Amanda’s Influences
I am an avid learner – I can’t imagine ever stopping learning – and I particularly enjoy exploring how different theories, models, perspectives and techniques differ and overlap so that I enhance my own understanding of the big picture of the human condition.
I have many influences and have enjoyed the teachings and perspectives of a number of mentors over the years, all of whom have informed how I work today on every level.
Understanding Change
I first came across Emotional Intelligence in the late 1990s at the outset of my coaching and facilitation career, when I was working on a departmental Change programme and I wanted to understand ‘attitude’ – at the time I was struggling with the attitudes of some of the department employees and I wanted to understand more about how I could help them deal with the changes that they were facing in a more balanced way.
I discovered Applied Emotional Intelligence, a school of thought around emotional intelligence development conceived by Tim Sparrow in the UK, which comes from the humanistic perspective that EI is about our attitudes, it is multi-faceted, and it is changeable and developable. I studied with Tim on his in-depth 9 month EI practitioner development programme in 2000, and subsequently came to run the programme with him, during which time we authored the book ‘Applied EI’, published by Wiley in 2006.
Since that time I have continued to study all aspects of emotional intelligence and personal change, and have been particularly informed by Transactional Analysis (TA), a framework that had influenced Tim’s work. I have come to understand how judgment underpins limiting beliefs and unhelpful emotions and behaviours – as Tim used to say “Judgment is the enemy of understanding.” And I continue to explore how we can work with our beliefs, emotions and behaviours to ‘get out of our own way’ and create true happiness, health and success in our lives, both personally and professionally. I am currently following the work of John Assaraf (The Secret) who is doing amazing work in pulling together and synthesising all the latest research into how the brain works to help people ‘re-train’ their brains for greater success.
Study into mindset change cannot exclude understanding how the brain and the body interact. In my early study of emotional intelligence I was inspired by the work of Candace Pert, a neuroscientist who shared her research story in the book ‘Molecules of Emotion’. This gave me an early understanding into the significance of emotion, and how personal change requires us to understand our feelings and the impact they have on our behaviour, as well as understanding and changing any limiting thoughts. As Tim and I were writing our book on Applied EI, we met and studied with Dr Alex Concorde, a thought leader in the Mind-Body link who, as a medical practitioner, was having incredible results with patients by working with their psychological state as well as their physical state.
As I came to establish myself as an emotional intelligence facilitator and coach, I spent a number of years working as an associate with a great team of outdoor specialists who were running team-building programmes for corporate organisations. We developed a learning approach combining emotional intelligence with outdoor experiential learning, and we ran numerous leadership development programmes for clients that enabled real personal and group change to take place. We were keen to debunk the myth that outdoor learning doesn’t stick!
In fact to this day, I believe experiential learning (indoors and out) to be a hugely powerful learning tool at any level, as long as robust applied learning techniques are present. It provides an immediate experience in which to explore how your thoughts and feelings are impacting your behaviour and creating either great outcomes for you and your team … or undesirable ones. With effective EI development exercises supporting the experiential learning experience, the individual can identify changes they wish to make, understand how to make those changes, and set these into an action or development plan to be taken back to the workplace. I will however always recommend follow-up activities or support in the form of an accountability partner, to help the individual stay on track with their change plan.
Authenticity in Leadership
I have been fascinated by the concept of leadership since my early corporate career. My growing awareness of behaviour at that time, and what I observed in myself and the leaders around me, raised many questions for me about what leadership is and what makes a good leader. My subsequent work as a coach and facilitator, and my understanding of what emotional intelligence is, has shown me how vital emotional intelligence is to effective leadership in the 21st century.
For me, this is about truly understanding and creating learning opportunities to develop the leadership qualities described by world-leading leadership gurus such as Warren Bennis (On Becoming A Leader), Peter Senge (The Fifth Discipline, Presence), Tom Peters (In Search of Excellence), Jim Collins (Good to Great) and John Maxwell (The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership). The model of Transformational Leadership goes a long way to defining the qualities of a highly effective leader, and this concept is beautifully summed up by Stephen Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People):
“The goal of transformational leadership is to “transform” people and organizations in a literal sense – to change them in mind and heart; enlarge vision, insight, and understanding; clarify purposes; make behavior congruent with beliefs, principles, or values; and bring about changes that are permanent, self-perpetuating, and momentum building.”
For several years I have been working with the concept of ‘authenticity’. Whilst this has become a bit of a cliché in the last couple of years because of the overuse of the term in all areas in business, I continue to use it, because it best explains what underpins true influence, and how to become truly known, liked and trusted by others as a leader. It represents the personal transformation that needs to occur in a leader to enable them to facilitate transformation in others. And this is about emotional intelligence.
I am continuing my studies into emotional intelligence and leadership through a Masters in Work-Based Learning, and am currently defining my research project. If you would like to be involved in this piece of exciting research, please do contact me at here at Minds4Success.
‘Spiritual’ Intelligence in Business
For some people, even today, emotional intelligence is a bit of a stretch – they feel uncomfortable about referring to the word emotion, let alone using it in the same breath as the word intelligence – it seems a paradox! Ask them to consider a ‘spiritual’ intelligence, particularly in the business context, and ‘Bam!’, all your credibility flies out of the window …
But this concept has been around as long as the idea of emotional intelligence, and was invited for serious consideration in the corporate world in the late 1990s by Danah Zohar and her book Rewiring the Corporate Brain, and latterly, Spiritual Capital. In these books Danah explores concepts from the quantum sciences, and predicts how this ‘New Science’ will impact on business. Many other books have subsequently been written about running businesses on spiritual and quantum principles.
And there are many business people who get this idea. Entrepreneurs in particular, who live at the edge of uncertainty on a daily basis, are much more open to and accepting of the idea that there are larger, positive forces at play. The personal transformation that needs to take place to enable authenticity, sits well with spiritual principles, and the qualities of the transformational leader are well aligned too.
Another aspect of spiritual intelligence that is becoming a very popular personal development philosophy, and discussed more openly in business circles, is the concept of working with the Law of Attraction. This is not a new model. Books published in the first half of the 20th century brought these ideas into the public mind, and for consideration in business: Napolean Hill’s Think and Grow Rich is just a particularly popular entrepreneur’s ‘handbook’.
The Authentic Entrepreneur
As an entrepreneur myself, and someone who has transformed her life by living on spiritual principles and working with the Law of Attraction, I continue to explore and research the role of our feelings (emotions and intuitions), and not just our thinking, when working with the Law of Attraction – ie. the huge part they play in creating the reality we experience.
A mentor who has particularly helped me enhance my understanding of ‘the Universal Laws’ and how to work with these in my own business, is David Neagle whose blog I highly recommend (you’ll find the link on my Resources page).
As well as working with David Neagle, I have also studied with Lisa Sasevich who teaches how to sell authentically from the stage, and Greg Habstritt who teaches the Trusted Authority Formula. All three master coaches teach ways in which to become the ‘Go to’ person in your field. Combining their teachings with my insights and practical applications of emotional and spiritual intelligence, enable me to help my clients become ‘authentic’ entrepreneurs – entrepreneurs who live and work in transformational ways that enable them to be profitable whilst making a real difference in the lives of their clients.
Another leading edge thinker who I admire is Seth Godin whose ideas around finding and leading your tribe have really resonated with me. I also recommend his blog which you can also find on my Resources page.
Coaching Practice
Although I work mostly with my clients in the context of leadership, I am what is known as a Transpersonal Coach as defined by the leading coach trainer, Sir John Whitmore ( Coaching for Performance ). Transpersonal means “beyond the person”, and was the basis of an additional level to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs that he proposed in his later work, that of self-transcendence, ie. that once individuals reach self-actualisation they become motivated by transpersonal needs, needs beyond themselves. Transpersonal coaching enables the individual to get in touch with their deepest, truest, unconditioned, authentic self so that they can connect with, inspire, influence, lead and develop others from an uninhibited, non-competitive, non-judgmental, non-controlling, and truly collaborative space.
“If we look for where the positive energy is, the vitality, and the spirit, and explore and build on it, then this is what will grow within an individual or a company“ Sir John Whitmore.
Transpersonal coaching combines emotional and spiritual intelligence development with the aim of enabling an individual to perform from their highest potential, and it is fast becoming recognised as the leading coaching approach in leadership development.
Whilst Tim Sparrow taught me much that I know and understand about emotional intelligence, and how to coach this effectively, my initial coach training was with Stephen Bray who taught me how to coach using his Quiet Quality™ process – a quantum and spiritual-based approach to people development. I have been honoured to have been mentored by these two leading edge thinkers. By combining their two approaches with my own study into behaviour, attitudes, leadership and spirituality, I now work at a transpersonal level with my clients, the success of which is borne out by their testimonials.