What now?  Helping Clients Gain Insight and Discover Direction

Keynote Description

The presentation is broken down into the following sections with some sub-points included:

1.  Discernment: Fundamental to Personal and Organizational Effectiveness

How do I recognize what is at stake in the present moment and the best way to respond to it?  Through discernment, I come to distinguish and prioritize among all that is happening within and around me and learn how to respond quickly and well to my current situation.

2.  Principles of Discernment

Philosophical and religious traditions offer many principles that offer contemporary leaders valuable insight into the power, meaning and uses of discernment.

•  Gaining Insight: Learning from stories about how great thinkers came to new insight.
• Discovering Direction: the importance of putting direction in context by articulating one’s “philosophy of life.”
• Obstacles to Insight and Direction: Understanding and overcoming the three traditional obstacles to attaining and maintaining insight and direction: distraction, diversion, dispersion.

3.  Methods of Discernment

In the Information Age, what is needed most is not information, but discernment – which gives me the capacity to recognize the truly important information among the massive amount of facts. 

•  ADD: an attention deficit resulting from an information overload.
• The Lewis and Clark expedition: study, commit gradually, test, follow your best sense
• Phenomenological analysis: Among everything showing up around me, what is the most important “phenomenon” for me to pay attention to right now?  What will give me the best access to the truth about what is happening right now?
• Fundamental questions: Among all the questions stirring within me, which one is the most important for me to address right now?

4.  Discerning in the Midst of Many Possibilities

Here are nine insights from spiritual and philosophical traditions that help clients discern in midst of many possibilities.

5.  Discerning in Situations that Seem to Offer No Good Options

Here are nine insights from spiritual and philosophical traditions that help clients discern in situations with seemingly no good options.

6.  Coaching Your Client to Gain Insight and Discover Direction

How can a Client come to develop a lifestyle that is open to gaining insight and discovering direction?  There is a four-step process to help foster in Clients.

• Attend (Ready!)
• Discern (Receive)
• Interpret (Reflect)
• Act (Respond)

7.  Helping Clients become Coaches

Through the process of being coached, a Client will ordinarily come to appreciate and integrate various coaching competencies.  This process can happen spontaneously or be undertaken intentionally.

• The Art and Science of Coaching: forming coaching competencies through study, practice and through a life humanly lived
• The Way of the Scientist: Disciplines to Becoming a more “Scientific” Coach
• The Way of the Artist: Disciplines to Becoming a more “Artful” Coach