My wish for you in 2011:
1. Your divine spirit is meant to shine. Make no apologies for its brightness. Let it shine.
2. You are created as perfect, and your path is prepared and waiting for you in this moment. Dwell in the perfection of your imperfections.
3. Worry and fear are imagined. The reality is that there is nothing to fear. Release the past, be present, and create your magnificent future one moment at a time. Be where you are.
4. Change is inevitable. Be unattached.
5. You are never alone. Ask for help.
6. Regrets steal your energy. Let them go.
7. If you want to know what you’re committed to, look at your life. You’re committed to what you have created – what exists for you right now. Commit with discernment, and create with discipline only what aligns with your purpose.
8. Faith in God makes all things possible. Pray more.
9. Your judgments limit you. Suspend them.
10. We’re wired for love. Love more.
Much Love,
Charrise
It’s been just over 4 years since I began my coaching practice. Wow, have I learned a lot!
When I began my business, I truly had no real idea what it would take to create a successful practice. True to form, I had faith that I would figure it out. Though I did figure it out, it turns out I took the long and hard path sometimes. Thank goodness I had the good sense to hire talented coaches to coach me. I am grateful to them for guiding me to this place, where my coaching practice is lucrative, rewarding, and sustainable. And I will always seek the guidance of a coach.
I learned that it doesn’t have to be hard. Though it seems counter-intuitive, I learned that the place where the most joy and success is found is when I am simply being myself. I was pretty sure I had to be somebody else – someone with more education, more training, more skills, more connections. All those false beliefs were rooted in my fears of not being worthy. I guess I had to learn about that part of me and get past it so that I could teach it to others who are stopped by similar thoughts.
I’ve learned how to build a business model that makes coaching a business rather than a hobby. I’ve learned how to embrace the financial piece so that it serves both me and my clients. I’ve learned the power of waking up and serving. Most of all I’ve learned how to leverage my talents so that I can create transformation with people who are actively changing the world.
I’m now ready to share what I’ve learned, and thus I’m offering a position in my coaching practice for an Apprentice. The Apprentice will experience one on one coaching and mentoring directly with me, while also learning ways to adapt my business model to their own practice. The Apprentice position is designed for a coach who already has an established practice, and yet knows that there is more growth for them. It’s a unique opportunity for coaching and mentoring and creating. It’s experiential and developmental – unlike anything you’ve ever experienced.
The Apprentice will pay a fee of $45,000 plus travel expenses for one whole year of exceptional service. It doesn’t matter where you live and work, as long as you’re willing to travel as needed. As my Apprentice, YOU will be the agenda. I will meet you where you are, and we will create from that place.
You must be ready for the work. You will learn more about yourself in one year than you’ve likely ever learned. You will take that experience and fully integrate into your way of being as a coach. My commitment to you is to serve you fully – the trade off is that you must be open to learn and take the action necessary to get the results you want.
I’m currently interviewing candidates for this coveted space in my life. It all begins with a conversation. After we have that conversation, we’ll both know if this is right for you.
If you’re interested, call me now at 574-288-2280.
It’s amazing what can be created with just one conversation.
Love,
Fearless Leaders create and conduct uniquely inspired business practices. Here are 8 strategies that lead to business that rocks!
1. Hire the best people and take care of them. People are the most significant resource available to you. If you want to create a great business, you must create it with great people. Preferably great people with a well developed sense of humor.
2. Invest in extraordinary training, coaching, and mentoring for those great people. Talent is not always enough – people must know that you’re committed to their development or they will find someone who is. This creates your organization as THE place to work in your industry. Can you say Google?
3. Create and integrate guiding principles from which every decision is made at every level of the organization. Do not tolerate behavior from anyone outside these guiding principles. Really. Yes, I mean fire them.
4. Create a culture where innovation and change is the norm, by rewarding ideas more than anything in the workplace. You might find yourself surrounded by geeks and creatives, but isn’t that where all the cutting edge stuff is developed?
5. Operate with excellence, and never settle for what’s simply good enough. Remember that one time where you settled? Oh yeah, and look what happened.
6. Create a product or service that astonishes your customers so that they couldn’t imagine buying from anyone else. Deliver it relentlessly.
7. Lean into process when it’s appropriate and when it’s not, be willing to tear it down and start again. And provide lots of coffee (and maybe a chair massage) for those rebuilding it.
8. Be hyper-vigilant to matching talent with task. People will be fabulous at doing what they love to do, and they will stink at what they dislike doing. For examples of this, see recent performance reviews.
See, it’s really not so difficult, right?
Do you remember life before email? Perhaps you don’t, but I do. In those days, business moved at a much slower pace, as we waited for snail mail to deliver important correspondence. Often, we had a verbal conversation via telephone if it was more efficient than waiting for regular mail. Amazingly enough, sometimes we even had one-on-one conversations, IN PERSON, when we didn’t have the luxury of instantaneous communication via email.
So, times have changed. Having an immediate method of communication has drastically altered our communication channels and habits. It seems that without exception, email as a method of communication is both a blessing and a curse for most organizations.
There are many advantages to using email to communicate. It’s efficient, timely, and great for recording the history of a conversation. It’s easy to include others in a conversation without having to tie everyone’s time up at once. It is an effective way to confirm a verbal conversation. It’s less interruptive than a phone call or unscheduled visit.
On the other end of the spectrum, email can be quite destructive. For example, the tone of an email can imply an inaccurate message. Too many emails in your inbox can create enormous amounts of stress as the work involved to answer them piles up. We can begin to view email as another job duty rather than a way of communicating. Perhaps most destructive, is that people can avoid having difficult conversations by using email instead of having a fearless conversation with someone in person.
There is no question that using email to communicate will remain a widely accepted practice in business. A powerful way to maximize the benefits and minimize what is essentially the cost of email dysfunction, is to provide a set of guidelines for people to use. Every company is different, so the guidelines can be customized to fit specific cultures and leadership expectations. Nonetheless, creating an agreement about email, and the associated parameters within which a company successfully operates, will eliminate many of the frustrations that are rampant in the workplace.
Here are some suggested guidelines:
- Establish who needs to get copied, and be deliberate and intentional about it. Be mindful of over-copying to people who don’t really need to be included. Ask yourself why you are copying certain people. If the thought occurs to you that you must cover your you-know-what by copying them, you might re-think the situation. So much energy is wasted on such efforts. Be in integrity and have the necessary truthful conversations so that there is no need to cover your you-know-what. Along those same lines, blind copying is almost always a bad idea. Many an errant email has been sent to unknown people because of the reply-all feature. And what if the person that you blind copied doesn’t realize he/she was blind copied? Instant loss of credibility and trust erosion can occur.
- Create an agreement around response time. It could be that you agree to always send a confirmation response that means you’ve read it – with a commitment for when you will take the action that is requested in the email. At least we then know that our email was read. We can negotiate our commitments so that it works for the good of the group.
- Create clear, concise, tight communication with specific action requests. There is no room for ambiguity in email.
- Remove all negative emotion. Tone is absolutely a factor in the way in which an email communication is interpreted. Lose it.
- Have difficult conversations in person. Don’t hide behind email. Be fearless.
- Use email as a way to follow up in writing what you think you heard in a live conversation. It is astonishing the way in which we humans sometimes hear what we want to hear, and reiterating it back is one way to avoid miscommunication.
- Beware of the auto fill-in feature for email recipients. Have you ever sent an email to someone highly inappropriate because you carelessly allowed the feature to think for you?
- Establish a protocol for identifying urgent email communications. It’s most effective to use specific subject line language in order to relay the importance of a message. And don’t cry wolf – use urgency sparingly.
- Organize your inbox in a way that has you properly managing it, rather than it managing you.
- Email makes good sense when it is saving time – keep that in mind when you are writing emails that take more than a few minutes to read. Use bullet points whenever possible.
- Value and respect the time it takes someone to read your email, and also the time and attention it takes to create one. Don’t allow that time to be squandered.
- If you are in doubt about whether or not to send an email, don’t send it. Wait 24 hours, read it again, and then make your decision. It’s best not to send an email in the heat of the battle.
As with all technology, email was created to be a useful tool. We can choose to use it as such, or we can choose to become a victim of it. Either way, it’s here to stay. If the very idea of tackling your email stresses you out, it’s time to re-evaluate your relationship to it. Create it as powerful, and it will be powerful. Create it as the enemy, and it will be that for you.
It’s more about you than it is about me. And yet, I know you’re wondering what qualifies me to be in your life.
When I enter your life, I’m wide-awake to who you’re being. My instincts guide me to ask questions that lead to a new sense of awareness about you. I arrive into your life, loving you for the magnificent creature you already are, with a deep understanding that you are not broken. I stand for you.
I come to you having experienced, and indeed still experiencing… a fully expressed and richly abundant life. We are on separate and distinct paths, and still we are united in the human journey toward elevated consciousness.
Like you, I’ve been afraid. I’ve felt the iron grip of fear, and chosen to allow it to control me or stop me. I’ve also learned to love my fear, as I now know that it’s telling me something important.
I’ve been unhealthy. I’ve fought my way back to good health, and realized that physical illness is almost always driven by some emotion.
I’ve experienced deep love and profound loss. I’ve failed in big ways and persevered long enough to succeed in many others. I’ve lost, and I’ve won.
I’ve surfed the waves of business ups and downs and in the process learned that everything we are, everything we do, everything we have, is created by us, and not by circumstances outside of us. I’ve failed repeatedly in business, and learned that failure is an event, not a personality trait. I’ve learned to fail faster and learn something; getting back on the horse.
I’ve modeled extraordinary leadership in order to create the desire in others to be extraordinary leaders. My sweet spot is working with people who have already reached some level of success, and who are quite sure there is more for them.
I see what you cannot see, hinged as you are to your own reality. With my strong and loving arms figuratively around you, I believe in your unique power to make a difference. I create space for you to be fully expressed in every way. You become aware that you are a powerful creator, and get into action in ways you wouldn’t otherwise.
I’ve learned how humans project judgments onto others, from having done it myself. The beautiful thing is that I’ve made many mistakes, and have made the choice to learn from them. My life is transparently shared for your growth and upliftment…my struggles and mistakes and mis-steps. Our human frailty is our playground for growth and evolvement.
I’ve suffered, and I’ve since learned that suffering is optional. I’ve believed thoughts and lived inside stories that didn’t work for me, and still find ways each day to let them go. I’ve held the belief that somehow I’m not enough, that I don’t have enough, that there isn’t enough. I’ve come out the other side of those beliefs knowing that I was created to be more than enough, and any other thought is simply an excuse not to let my immense light shine.
Each day, I wake up knowing I will make a difference…also knowing I’m meant to lead others along their own unique path toward creating THEIR difference.
I choose to be happy and committed to laughter every day, determined to find the light in the darkest of places. I love making people laugh.
I’m a guide, a catalyst, a seeker, a truth-teller. I’m a philosopher, a cheerleader, a mentor, and a leader. I’m both teacher and student, and I live in gratitude for the challenges and lessons I’ve experienced. I love easily, forgive often, and always see an ocean of possibilities.
I believe that one moment can change everything. I believe that we are all connected at a level we cannot possibly know. I believe we must balance our karma. I believe God created us with purpose and intention and that there is no such thing as a waste of flesh. I believe that love is the cure for every single thing, and that when a person embodies this belief, they become love.
On this morning’s walk, my husband and I were talking about the day ahead. He made a comment about staying positive about life and that he wants to recognize that for which he’s grateful. It’s a perfect way to begin the day; getting exercise, spending quality time with one another, and setting our intention for the day.
The truth is, it would be very easy to miss the opportunity to count our blessings, and in the process skip our chance to choose joy over worry. Our days tend to blend in, one to the other, as we pass through our habitual motions. We practice our habits, the good ones and the bad ones, as a matter of course throughout each day without really considering them.
Sometimes, we are jarred awake by something extreme – a friend passes away, or someone gets sick – and that’s when we remember to count our blessings. It’s our nature to take things for granted until we’re reminded not to.
Today, I’m feeling light and joyful – abundantly grateful for the life I’ve created. And not because I’ve suffered an extreme, but because it is my new choice, each and every day.
My cup runneth over…
Coach Charrise
Imagine a world where everyone does what they said they would do. Really? Is this possible? It may not seem feasible and yet, isn’t that what leaders do? Fearless leaders teach, mentor, and coach people to achieve impossibilities.
You can begin by answering these questions:
- What would your life/work be like if you could always depend upon others to honor their agreements with you?
- In what ways are you asking people to honor their agreements?
- In what ways are you honoring yours?
- Do you often have expectations of others, without getting their agreement that they will do what you expect?
There is a way to create more powerful agreements everywhere in your life. It begins with a true desire to hold people accountable to their word. Too often, people make commitments that they have no business making. Or worse, they make commitments without any intention of fulfilling them. We perpetuate this cycle by accepting this condition as status quo, rather than challenging it as unacceptable. It’s everywhere, so it’s easier to ignore.
As a leader, I invite you to think about the power of YOUR word, and to look for ways to show people how powerful their word is, or can be.
If your direct reports could really get this at the gut level, and could see how much better things work when communication is tighter and more reality/truth based, I’m betting you’d find more joy and ease in your world.
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned over the past few years is that living with purpose means serving others. My friend Steve Hardison lives by the mantra “Wake Up and Serve,” and I’ve adopted it as well. It occurs to me that sometimes we can forget the importance of serving ourselves in the midst of serving others.
There is a difference between martyrdom and serving, and the distinction has to do with getting clear on the purpose of doing something at all. How much of what we do is done to please other people? Are we addicted to the validation that comes from doing great things for people? Or, are our actions aligned with a clear desire to simply serve for the sake of serving? Therein lies the difference.
And what about us? If we are to be productively serving others, we must first serve ourselves. We must take good care of our physical health, our mental health, our emotional health, and our spiritual health. What good are we to others if we don’t arrive into service fully expressed and whole?
Coach Charrise
I’ve come to know that our time here is really borrowed. I was reminded of this as a result of the untimely death of a family friend. At the pinnacle of her life, she was taken last week in a bicycle accident at the age of 37. She leaves behind two small children, an adoring husband, and a large network of family and friends who loved and admired her.
It’s always difficult to understand things like this. We feel like it’s so unfair, and question why God would take such a wonderful person away from us at such a young age. The circumstances of the bicycle accident are so unlikely. She always rode safely, and didn’t take unnecessary chances – yet she lost control of her bicycle while her triathlon training partners watched on. It’s unbelievable.
And it’s partly the circumstances that make me think I know why she left us.
My faith tells me that her work here was finished. That she and other highly evolved souls come here for a brief stay to complete something, and once their karma is balanced they move on. Now, I understand you might not agree with this. But isn’t that the purpose of faith? Isn’t it meant to comfort us?
I’ve learned once again how fleeting life is. And how much I’m committed to squeezing every single drop out of every single moment, making as big a difference with people in the world as possible.
Because the truth is, we are all on borrowed time, and we’re just passing through.
It’s a powerful place from which to come, knowing that we’re here for a distinct purpose and that we’re meant to make a difference.
Rest in peace, Tina. Your difference was profound.
Coach Charrise
Daniel Pink says there is a disconnect between science and how we do business. I happen to agree.
I’ve seen clear examples of this myself. I’ve even experienced it as a salesperson, and a sales manager. What is your experience?
Coach Charrise
