SeattleCoach! "Connection. Curiosity. Challenge."
About Patricia Burgin, MA, MCC
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Patricia Burgin has helped to develop a generation of coaches and coaching leaders. As a leader, facilitator, speaker, supervisor, and coach of leaders, Patricia ("Patty") Burgin has advised and mentored thousands of individuals and teams toward better performance, communication and meaning. She is the author of the new and best selling overview of leadership coaching, The Essential Coaching Leader, and of The Coaching for Leader's Playbook. |
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Following stints in the international leadership of a Christian non-profit, as a campus chaplain, conference speaker, as a tour leader in the former Soviet Union, and as a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Patty founded SeattleCoach in 2002 and began to coach and facilitate exclusively in 2005. She holds two master's degrees, one in Theology and a second in Applied Behavioral Science. In addition she has joined the top three percent of credentialed coaches worldwide to have been awarded the title of "Master Certified Coach" by the International Coaching Federation (ICF).
In 2008 she launched The SeattleCoach Professional Coach Training and Development Program for executives who see coaching as an extra--and increasingly essential--gear in their leadership engine. The program is accredited by the ICF, and over 500 "SeattleCoaches" who have completed the training, or soon will, are having an impact on the West Coast and beyond as both external coaches and as better leaders on the inside of great companies and organizations, including the customized Coaching for Leaders programs at Microsoft and Vulcan.
Whether it’s a class or a keynote, Patty values insight-creation as the crucial component of content delivery. “I love it when my brain lights up,” she says, “And it’s even better when everyone else's brains light up.” She works with an approach that is warm, practical, innovative, direct, playful, and generous.
Whether it’s a class or a keynote, Patty values insight-creation as the crucial component of content delivery. “I love it when my brain lights up,” she says, “And it’s even better when everyone else's brains light up.” She works with an approach that is warm, practical, innovative, direct, playful, and generous.
In 2008 she launched The SeattleCoach Professional Coach Training and Development Program for executives who see coaching as an extra--and increasingly essential--gear in their leadership engine. The program is accredited by the ICF, and over 500 "SeattleCoaches" who have completed the training, or soon will, are having an impact on the West Coast and beyond as both external coaches and as better leaders on the inside of great companies and organizations, including the customized Coaching for Leaders programs at Microsoft and Vulcan.
Whether it’s a class or a keynote, Patty values insight-creation as the crucial component of content delivery. “I love it when my brain lights up,” she says, “And it’s even better when everyone else's brains light up.” She works with an approach that is warm, practical, innovative, direct, playful, and generous.
Whether it’s a class or a keynote, Patty values insight-creation as the crucial component of content delivery. “I love it when my brain lights up,” she says, “And it’s even better when everyone else's brains light up.” She works with an approach that is warm, practical, innovative, direct, playful, and generous.
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Patty embraces a life-long enthusiasm about American history, and gratitude for our founding documents and stories as we journey toward a "more perfect Union." As a native of the Pacific Northwest, she loves just about everything about it: the water, the coast, the mountains, the great IPAs and “not having to squint as much as Californians do.” During her freshman year at Oregon State University she was named "Smart Ass of the Year" by members of her sorority. She lives near the Seattle Zoo with her partner, Dr. Kari, a veterinarian, and thus, with a revolving assortment of creatures, including Beep, the orange polydactyl cat, and new coach pups, Winston and Clementine.
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With Patty's background as a competitive rower, and as past president of Interlochen Rowing Club in Seattle, she sometimes takes executive teams out on the water with her. When a team sits together to find balance in a racing shell (60' x 18"), the experience quickly produces both soggy metaphors, and spectacular team learning.
Her faith still informs her life and work, helping her to explore how human brains and bonds flourish, how we make sense of the tough stuff, and how we live out the big "what's-it-all-about" questions that we share through the arcs of our lives. She thinks excellent coaching is like grace: rarely intrusive, usually disruptive, more nuanced than announced, and just as much about "how" as "what."
Her faith still informs her life and work, helping her to explore how human brains and bonds flourish, how we make sense of the tough stuff, and how we live out the big "what's-it-all-about" questions that we share through the arcs of our lives. She thinks excellent coaching is like grace: rarely intrusive, usually disruptive, more nuanced than announced, and just as much about "how" as "what."
What we do at SeattleCoach: Coaching great people--and training some of them to be coaching leaders . . .
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In 2016 Patty received the ACES Award from ICF Washington State. This award "recognizes a coach who authentically acts, motivates and inspires excellence and commitment to achieving goals that advance the development of coaches, the coaching profession and the coaching community. They exemplify outstanding achievements in leadership and are a visionary with major contributions to both the profession and industry of coaching."
Click here to read comments from some of Patty's past and present clients. And click here to read about the origins of her work as a coach. |
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What and Whom Patty Follows, Likes and Retweets
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Admittedly, Patty is a bit of a free-enterprise geek. These are a few of the beliefs that have guided her since before she started coaching, and developing coaches and coaching leaders at SeattleCoach:
- Almost anyone can become an exemplary person with a compelling story and a service that the world needs.
- In a free society with fair laws, good behavior—and the moral architecture that supports those things—are non-negotiable to the process. This of course is where the content of your character and the quality of your colleagues matter.
- The marketplace is very discerning and competitive. The honorable people with the best stuff usually get discovered. And they never stop listening for how to make their stuff even better.
- When she came out in the 1990s as a gay Christian (equally challenging back then in Seattle), she learned that when you face systemic barriers, you must overwhelm them with excellence. Today, as a coach, this means that she is far more interested in equality of opportunity than in trying to ensure that everyone gets the same outcome (which is sometimes called “equity” so we prefer to talk about “equality of opportunity”). This means that at SeattleCoach we have historically looked for ways to serve organizations and coachees who stand at a challenging starting point. Click here to see the growing list of organizations to which we have offered support and training through the years. And the coaches we’ve trained could add scores more.
- Governments that have faith in at least half of all citizens practicing #1, #2, #3, and #4 figure out how to trust them and to limit the weight of rules and regulations. And mastery, purpose, and freedom grow.
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Mr. Rogers: A patron saint of the modern Professional Coaching Movement . . .Click here to read Mr. Rogers' letter to Patty's Partner, Dr. Kari, after she wrote to thank him for his influence during her tumultuous childhood. |
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"In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways." Edith Wharton
The Flood. 7/31/1976. On Turning Seventy. November 2020. "Listen and attend with the ear of your heart." St. Benedict "It is still new to me. . . . the life of oak trees can still astonish me. I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for, and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all apparition to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it, and I can’t believe that when we have all been changed, and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence--The great, bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epoch of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets, because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try." From Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming 'Wow! What a Ride!'” Hunter S. Thompson |