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FREE WEBINAR March 29th: 4 Reasons Why “Everybody Needs a Coach”

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Big Beacon presents a FREE WEBINAR

4 Reasons Why “Everybody Needs a Coach”

Business leaders, Eric Schmidt and Bill Gates say that “everybody needs a coach”, and the C-suite, (CEOs, CFOs, CTOs, etc.) increasingly hire leadership coaches to help them navigate difficult business problems. This practice is now spreading to other leaders, educational leaders, faculty members, and even students. This short, interactive webinar gives 4 ways coaching can help you in your work.

You will come away learning:

1. Coaching is not what you think: It is not advice giving by a smarty pants know-it-all.

2. Coaching is remarkably cost-effective and webinar attendees can attend free monthly group coaching sessions.

3. Coaching is a form of humble inquiry in which the coach asks powerful questions and the client reflects deeply on possibilities, values, goals, and desirable results.

4. Learn the four ways coaching can help you in your work.Learn the 4 common mistakes of educational change efforts and how to overcome them.

Big Beacon is a 501c3, non-profit organization dedicated to the transformation of education. This webinar is free with no cost or obligation. but with plenty of opportunities for successful educational change.

Sign Up Now

Big Boys Don’t Cry

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The 21st century transformation of education is profoundly emotional, but why is “emotion” such an uncomfortable subject?:

The idea that we might acknowledge emotion directly in education runs up agains a taboo for men (in many cultures).  From an early age, men are urged to suppress their unhappiness, sadness, or other negative emotion that leads to the emotional display of crying.  Sometimes this is done with understanding and concern, but oftentimes boys are shamed if they do cry, and the shame continues until they stop.

Read more, here.

Six Minds and Petroleum Technology

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The Journal of Petroleum Technology recently published a piece by David Goldberg on how the Six Minds of a Whole New Engineer can be applied to the petroleum industry:

Petroleum engineers have played a pivotal role in the rise of the modern engineer, and they can once again join hands to rejuvenate their own discipline and engineering as a thriving whole.

Read the full article, here.

Six Minds of the Whole New Engineer

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David Goldberg and Mark Somerville’s A Whole New Engineer outlines the challenges facing engineering today and offers solutions on how to adapt to 21st century needs.

Today’s civil engineer increasingly needs to combine the leadership spirit of the profession’s pioneering days in the 1800s with today’s technical and social knowledge and know-how. This situation calls on today’s civil engineers to be more broadly educated and capable than in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, when a narrower kind of training and practice were the norm.

What are the Six Minds? Learn more here.

7 languages for educational transformation

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7-languagesIntroduction

Coming home on a long flight I was reading Kegan and Lahey’s book How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work: Seven Languages for Transformation.  In working as a coach, the power of language, story, and reframing is hard to overestimate.  As clients work to change, the role of talking differently about themselves and others is often a key element to making the changes they say they want to achieve.  

What We Want & What We’ll Do to Keep from Getting It

What clients “say they want to achieve” is one thing.  What they will do to keep from getting it is critical here and is is driven home in the book in the introduction.  There, the authors quote Harvard colleague William Perry as follows:

“Whenever someone comes to me for help, I listen very hard and ask myself, `What does this person really want-and what will they do to keep from getting it? ‘ ”  

In change, the major obstacles to change are often internal, not external, and the client’s own actions against his or her own stated interests are often obstacle one.

7 Languages for Transformation

The book discusses 7 shifts in language as follows:

  1. From the Language of Complaint to the Language of Commitment
  2. From the Language of Blame to the Language of Personal Responsibility
  3. From the Language of New Year’s Resolutions to the Language of Competing Commitments: Diagnosing the Immunity to Change
  4. From the Language of Big Assumptions That Hold Us to the Language of Assumptions We Hold: Disturbing the Immunity to Change
  5. From the Language of Prizes and Praising to the Language of Ongoing Regard
  6. From the Language of Rules and Policies to the Language of Public Agreement
  7. From the Language of Constructive Criticism to the Language of Deconstructive Criticism

The choice of complaints to commitments as the first shift is an interesting one.  It can be an important first step away from playing “ain’t it awful” with oneself, one’s colleagues and co-workers and toward making clear requests, commitments, and agreements toward actions that matter.   

Educational transformation is a difficult undertaking.  Reading this book and applying it’s lessons can be an important step toward utilizing language in productive ways to bring about transformation.