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Tag: risk

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Super Hero
Coaching

The Power of Daring to be You

This past weekend I attended CTI coach training.  For three days I was able to experience coaching from an entirely different perspective.  This experiential training in a group setting was very powerful. During this weekend I didn’t just meet a new group of people – I met myself!  It was amazing to experience the insight and deep intuition of people on a level that made me feel understood, seen, and heard.  There were times when I felt like they knew me better than I knew myself – or maybe they were willing to pull out of me what I have spent so many years burying.

During one session, we did an activity where we took turns sitting in the focus seat and others called out what they were seeing in you.  It was amazing and encouraging to hear the impressions that people had of me after just 14 hours together.  Then, they shifted and identified what they caught glimpses of but really wished would emerge.  In the next step, the class began to suggest metaphorical archetypes that captured the part of you that isn’t being fully embraced – who you really are deep inside that needs to be tapped into.

Psychological Safety - Risk and failure
Agile

Psychological Safety – On Taking Chances

Okay, so the truth is that this picture is not me.  It’s not even Vermont – where I happen to be working and freezing right now!  It’s my cousin Theresa and it’s in Illinois.  She is standing on her Dad’s frozen pond and loving it!  When I saw her post this picture on Facebook all I could say was, “That is so cool!” But other people who viewed the picture were saying things to her like, “Get off there!” and “Are you nuts!” and “OMG you are scaring me!

Experiencing great things in life sometimes means taking risks.  Without risk we will never be as innovative as we could be because we’ll always be playing it safe.  Some people are afraid of taking risks because with risk comes the possibility of failure.  But, mature agile leaders and teams will recognize that failure doesn’t have to be bad.  We learn things through failure that we would never know if we hadn’t tried and flopped.  We learn what we never want to do again and what changes we can make to create a better team or product in the future.