The Co-Creative Garden
by Sue Brundege

The co-creative relationship is the cornerstone of masterful coaching. Sometimes, however, this concept is difficult for new coaches or prospective clients to fully grasp. In explaining the co-creative relationship I like to use a gardening metaphor.

Together, you and your client are responsible for growing a garden of possibility and change. You both have specific roles as “gardening partners.” Your client chooses the seed or plant (the agenda) that they want to cultivate during each session. You as coach provide the gardening tools—listening deeply, acknowledging, asking powerful questions, responding intuitively, and providing observations and feedback. The soil in which you both work is the fertile ground of the co-creative coaching relationship. You are each active participants in designing the overall landscape of the garden.

Germinate and Grow
In each session, coach and client focus on planting just one seed, or tending to a single plant (clarifying the agenda). You then work together to till and fertilize the soil; remove weeds; and thin crowded seedlings. This can be likened, correspondingly, to engaging in powerful and intuitive conversation; challenging negative thoughts; and narrowing down to specific action steps. All these activities help the client’s seeds to germinate and grow into strong healthy plants.

Coaching, like gardening, takes time and patience. A coachable moment may suddenly appear when you least expect it, like a tender shoot poking through the soil. Other times a client’s seed may sprout more slowly. The power of silence in a coaching session can give that seed time to incubate, absorb nutrients, and grow at its own pace.

And finally, the presence of sunlight, rain, birds, earthworms, and other garden helpers represent the vast resources and experience both coach and client can draw upon and bring into the coaching relationship. Together, over time, both partners nurture the client’s tender seeds of possibility into healthy plants of positive change, in a co-creative garden.

Sue Brundege is a Mentor Coach and Trainer for CTA. In her practice she works with mid-career professionals who long to find the work they’re meant to do. Learn more about the Co-Creative Relationship in the Coach Training Accelerator .

What exactly is ‘work-life’ balance anyway? How can we really balance our all-important careers with those leftover few hours of the day? Can we really expect to give as much of our precious time to ourselves and our families, as we do to our all-important careers? After all, our career is more than what we do, it’s who we are; it’s the symbol of what we believe in, it identifies us to total strangers and explains what we have spent most of our lives working towards, not to mention our monetary worth and social status. Especially when it’s a business we have nurtured all on our own. Ultimately, it’s what makes us happiest… right?

For most of us, things got out of alignment somewhere along the way. Maybe you can pinpoint the exact moment – when you went from majoring in English Lit because you passionately loved to read, to majoring in English Lit because it looks great on your undergrad record when you apply to law school, and everyone knows that’s where the money and prestige really are – or maybe you really did start out loving your job, and somehow your life got lost along the way. Take heart, you are not alone – nearly 50% of America answered “unsatisfied” when polled about their job satisfaction. And close to 25% of American workers identified with the “just showing up to collect a paycheck” bracket. Sound familiar?

The good news is, it’s actually easier to change the balance and perspective of your life than it is to pack up that sawed-off shotgun and eliminate irritating employees. And it’s certainly much more rewarding – and less messy!

So what exactly does a balanced life look like? Simply summed up, having work-life balance means you view all major aspects of your life (career, family, spirituality, personal happiness, short-term and long-term goals) from approximately the same distance. Meaning, 99.9% of your energy does not go directly to lying awake at 3am worrying about what direction your marketing team should go. Does this mean running a business will never be stressful? Absolutely not, my friend – most likely one of the things that led you to branch out as an entrepreneur in the first place was your love of problem-solving and delivering solutions – but if your life is pretty balanced overall, you probably have some extra energy banked for those periodic stressful blips. At the very least, you will have the invaluable addition of perspective in your life – enough to realize WHY you are at times going through rough patches, WHAT you are getting out of the experience, and HOW it is enriching your life overall.

This balanced perspective is key. Many of my coaching clients came to me because of frustration with their lives, and almost 99% of them think this frustration can be traced directly back to their own particular brand of 9-5 grind. Sometimes, they are correct, and you may be too – but hold off on selling the company just yet. The first piece of coaching advice I always give, is “stay put”!! If we don’t take the time to dig deep enough into the meat of our whole, balanced lives, one more job change probably isn’t going to do the trick.

Staying put gives us the opportunity to sit back and evaluate some very important elements in our lives, all of which need to be addressed to maintain balance and happiness. Again, perspective is key – together with my clients, I seek answers to these essential questions: what is the bigger picture? What are you doing on a daily basis, how does it fit in with the larger pattern of your life, and why have you chosen to allow this particular scenario enter your life?

The truth is that the sweat and tears required to own your own business often obstruct the deeper truths… making it easy to forget the deeper meaning and purpose of your life. When I ask my clients to introduce myself to who they really are, many of them have buried those answers under the labels “successful business-owner”, “entrepreneur”, and “hard-working”.

As the coach of a hard-working, self-employed individual, I am thrilled to hear about such qualities – to the extent that they benefit my client directly in what he or she wants to do. But to anyone who wants to step back and shift their perspective towards a more balanced life, I demand you dig deeper!

• Passion – what is it in life that makes you really tick? What is the source of your drive to succeed in this particular business?
• Paradigms – what belief-system (possibly antiquated!) are you still subscribing to? How is this old paradigm helping or harming you in your current life? How can we reshape and build new, more healthier paradigms where you can thrive and grow?
• Boundaries – setting energy and emotional boundaries are an integral part of self-care, just as delegating is an integral part of running a business. Many times fear leads us as business-owners to try and maintain control of ALL aspects, and with that control comes responsibility – often at unrealistic levels. Where you can set boundaries on your time, energy, and daily responsibilities to help balance your life?

Exploration of these issues, and more, are what contribute to a balanced personal life and career. If you would like to explore your own work/life situation further, visit Stephanie online at www.celebrateyourlifecoaching.com.

Three cheers to one of my favorite clients (!) for sending me such a great re-cap of our coaching experience thus-far! I absolutely love this comment because I think it addresses the basic “what is coaching, and WHY are you doing it?!” question that seems to arise more and more as I complete my transition from successful corporate sales exec to self-employed, full-time life coach. Much verbiage is given (and more easily understood!) to the executive side of coaching, but fewer people are familiar with the concept of individuals actively wanting to better their life, not to mention learning to enjoy the process as they go along! As Coach Brian Quinn says so succinctly, “Everyone talks about corporate coaching for executives. I say, if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for everyone!”

Coaching skills come from an ability to wholistically view a situation as it is being described to you and then ask salient questions of that person to help them look at what their choices may be in a given situation. You, as a coach, need great listening skills and then, more importantly, great cognition – which you do have – to outline possible scenarios for the client. It’s a dynamic – ‘think tank’ – type of experience to be coached. It actually has little or nothing to do with your (Stephanie’s) amount of life experience. It has everything to do with sorting out the client’s life experiences and injecting a fresh perspective in order for the client to look at their situation more objectively.
(Reproduced with permission on May 22nd, 2007.)

Learn more about coaching with Stephanie at www.celebrateyourlifecoaching.com.

So as part of further developing my coaching practice (into full-time heaven!), I have had to face keeping up with “the times”. I can write, I can think, I have lots to tell the world…. And I have NO IDEA how to merge any of my creativity with today’s technology! I’ve looked around enough to accept the facts; I need to present myself, my services, my credentials, through a website and a newsletter or a blog. And I’m excited to do this! But as I struggle through the actual creation of this ‘virtual me’, I keep circling back to one dominant thought – thank God I was single for those few years!

What does being single have to do with programming in HTML and setting up remote access phone lines and email billing through PayPal? Why is it especially important now, when I am no longer single, and haven’t been for a period of almost two years? Simple – looking back at my years of living alone, I like to think I mastered being the modern, independent woman. I certainly had a blast! But I also learned a very important skill for navigating life happily and with a fairly constant sense of accomplishment – learn to delegate.

A wise man once said, “it does not count as an opportunity if you don’t have a greater than 80% chance of success….” And although I can often learn something from situations where I don’t succeed, there’s certainly no reason to go actively looking for them! I am perfectly comfortable admitting that there is a vast array of skills I don’t have, and furthermore have no interest in developing – HTML programming being right there at the top. Ok, so I’m mature enough to look for help… now what?

In the parlance of our times, strong women are supposed to be able to handle pretty much everything. And for that small, never-brought-out-in-public list of things that you can’t do, well, just try to fake it until you can get married, and then the husband will probably fill all your holes nicely.

Hmph.

Don’t get me wrong – my significant other Matt is quite useful, a veritable Adonis with an electric drill and able to lift ridiculously heavy items when called upon. (Not to mention the first person I pour my heart out to, my favorite person to recap my day with, and the only one I want to see at the breakfast table every morning for the rest of my life. But all love and handyman skills aside, he could no more program a website than I could build a second-story add-on to your house.)

The entire reason I’m so glad now that I was single then is because I spent my alone time building a strong network of friends and support. One of whom just happens to be the head of IT for Northwestern University. Someone who has been one of my best friends for many years, and has witnessed my low points and triumphs through a broken engagement, post-date dissections, and now, gag-inspiring pre-marital bliss.

I think too many women are afraid of really being on their own because they feel inadequate – what if a car tire needs changing, or a shelf needs mounting, or a router needs to be set up? The best part of being single and extending your friend network is the joy of having a different person to ask for help with each of those things! Although I love the depth and security I feel in my relationship now, there are some ways that a one-on-one connection feels different than a finely honed, spider-web support group of friends. Looking back, I was never single – I was Stephanie with Elvin for frantic pre-date calls, Sarah for post-date stories, Ray for technical help and weekend brunch, and Tammy and Tawnya for emergency, meet-me-in-five-minutes happy hours. And what a fantastic feeling of security that diversity brought!

Luckily Ray still answers my frantic questions (“um, I was online and then I hit one little thing and now the computer is blinking mockingly, and the router is smoking in the corner, WHAT DO I DO???”) and now I get to tell funny stories of my panicked morning on hands and knees under the computer desk to Matt over dinner, but I’m afraid I don’t keep up my end of the bargain so well – meaning, Ray’s refrigerator has probably reverted back to pre-Stephanie contents consisting of ketchup, several curry sauces, soy milk, half a loaf of stale white bread, and a gallon-size Ziploc baggie full of Hershey’s Miniatures (of which he was always willing to let me dig through and pluck out the Krackles, bless his heart…) Often I feel guilty about this. But I guess the good news is, his spider-web is strong too. And if the source of my thread has changed a bit, it’s still woven tightly, along with all the other friends and their specific, wonderful contributions.

p.s. Thanks again to Ray – and look, I’m online!! ☺