Co-active Summit Snapshot Comments

Wow! The day one of the Co-active Summit truly soared. We started off dancing to Keith Urban. . .I Want to Love Somebody Like You. . .and we did.

400 people assembled a giant puzzle in 18 minutes. (Photo below.) Puzzle debrief. . .shares from Korea, Japan, Spain, France . . .we ARE International.

Closed the day at a cocktail party on the terrace watching a lovely sunset and singing Happy Birthday to Lynn Twist. BIG cake with 4th of July SPARKLERS on top.

Happy. Tired. Fulfilled.
KKH

More audio notes from Karen about the Summit and aftermath.
Runtime: 4:50 minutes

Photo by Johan Premfors.

400 Arrive at Co-active Summit

This is Marcia Norris reporting from CTI Headquarters. Late last evening (Feb 23) I checked in with Karen Kimsey-House by phone to find out how things were moving along at the Co-active Summit. The Co-active community makes its presence known. Listen in, and watch for more audio notes to come. Runtime: 1:25 minutes

Reaching the Summit

We’re here! Yesterday, we arrived at the beautiful Marco Island Marriott in Florida to begin preparations for our first ever global Co-active Summit.

The weather is incredible and I can feel the quickening, the catch in my breath as I anticipate the coming time here on Marco Island. I am eager to leap into the mystery with others that I love and respect and am ready to dance with what emerges.

This Summit, though a very big deal at CTI, is the beginning of something new and I look forward to engaging with and nourishing what emerges.

For those of you who are able to attend, you have an important job to do. Your job is to bring your very best to this time together and to understand that the learning and work that we do together here is both in service of you individually and also in service of the whole.

For those of you who are not able to join us in person, you have an important job to do as well. The most important thing you can do right now is to believe. . .believe in the Co-active Way and in the potential of this gathering.

I’ll be writing more on the blog and on CTI’s Facebook as the event unfolds. Today, I want to say thank you. Thank you so much for standing with us here as we look to the future and to the contribution we are destined to make to the world. . .together.
KKH

It’s All Coming Together

Henry Kimsey-House has something to say:

Today I am making my final preparations here at home before I begin making my way up to the Co-active Summit. I am gathering my gear and packing my bags, checking my lists and checking in with my resources, and most of all I am feeling the energy that is building in me. This energy is that wonderful combination of excitement, fear, anticipation, and wonder that has built up in me any time I have gotten myself ready for a new journey into new and unexplored territory.

Artwork by Pinkney Media Group.

I know that all over the world there are 400 others that are beginning their preparations for their own journeys up to the Summit. We are all heading for a new place together from our own very unique places in this world we are all stepping into this mystery of transformation. We are traveling to open up ourselves to a new paradigm, leaping into the next step on our evolutionary journeys.

I know that all over that same world in many more unique places there are thousands of others that are connected in to this particular journey and taking it virtually with all of us. These people are out there fostering transformation and brightening consciousness in the people around them and they too are climbing this summit to leap off into this mystery, this new paradigm. I know that these folks have committed themselves to their life purposes and are looking for ways to coach, guide and lead people through these fascinating times we all live in.

I also know that spread out over that same world are millions of people who are waking up to this sense of quickening that is happening and this sense of a momentous time in the evolution of humanity and indeed life itself. Even though these people don’t know we are all on this journey I can feel their spirits lining up with this journey and our spirits lining up with their journeys. It feels to me like so much of the world is at this amazing place of choice, between stepping backwards into a life diminishing path or stepping forwards into a life affirming path. The Summit in Florida and so many other conferences and meetings and revolutions around the world are places where that final nudge down that life affirming path will happen. So nudge on!
Henry

The Power of Choice

I’ve been thinking lately about the power of choosing. To choose. To de-cide. The power lies in the elimination or “death” of all other possibilities.

Becoming a coach was like that for me. I struggled and failed and had two clients for forever. I was shy and did not LIKE marketing or asking people to pay me money. When I called people to talk with them about being a client, I hung up on the live people and only spoke to answering machines. Not a very effective strategy. I was filled with self-doubt and my saboteurs ran relay races.

And then I decided. There was no particular event or big waha. No big whack up the side of the head that straightened me all out. I can’t put my finger on it really. I just. . .decided. I was going to be a coach. Period.

I stopped trying and struggling and doing things that didn’t work and sat down and made a list of things that I knew I needed to do to be successful. Then I started DOING them.

It was still lots of hard work. However, the context had shifted completely. Now, each challenge was just something to address rather than my needing to hold each one up and examine it for possible evidence of the folly of this route. I was going to be a coach. Period.

I started to have a lot more fun building my practice. My client roster began to build: first five, then eight and then suddenly, I didn’t have time to count. I was able to let go of the side job I had taken on to support myself and move to coaching full time. I’ve never looked back.

I spent two years, resisting, avoiding and struggling. I was miserable. I built my coaching practice in just over 6 months. I was filled with aliveness and possibility. The major difference between these two scenarios was that I had decided.

There is a famous quote by Goethe which speaks eloquently to the power of choosing:

“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: That the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do or dream you can. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.”
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

In my life, I have seen evidence of this over and over again. Boldness does indeed have genius, power and magic in it. So get cracking!
KKH

The King’s Speech

Last week, we went to see “The Kings Speech” starring Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush and Helen Bonham Carter.

Wow! What a movie! The film lingers and the impact will likely stay with me for some time. The movie is based on a true story and so unique and real. In addition to truly fabulous acting, directing and cinematography, The Kings Speech is about COACHING!

Throughout the movie, there are repeated demonstrations of truly terrible coaching, with the other person grimly focused on solving the problem and repeated demonstrations of brilliant coaching, with the other person focused on the human being.

In the movie Colin Firth (the king) stutters and wants and needs to stop. Any numbers of highly touted “experts” have failed to generate the change that the character is seeking. He still stutters.

Geoffrey Rush (the speech therapist) sees immediately that the problem is emotional and psychological. As a matter of fact, he demonstrates that fact to Firth in their first meeting. Still, it takes most of the movie and quite a bit of patience on Rush’s part for true and lasting transformation to evolve.

The movie is a testament to the power of love to heal, nourish and expand another. Love and generosity triumph where force fails.

I’m reminded of the scientific book “Power Versus Force” by David Hawking. In this beautiful book, Hawking clearly illustrates the higher resonance of love, of caring and collaboration over dominance and force. I’m reminded also reminded of the book “The Hidden Messages in Water” by Masaru Emoto which illustrates through photos how water crystals respond to love in a whole way or to hate with a damaged formation.

Examples of the effectiveness of love surround us, philosophically and scientifically and now, theatrically. What will it take for the whole of our species to come into alignment with this vital principal of the universe? What becomes possible when we let go of our patterned way of trying to FIX someone or something and instead learn to start from a place of acceptance and seeking alignment?
KKH

The Backstory

Hello everyone:
For today’s blog post, I’d like to share a recent entry from my husband Henry’s blog.  Although I might be somewhat biased I think it is definitely worth the read. Enjoy!
KKH

Originally posted on January 27, 2011 by henrykh

We all love a good story. What is your backstory?

I was working with my co-author David yesterday on the book we’re writing about co-active leadership. It’s getting fun now as the book is really getting a strong shape and structure to it and the skeleton is nearly done. Because this book is an amalgam of fiction and non-fiction we have to flesh it out with fully drawn characters and engaging plot in addition to making sure our points and theories are being developed fully. Yesterday we started exploring the backstory on our characters. Where did they come from, what they did, and who they were in connection with prior to their arrival in the story. What brought these people to this point in time where this story is unfolding. The bones of our story are solid with what happens to them once in our story but how much richness shows up when we bring in where they came from. As we do this the reader starts to care about them and either identify with them or find them a curious and engaging human being that they want to know more about. The book then becomes a vortex into which all these stories arrive and swirl together and then get bumped out the other end into new stories all together.

Isn’t that what transformation is all about?

We go through our lives developing our story, our beliefs, our emotional truths, our philosophies, our justifications and compensations for why we are the way we are. We reach a point in that story where our eyes open a bit and we see that much of our story no longer works for us and we start scrambling around “trying” to make it work, because this is our story after all. Many of us then create a new story all about “trying”. Others of us create stories about giving up, or hiding out, or pushing and forcing the world to change in some way to support this story that no longer works for us. At some point some of us, who knows maybe many of us, reach a point where we are exposed to ourselves completely and know that this story must change, this story is so filled with limiting beliefs and suppressing structures, with ancient horrors and terrors that are still determining the plot of our story.

At that point a transformation is needed, a metamorphosis, a jump from one story to another, an inclusion or healing of the old story and the magical manifestation of the new one. This transformation can be an all at once experience that forever changes the hero or the heroines life story or it can be a series of mini transformations over a period of time with each mini transformation feeling, at the time, like stepping into an entirely different world.

The backstories are what engages us, the reader or the audience, the struggles, the limiting beliefs, the dark times and the pain of the hero pulls us into the story. Once we are in the story we stay to see how the hero or heroine transforms and evolves from those places to where the bigger story is taking them. We need to know our own backstories and be entertained by them without believing them. We need to remember that they are stories, they are perspectives and the stories can always be either rewritten or they can move in new and surprising ways.