This is the ninth year that I am sending out a range of Systemic Team Coaching® Christmas Crackers to the wide and growing global community of team leaders and coaches around the world. Each year I take one-line aphorisms that I have found myself using on my various trainings and make a short collection. Like mottos and jokes in Christmas Crackers, they are there to both amuse and help us see the world differently. I hope you enjoy them. Previous years aphorisms are published in the 4th Edition of “Leadership Team Coaching: Developing Collective Transformational Leadership” (2021) published by Kogan Page.
- My life flows through many forms, but none of them are who I am.
No individual can be reduced to the sum of every part of their living body, or the sum of every event that makes up their life. Our whole being flows through these events and material parts but is not limited to them.
- An Organization flows through many internal and external relationships and events, but its ‘being’ is more than the sum of all its engagements.
- A team is only as healthy as its relations with the team above it and beneath it, and the teams upstream and downstream from it in the value chain.
This year Kogan Page published the book I co-wrote with Catherine Carr on Team of Teams Coaching: Using a Teaming approach to build business impact. This book along with its 30 case studies from right around the world shows how you can coach the connections between teams
- The degree to which you can be an effective team of teams player, is equal to the degree you have integrated your own internal team.
This is another quote from the Team of Teams book. Each of us have an internal team of many roles. Mine include husband, lover, father, grandfather, brother, CEO, chairman, professor, gardener, writer, learner, celebrant and many more. But is our inner team more than the sum of the roles?
- I am an unapologetic perpetual student at the school of life – where the fees are love, the homework never ends, and failing exams is no problem, as there are endless resits.
- You never learn alone.
All learning happens through relational engagement. This may be through relationships to partners, colleagues, bosses, employees. But reading a book, listening to music, carving a piece of wood, are all examples of relational learning.
- Beauty is an energetic force, that awakens and connects us to what is beyond us.
This is a quote from my other book that came out this year: Beauty in Leadership and Coaching: and its role in transforming human consciousness. Published by Kogan Page. In it I show how beauty is neither just in the object nor just in the eye of the beholder, but a relational energy that connects us to the beyond.
- Evolving human consciousness cannot be done by humans alone.
To evolve human consciousness Robin Wall Kimmerer teaches us that we humans as the youngest child of creation, need the humility to learn from our elder sisters and brothers who have been on this planet much longer than us. Iain McGilchrist shows how we also need to learn from the realms beyond the material, measurable and rational known. This is explored in depth in “Beauty in Leadership and Coaching”, as is the quote below.
- Only a new religion – one that is as old as the hills themselves – can save us from the destruction with which we are ravaging and dismembering our Mother Earth.
- The only freedom is in service. This amazing short one-liner comes from the young philosopher, Bernardo Kastrup. Teams only become truly successful when they move beyond focussing on their own performance and focus on how they co-create more benefit for all their stakeholders and the systemic levels they are nested within.
- We are the midwives of tomorrow, not the ones who take sides today
As leaders, coaches or consultant we should never be on the side of any individual or part of an organization, only on the side of what is needing to get born, the new that is needed by the world of tomorrow.
- Nothing gets birthed just by one person.
And what is born is never 50% of one parent and 50% of the other, but something new and surprising.
- I would love to share with you what I love the most and to journey with you to the place where magic happens.
May you find magic and your life be enriched this Christmas, Hanukah, Solstice, Dōngzhì Festival, Yuletide, Saturnalia, or December holidays, whether with family, friends, in nature or the sacred.
I will be running Systemic Team Coaching trainings in 2026, both on-line and in person in Germany and London. Also Advanced Retreats for Leaders, Coaches and Team Coaches during June 24-26th and September 2nd to 4th.
