| From the Editor
It is finally beginning to feel like summer here in New England and I’m looking forward to a busy and productive month of June filled with festivals, writing, travel, and (hopefully) sunshine. I’m hoping you’ve all got plans to look forward to as well! The IAC is equally enthusiastic about the months ahead. Our contributors share many updates on upcoming conferences, new members of the Certification Team, developments in the IAC, as well as tackling prevalent challenges such as understanding your “inner team” and seeking avenues for positive change. Enjoy! Is there something you’d like to see in the VOICE? A particular subject you’d like us the tackle? Please don’t hesitate to contact us at voice@certifiedcoach.org with comments, questions, event notices, or article contributions. We are always looking for new perspectives and look forward to hearing from you. Best,
Contents From the President – Vicki Zanini Your Inner Team – Sarah Lane Why Burn Out When You Can Choose Change Instead? – Martha Pasternack Infographic # 7: A Beautiful Interdependence – Natalie Tucker Miller Inside the IAC Licensing Committee – Charlie Boyer Welcoming the Newest Member of the IAC Certification Team Open Chat Calls From the President Greetings, This month I write to you from Breckenridge, Colorado where I am on retreat with family and friends. Breckenridge is the largest historic district in Colorado, and a beautiful place to visit year round. It’s a lovely environment to reflect on all that is happening at the International Association of Coaching. We are pleased to be presenting at the World Business and Executive Coach Summit (WBECS) this month. Susan Meyer, Krishna Kumar, Natalie Tucker Miller and Aileen Gibb will present a session on “Are You Really Coaching in this Era of Rapid Change? How the IAC Masteries provide you with an integrated foundation.” For more information visit: here. In May the IAC became a sponsor of The Library of Professional Coaching, an internet-based center that provides resources in the field of professional coaching, including articles, research briefs and white papers. Visit their website to learn more. The International Coaching Conference Kuala Lumpur 2014: Exploring New Frontiers in Entrepreneurial Success & Leadership Through Coaching is scheduled for August 19th and 20th. To learn more, download the conference brochure here. We would like to welcome the Online Therapy Institute to our list of member benefit providers. IAC members can now download the ebook “Applying the IAC Coaching Masteries™ to Your Online Work”, and also receive a 20% discount on selective courses. Log in to our website to learn more. It’s been a productive month and the year is still young. As we prepare to journey through the month of June together, I’m reminded of a quote: “What is one to say about June, the time of perfect young summer, the fulfillment of the promise of the earlier months, and with as yet no sign to remind one that its fresh young beauty will ever fade.” — Gertrude Jekyll. The IAC is indeed a beautiful organization that continues to fulfill its promise of expanding the path to coaching mastery. With gratitude, Vicki Zanini, President
Your Inner Team Inside each of us are many different players – our inner team. It’s a rare individual that is exactly the same in every environment with every type of person. In fact, you could argue that life would be pretty boring if we were. Certainly as a coach it might limit your flexibility as to the ‘type’ of individual you might be best able to work with. Getting to know who’s in your team can be really powerful and offers you greater choice. Throughout your life so far you’ll have met most of your inner team, you just may not have thought about them in this way before. You may have thought about your personality and how you are in different environments with different people, but just not considered those personality traits as something you have any control over, or as a team you can call upon consciously. A common time when the inner team becomes clear is when we are saying “On one hand, I want to do x, and on the other I want to do y.” It may be that the really social part of you wants to go to that networking event, but the nurturing part wants to head home to family. If you were one dimensional, life would be rather flat. Knowing the characters in your team that you’ve got available, all the different sides of your personality, gives you greater choice and makes your behaviour conscious. For your coaching practice, deciding who on your team to send to that networking event could make the difference between making a new connection or sale – or not. Equally you may have other parts of you, like the inner guru for instance, that could be even better to put at the lead of the team. If, in a work environment, you were tasked with pulling together the best co-workers to deliver on a project, the first thing you’re going to need to do is know who you’ve got to choose from. Then you’ll want to know more about them, things like their strengths and weaknesses, their motivations and drivers as well as their needs and wants. To get the best mix for the team you’d need to get to know them well. This is exactly the same with our inner team – it’s just we’ve never been sent on a course to learn about managing our own personalities and facets! Whether you want to grow your coaching practice, make it more targeted to a particular industry, or do more in depth work with clients, it’s a useful to begin consciously choosing who you send into key conversations and meetings. Here’s a fun exercise that can start you down the road of better inner team management. Who’s on your team? Have fun with this exercise. Take yourself to an environment where you can allow your mind to wander. It could be the local park, the ocean, in your garden, or a quiet spot at work. Wherever it is, make certain to relax and enjoy the exploration:
Once you’ve got your sub-personalities on paper, you now have greater knowledge of who’s on your team. Now you can pair them up, choose specific characters for certain situations, or simply enjoy knowing they are there. Whatever you choose to do, you have a greater self awareness and that means more choices.
Executive coach Sarah Lane is the author of ‘Choices: from confusion to clarity’, which aims to support business owners and leaders with supporting their people in creating the careers and lives they want. For more information about Sarah Lane, visit http://www.coachinglane.co.uk/.
Why Burn Out When You Can Choose to Change Instead? That is a great question and as life coaches, we seem to ask a lot of questions. Like me, most life coaches initially felt a calling from deep within, from a place of caring for and helping people. One of the beautiful things about coaching is that each individual can respond to that calling from a variety of specialties and difference approaches. For example, a life coach can practice with clients in private coaching sessions: in person, on the phone or on the internet, as an educator, or researcher. The coach can specialize as a business coach; as a health coach; spiritual coach; family and relationship coach; part of a trauma team; environmental specialist; or life coach entrepreneur. Some life coaches are generalists and do a little bit of all the above. (I get tired just thinking about that.) Regardless of the area of focus, professional life coaches are engaged with the human spirit on a very intimate level. The coach is attuned to the body, mind, emotion, soul, and spirit of a client by the nature of the work. Throughout the development of the profession, life coaches have provided creative leadership in the realm of compassionate care for those ready to move forward towards self-empowerment. We know that valuing assertiveness, developing effective communication skills, establishing space and time for client-care, and honoring commitments to self-care are important. “But please tell me, where do burned out life coaches have a choice?” That is a question I hear often from my colleagues. Here is the thing. Professional life coaches do have a choice. We can mature into models of healthy living or be worn down and burned out by consistently choosing an unbalanced lifestyle. Emotional, physical, and mental fatigue can render a life coach ineffective. Life coaches can only be facilitators of health and personal growth to the extent they are willing to be healthy and grow personally. It is that simple and it is a choice. Some coaches seem to have forgotten the power they have to care because they are overwhelmed with the demands placed on them to “perform” as selfless servants of the client. This is where burnout can wriggle its way into our experience as coaches. But coaches do care, and caring for another human being is a powerful force in nature. Inherent in that work is the challenge of self-care. Too often the coach fails to care for her or his own body, mind, and spirit. The coach may seem to forget to care for his or her own well-being, but do they really forget? Or do they relinquish their power to what they may perceive as more important (namely the client, the task, the paycheck)? Forgetting one’s purpose and disconnecting from one’s passion takes energy – a lot of energy – away from the work coaches love to do and the reason they decided to do it in the first place. Self-confidence, self-awareness and self-love are often put deeply at risk of becoming diminished by the demands of the coach-client relationship. Deeply felt fear is often at the core and plays a role in our lack of confidence, loss of creativity, fatigue, and what is commonly known as professional burnout. That is the area I focus on as a fearless living coach: fear. Now we are back to the concept of having a choice. Ask yourself about your own choices. Are you choosing to burn out? Will you chose to change? Are you being your own champion?
This completes the series of Masteries interdependence infographics. To see them all together, click on the “infographic” link in the category section of the newsletter (here), or visit your member page (here) and get the ebook, which includes all 9 redesigned in an easy to access format, in brilliant color!
Do you have a question that you’d like to ask the certifiers? Submit your questions here: http://certifiedcoachblog.typepad.com/blog/ask-the-certifiers.html. Please send your questions on the IAC Coaching Masteries® and the certification process to certification@certifiedcoach.org. Licensing Committee Corner The Licensing Committee enjoyed meeting with IAC Certifiers recently to discuss some of the issues around the need for translations and information into languages other than English. The most pressing need appears to be for Spanish-speaking licensees, but we are looking into needs in other languages as well. Despite the many problems involved, we cautioned ourselves to focus not on the problems, but rather on one of the Masteries: Inviting Possibility, and on one of Thomas Leonard’s 15 Frameworks: The Answer is Somewhere. All agreed to continue working to resolve the difficulties of language in an international association. Our May meeting was postponed until after the copy deadline for this issue, so we’ll have more to report next month. On the agenda for our late-May meeting are these topics: Licensure Budget, Review and Approval of new applications for Licensure, and written IAC exams in languages other than English. Committee members Pepe del Rio, Deb Chisholm, and Charlie Boyer welcome your suggestions and comments. Contact the Licensure Committee at licensing@certifiedcoach.org.
Welcoming the Newest Member of the IAC Certification Team The IAC is pleased to announce the newest addition to the Certification Team. As we expand outreach to include the Chinese languages, it’s an exciting time for IAC members!
Lorraine Lee been coaching since 2005 and first became a member of the IAC in 2007. Lorraine was certified in 2009. She is passionate about coaching and supporting others to be the best they can be. Lorraine coaches leaders and professionals on a variety of workplace issues including leadership, talent management, communications, managing change & transition, cultural aspects and inspires leaders to maximize their full potential. Lorraine is a part-time Lecturer of Coaching and Marketing courses at the HKU SPACE. Lorraine has some twenty years diverse corporate services marketing background having worked in major multinational organizations in Hong Kong and Canada. In her free time, Lorraine enjoys watching investigative drama such as the likes of Castle and CSI. “So intriguing!” There will be no call in June, but tune in on July 8th at 9:30 am ET and we’ll pick up where we left off! New IAC Coaching Masteries® licensed schools and mentors
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Hello there, 
Martha Pasternack, MMC 
