SeattleCoach! "Connection. Curiosity. Challenge."
About Patricia Burgin, MA, MCC
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As a leader, facilitator, speaker 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. 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 Coach Federation (ICF). |
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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 300 "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 program at Microsoft.
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 is a life-long enthusiast of American history, its stories and foundations. And, 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 "Bad Ass of the Year" by members of her sorority. She lives near the Seattle Zoo with her partner, Dr. Kari, a veterinarian and college professor, and thus, with a revolving assortment of creatures. (Read about the one who hangs out at the SeattleCoach offices at LucyDoodle.)
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."
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, believing that: The marketplace is very discerning, and just about anyone can become an exemplary person with a compelling story and a service that the world needs.
This, of course, means that good behavior--and a moral architecture that supports it--is non-negotiable to the process. This, of course, is where it becomes non-negotiable for each of us to put ourselves around great colleagues who share our values. And when a culture or an organization can attract, build and inspire large numbers of exemplary people, excessive control, direction, regulation and taxation get in the way of the magic. |
Dr. Seuss & Mr. Rogers:
Two patron saints of the modern Professional Coaching Movement . . .
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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
"Listen and attend with the ear of your heart." St. Benedict "Bidden or unbidden. God is present." Erasmus "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 |