From the Editor Hi there, September is here and I find myself soaking in as much sunshine as I can as I brace myself for the change in seasons. Soon we will be in beautiful – but chillier – autumn and it’s still hard to believe how fast time flies. It’s a wild world, isn’t it? Thank you for reading. Be sure to post your thoughts and responses and don’t feel shy about getting involved in a conversation! Is there something you’d like to see in the VOICE? A particular subject you’d like us to address? 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,
From the President – Vicki Zanini Is There a Secret to Career Building? – Ed Britton Ask the Certifiers – Natalie Tucker Miller You are What You Write – Susan Feehan Licensing Committee Column – Charlie Boyer 2015 Global Coaching Survey – Let Your Voice Be Heard! From the President “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” – Dr. Wayne Dyer (1940-2015). This is one of my favorite Wayne Dyer quotes. It reminds me that as coaches support their clients in expanding their view of the world and themselves, lives change. Dr. Dyer’s books and teachings have certainly expanded my world and I was deeply saddened to hear of his passing on August 29th, the day I sat down to write this message to you. He was a best-selling author, an inspiring teacher and beautiful soul. He will be missed but his light will shine on. The arrival of September is always bittersweet for me. Although I look forward to the fall season when nature explodes into colors of reds, yellows, and oranges, it’s a bit sad to watch the garden fade. Thankfully, one of my favorite flowers, the Sunflower, thrives in September. My father-in-law always called them weeds but they make me smile – and a field of them takes my breath away. It’s going to be a busy month at the IAC. The Chinese Professional Coaching Development Association/IAC Conference is being held in Taiwan on the 5th and 6th with several of our board members speaking, including president-elect Krishna Kumar and Board of Governors member Shanmugam Moorthi. The conference theme is Love, Empowerment & Leadership: Performance Coach and Quality Talent Development, and topics include leadership cultivation, talent guidance and market development. We are super excited and thank board of governor member Jinny Wang, the Taiwan IAC chapter and all involved for putting together this very special event. On the 25th and 26th I’ll be traveling to Boston, Massachusetts with IAC lead certifier and general manager Natalie Tucker Miller to attend the Coaching in Leadership and Healthcare Conference sponsored by Harvard Medical School, McLean Hospital and the Institute of Coaching. This event offers an amazing opportunity to hear from thought leaders on leadership, health and well-being, coaching, positive psychology, behavioral psychology and neuroscience. I can’t wait to share more with you when we get back. People move through our lives and seasons change but new opportunities and new souls are always on the horizon, inviting us to grow and expand, to see ourselves differently, and to change our world. Thank you for being a part of my world and a part of the IAC where you make a difference. With gratitude,
It There a Secret to Career Building? Make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick seems worth. Is there a secret to this? Yes, there is a secret to this career building. It’s Teller’s trick (as in the master magicians, Penn & Teller), quoted at the top of this article. If you know what to do and how to do it, and you diligently apply your know-how, then, inevitably, you have, well, magic! Most of us job seekers and career builders don’t know what to do and don’t know how to do it. That translates into putting the blinders on when we have a job, and counting on an endless series of promotions within the same company with no hiccups of joblessness along the way. Honestly, I’m talking about my past-self! When a jobless period came along, I didn’t have any idea about what to do. I felt scared and discouraged, and often tempted to put the blinders on again by working on home projects, watching TV and sending out dozens of resumes to postings on popular job sites. Bad things can start to happen. There can be massive waste to career development, finances, family and the economy at large – not to mention our own emotional health. It simply doesn’t, DOESN’T, need to be that way. Really, it can be so much different – it can be magical! When you know what to do, how to do it, and practice it, well, it will amaze! And it will be fun. People tell you that when you are out of work, your job is to find work – it’s your full time job. Well, that’s rather trite, quite frankly. You were trained to be an electrician, a lawyer, a musician, a teacher – not to find work! Nowadays, finding work is a career specialty all on its own. There are so many different job categories that even the experts can’t count them. There are online job boards, social media (Linkedin, Linkup, Facebook, for starters), networking events, webinars, resumes, CVs, portfolios, auditions, personal websites, information interviews, career counselors, career coaches, career centers, job fairs – and on it goes. In large corporations, there are whole departments dedicated to succession planning, recruitment, interviewing, negotiation, orientation and training, evaluation and promotion – all managed by trained and experienced professionals, and we don’t even know what the words mean. Career building? Where do you get the degree in that?! So, we go online, sign up on job search websites, fill out online profiles, click on offers sent straight to our inbox, and wait for the interviews to come in. And wait, and wait … for nothing. Enter, our silent magician, Teller, (who only makes impossible things look easy), with advice that is precisely right for career building: Make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick seems worth. If you know what to do, how to do it, and you take the trouble to practice, career building works – like magic! And magic is fun! Now, does that sound scary? All that work? Not if you are Thomas Edison – I never did a day’s work in my life. It was all fun. – Thomas Edison
Keeping up with Coaching Trends Q: Trying to keep up with so many of the coaching trends and human development trends is overwhelming, especially while investing time in becoming a great coach and getting certified with the Masteries. Any ideas? You didn’t mention specific trends, but here are few that are often included in coaching conversations: Positive Psychology, Positive Intelligence, Emotional Intelligence, Social Intelligence, Gamification, Ontological Coaching. Biology of belief, molecules of emotions, neural network pathways. As coaches we are never at a loss for material to read up on, train with, play around with and incorporate into our practice and our own development. The thing that excites me as an IAC coach is how all of these things, not matter how you look at them, lead back to the Masteries. Let’s start with a quote I found about Gamification: “Gamification is exciting because it can make the hard stuff in life fun.” Before jumping into that assumption, something to determine is your client’s definition of some of those terms. Hard? Fun? Exciting? Go to the Common Mistakes section of Mastery #6 of the Ebook to find this little nugget: “Thinking the coach knows the right answer or what is best for the client.” An effect that could emerge from this might be “Uncovering the unknown”, as well as a better understanding of the answer to those questions. Here is an explanation of Positive Intelligence: “Positive Intelligence can be measured as the percentage of the time your mind works for you instead of against you.” Oh my, isn’t that what we are discovering all the time as coaches? Mastery #2 invites us to “challenge limiting beliefs” that our client may be expressing. Mastery #4 helps us “expand the client’s awareness of different levels of knowing”, allowing the client to become attuned to their own blocks and unhelpful behaviors. And that is just scaling the surface of these concepts! In Mastery #8, “the coach helps the client transcend barriers”, thought barriers that could very well be working against the client. When I look into the philosophy of Ontological Coaching and its roots in the way of being (and in coaching specifically) I see how several Masteries support “based on a grounded and practical understanding of language, moods and conversations for behavioral and cultural transformation.” Although Mastery #4 Processing in the Present might seem the most obvious partner when you think of ontology, there are other Masteries that are unlikely allies. For example, how about Mastery #9, where too often coaches focus on just the “tangible” or “doing”, yet one way it asks us to go deeper is by “eliciting and use the client’s values and or sense of self to ensure sustainability”? It’s all in there. Wherever your coaching interests take you or whatever trends attract you, I can guarantee you will be supported in your expansion by keeping the Masteries close by. Let us know some of the connections you make with the Masteries to new coaching approaches, models, and trends.
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. You are What You Write… So Who are You? Show me someone’s writing and I’ll show you who they are. Computer software is often used to pinpoint authorship, using writing quirks to capture criminals and save lives. Soon, software may take us into a world where we can predict which of us will become online trolls before we start any anti-social behaviour. We are what we write, each with a unique writing fingerprint. We make instant judgments about writing that hits our inboxes; we weigh up the sender’s credibility and trustworthiness, and all without the use of software. We may feel guilty about our snap judgements and their subjective nature, yet they are easily justifiable. We lay ourselves bare with our words, showing the full battery of worries, ambitions, quirks and foibles, and we’ve become expert at sensing these clues, using them to paint accurate profiles of the writer. Just show a piece of your work to three or four people willing to take part in an experiment — writing that’s between 150 and 300 words is fine. Ask your helpers for three adjectives to describe what they’ve read. They will offer more, wanting to justify their reactions. Stop them. Overthinking will skew the results. You’ll hope for words like clear, decisive, inspiring. But you might get confused, rambling, and dull. Whatever the verdict, you’ll probably agree — if you’re being honest — that it’s a fair snapshot of your state of mind while writing. While our personalities show in our language skills, the real issues are there before we write a word. When we write: ‘It is understood that a decision will need to be made…’ we’re showing reluctance to own action when we could say, ‘I/we need to make a decision…’ When we write: ‘A small cut in staff numbers will be necessary to achieve financial solvency…’ we show vagueness we could avoid by saying, ‘I/we need to cut 50 jobs to return the company to profit.’ Often we’re afraid to write short, concise sentences for fear of being thought terse. We’re afraid to get straight to the point, in case we’ve picked the wrong one. We qualify words, making our meaning indirect. Sometimes readers give up, either from boredom or the belief that we have nothing to say. Clear writing exposes exactly what we think, and it’s scary. The temptation is to hide behind templates and blueprints, copying someone else’s answer on how to write well. But this stops us from improving our skills, and invites readers to see us as a copycat, someone who hasn’t earned attention by hard work. Blending in is a dangerous business approach to take in a world awash with words. Our deepest need is to be authentic, particularly through our words. To stand out, we just need to discover how to be the best version of ourselves in any given circumstance. First, recognise that writing is a process that reveals our thinking through the way we use language. These are the stages: • Purpose • Readers • Research • Structure • Language skills Writing is a great diagnostic tool for highlighting where we need to do further work. Filter clear thoughts into well-crafted words and you’ll do more than change who you are: you’ll change your world. Susan Feehan is a journalist, university lecturer, business writing mentor, screenwriter, and the author of How to Write Well — when you don’t know where to start. Licensing Committee Column Our August meeting was a bit – well, eventful, to say the least. Despite some internet interruptions and frantic call-backs to get connections re-established, we managed to get some business accomplished! One application for licensure was reviewed. Recently, the applicant had passed the written exam and had submitted a Professional Development Plan, as required by our guidelines, and the Committee was very pleased to approve the application. We reviewed an online application process and will be submitting suggestions for implementation to the Board of Governors very soon. Also, we noted the continuing need to revise the Handbook, making sure that the on-line Handbook is in sync with current practices. There is a need to update the current list of licensees on the IAC website. This will be done as soon as possible so that the website displays our most current list of licensees. Committee members Deb Chisholm, Pepe Del Rio, Eduardo Vier and Charlie Boyer welcome your suggestions and comments. Contact the Licensing Committee at licensing@certifiedcoach.org.
2015 Global Coaching Survey – Let Your Voice Be Heard! Our colleagues at the ICF have commissioned a global coaching survey as a follow up to research conducted in 2012. This is a great opportunity for the experiences and opinions of all coaches to be collated to give us a better understanding of the current and future state of the coaching industry, what opportunities and challenges coaches are facing today, the evolution of professional coaching, and practicing coaches’ perspective of the future. https://pwcresearch.com/uc/ICFReg/ The survey is available in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Portuguese and Korean. Please contribute your ideas to the rich body of knowledge around being a coach! New IAC Certified Coaches Congratutlations to Graham Kean from Johor, Malaysia who recently earned the Master Masteries Coach (MMC) designation! Your Feedback We’d love to get your feedback on any issue related to the IAC. Do you have any questions, concerns, encouragement or ideas for improvement regarding membership benefits, certification, the VOICE, the direction of the organization or anything else at all? Please send an email to voice@certifiedcoach.org. Please help us improve. |
Beth Ann Miller is an MFA candidate in Writing and is a native New Englander. She has a professional background in editing and higher education, and enjoys working with youths in the arts. Her stories have appeared in online and print journals and she is perpetually at work on new creative projects.
Vicki Zanini is founder of Vicki Zanini Coaching & Training. As a certified holistic life coach, she works with individuals and groups who are ready to create new possibilities, boost personal effectiveness, and experience a deeper sense of meaning and inner peace. She has been leading coaching groups and workshops for over 15 years in personal development, self-care, creativity, and intuition. Visit her website at 
Ed Britton is a career and leadership coach who lives in Calgary, Canada. He also serves the IAC as the Director of Development and leads the Path to Mastery coaching triads program. Ed has a background in the physical sciences, in adult education and leadership development. After living in China for 10 years, Ed looks forward to a Canadian winter and cross country skiing! If you would like to participate in the Path to Mastery coaching triads program, please contact Ed at 
Natalie Tucker Miller, MMC, is the Lead Certifier and a certifying examiner at the IAC, as well as Past-President. Natalie is founder of Ageless-Sages.com Publishing (
Charles Boyer, Ed.D., (Charlie), BCC, Certified Masteries Coach, is the founder of C-Star Coaching, a values-oriented practice for newer leaders, and creator of the Team 412 Project, a web-based leadership development program.