COACHING

I Specialize in Three Key Coaching Areas

Communication Enhancement

Assessing, identifying and interpreting core contributors to communication problems and offering methods for improvement including style assessment, listening skills, and demonstration models for constructive and collaborative communication. Identifying conversations that need to be had but are being avoided. Facilitate / teach / train how to have crucial conversations and identify how and why these conversations serve end goals and strategic vision.

Conflict Management

between co-workers with an end goal of collaboration toward achieving mutually agreed-upon outcomes. Group facilitation may focus on conflict mediation, strengtehening communication and listening skills, and understanding the links between leaders’ personal satisfaction and employee retention and performance.

Executive Coaching with Individuals & Teams

Asking and answering the questions (1) “What do you want to work on today?” and (2) “What do you think will help you get there?”

My Approach to Coaching

David has been working with founders and leaders as a consultant and coach for more than three decades and delights in being a catalyst for human and organizational transformation. His coaching combines everyday practicalities of management and leadership with the great questions of life, having deep roots in the philosophical, psychological and theological traditions.

Mixing psychodynamics, systems theory and conversational leadership, David co-creates space for a leader’s experience to be explored and challenged with a direct and gentle approach.

He knows the effectiveness of one-to-one coaching, consulting and counseling, and offers insightful, efficient and compassionate guidance. Whether approaching a difficult conversation, a transition challenge or a crucial decision, David comes alongside to navigate challenges with grit, dignity and a generosity of spirit. He is at home in complex and high-risk situations, especially within family and multi-generational organizations.

David believes that a first factor in shaping relationships and organizations is to consider the kinds of conversations that underlie how people think and behave.
Though ever-present, these conversations often remain unspoken for fear of exposing the tensions, rivalries, competitions and differences that exist beneath the veneer and, if addressed, might illuminate the darker contentions and struggles at the source of the presenting problem.

Courage is required for a leader to address this challenging landscape as it requires a relinquishing of control while opening to the thoughts and opinions of others.

In his facilitations, workshops and presentations he regularly employs film, art, music and literature in the service of helping leaders host essential conversations, with significant others and with themselves.

What Coaching Does

Coaching invites radical self-inquiry which is critical to professional success and healthy relationships in all of life. Coaching identifies the mental habits and behavioral patterns that have both made for success (what works) and detracted from the well-being of individuals and teams.

Coaching doesn’t teach us what to think but how to think.
We often think about fixing, healing, or progressing beyond a difficulty.
Effective coaching isn’t about curing, fixing or making whole.

It is about gently approaching the layers of resistances and defenses we have erected that keep us safe from ourselves — from the confident, competent one who lives and moves in the world from a grounded trust, who moves through life with a robust vulnerability, secure in knowing that it’s not perfection that makes a fulfilled life, but being clear about who I am and how I will form meaningful attachments to others and the world.

Coaching addresses problems by helping us think about the people involved, how the problem began, and what thoughts and behaviors feed the problem. In this way we are thinking about how we are thinking. When we see how our thinking contributes to the problem, we then have the potential to work the problem differently, more creatively, and more collaboratively.

Who Can Benefit From Coaching?

If you are a Founder or C-Suite Executive wishing to navigate your organization with more wisdom and clarity I invite you to contact me to discuss your specific needs and desired outcomes.

Essential Components Of The Working Relationship

Invitation

For leaders, I believe a primary objective in shaping and evolving an organization is to invite colleagues to consciously address the essential conversations that form how people think, feel and behave.

CONVERSATION

These conversations often remain unidentified and/or neglected because they often illuminate tensions and conflicts that live outside of awareness, revealing disagreements and controversy upon approach. These conversations emphasize keen attention, self-awareness and a certain kind of artistry in engaging with others. I help leaders develop the ability to host such conversations.

Curiosity

I help guide conversations that encourage curiosity and provide a kind of safety where vulnerability and risk are valued in order to facilitate meaningful change. A goal is to invite what you do not expect, bringing you to the frontier of what is emerging in your organization and asking you to turn into it, rather than away from it.

Vulnerability

Courage is necessary for a leader to engage such conversations, to release control, to be open to differing perceptions and ideas, and to have the conviction and commitment to develop these abilities in their leadership.