Program Descriptions

“We all feel a tremendous push from the past and a compelling pull from the future to step fully into who we are meant to be. We need courage and time to reorder our priorities and consider this internal exploration as important as ‘work’ or outward success. We need to practice the art of strippin g away false notions about who we think we are so that we can deal with what is real. We need to release anything that is deadening to our spirits. We need to stand for something that is greater than ourselves.”

- Dawna Markova, "Wide Open: On Living with Passion and Purpose"

The Joy of Being is a profound opportunity to stop and reflect, in a community of other souls, on your vocation or purpose in life.  It allows for a deep reaching inside to a still place, a thinking place, and a loving place, where your own wisdom, your Soul, your Life Force, can be in communication with you about this Life’s purpose, this Life’s Journey, your Soul’s calling.

Having rigorously discovered and discerned the shape and quality of your core, your essential nature, and your personal destiny that is yours alone, you emerge from this rich and moving conversation with your heart into a bridge back to life, and into an opportunity to design your life, opening up your exploration of your calling into creating and shaping a life that allows for an ongoing expression of your purpose.

This is a deep cut into authenticity and integrity.  And since we teach who and what we are, and we contribute by and through our very nature, this course, too, has everything to do with expanding our capacity to make a difference in the world.

The tuition for the Joy of Being is $1450.00.  It will take place on May 4, 5, and 6 at the gracious Alderbrook Resort and Spa and May 20, 2011 at Kiana Lodge.

Our foundational program, The Heart of Leadership is a personal and professional developmental conversation which unleashes heart, spirit, wisdom, and power in life and in business. This program brings into being the core ingredients for creating a life worth living for individuals, for exploring their own access to community, to belonging, and to soaring spirit. It enables people to develop a culture in the workplace for trust, partnership, collaboration, accomplishment, and the fulfillment of human beings.

Elements included are: pathways for open, honest, authentic communication based in powerful listening; honor and regard for one's own and others' unique contribution; a capacity to take risks and embrace mistakes; integrity; the ability to fulfill intentions and accomplishments collaboratively through powerful conversational pathways; the key to creating breakthroughs from breakdowns; and an increased ability to forward and empower others to fulfill their intentions.

This program opens up territory for people to connect with living life from a place of profundity, meaning, joy, and inspiration while creating accomplishment with decreasing effort.

While The Heart of Leadership is frequently offered as a program within organizations in behalf of creating a new culture inside an organization, it is currently being offered to the public on October 13, 14 and 15 and November 4 and 5, 2010 at the Clearwater Resort and Spa in Suquamish, Washington.

A program for Heart of Leadership graduates, we offer this program in conjunction with the fall Heart of Leadership. An opportunity to have a breakthrough in your ability to lead groups such that the intent and purpose of any group you lead is realized, it is also a transformational piece of work.  A breakthrough into your own ease and grace in leading, and in being a clearing for others to be engaged and inspired, this program allows you to “observe” the leading of  The Heart of Leadership, from within the thinking of the leader, embodying the meta conversation of  The Heart of Leadership, debriefing each day, and then engaging in multiple dialogues, training inquiries, exercises, and practice mocks during a three-day period following The Heart of Leadership, opening you into the “Beingness” of one who serves through leading.

The dates of this program are October 12-15 and October 18-20, 2010.  The cost of the program is $2400. The program caps at a maximum of 8 participants.

- The Context of Being of Service:  Explore, inquire, and take on the Beingness of Being of Service in behalf of you living from this Mother of all Contexts. This is the home of our work.

- Coaching  and Developing Others: Releasing others to their own wisdom and power may be one of the most precious of all Life Giving gifts we can give to another human being.  The principles, conversational tools, listening tools (the whole of the conversation for mastering coaching) is much at the heart of this dimension of the program.

- Enrolling Others: Connecting, or hooking people up, with new life giving possibilities (enrolling them) that they may be stopped from engaging with or may not even be aware of or know about, is not only part and parcel of coaching well but also part and parcel of Life! (whether you are a parent, a manager, a leader developing others to lead, or a son, daughter, sibling, etc).  There are no relationships that are not contributed to by someone else being an opening and source of enrollment.  That art of enrolling others (whether they be resistant, recalcitrant, and not interested OR a big opening already), is at the heart of the matter of making a difference.

- Speaking Up: Whether in meetings, community gatherings, at home, at play, at work, courageous speech often eludes us.  The intent in this body of work within this course is to enable you to see and extricate yourself from the stops and thwarts or barriers between you and speaking up that keep you from making the full blown difference you intend to make.

This program offers a deep cut into Self Knowledge, and Self Mastery, while being about expanding your contribution to others.

The tuition for The Heart of Making a Difference is $2150.00. February 8-11, evening March 3, all day March 4, 2011

The Heart of Leadership for Business offers the opportunity for an organization or business or team to transform the environment in which it is working.

This is an in-house program that consists of groups of approximately 24 people per program. Its thrust is to bring into being the conditions that enable a full, collaborative and sustained culture within a company or organization, a culture of openness, partnership, trust, and understanding.

The major elements of this work include:

• Open, honest, effective communication
• Creating trust from little or no trust
• Respect and honor for people's gifts and their unique contribution
• An environment that is safe and encourages contribution
• The capacity to step out, take chances, and embrace mistakes and failures
• A condition of integrity, trust, and the ability to work together collaboratively
• The ability to fulfill intentions through collaborative communication pathways
• The ability to resolve breakdowns powerfully
• Having a culture to work in with no gossip and negativity
• The ability to empower others, to have people in the company know that they are valued and appreciated, and creating the ability to sustain a transformational shift

This program has produced extraordinary breakthroughs in business success, satisfaction in the workplace, retention, and power to accomplish.