Coaching & Workshops

Let’s shift the tide to create a life-sustaining world for all. We believe everyone has the potential to be a leader for sustainability, and each of us has a role to play. Contribute at your highest capacity in your chosen field.

 

“I call the transformed world toward which we can move “sustainable,” by which I mean a great deal more than a world that merely sustains itself unchanged. I mean a world that evolves, as life on earth has evolved for three billion years, toward ever-greater diversity, elegance, beauty, self-awareness, interrelationship, and spiritual realization.”
— Donella Meadows

Photo by Sandro Oramas, 2019

Coaching

Our one-on-one or small-group coaching helps individuals as they define their vision for work and life, find opportunities in current challenges, identify learning edges and desired outcomes and articulate how they want to show up in the world. Our approach is firmly grounded in deep listening and inquiry. The disciplines of systems thinking, reflection, vision and creative expression frame our coaching methodology. Sessions are thought provoking and inspiring, with participants coming away with greater clarity, purpose and results. We focus our coaching on sustainability, on working and being at one’s highest ability, on clarifying personal and professional vision and on sustainable health.

The world’s troubles are your troubles … and there is nothing wrong with the world that better human beings cannot fix.
—John Sloan Dickey

Leadership for Sustainability

We use a systems thinking approach to enhance well-placed sustainability champions’ professional and personal capacity to increase their impact as leaders. We work with young, mid-career and senior leaders from all sectors, as well as with those who have yet to take on the sustainability cause but are searching for how to do so. Capacity building integrates identifying aspirations, designing the implementation process, acting for sustainability and serving as a learning leader in collaboration with others. Workshops can be anywhere from ½ day seminars to week-long trainings. Longer-term Fellowships can be a series of two-to-four-day workshops over the course of several months with coaching in between. The more time committed, the more in-depth we can go. Key practices include the interplay of visioning, systems thinking, reflective conversation, coaching and personal sustainability.

A sustainability revolution requires each person to act as a learning leader at some level, from family to community to nation to the world. And it requires each of us to support leaders at all levels in their learning by creating an environment that permits them to admit uncertainty, conduct experiments, and acknowledge mistakes.
—Donella Meadows

Systems Thinking

Systems thinking calls for rigorous and empathic analysis of the systems we seek to change, allowing us to identify leverage points for moving closer to our vision. “Systems can’t be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned. Systems thinking can lead us to the edge of what analysis can do and then point beyond to what can and must be done by the human spirit,” advised Donella Meadows. We approach systems thinking from both a technical perspective – including identifying indicators, mapping behavior over time and creating stock-and-flow and causal loop diagrams – and a principles-based perspective, offering practical guidance for navigating complex systems. Convening a range of stakeholders, who represent diverse parts of the systems we seek to change, provides insight into challenges and assists in identifying leverage points. Workshops are tailored to individuals, teams, or issues, emphasizing a process-oriented approach that encourages experimenting, reflection and learning.

Courage is the first sign of the Spirit. It is the root of all the other virtues.
—Matthew Fox

Visioning a Sustainable World

The discipline of vision gives clarity and direction, while aligning personal and professional priorities. As Donella Meadows said, “The future can’t be predicted, but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being”. Donella taught us to first engage with a visioning process before undertaking any project or new chapter in life, whether for a month, a year, or 10 years into the future. Shared vision is responsible vision; it is a powerful way to bring people together around a common purpose. Either in person, via Zoom, or as part of a webinar, we offer guided sessions for individuals and groups. These can be tailored to your current team or personal needs, such as desired outcome of a project, event, or next steps in your work. We offer visioning for professional growth, greater impact, successful work, finding work-life balance, your ideal health, or to help find clarity on a health decision.

Start with the vision, be open to any path by which the vision will be realized, be patient and persistent, be true to the vision, and things will work out.
—Donella Meadows

Art of Sustainability

Creative problem solving is essential for addressing the increasing challenges we face in bringing about a sustainable future for people and the planet. Art stimulates the right side of the brain – essential for finding insightful solutions. Those who use a creative process are more expansive in their problem solving, see new possibilities more easily, and are more effective in their chosen work. Workshops can be tailored from an hour to several days; an afternoon is an optimal start. Sessions address specific issues in an organization as well as enhance personal growth, working relationships, sensing systems, and team building. We offer workshops on art in nature, action performance, deeper dive, and big art.

 

In addition to our work with sustainability professionals, we have designed and taught leadership for sustainability, systems thinking and biomimicry courses to both high school and college students.

Living systems are learning systems.
—Louise Diamond