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Bill Berthel
Growing or Dying
If you’re not familiar with thermodynamics (no judgment!), the field has defined four laws that help explain temperature, heat, work and energy. The second law, most applicable to leadership and development, is tricky despite its simplicity. It’s often expressed as a simple truth: Energy is converted through work, yet you never get the same level…
Leadership’s Need for More Courageous Authenticity
As a leadership development specialist and certified executive coach, I work with leaders who are interested in scaling their leadership. Scaling leadership is defined as building organizational capacity to create outcomes that matter most. The scope of development is typically in three focus areas: The leader as an individual The leader’s team(s) The organization the…
Platforms and Pitfalls
I’m not really much of a gamer; my history with Activision and Atari 2600 gaming systems will either date me or render me seriously retro-cool. One of my favorite video games of all time, however, was Pitfall. In Pitfall, the player was a jungle explorer-type of character attempting to navigate around, over and through various…
A Practice in Surrendering
Sometimes when I reflect upon my own thoughts and actions, I have to laugh a little – that laugh we use to mask critical judgment, the one that says somehow we knew better, somehow we’d been there before, yet here we are repeating the same folly. It seems that it would be infinitely easier to…
What Are Success Systems and How do They Work?
This is going to sound like “coach blasphemy,” but I am going to pose the question anyway: how well do goals work? I’ve seen goal-setting work incredibly well for some people, but in all honesty, I’m not one of them. Do they work for you? If not, I may have an explanation … and an…
Ambiguity
The acronym VUCA has gained modern popularity, and there’s little mystery as to why: has there been a time in recent history when Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity were in such abundance? Considering that this acronym was coined as recently as 1987 – drawing on the leadership theories of Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus and…
Complexity
Life during a pandemic is extraordinarily complex. Processes, rituals, and daily habits we once took for granted have been sabotaged by complications and changes invariably leading to more complications and changes. That complexity – the addition of multiple interconnected parts into our daily lives – can be challenging on many levels. New information may be…
Emotionally Strong
Much like Johnny Cash, I walk the line. As a coach, of course, I walk a different line than Cash… not the criminal line, not the line between light and dark, but rather the line between being highly supportive and highly directive. Some people would call it tough love … I like that too. But…
Hot and Cold Cognition
Emotions, or the physiological states that arouse them, are often what power motivation. As leaders, human motivation must become an important part of our understanding because ultimately, leaders are interested in influencing others toward purposeful action. It’s arguable whether we motivate others or if motivation is only an intrinsic dynamic, but it’s important to understand…
Only Distanced, Never Apart
Readership Warning: In this blog post, I am energized by the deep concerns we all have of the pandemic tightening its grip on us yet again. A small reprieve over the late summer months had some of us back to something fairly normal with shopping, some recreation events, and schools open and operating. Some of us got…