Isn’t it true that if a business person only works IN their business and not ON their business, they’ll soon be OUT of business?

If you only fulfill contracts, but never step back and look at how the marketplace is changing, you’ll soon find that the phone stops ringing. An ability to toggle between the small picture details and the big picture themes is essential to success.

Turns out its pretty much the same story for our lives. Fulfillment and satisfaction emerge when we balance the doing of life with the being of life. When we are at least as interested in pausing and reflecting on the overall direction we’re headed in, as we are in carrying out the details of our day to day life. And yet for most people it’s a very different story. With the exception of a few major decision points along the way, (who to marry, where to live, what job to shoot for) most people wind up just trying to get through the day. Stopping to consider whether the way we live is fulfilling simply doesn’t enter into it.

One of the biggest challenges to staying on track is being inundated by distractions. With the advent of social networking, we can be interrupted simultaneously by FB, Twitter, Linked In, Blackberry messenger, email, voicemail, Skype, to say nothing of phone calls and unannounced drop ins. Staying focused and on track in this kind of environment becomes extremely challenging, which might be why so many of us simply tune out at the end of our work day, satisfied that we made it through another one.

That’s where we come in.

Through training programs, group facilitation, speaking and business and life coaching, we help individuals and organizations cross-reference their values, visions, wants, objectives, and goals with their current trajectory, looking for where they might be falling short or missing their targets. If an individual values growth, adventure and fame, we help them to tweak their day to day choices to take them further in the direction they want to go. If an organization values innovation and exceptional customer service, we explore whether the actions of employees are in sync with the vision. If a manager wants to align their team for tough times ahead, we’ll peek at the priorities on their ‘to do’ list to see if they’re spending their time in the right places. And if you don’t have a vision, we’ll help you sort that out too.

We partner with you to beat back the distractions and background noise to reveal the territory you’re standing in accurately and from multiple vantage points. Through dialogue, exercises and group discussion, we eavesdrop on your thinking process to see where your attention is going, making a clear distinction between the content of what you’re thinking and the structure of how you’re thinking – the meaning you assign to people, things and situations in your life. It is not what happens to us that matters most, but how we interpret and respond to what happens. We work with clients where the real game occurs – the game inside your mind. By creating a new map and changing the way we think, we can’t help but transform and open new capacities for navigating obstacles more effectively, allowing us to strive for higher goals.

Important note:

We believe that one of the greatest tools for expanding our core capacity in an increasingly complex world is to continually expose ourselves to different perspectives, in much the same way we might do when we travel to foreign countries. The practice of seeing life through other lenses increases our sensitivity to hidden opportunities and helps us see obstacles before we hit them.

If you’d like to try a little exercise in perspective shifting, we invite you to consider the following. The majority of people on the planet will never be able to consider personal growth seriously. Coaching, training, group facilitation, motivational sessions and other forms of personal growth and development are created for people who don’t have to think twice about whether there will be food in their cupboards, heat from their furnace or a well-paying job from which to derive a regular paycheque. For the majority of people in this world, feeding their family, finding work, staying alive in a war torn region, educating their children, finding clean drinking water – these are the concerns that easily trump questions about fulfillment and satisfaction.

The simple fact that you’re reading this suggests that you are not worrying about basic survival and that you have the means to consider things like personal growth and development. Privilege is a powerful thing and we believe that the simple act of raising your awareness to it will empower you to make a more meaningful impact in the work you do in the world. Good luck!