Already purchased a ticket?  HALF PRICE still applies when you simply register a friend.  We want to spread the joy and impact of this dynamic duo and it just can’t be done alone, we must all share this with a friend! http://www.bayareacoaches.org/event/bring-a-friend/

Want to go but can’t swing the driving AND the presentation time?  SIMULCAST is just for you!   Enjoy the presentation, feel the excitement of the live simulcast AND replay your favorite parts of it for up to a month after the event is a wrap!   We don’t want anyone who is interested in the growth edges available to us in the realm of leaning into fearlessness to miss this duo for ANYTHING!!! Not only that, we’re making it super affordable with a new price of $78.50. For the simulcast registration, here’s the link: http://www.bayareacoaches.org/event/simulcast/

So give yourself AND a friend the gifts being offered to experience, engage, discover, awaken and nourish your way of being in the world through the beauty and intentions of one of today’s most widely-acclaimed thought leaders, Margaret Wheatley.

In the spirit of Halloween “treats,” here is a teaser treat for you: a link to a recent webcast attended by many local, curious participants and Barbara McAfee!  Listen to her lively and fun interview as she offers insights about how your voice can be a vehicle for greater freedom, joy, and aliveness.

To request a link for this webcast, simply go to http://www.bayareacoaches.org/event/taming-your-brain-rats-a-call-with-barbara/#access-call.

STEP INTO FEARLESSNESS — SPREAD THE NEWS — HALF OFF FOR A FRIEND!

• Watch the video of Barbara McAfee as she sings, “Taming Your Brain Rats.” It’s fun and worth the five minutes it takes to watch. You can also request a link for the webcast where Barbara teaches us the different voices we can access for a more effective impact. It’s a mini-voice lesson and she presents it interactively. Go to  http://www.bayareacoaches.org/event/taming-your-brain-rats-a-call-with-barbara/

• If you can’t be physically present at the First Unitarian Church of Oakland, 685 – 14^th Street, Oakland, on October 22, a simulcast is now available. You can watch it from the comfort of your home or watch it for up to four weeks after the event. Here’s the link: http://www.bayareacoaches.org/event/simulcast/. Please note that the CCEUs also apply to the simulcast.

• When you register, you can order your lunch for the day of the event.

• Need to upgrade your professional status? Take advantage of the five CCEUs offered for attending this event – Two are in Core Competency.

To register for the event, go to the registration page here. This is an amazing value, so don’t miss it!

It’s rare that we have the opportunity to be a part of such a remarkable event where in one inspirational day you will heed the call to fearlessness and experience a joyful way to discover your leadership voice…plus much more. If you’re not familiar with either Meg Wheatley or Barbara McAfee, this is your chance to experience live these two amazing women who are in great demand for their appearance and the great value they offer.

Meg’s articles appear in both professional and popular journals and may be downloaded free from her website: www.margaretwheatley.com. Meg received her doctorate in Organizational Behavior and Change from Harvard University, and a Masters in Media Ecology from New York University.  She’s been an organizational consultant since 1973, a global citizen since her youth, a professor in two graduate business programs, a prolific writer, and a happy mother and grandmother.  She has received numerous awards and honorary doctorates. You might also want to check our some of her podcasts.

Here are the 7 reasons why Margaret Wheatley and Barbara McAfee were selected for this event and why you should attend:

When the five Bay Area Coaches chapters met to brainstorm a special event for the Bay Area, this is what they wanted to bring you:

1. Someone we wouldn’t normally have access to;
2. An opportunity for people who don’t know about coaching, to learn about what coaching can offer;
3. For people attending the event to be inspired;
4. To provide something you can’t get somewhere else;
5. To provide a fun, inspirational opportunity to build relationships, get exposure for coaches and raise money for our chapters.
6. Margaret Wheatley and Barbara McAfee met and exceeded all of the criteria.
7. This event has been created for you!

Don’t miss it! Do yourself a favor and go to www.bayareacoaches.org and register today!

Barbara is fresh off her visit to the ICF Conference and is just beginning a tour of her new book Full Voice: The Art and Practice of Vocal Presence!

On the call we not only got the chance to know more about Barbara and how to listen to our voices, but we also caught a glimpse of what it is going to be like attending our event on October 22nd with both Barbara and Margaret Wheatley. If you missed it, you can now request a link to listen to the Taming Your Brain Rats call.

Also of note, as a special part of Barbara’s book release, anyone who purchases her book on Tuesday, October 4th will help Fifty Lanterns bring solar power to The Grandmothers Project in Uganda! You can also learn more about Barbara, and her book at : http://www.barbaramcafee.com

Have fun listening to the call and asking for “lasagna” !

So you now have threeways to “taste” a bit of what the event on 10/22 has in store for you

(1) On September 29 you can listen to a talk with Barbara McAfee at noon PDT. Please register (column on the right side of this blog) for the free webcast. If that time is not convenient for you, sign up anyway and you will receive the link for later listening.

(2) You can also watch Barbara as she sings, “Training Your Brain Rats,” a five-minute clip on the same registration page.

(3) You can read excerpts from Barbara’s new book, FULL VOICE: The Art and Practice of Vocal Presence, and see a short video as she talks about the importance of finding your true leadership voice and the difference it can make in your life.This book promises to be a real gift for public speakers as well as anyone who wants to make their presence known. Go here.

We don’t often have the opportunity to be a part of such a remarkable event where in one inspirational day you will heed the call to fearlessness and experience a joyful way to discover your leadership voice…and much more.

Please register for the day with Margaret Wheatley and Barbara McAfee before October 1 to take advantage of the early bird discount. It’s an important event and one in which you won’t be disappointed. How do I know? Meg Wheatley and Barbara McAfee are in great demand for their dynamic, purposeful presentations and it took a lot of negotiating to find a date when they were available.

Please don’t miss Meg’s mind-opening presentation and the joyful way Barbara works to help us find our true leadership voices. You will meet and network with community leaders, human resource managers, organizational leaders and coaches…and you’ll have a lot of fun.

To register for the event and take advantage of the Early Bird Special, go to our registration page here.

Jennifer Hanlon Diamond Edge Coaching

I love that there are no accidents in life.  It’s no accident that I am able to serve with a wonderful Board of Directors at Silicon Valley Coaching Federation and no accident that I was asked to serve as a liaison to the Bay Area Coaches group to work on bringing a region-wide program and dynamic duo to the members, affiliates, and the general public in the Bay Area.

True to my coaching nature, I became curious immediately about who Margaret Wheatley was.

As an avid reader of things to grow the heart, mind and spirit, I bought three of her books, saving Leadership and the New Science for last.  Today, I just thought I would share a few thoughts of inspiration from Margaret’s book Perseverance with the hope that it will add to your curiosity about this speaker and entice you to consider what other wisdom and insights she will bring to us through the brazen topic of fearlessness.

Perseverance is a book filled with simple, yet profound themes and topics for contemplation.  Since we are going to embark on a journey with Margaret around fearlessness, I thought it would be interesting to share her insights on “plain old” fear.  In brief, Margaret acknowledges, “Fear is just part of human life. Fear is simple evidence that we’re human.”  She beautifully frames an approach to fear that is interconnected to our coaching world, the concept of “staying,” or “being with:”

“What’s important to decide is what we do with our fear.  We can withdraw, flee, distract or numb ourselves. Or we can acknowledge that we’re scared. And stay right there.”

In gorgeous form, she then touts our beloved embracing of curiosity:

“We can stay where we are and bravely investigate our fear.  We can move toward it, curious about it.  We can even interview it.  What does it feel like?  What color it is?  Does it have a texture, size, personality?”

She notes that it is more important to question the fear itself, rather than the typical inquiry of “why?”  And what I love is her insight about how “Paradoxically, the more we engage directly with it, the less fearful it becomes.”

The implications for us here, I believe are huge.  We can replace “fear” with anything that we are hesitant to investigate. With any feeling or condition arising in us that seeks to put us in a spin or spiral down a vortex of no return. The hope she offers here is this:  “It is our curiosity that transforms fear.  Most often, it dissolves into energy that we can work with.  And all because we were willing to develop a relationship with what, at first, appeared so frightening.”

So I encourage us all to consider developing a relationship with fearlessness–to delve into what we know about it right now, what it evokes in us and what it is we can bring with us in the form of our curiosity about it. If there is any homework to do, let us do this in preparation for the insights and offerings that Margaret has for us on October 22.  As coaches, leaders and spirits having a human experience, it looks like we have an opportunity to continue on the path of transformation in this sacred place of fearlessness.

Don’t hesitate to sign up today and take advantage of our early-bird special. Simply go to our registration page here.

Olivia Herriford, DM, MBA

In 2008, Margaret Wheatley wrote an article titled Fearlessness: The Last Organizational Change Strategy. (You can find it on her website, www.margaretwheatley.com. Reading it three years later, not only are her observations hauntingly more relevant, they bring to mind Steve Jobs and why his leadership blasted Apple past Exxon/Mobil to become the most valuable company in the world. He was fearless.

Certainly, he cared about quarterly performance as much as Rex Tillerson, but, as Margaret points out, it took fearlessness to place a higher priority on a strategy driven by quality and the values of people.

Where Jobs was unorthodox in his style is that he appeared to care more about the people he was meant to serve; i.e., technology consumers, than the Apple employees. The motivation for his constant quest for innovation appeared to be the attention and super-star status that Apple-loyals relished about him.

Yet most Apple employees I know don’t feel they need our empathy. Jobs’ fearless style was “clear direction from a visionary genius CEO . . . highest expectations of one’s creative talent . . . this is Heaven to people who are proud of their own abilities and are exhilarated by pushing themselves to the utmost to reach success,” as reflected in a blog post comment in a Forbes article, Steve Jobs and Should CEOs Be Nice.

Here’s how Wheatley defines fearlessness in the context of leadership:

“To be fearless is to face the reality of your situation – to recognize what you can actually achieve, given these very powerful cultural and systemic dynamics, without deluding yourself that you can, through your own act of will, be more powerful than you are. And then, at the same time, decide who you want to be, so that you can stand firm for the practices you believe in most deeply, so that you can accept criticism.”

Leadership takes courage…and fearlessness can be a pretty effective strategy in an era of change and uncertainty. I hope this example inspires you to be present to hear Margaret Wheatley’s call to fearlessness on October 22^nd.

________________________

Don’t hesitate to sign up today and take advantage of our early-bird special. Simply go to our registration page here.

By Olivia Herriford, MBA, DM

When asked why I’m such a fan of Margaret Wheatley. I’ve been building anticipation among my colleagues from the day she was announced as our event speaker, so I’m going to use this opportunity to share my story.

My doctorate is Organizational Leadership, so suffice it to say I’ve read the works of most of the thought leaders. I continue to do so. Yet there are two that still stand out for me and have shaped my philosophy of what makes a great leader. Meg is one of them. The other is Frances Hesselbein.  Frances Hesselbein  is the President and CEO of the Leader to Leader Institute (formerly the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management).

The theme throughout her theory is “Leadership is a matter of how to be – not how to do it.” This simple statement helped put the meaningfulness I found in twenty-five years in management in perspective. The more I grew as a mindful and self-aware human being, the better I performed as a manager and leader – and the more I enjoyed being in the role.

Wheatley transformed this personal realization from an individual way of being to add an organizational way of being with her first book, Leadership and the New Science. Fritjov Capra’s Web of Life was the inspiration for that book, which got much of its attention because it presented how leaders and organizations, like all living organisms, are very interdependent with the environment in which they function. Awareness of interdependencies and an open exchange of information between the entities are what make organizations great.

So I’ve followed Margaret over the years, including participating in two retreats with her and others who challenged us just how to be as we faced uncertainty and surprise. The most memorable was a December weekend in 2002 at the Marconi Center in Tomales Bay. Just as we arrived on Friday night, one of the worst winter storms of the season followed us in. Saturday morning we lost power, but true to the wisdom Margaret shares about how organizations adapt and emerge, the retreat went on.

We came together as a team (about 50 people including the Center’s staff) and the retreat program went on. That afternoon, I stepped into a circle of friends that helped me out of my post-doctoral paralysis. Over Saturday evening’s delicious, collaboratively improvised dinner, I gave Peter Block an introductory lesson on Kwanzaa. After dinner we returned to a candlelit meeting room where Margaret surprised us with a drumming troupe and we played Brazilian rhythms late into the night with sound of the storm as our melody.

Join us in October.  Who knows what we’ll all be, but it will be great and if it’s like Margaret’s usual workshops, expect delightful surprises!

In her book, “Walk Out Walk On,” Margaret takes us on a journey to different countries. The stories are captivating to read. They show how people in these countries, faced with seemingly unsolvable problems have “walked out” of an impossibly difficult situation and “walked on” to discover new opportunities and ways of doing things.

Many of us have been faced with seemingly insurmountable problems that could be the result of a loss of a job, a home, a loved one, a marriage. Under duress, it’s understandable that we sometimes choose to stay in the situation because we fear the unknown.

The message I got from this book is that in stepping into the fear and stepping out of our self-imposed, limiting restrictions, we can find joy and fulfillment by “walking in” to a new way of thinking.

It’s no wonder that excitement is building up for the upcoming workshop to be held on October 22nd at the First Unitarian Church in Oakland, when Margaret will grace us with her wisdom as the presents, “A Call to Fearlessness.” At this event, we will join forward thinkers in organizational leadership, coaching, training and personal growth and explore how we can serve our planet at this time.

Don’t hesitate to sign up today and take advantage of our early-bird special. Simply go to our registration page here.

For a special treat, Barbara McAfee, songwriter, singer, entertainer, will inspire you with her original music and add a lot of fun and joy to the event.

Please don’t hesitate! Attendance is limited and you don’t want to be left out of this life-changing event.

Watch for more details in the coming months. In the meanwhile, mark the date, 10/22 on your calendar NOW.