As Co-Lab members, even if you weren't able to attend, we definitely want you to have access to the information and resources from that time, so that is what this newsletter focuses on.
Create Courageously
You'll find a PDF of the slides in the Coaching Resources, as well as a recording of the first part of the training so you can follow along.
Choose Aliveness
For our Choose Aliveness skill refresh, we have a recording of the Trauma & Belonging panel from our training. Please watch and consider what steps you might be able to take to create more access and equity in your coaching practice.
Discover Purpose
Childhood trauma is now considered a public health crisis! This means that as coaches, we don't get to ignore trauma in our client's lives, but we also don't become their therapist. Listen to this TED talk by Nadine Burke-Harris to understand how childhood trauma impacts health across a lifespan and consider whether you might need to assess for trauma during your discovery process differently.
Develop Potential
Understanding Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) can be a really meaningful way to understand your client AND partner with other professionals around their care. The ACE Questionnaire is attached, but you can also find an ACE Questionnaire with the Resiliency Scale attached. This assessment considers not only the trauma but the strength of your client's recovery and resiliency from it.
Lead to Serve
BONUS resource! The Flourishing Center is offering a webinar today on "How to Prevent Trauma Caused by the Pandemic | The Brain Science of Trauma" TODAY from 2:00-3:30 PM EST for free!
Engagement and COVID-19
Create Courageously
If saboteurs and imposters are blocking your client's progress, check out this great resource from Laurie Santos, a psychology professor that created Yale's most popular course ever. In this YouTube playlist, she details the different kinds of cognitive biases that cause limiting beliefs and restrict our flourishing.
Choose Aliveness
Thought that was great? Laurie Santos and her team took "Psychology and the Good Life" (the most popular Yale class ever) and turned it into a FREE 6 week training on the Science of Well-Being over on Coursera.
Discover Purpose
Love the Enneagram? So do we! It's a great engagement tool for your clients. The RHETI assessment from the Enneagram Institute has the best test-retest reliability out there! As a coach, you can set up a business account and order assessments for your clients.
Develop Potential
As a well-being facet, engagement is synonymous with Flow. The world's leading expert on flow is Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihayli. Watch his TED presentation on flow here.
Lead to Serve
Instead of a note from Megan this month, we want to be sure that you are all up to speed on the resources that are available from the International Coaching Federation to help us as coaches respond to the COVID-19 global pandemic.
Positive Emotion
Create Courageously
Use this presentation deck and these coach notes to lead a group coaching session on Positive Emotion.
Choose Aliveness
In this video, Megan explains what kind of positive emotion leads to our flourishing.
Discover Purpose
Use the 5 Minute Gratitude Journal app for 21 days with your clients as an intervention to increase positive emotion.
Develop Potential
The Flourishing Center: Founded and led by Emiliya Zhivotovskaya, the Flourishing Center - where the science of happiness meets the art of thriving. Check out their resources, including their free e-book "From Languishing to Flourishing"
Lead to Serve
In ancient Greek culture, joy was defined as the happiness that one feels as they move toward their potential. Psychology comes from two Greek words -1) psyche, which is translated into English as soul or life, and 2) logia, or "the study of." Coaching is a professional practice that applies the study of positive psychology to human lives in an effort to increase well-being in a manner that impacts the fulfillment and flourishing of both the client and the coach. Positive psychology is a specific field of psychological studies that operates on a unique set of assets-based assumptions.
As a scholar and practitioner in the field of positive psychology, when looking at a human soul - a human life, my study of it first assumes that that soul is good - creative, resourceful, whole and relational, that it is blessed - uniquely valuable, that it's experience and potential is far beyond my own understanding - worthy of being championed, that it is conscious, determined, and imaginative - capable of solving complex problems, and that it is naturally free, full of agency, and interconnected - ready to live at choice. These assumptions do not preclude the truth of suffering, pain, harmful expression, incompetence, illness or injustice. Rather, they help us make sense of those things from a place that empowers human dignity and equips us for a generative and transformative approach to changing the things that need to be changed in our world.
It's not a light, fluffy, or woo-woo! It is a deep, interdimensional study of the human soul that provides hope. The field of positive psychology is predicting that we are 3-5 years away from a CURE for depression! Not just cyclical treatment options, a cure. We now know that you can heal inflammation in your genetic code that leads to disease with eudamonic well-being practices.
It turns out that the joy that we feel as we move toward our potential is incredibly important for our flourishing as human souls! And a piece of that flourishing is positive emotion.
Essentially, it is very important that you are happy...eudaimonically! (See the Skill Refresh for the difference between pleasure/hedonic happiness and joy/eudaimonic happiness.)
Growing in optimism is necessary for our survival, our healing, and our growth. This does not mean ignoring suffering or acting like it does not exists. It means being fully aware and engaged with the suffering that exists within ourselves and within the world and practicing a response that expresses authentic gratitude, positive reminiscence (a redemptive script of memories that grants you agency over your own life, rather than a painful rehearsal), and purposefully engaging our senses in environments and activities that make us smile and laugh.
Here are a few reflection questions and an affirmation to guide you in your further exploration and action around positive emotion.
Reflection Questions:
Who are the top five people in my life that I am most grateful for?
Have I adequately expressed my gratitude to them for their impact on my life?
What environments or activities make me smile?
How can I creatively engage in those environments and activities regularly?
Affirmation: I am full of joy and gratitude. I see my soul's potential and move toward it with gentleness and compassion.
PERMA+ME
CREATE COURAGEOUSLY
PERMA+ME Assessment Wheel
This coaching tool was created by Megan Gilmore to assess a client's level of well-being by considering 7 different facets with evidence-based interventions - Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Accomplishment, Mindfulness, and Embodiment.
Use with clients to establish coaching objectives or assess areas of focus to increase flourishing in their lives.
CHOOSE ALIVENESS
Skill Refresh - Numinous Leadership and PERMA+ME
Megan explains Lark's Song's 2020 theme and gives an intro to the seven facets of well-being.
DISCOVER PURPOSE
What Determines Happiness
Leading researcher in positive psychology, Sonja Lyumbomirsky, gives a brief overview of the factors that determine happiness by synthesizes research studies in her field.
DEVELOP POTENTIAL
Functional Genomic Perspectives on Well-being
Geneticist, Stephen Cole and Positive Psychologist, Barbara Fredrickson team up to provide this incredible study on how eudamonic well-being practices actually heal our DNA. (WHAT?!)
LEAD TO SERVE
I'm sitting here, writing the article for our January Co-Lab newsletter on March 1st - shortly after committing to fast from disappointment for Lent and announcing that our organization's theme for the year is "numinous leadership." It is not lost on me that we have quite a ways to go before numinous leadership is a comprehensive reality and that my Lenten withdrawal from perpetual disappointment is both hilarious and sorely needed for my own growth. (Also, did you know that I don't like taking care of sick people. I've talked with other Enneagram 8s and it seems to be a struggle for all of us. I found out last year that my threshold between compassionate caregiver and clinical dictator occurs at about day four of said sick or injured person's anguish. So of course, in the month of February my entire team and family was sick and injured. There were MAYBE four days in the entire month that I wasn't taking care of someone. I share this with you because I find it interesting that the world did not fall apart...yet, in this state of things that feels very not numinous, but is just the thing to grow numinous leadership in anyone.) And yet, it is also not lost on me that all vision holds both the beauty that is already here and the hope of what is not yet. "Numinous" is a word that indicates or suggests the presence of divinity. It's a lofty thing and yet it's also a very present thing in this moment - able to be seen in our community and it's generosity, able to be experienced in the new Cohort 14, able to be known as our team sits with each other after surgeries and propagates plants that have outgrown their containers and witnesses transformation over Marco Polos and loves on each other by granting permission for rest and renewal through encouragement and tea-gifts.
As you think about your own well-being and that of your clients, what would it be like to lead them by granting power to the relationship and granting permission for the divine to show up in your sessions in unexpected ways. What if you embraced the very real proposition that by exercising your coaching competencies in risky, brave, excellent ways, you actually have the opportunity to help someone heal their DNA. That sounds pretty...numinous. Here are five daily well-being interventions for you:
3 Gratitudes (each day catalog three new things you are grateful for, no repeats for twenty-one days)
One Positive Memory (set a timer for two minutes and freewrite about one positive experience you have had in the last 24 hours)
Exercise (set a timer for 15 minutes and move in a way that feels fun and free to your body - this trains your brain in optimism because you are believing that your behavior matters AND it's the equivalent of taking an anti-depressant for 6 months - no joke!)
Breathe (set a timer for two minutes a day and just breathe - you don't even have to breathe a fancy breath or in any special way - you're training your brain to focus on one thing at a time - did you know that attention has quickly become one of our scarcest resources?)
Send kindness (this one only takes two minutes too! send a text or email to another person once a day that only expresses acknowledgement and kindness - don't ask them to do anything for you. do this for a new person each day - no repeats - for 21 days.)
Twenty-five minutes a day to a more flourishing you!
Questions for Reflection:
Where do I experience well-being right now? What does my flourishing that is "not yet" look like?
What is at stake if I stay the way I am without growth, rest, inspiration, or letting go?
Affirmation:
“I will move and be moved.“
Blessings,
Embodied Emotions
CREATE COURAGEOUSLY
Embodied Emotion Worksheet
A worksheet for increasing awareness and regulation around emotion and sensation.
CHOOSE ALIVENESS
Skill Refresh - Embodied Emotions
In this skill refresh, Megan talks about the relationship between our emotions and our body, and how that can be used as a tool when coaching a client.
DISCOVER PURPOSE
Bodily Map of Emotions
An article describing the unique and universal bodily signature of different emotions.
DEVELOP POTENTIAL
Polyvagal Theory: How your Body Makes the Decision
In this video, Dr. Stephen Porges explains Polyvagal Theory, and how our autonomic nervous system impacts how our body processes emotions.
LEAD TO SERVE
At a recent appointment, a nurse practitioner who was treating my eleven year old son started asking him leading questions about his daily habits and criticizing his body. I sat to the side, very quickly escalating toward contempt as seething rage flowed just below the surface of my skin, and right before I stood in front of my son and asked this woman to leave the room, Elliot said (in a fully confident voice), "Excuse me. But I don't appreciate how you're talking about my body! You are acting like there is something wrong with me, but I know my body is good. So please stop!" And he put both hands up to fully emphasis his lack of consent to continue the discussion in this way.
My emotional state changed immediately. I sat up straighter, not with indignation, but filled a mix of with love and admiration for and hurting with my son.
I often teach about the five different dimensions of personhood - body, mind, heart, soul, and spirit. My opinion is that, in our society, the body is the most devalued, dismissed, and demonized of these dimensions. Which is so crazy, isn't it? Since it gives us awareness, access, and choice around the other four.
As coaches, embodiment is a skill and also a practice that brings us into this present moment, enables us to feel our emotions fully, and carries us to an awareness of what needs to be paid attention to. And emotions, as volatile and dynamic as they are, are so incredible! The way they give us information about what we want and don't want and how we feel safe or brave or ready is such a gift. We don't get a body without emotions, and we don't get emotions without a body. And both are just so good!
By practicing embodied emotion for yourself, you will be able to better access your intuition, empathy, and the range of aliveness you can experience. The thing that most often gets in the way of this is our own traumas that we still hold in our bodies and the conditioning that we receive around the narratives we carry and continue to tell about our bodies and emotions. One way of undoing this faulty wiring and dysfunctional learning is by toning your vagus nerve.
Here are four easy ways that you can start toning your vagus nerve immediately:
Deep diaphragmatic breathing
Singing and humming
Meditation and prayer (especially ones that focus on lovingkindness, gratitude and wonder)
Washing your face with cold water
Try creating your own vagal toning ritual each morning or evening. By taking five minutes each day to specifically focus on toning your vagus nerve, you will dynamically impact your ability to sense and identify embodied emotion more quickly and regulate the use of that emotion toward something good.
Affirmation:
“I accept the body that I have as good and worthy of attention and curiosity. I honor it in this state by speaking to and about it with lovingkindness.“
Blessings,
Values
CREATE COURAGEOUSLY
This tool is designed for the introduction to exploring values with clients, created by LSCC Rachel Passereni.
CHOOSE ALIVENESS
Skill Refresh - Values
In this skill refresh, Megan goes over the essentials when coaching around values with a client.
DISCOVER PURPOSE
Tolerations List
We tend to get dragged down and overwhelmed by things that accumulate over time - and end up cluttering our minds. What are you putting up with?
DEVELOP POTENTIAL
LEAD TO SERVE
One of the most powerful fulfillment tools that we have in our coaching toolbox are personal experiential values. When we have a resonant names to give to the concepts that we hold most dear, we are able to establish a foundation on which creative self-expression and courageous servant leadership can stand and thrive. Without names for these values, we often struggle with clarity and confidence in our decision-making, leading to a host of limiting beliefs and a conveniently difficult and meandering journey to addressing and transforming the status quo.
As LSCCs, you've been through a pretty rigorous process to mine for your own values and cultivate creativity within yourself. Once you've graduated from the program, you are at choice around how you implement those values in your life as well as your coaching practice.
Within the past year and a half, I found that I was less and less excited to show up for my clients in their session and outside of them. Part of that was a grief and healing process that required a lot of my energy, and another part was the lack of resonance in my coaching process with my current experiential values. I was using the same tools and processes that I started with when I launched my own private practice 7 years ago. There was even carry-over from when I began coaching in higher education 12 years ago. While these tools and processes are still good and effective, they lacked an infusion of about 10 years of personal research and the creative self-expression that comes with fully honoring my experiential values.
So I took this year to assess what was missing and what I wanted my coaching practice to look like now and who I wanted to serve now. In October, I launched a new coaching package as part of my Flow Wild Soul services called the Rhythms of Unfolding, and I began mentor coaching. I feel more vitality, resonance, and fulfillment in my work now, and I want that for you too.
The whole point in sharing this with you is to say that there is not a point in your personal and professional development that honoring your values through resonant choice becomes unimportant or old hat. Research has shown that reaffirming your values leads to decreases in psychological distress and maladaptive behavior. It is not just for new clients, and you don't just do it once and leave values on the discovery-session-room-floor. We reaffirm our values again and again.
Questions for Reflection:
What are my top five experiential values? Do they need a refresh?
Where and when are my values most highly honored? Who is around me when that is happening?
What am I tolerating that is not in line with my values? How can I re-craft those tasks/relationships/situations so my engagement with them is resonant?
How can I bring more creative expression of my values into my coaching relationships?
Affirmation:
”I am worthy of living a life of conscious, resonant choice.”
Blessings,
