Fully Integrated Leadership

In this episode, I welcome professional mountain biker and Integral Coach Ryan Leech.  Ryan is the founder and head coach of the Ryan Leech Connection, an online mountain biking skills training company with a mission to cultivate a lifelong passion for the sport of mountain biking.  Through his 20 year-long career as a pro mountain biker, Ryan performed thousands of stunt shows around the world with clients such as Cirque du Soleil, IMBA, and Crankworx.  

Ryan and I cover a number of topics in this interview, including:

• What is the flow state and what are the four ways you can access it?
• How "down-time" has helped Ryan with breakthroughs in his personal and professional life
• How he's transforming his business to have more depth and communion with his fans, clients, and followers
• How his life has been shaped by his adoption and how he's using it to understand why he is here and what impact he is trying to have on the planet
• Dealing with hardships in life and how to stay with the pain rather than medicating or getting away from it

At the end of the interview, Ryan shares a practice for communing with nature and how this helps him to stay grounded and present.  

To learn more about Ryan and his work, go to The Ryan Leech Connection Website.  

To learn more about Integral Coaching and living, go to https://www.integralcoachingcanada.com/

In this episode, I interview author, speaker, coach, and consultant Marilyn Paul.  Marilyn is the author of two books: It's Hard to Make a Difference When You Can't Find Your Keys: The Seven Step Path to Becoming Truly Organized and An Oasis in Time: How a Day of Rest Can Save Your Life.  We cover these two topics, getting organized and resting, both with an eye on how this can help in a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous world.

In the first portion of the interview, Marilyn shares her own story of discovering how her disorganization was impacting others around her, and how this realization led her to making big changes in her life and habits.  She asks us to consider what it is costing us to be disorganized, and she talks about what it costs organizations to constantly rely on the "hero" to swoop in at the end and save the day.  Marilyn shares practical advice, including how to get started if you are struggling to take the first step.  She encourages us to really connect with why we want to get more organized, our vision of what life would look like if were to be more organized, and how our current reality is holding us back.  

We then shift into her more recent work, the value of getting rest.  She again shares her own story of realizing how exhaustion and burnout were normal to her, that is until she attended a Shabbat dinner at a friend's home and started to see unexpected benefits in the rest of her life.  She began to build more "Oasis Time" into her life, and has now made it a weekly practice with her family.  Marilyn encourages us to revel in this oasis time, spending time doing the things we "never seem to have time to get to" in our busy lives.  We talk about the benefits of rest, two of which include feeling more joy and experiencing more awe in our lives.  She also talks about how the lack of rest is impacting how leaders lead and how organizations make decisions in complex situations.  She again offers practical advice on how to get started on the road to more rest, encouraging us to start with one hour/week and then building from there.

Here are links to Marilyn's website, and links to her books:

Marilyn's Website

Marilyn's Consulting Business

Books on Amazon

In this episode, I am joined by William Walker, a coach and entrepreneur who works with individuals, teams, and organizations to develop sustainable practices that meet with their specific circumstances.  William's coaching is integrally informed, developmental, and authenticity-driven and helps his clients constantly inquire into what is happening right now in their lives and what the best actions are to take based on that knowledge.  

In the interview, William guides us in an "embodiment practice" that he uses in his own life and with his clients.  He then talks about how this practice, and other practices meant to cultivate presence, can help in practical ways in our life and leadership.  We spend quite a lot of time in the interview practicing and talking about presence.  I encourage you to actively participate in the practices as we walk through them in the interview.

Towards the end of the interview, William and I talk about co-hosting a follow up call for people interested in asking questions, sharing, and continuing the conversation.  If you are interested, please contact me on my website at http://www.fullyintegratedleadership.com

Some of the resources mentioned during the interview include:

-You can contact William on his website at http://thewayofapprenticeship.com/

-To read more about Otto Scharmer and the U Theory, go to https://www.ottoscharmer.com/theoryu

-To read more about Integral Theory, go to https://www.integralhealthresources.com/integral-health-2/the-four-quadrants/

In this episode of the Fully Integrated Leadership Podcast I welcome my friend, former colleague, and Chief People Officer of The Nature Conservancy (TNC) Mike Tetreault.  For the past four years, Mike has been leading a team that is responsible for scaling VUCA leadership skills and competencies across the 4300 employees of one of the world's largest nonprofit organizations.  Mike shares his own learning journey as he discovered the VUCA concept and how it informed his personal and leadership development.  We then talk about the seven competencies he and others are focusing on in developing leaders at TNC, and then he talks about how they are designing learning and development to grow these competencies to help them tackle complex challenges like climate change.  He finishes off the interview giving us a practice called the After Action Review, something teams can use to ensure learning is a continuous process.  

There are a number of concepts, models, and frameworks that Mike and I refer to during the conversation.  I encourage you to explore the following resources prior to listening to the interview:

The Cynefin Framework is an explanatory model that helps leaders identify which of four realms they are operating in...simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic.  To learn more about this framework and its use, check out the following video: You Tube Cynefin Framework Explanation

Mike refers to "Adult Developmental Stages" and the name Torbert at one point in the interview.  Here is more on what he is referring to: Seven Transformations of Leadership Article

In different parts of the interview Mike refers to an organization called Conversant.  Here is a link to their website: Conversant Website

This is an awesome conversation with a wise and caring man who is leading amazing work in an organization that is trying to tackle VUCA challenges.  

In this episode of the Fully Integrated Leadership podcast I interview David Stroh, author of one of my favorite books Systems Thinking for Social Change."  David is a humble and courageous soul who is helping to bring a new way of thinking to the world as we navigate increasingly more VUCA challenges.  He has dedicated his career to mostly helping organizations who are attempting to impact social challenges like homelessness, environmental degradation, and poverty.  

In this interview, we cover a range of topics including:

• How David's background as an urban planner helped pave the way for his life's work as a Systems Thinker
• What Systems Thinking is and how it can be used to tackle complex challenges
• The difference between "Static Complexity" and "Dynamic Complexity"
• The application of Systems Thinking to the issue of homelessness
• The "intangibles" that David feels are needed to be a Systems Thinker
• The barriers we all have to being Systems Thinkers when tackling complex issues

You can find David's book Here

You can read more about David and his work at Bridgeway Partners Here

Please leave a comment or rating on the show and please also share this episode with others you think may be interested in David's work.  

In this episode, I welcome my long-time friend and former coach Dr. Barrett C. Brown of Apheno Advisory.  Barrett is an incredible soul with a passion for developing leaders to tackle critical sustainability issues in the social and business sectors.  Barrett has worked with governments, multiple nonprofit organizations, and a plethora of businesses to help develop the skills needed to manage in VUCA conditions.  In this interview, Barrett shares the wisdom he has picked up from studying the top complex change leaders in the world, and he gives some great nuggets on what it takes to shift from our conventional thinking to more "systemic thinking."  Towards the end of the interview, he offers the audience a suggested Virtuous Cycle of Learning (VCol) to turbocharge VUCA leadership.  

In this episode, I interview Dr. Theo Dawson the Executive Director of Lectica, Inc.  Lectica creates assessments that measure a person's ability to manage complex dilemmas.  More specifically, they have identified the set of "VUCA Skills" that they believe are necessary to lead in complexity.  Dr. Dawson and I have a wide-ranging conversation on topics including:

-What is optimal learning and how are our schools not setting us up for this type of learning?

-What are the skills that leaders need to master to thrive in VUCA conditions?

-How can we build "learning organizations" that are committed to developing leaders for VUCA?

Towards the end of the interview, Dr. Dawson talks us through the Lectica learning model, called the Virtuous Cycle of Learning, and she even gives us a VCol to develop a skill that she believes is critical to our leadership development.

In this first installment of the Fully Integrated Leadership podcast, I share my personal story of how I became a leadership coach.  I lay out the three core beliefs that serve as the foundation for the Fully Integrated Leadership model:

1. The world we face today is incredibly complex, and this complexity is only increasing.

2. Our minds are not well-suited for this complexity

3. Our minds can be re-trained to thrive in complexity

I then talk about what this podcast is: a combination of solo shows, where I will share my own learning journey and skills that have helped me along the way, and interviews with people on the cutting-edge of living in a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) world.  This is a shorter episode than we will have in the future, but do not skip over it because it helps to level the playing field before diving into the first interview.