Does practicing leadership really make perfect?
No. Practice is far more important than that. The best musicians practice. Wynton Marsalis, arguably the best trumpet player alive today, still does nearly every day[1]. John Coltrane, perhaps the best jazz trumpet player to ever have lived, practiced incessantly until the day he died. Which, for some, can seem confusing. If they’re already the best, what are they hoping…
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Destined for Entrepreneurship
Written by Shelby McDonald Our coach, Julie Ann Gauthier, has always been an entrepreneur at heart. She grew up in a very entrepreneurial family with many family members owning successful businesses across Prince Edward Island. Inspired by her family’s hardworking and risk-tasking nature, Julie Ann leapt into entrepreneurship in 2019 and hasn’t looked back since. She calls herself a multifaceted…
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Leaders: Are You Willing to Experience Having Enough?
I’m not safe enough. I don’t have enough support. I don’t have enough freedom. These are familiar refrains right now. We feel we lack time, money, profits. We long for more collaboration and recognition, more appreciation and respect. We’d like to be healthier, yet we feel we don’t have enough energy or motivation to do the things that would deliver…
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Leaders: What’s the Song You Want to Sing?
By: Glen Herbert, Writer/Editor (and Lisa’s multitalented friend who offered to write this excellent guest post) For a number of years, I taught group guitar lessons at a seniors’ centre in Burlington, where I live. Each session—they typically ran 10 weeks—there would be between 20 and 30 people around the circle. If you asked why they signed up, they’d say…
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Conscious Leadership Can Improve Relationships
When you hear the word ‘Leadership,’ most of us think of our workplace and what it means to be an excellent leader to our employees or colleagues. But what Lisa Chandler has found, both for herself and in her clients, practicing conscious leadership can dramatically improve one’s parenting and partner relationships. “Many of our leader clients report a huge shift…
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Renovate Your Leadership From the Inside Out
When we moved back to PEI 7+ years ago, I bought our current home. It’s charming, old, and in a great location. Despite its many attributes, we encountered some limitations. The previous owners had installed a high efficiency propane furnace to help sell the house. I expected a moderate fuel bill. That first winter was really cold and I turned…
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Lead Like Hoss with Small Deeds Done Daily
Dear leaders: Early in the pandemic, many of us were operating on our surge capacity (Great article here). We had the kind of energy and focus we’ve seen first responders bring to a natural disaster. Surge capacity works great in the beginning but after a while we get worn out. By late spring, after a few months of business, mothering,…
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Love Leads
Many leaders are very uncomfortable with the idea of love in the workplace. It brings up fear about the bad things that happen when people cross boundaries and behave inappropriately. This is not the kind of “love” I am talking about! I am talking about deliberately developmental companies that focus at least as much on the GROWTH and WELL-BEING…
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A Punching Bag in Your Leadership Toolkit?
I travelled all the way to Montreal for coaching sessions with a practitioner, Josée, who uses somatic (body) approaches in her practice. Josée uses tools like a Bataka (a soft bat) and punching bag to help clients like me to break free and live radically alive. Very quickly I could see I would need to stop clinging to control…
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Are You Ripe for Coaching?
How do you know if someone is ready for coaching? Until now, I have been using my own experience and intuition to determine coaching readiness. Happily, all of us who work in leadership development, there is a new model to assess coaching readiness: RIPEN.
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