If it’s true that life is a journey, then the most important voyage we know of is the one that takes you back to you. This holiday season, we want to encourage you to take time for yourself. Yes, there is a lot of pressure to spend time with family and with friends, but as your coaches we strongly recommend that you plan some time for yourself that is unencumbered by the demands of life. Time to relax, reflect, work…
As coaches and consultants, we find that people regularly struggle with delegation and they tend to feel uncomfortable admitting it because they believe they should know how to do it. In our experience, delegating is a challenging skill; one that few of us are taught. People are frequently told they should “just delegate that” but when they try, they don’t get the results they hoped for so they give up delegating and just heap it onto their already full plate…
We were recently at a meeting where the presenter asked these questions: Who in the room has read an article on time management? Everyone raised their hand. Who has taken a class or webinar on getting more things done? Almost everyone raised their hand. Who feels great about their ability to prioritize their key imperatives and get them done in an efficient and timely manner? Only about 11 people raised their hands. Despite all of the reading and classes, it’s…
Those of you who know us know that we believe that leaders exist at all levels of an organization and in all walks of life. We believe that leadership is a way of being in the world. It requires a willingness to influence the world (not stand on the sidelines and complain) and to be influenced by the world (not stand impervious to the events and lives playing out around you.) We are passionate about finding the key nuggets of…
At a local professional meeting, we ran into a man we’ve known for some time who reported that he’d recently had his first appointment with Jill Banks, our Director of Career Services. He said that he had been thinking about calling for a while, but just wasn’t sure he was a good candidate for career coaching. (With career coaching being a relatively new field, many people don’t really understand what it’s about.) Our friend started to share his experience and…
Recently, while hiking with a wonderful 6-year-old, she asked a question that highlighted the importance of creating a shared vision. That morning, one of her parents had asked a group of us, “Who wants to go on a hike?” A small number decided that a hike sounded like fun, and so we each grabbed our hiking shoes, a bottle of water and a small snack. When we were no more than 10 steps into our hike, this youngest member of…
There are a lot of reasons why it’s important to nourish your spirit, but the most important reason is so you will have more of yourself as you navigate the opportunities and challenges in your life. In our leadership model, The Leader in You: Three Steps to Claiming Your Power, Influence, and Impact, the second step focuses on knowing yourself. This includes: Knowing the kinds of things you fear and how you show up when you are at your best…
The past couple of weeks, we have been talking about articulating your passion and identifying the things that get you up in the morning. In response to those posts, we have heard from a number of you that it was difficult to consider what gets you up in the morning because you are barely able to get out of bed! Many of you said that you are finding yourself deflated and worn. So today, we thought we would talk about…
Last week, Jill Banks, our Director of Career Services, wrote asking you to think about your passion and success. We heard from quite a number of you in response to that post. There were a lot of comments about the challenges of articulating your passion in a way that can guide your efforts and your decisions. One CEO wrote that he quickly identified his passions and he used the phrase, “these are what get me out of bed in the…
We want to start this week’s post by thanking our incredible Monday Morning Business Coach community. Your questions and comments continue to fuel our thinking and shape what we think about each week. In the past couple of months, quite a number of you have written to ask why we are sending out, free, these powerful tips to claiming your power and stepping into your leadership. So this week we wanted to take a moment to tell you how much…
We stand shoulder-to-shoulder with leaders, teams, and individuals who are passionate about growing in their leadership and in their ability to create cultures of psychological safety and engagement.
Carpenter Smith Consulting is a Women Business Enterprise, Oregon Cert ID 7047.
