Program Offerings

Awakening heart,
spirit and joy in worklife

The Heart of Leadership:

February 5, 6, 7, and 27, 28, 2019 (open)

Our foundational program: Leadership at its Heart: authenticity, integrity, individual essence, Awareness

The Heart of Leadership is a developmental program that unleashes the heart and spirit dimension in work and in life. This robust conversation develops people to live their life from and begin to master what is at the heart of leadership, and what is at the heart — the very core — of communication, trust, connectivity, empowerment, and accomplishment. It enables people to create work and life as a pathway for meaning and fulfillment, to create a present and a future where people are released to their own passion, to their ability to release others' brilliance and passion, and to being productive, accomplished, and fulfilled.

The Heart of Leadership is a pre-requisite for all other public courses.


$1795.00

Leading Groups Effectively:

October 3, 4, 5, 6, and 9, 10, 11, 2017 in association with The Heart of Leadership


This is a "sleeper course." By that, I mean that while you have a breakthrough in your capacity to lead groups, you get your life out of it. "We teach who we are," as Parker Palmer says. We offer this program from time to time in conjunction with The Heart of Leadership. This is 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. 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, inquiries, training exercises, and practice mocks during a three-day period following The Heart of Leadership, opening you into generating leading groups powerfully as a way to serve.

Pre-requisite is The Heart of Leadership

$2,850.00

The Heart of Making a Difference:

Being of Service, Coaching Others, Enrolling Others, Speaking UP: Date: TBD


A long title, which captures the substance of this program – taking us into the very heart of making a meaningful difference in the lives of others. This rigorous, senior course explores, discerns, reveals, and distinguishes what is at the edge of Being-of-Service for you, as you maximize your possibility of affecting, impacting, influencing, shaping life, and making a difference in the productivity, performance, Being, Actions, and development of others. The course shines the light on three fundamental distinctions of fulfilling your contribution, which allows for a breakthrough in Service – developing others through coaching, training, and mentoring; enrollment (which includes creating a new space of possibility for others); and speaking up, transcending your fears, and bringing your own voice out of hiding.

Pre-requisite is The Heart of Leadership

$2550.00

The Heart of Accomplishment:

Acquiring Velocity through Creating Accountability and Generating Coordinated Action: Date: TBD


The title of this program means exactly what it expresses. The Heart of Accomplishment is a four-day conversation which gives participants an opportunity to dwell, live into, explore, and delve into exercises, to research, intuit, and inquire into what is at the ”heart” – the very soul and essence – of accomplishment and coordinating action with others, particularly in the face of breaches. It is a strategic and tactical course, a conversation whose intention is to allow each participant to be able to authentically say, and live, once they are back in life after the course, “I can and am committed to being responsible and accountable for generating coordinated action around me, with others, for creating partnership, collaboration, and workability, and fulfilling my intentions and accomplishments throughout my life, including both my personal concerns and my operational or institutional concerns.” This is a deep cut into compassion and holding people to account for broken promises in a way that restores integrity to the conversation of any project.

Pre-requisite is The Heart of Leadership

$1,795.00

The Joy of Being:

Designing your Life: Date: April 17-19 and May 4, 2018


This conversation provides you with the opportunity to discern your Core, your Essential Design — to remember what is hidden and real — and then, to shape a life which makes manifest and expresses that unique thread and purpose that is at the heart of who you are. Through this deep work, you 1) come to discern your own, individual, unique purpose in life, your “thread,” your Essential Selfhood; 2) come into communion with that Self and fall in love with that Self; and 3) design/author your own life in such a way that your purpose is realized on an ongoing basis. Your embodied purpose then becomes a homing device that allows your soul to “enter the gravity field of its own destiny,” as poet David Whyte says. Only in a relationship with silence and emptiness, two essentials, can the kind of depth of conversation occur. The Joy of Being, as a conversation, in tandem with a limited number of people, provides that environment. After engaging with it, you move into living “in your true inheritance," that which is a Source of Joy, where “living” and “being” are one.
The Joy of Being: Designing your Life is truly a gift you give yourself, a gift of loving and honoring yourself.

Pre-requisite is The Heart of Leadership

$1,795.00

Joy of Being Graduate Retreats

Following The Joy of Being, a full curriculum of graduate retreats are available, to sustain and deepen our life pilgrimage of having life itself be the transformative power of the journey. In those graduate retreats, we deepen our embodiment various distinctions. In November we are offering a retreat called The Art of Living Wakefully: Surrender, Open Heartedness, Intentionality. December’s retreat is called Listening from Love: Passion, Presence, Play.

$1,795.00



One-On-One and Individually Designed Work

Amba delights in providing one-on-one and small team executive/life/personal development coaching. Amba also available to design in-house work in behalf creating a culture inside a business or organization based in trust, communication, integrity, authenticity, accountability; generating transformational leadership in your organization, including The Heart of Accomplishment, The Heart of Making a Difference, The Heart of Leadership, Vision/Mission/Intentions/Value work.

We have added two new, special programs. The Joy of Being is now also being offered as a 4 day one-on-one coaching session with Amba, and a new “in house” program, The Power of Listening:

Joy of Being: One-on-One

The Joy of Being is now available as a one-on-one coaching conversation, where, working with Amba, you create completion with your life thus far, and design your life from your commitment to fulfill your Core purpose.


The Power of Listening

A two or three day conversation (to be determined in tandem with the client), this conversation is an introductory cut into listening as a source of power for creating workability, trust, and partnership among people. Available to organizations, in behalf of making a difference with those who have not taken The Heart of Leadership. Without communication, nothing works. While people think speaking is where the power is, once we begin to explore communication, we see that listening is at the heart of communication.

An in-house program, for which there is no pre-requisite

The Heart of Leadership for Business

Date: Dates and location to be designed in collaboration with the client

As a firm oriented around developing people, we are dedicated to the possibility that one's work and all other aspects of one's life can be a source of joy, inspiration, ongoing development, contribution and meaning. In the past thirty years of developing people, we have observed that living well and working well are related; that accomplishment, productivity and satisfaction are related; and that forwarding people’s development over time ever increases the power of people to fulfill their intentions and to create environments around them that nourish themselves and others.

The Art of Living Wakefully

Date: November 28, 29, 30, and December 14, 2017


The purpose of the graduate work to The Joy of Being has been, and is, to provide wide access to a descent into the depths, to that place wherein dwells “the hammock of the deep.” Emerging out of each graduate retreat, having seen and breathed the treasure of knowing ourselves and others deeply, having taken deep dives into reflective and thoughtful conversation and inquiry with each other, having looked at our current life design and brought ourselves up to speed with the iteration of our selves and our life, we travel ever more wakefully, mindfully, enlivened, in our days.

Pre-requisite is both The Heart of Leadership and Joy of Being

Building an Extraordinary Culture in your Organization

…A culture in which your people thrive, are engaged, called to participate fully and wholeheartedly their passion released, their skills and gifts and talents are a fit with the accountability they have, and profoundly experience being able to be of Service in the world.

What are the key ingredients that foster such a culture, a culture of joy and aliveness, where results are consistent, retention is not only not a problem, but great people flock to your company because the buzz about it is so great?

It is our view that while integrity, collaborative partnership, communication (without communication, nothing works!) authenticity, vulnerability, transparency, and leadership borne from people’s heart and wisdom are at the center of such a culture, the one word that best captures the spirit of such a culture, and embodies all the other principles, is Development.

Development releases people to their own Power…. power like the ability to Empower..,power, like the ability to fulfill intentions while leaving everyone around them enlivened and honored, becoming acquainted with their own Power.

A company that cultivates Development – that insures the development of people, through its offerings, its teachings, its structures, and its practices – grows: grows the business, grows the people, and grows organically into a business that is successful – successful in its contribution to the larger whole, including its customers, its stake holders, its vendors, its share holders, and to the larger community.

The transformational offerings, both public and in house programs, which allow for ontological breakthroughs (Breakthroughs in being) sustain themselves through time, and transform the very nature of the organization. Those rigorous and profound conversations, combined with the partnership and commitment of Gale Leadership Development with their client organizations, through time, allow for the growth of an internal culture that results in Awareness, Awakening, and access to ongoing Generativity.

The Heart of Leadership, The Heart of Accomplishment, The Heart of Making a Difference, The Joy of Being, Generating Vision and Mission, One-on-One executive leadership coaching, Thinking with Internal Development creators, are all offerings the Gale Leadership Development core leaders make to insure a viable, healthy, nurturing, Alive culture, that results in everyone that is touched by that company being served.