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Leaders: Their Stories, Their Words  Leaders: Their Stories, Their Words subtly challenges much of the conventional wisdom found in books on leadership.

These conversations create an opportunity to not only pause and reflect on the lives of contemporary leaders, but also to assess one’s own journey and next steps.

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Where have you seen shadows emerge? In your colleagues, family members, teams, leaders, kids, parents, or students?

Whenever I speak with students, they share all their fears and insecurities. How are teachers speaking to that?

In the workplace, the impostor syndrome often rears its ugly head. It's a shadow that creates roadblocks at every turn.

Are you up for a new position or promotion and have no idea how you're going to dive in, especially when you're not sure what they saw in you to give you the position in the first place? Are you in the middle of a chaotic world, on a task force, or in an emergency response center or political environment? Do you have to dance in real time, change how you process things that happen at the speed of light, redefine how you interact and work with a team, virtual or in person, and make different choices in your life as a whole?

"To strip an idea down to its core, we must be masters of exclusion.  We must create ideas that are both simple and profound, something so laser and to the point that an individual can want to spend a lifetime becoming masterful at 'it'.  Once they know something or they can do it, they can't begin to imagine what it would be like not to."

That is the world of Shadow Coaches and their clients.

We have a finite amount of time available to us to coach clients on the fly, in boardrooms, government and political offices, with students, or professionals in the centre of complex challenges in chaotic times.  Unlike most coaching sessions, shadow and laser coaching sessions can be a matter of moments in time, where we coach on one thought, one moment that had just unfolded in such a way that when they're coached on it, they not only "get it" but it sticks.

Add to that equation working with client's and team's shadow personalities, and not only do they 'get it' but they embrace it, all aspects of themselves within the context of their worlds as they know it.

Combining evidence with patterns of behavior I can say that 50% of the data I use when Shadow Coaching my clients is what they don't tell me.  It's located between their words. I discern what wasn't said, pick up what wasn't evident and become a catalyst so my clients could discover what it was they weren't aware of, in real time.  It's all about context.

What is Shadow Coaching?

Shadow Coaching® is a particular advanced application of reflective and observational coaching that provides one way for clients to go below the surface into the core dynamics of a situation, illuminating the truth of the moment and making decisions that move people forward.

Shadow Coaching® is a real time learning approach in developing a refined self-awareness and capabilities in the workplace as a result of reflection on practice. It enables people, not only to benefit from the continuous presence of an observing coach over an extended period of time in a typical set of workdays, but also develops their own role as self-observer for the long term. It teaches clients to become reflective practitioners. 

This type of coaching is ideally suited to organizational leaders who must make decisions and act adaptively in intense work environments. Shadow coaching involves partnering with clients in their work environments and brings another experienced and fresh perspective that helps to identify problematic dynamics, work habits and assumptions that impede effectiveness. Within Shadow Coaching® is the competency of Laser Coaching® which involves being able to provoke the leader’s awareness of these problematic features in ways that they can be addressed immediately. It goes beyond support to problem solving.  

Shadow Coaching® attends to the individual, social, relational and environmental aspects of the client's ‘world’. The Shadow Coach coaches all sides of a person's personality, what clients are aware of and what they aren't paying attention to including their 'Shadow' personality.

 It creates seismically altering change.

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