An Exercise for the Stressed Whether it's good stress or the difficult kind, I get smarter and happier when I take a few minutes to catch my breath. Try out this 5:44 minute exercise (audio below), turn up your speakers. Finding Your Personal Reset Think about a time in your life when you experienced a moment or an event in which you felt all of those things on that list to the right... Reme...

The VIA Survey of Character. This will link you to a free, well-researched questionnaire that will help you to identify your integrated top five (of twenty-four) "Character Strengths". I ask all of my new clients to take it. It's part of a research project, you will be asked to register, but they won't spam you. Click on the "VIA Survey" button to begin. (No need to purchase a report unless you wa...

Making it possible for your ideal clients to find you "Vocation is the place where the work you most need to do connects with what the world most needs to have done." Fredrick Buechner, Wishful Thinking Coaching is a young professional and leadership movement. And most people have heard or read or formed opinions about coaches and coaching. As a coach—whether your plan is to work internal...

Many of the people I coach are in the midst of a major transition. So after I remind them to breathe, I come alongside them to explore the details of their next possible and desirable steps: If a miracle happened that brought them more of what they want and less of what they don't, what would the evidence be? Then I start challenging/supporting them to think about their key words, messages, ...

What would you do? We know you're coachable and that you wisely bring your own coachable issues to your peers. In the course of coach training you're getting some great coaching! But if you find yourself running out of things to bring to your triad, check out the following scenarios. Through the years, the following people have walked into SeattleCoach and done magnificent work (but if you th...

"All men are created equal. Some work harder in the pre-season." — Emmitt Smith "When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws." — G.K. Chesterton, English writer, dramatist, journalist, and theologian Everyone I’ve known or worked with is deeply interested in their belonging, in their worth, and in their competence. ...

If You’re Alive One of the terrific people I coach told me once that she has a “short, sure-fire test for determining whether your mission in life has been fulfilled.” I looked back, amused and waiting and she said simply, “If you’re alive, it hasn’t.” I think about that every July 31 when one of these gorgeous summer days descends on us. I find myself...

So, I’m turning seventy this week. That was fast. And Dr. Kari and I were planning a big celebration of her 55th, my 70th and our 25th. But, of course, in 2020 the magic of human proximity is in short supply. So, in lieu of party planning, I started writing. Since I’m far more used to asking about the stories of others, writing a mini memoir about some of my own feels a little indulgen...

There is a much-quoted moment from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises in which a character explains how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” he says, “Gradually and then suddenly.” We've all experienced it. Physics calls it the tipping point. A Buddhist proverb says, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” Jesus talked about acquiring “ey...

A thirteen-foot oar hangs in the main meeting room in my offices on Lake Union in Seattle. It was used for years in the racing shells that row past, through the Montlake Cut and into Lake Washington. For ten years I rowed the “eights” competitively and practiced the lessons of the beautiful sport. The old oar in my office reminds me of how those lessons apply today as I coach the men a...