SeattleCoach! "Connection. Curiosity. Challenge."

About Patricia Burgin, MA, MCC



​“Go into life and work thinking, 'Hit the ball to me!'"
Bruce Larson, long-time Seattle minister and mensch

"I don't know Who, or What, put the question, I don't know when it was put. I don't even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone, or Something, and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life had a goal.” Dag Hamarskjold

"Help. Thanks. Wow. The three essential prayers." Anne Lamott

"Retire?! Why would I ever retire? When I play, men weep and women dance." Bruce Springstein

"The grace of God means something like: 'Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are, because the party wouldn't have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It's for you I created the universe.'"  Frederick Buechner

​"Patty is the ultimate coach to coaches, and her love of her audience is apparent throughout her work." A SeattleCoach​
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. 
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, Vulcan, Seattle Children's Hospital and UW Medicine.

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.
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.
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."

​
​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."

When Patty started training coaches in 2008, she took the time to record some aspirational hallmarks.
This would be the stuff for which she wanted SeattleCoach   ("The Small Craft Brewery of Coach-Training & Development Programs")    to be known, and by which she would make decisions.
Click here    to listen to Patty talk about the twelve "SeattleCoach Rules."

A few of the people Patty likes and follows (random order . . .)

From "Coachable!" the SeattleCoach newsletter . . . 

Gaze. Glance. Gaze. Glimpse. Gaze.
The Flood. 7/31/1976.
On Turning Seventy. November 2020. 

Quotes that inspire  . . . 
"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

"Listen and attend with the ear of your heart."   St. Benedict

"The founders of every major religion said, 'I'll show you how to find God.'
Jesus said, 'I am God who has come to find you.'"  Timothy Keller

"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

"When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home."  Tecumseh