Nancy Love’s Weblog

sunday morning on the island of Kauai.

The calm before the storm …. that place where things are going well and yet you know that something is about to break loose and reek havoc.  Sometimes I feel like I am just waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the race to begin.  “And they’re off …”   2010 has been a bit of a horse race.  The winner is yet to be determined.  What if PULSE Institute was put out to pasture?  What then?   Would Dr. Nancy Love still have her loyal following of 10 or 12 people who read the blog more or less reularly???  Would the world as we know it cease to exist?

We are closing the downtown office of PULSE on January 31st, 2011.  WE have had office space in Calgary since August 2002.  WE still have offices in St. Albert and Vancouver and we are all working out of home offices, but this will be a bit of a milestone.  We have been talking about making some other changes too.  Right sizing I guess you would call it … moving to a place where our expenses are manageable.

Efficiency and Effectiveness and a letting go of what could have been.  It is a little sad really.  I had such hopes for hte PULSE Institute.  this year we are on receive.  We have planted the seeds and are waiting for them to germinate and grow.  Menawhile we write and respond to clients who know and love us and to new clients who learn about us from others.  We give up the push.  We have never been good at the hard sell.  We don’t know how to do it.  Our best sales tool is to have people attend our sessions and learn what it feels like to learn like that.

How do you spread the word?  Do YOU knkow anyone who needs to know about PULSE???

Today I am traveling by train from Toronto to London. It is gray and wet outside but the comfort of train travel is always surprising to me. I enjoy watching the world go by. It provides a new perspective.

There are many stories about trains and a sense of romance that accompanies them. I’m not sure about the romance but it is a great experience. You get from one place to another along a track that was laid a hundred years ago. The history alone is amazing.

The idea of the track as a way to think about conversations intrigues me too. We use the PULSE Frame to railroad people through the process to get to their destination. As a coach and a mediator I do that. As of today the word “railroad” has a more positive and progressive meaning for me.

Co-create is a term that I don’t completely understand.  If it means creating together it confuses me in the context of coaching relationship.  As a coach you define the relationship you are having with your client and as a client they define the relationship they have with their coach.  You choose your contribution as do they.  I accept that you influence each other’s perceptions of that relationship.  I think that things you say and do contribute to the interpretation and the acceptance of that relationship. The part you are not in charge of is the client’s past and present reality and how you fit into that.  You may say or do something that reminds them of something else that you have no clue about and they may begin to create illusions about you and the relaitonship they are having with you.

Better to define the relationship on your own terms with in their context.  Flexibility is needed to make the relaitonship work for you and for them but CO-CREATE? I’m not getting it. The relationship that will help “Make it so” (which is a phrase I love) has to be build on the premise that you are the professional and IN CHARGE or the process.  They are the client and IN CHARGE of the outcome.  Making it so comes from understanding and moving forward through the process.  Speed, focus, level of commitment are variables and allow the traveler to control aspects of the journey but the coach has to maintain control of the fact that a journey is occurring and sitting still is only acceptable for rest and contemplation.

I may be taking too hard a line here but if someone hires a coach they want to change something.  I may also be confusing ROLE with RELATIONSHIP.

if you think about pulse as an operating system then you can begin to imagine how many programs or conversations you can run using this very effective operating system. all of the Programs or conversations would be appreciative and would be focused on the future. The skills would be used when appropriate. the protocol would be Gentle Honest Open Specific Talk. People would listen with HEART and would give evidence of having listened with POWER. the world would be ore collaborative if we all used PULSE as their OS.

Think about it….. that’s contemplation.  Time to think and that is the pay off when you manage your time.  At least it is for me.  I love to be in my head and if I have time to spare I sit and think.  Other people go for a jog.  Others move into their emotions and enjoy me time that way. The first time Mel said to me “I have this whole new concept around time and how we move from Chaos to Contemplation” …   I got to thinking ….  I love the idea, the comparison, the juxtaposition.  I love the way opposing ideas enrich each other.  The continuum stretches in my head and I can SEE what it all means.  I know when I have been in Chaos and when order has emerged and I feel good about that and then finally I might have the time to contemplate next moves and plan  …  and then I move back into the busy-ness that sometimes moves along the continuum to chaos.  In and out in a rhythm that is almost predictable.

It’s like when your desk is messy.  There are times when you NEED to clean it and other times when you can sit with the physical chaos and manage … until the next wave of need to tidy is upon you.  Sometimes it is fun to wait for the wave and I can see the ebbing and flowing of my days and hours and minutes as they become FULL and then empty and then FULL and then empty.  It is so cool.  Does everything come in waves????  Maybe. hmmm .. Time to Contemplate!  YAY.