13 new crackers for Systemic Team Coaches®
Thank you to all those who came to the Book Launch for my new book “Beauty in Leadership and Coaching: And Its Role In Transforming Human Consciousness”. If you purchase it from Routledge directly, you can use the code SMA24 to get a 20% discount. If you missed the launch you can watch the redcording here.
This is the eighth 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.
1. “Life is in love with becoming.”
Discovering this while writing my new book, “Beauty in Leadership and Coaching”, just published by Routledge, was an epiphany for me – that in all of creation no moment and no being have ever been repeated, life (including us) are always giving birth to the new.
2. “Let me live my life like a river flows, constantly surprised by its own unfolding.” John O’Donohue, Irish Mystic and Poet
This beautifully moves us from the cosmic in one above, to a personal prayer or aspiration, that I share with this inspirational poet, that touches my heart.
3. Every problem is a challenge in disguise and a generous lesson from life.
These are the first steps in the practice (which is in the book on Beauty) called from “Grumble to Gratitude”. Just simply reframing every problem as a challenge and a learning opportunity, changes our, and our coachees’ perspective and fundamentally changes how we engage with the issue.
4. “Whatever the question about the future, the answer is learning.”
This quote from Richard Gerver Author and thought leader, echoes number 3 – we should welcome the fact that everyday is a school day.
5. It is hard to be a good ancestor unless you first learn to be a good descendant.
We need to honour all we have received from those who came before us, in order to pass on more fully, what we can to the coming generations. This summer my friend and colleague David Presswell said something very similar “it is hard to fully embrace life when we judge how it came to us.”
6. Wisdom is the knowledge we receive, that we have tried out in practice, learnt from experience and feedback and reflected on.
I often quote Krishnamurti, who would say in all his talks – what I tell you is not true, it is only true when you apply it in your life and discover its truth yourself.
7. True team leaders and team coaches are more in love with what the team could become, and the beneficial value it could co-create with others, than with their own success.
I never ask a team leader what they want from team coaching, but rather what the team need to become to co-create more beneficial value for all their stakeholders.
8. Culture does not change by PowerPoint, but virally through enactment and role-modelling of the culture that is needed.
First, we need help to see the culture we are immersed in, as it has become part of us and how we experience the world and our habitually ways of doing and being. Then we need help in stepping into the culture that is needed for the future, and live it before we try and advocate it to others.
9. When a senior position in an organization becomes vacant, it is too late to develop the internal candidates for the short-list.
We are helping several organizations integrate their future strategy and organizational development, with their succession planning and the leadership development required to have a strong pool of future-fit leaders, ready for potential promotion.
10. When we start a new job, both parties, like marriage partners, often fall in love with what they want the other to be, rather than what they are.ng.”
In the new year I will be sharing a blog on a new approach we have trialled with a couple of organizations, called the “Pre-appointment – Pre-Nuptial.”, to minimise the disappointment of only later waking up to the reality of the organization we have joined or the person we have appointed.
11. People do not buy products; they buy the difference the product will make for them.
To create beneficial value for all our customers and clients, we need to be constantly curious about their changing needs, and what we can uniquely do to meet them.
12. Don’t feed people the menu, but discover their deeper hunger, otherwise people may end up eating the menu and wondering why they are still hungry.”
From coaches to consultants, I meet many who are ‘selling potential solutions”, before first discovering what is the need and where is the deeper hunger.
13. The difference between enquiry and inquiry: En is the start of end. The thinking stops; In invokes the idea of going in and thinking – the start of dialogue.
This was a lovely phrasing by Andrea Leven-Marcon (student on Practitioner in Systemic Team Coaching 2024-2025), to my teaching on the difference between Enquiry that is seeking a factual answer, and Inquiry inviting a collaborative exploration.
Happy Christmas, Hanukah, Solstice, Dōngzhì Festival, Yuletide, Saturnalia, or December holidays to all my friends, colleagues, and Blog followers everywhere.
