Monday Morning Business Coach, Author at Carpenter Smith Consulting, LLC

Collaboration or Engagement?

December 9, 2013

We were recently talking with a colleague who was saying that her organization was putting energy and resources into creating collaboration among various departments. We asked if the organization was also talking about and putting resources toward engagement. She thought for a moment then asked us to explain the difference. When we use the word collaboration, typically we are describing an action or a culture in which people work together on major efforts and initiatives to create innovative approaches to…

Wisdom from Africa

December 2, 2013

Monday Morning Business Coach

Today, we want to offer you a powerful African proverb: If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. You will notice that this proverb doesn’t say that one or the other is right. Instead it suggests that the more you can make a conscious choice about how you move in the world, the more likely you are to get where you want to go. There are thousands of books released each year…

Owning Your Impact When You Make a Mistake

November 25, 2013

Monday Morning Business Coach

One of the key behaviors in claiming your power is taking responsibility for your actions. A willingness to stand tall in your missteps, as well as your successes, is central to your ability to be at your strongest. Often people worry that actions like admitting mistakes, cleaning up damage, and apologizing in relationships will leave them smaller when, in fact, the opposite is true. Taking responsibility for your words and actions reminds you that you are the person at…

Creating Empowering Stories

November 18, 2013

Monday Morning Business Coach

Last week, we talked about the stories we tell ourselves, What’s Your Story, and how those stories influence how we move in the world. We talked about a client of ours who didn’t believe that he could participate fully in his business because he was “a creative” and he held the belief that as “a creative” he didn’t have the capacity to understand the business aspects of his company. As allies, our role is to help our clients expose their long-held…

What’s Your Story?

November 11, 2013

Monday Morning Business Coach

Are you a winner? Lucky? The person to beat? The responsible one? The go to person? The person everyone takes for granted? Or are your stories about yourself more negative? We all have an internal story about our lives that we use to set our course of action. Most of us don’t know our full story, yet we lead with it nonetheless. For example, we worked with a client who came in saying that he just couldn’t get any…

Finding Your Mirrors

November 4, 2013

Monday Morning Business Coach

Last week we talked about the importance of having people in your circle who mirror back to you your impact in Surrounding Yourself with Good Mirrors. Without mirrors it is challenging to know, accurately, what your skills are, how they contribute to your success, how they (sometimes) block your success, what your impact is, where you can have influence and how you lose influence. You can guess, of course, and you can look back and reflect on what happened as…

Surrounding Yourself with Good Mirrors

October 28, 2013

Monday Morning Business Coach

In our recent work with a CEO, we asked him how things were going with his team, what they felt he was doing well and where they had concerns. He reflected on this question for quite a while before saying he had no idea what they thought of his work or his impact. He said his team was a strong group, for the most part, but were not confident when it came to challenging him or giving him clear feedback…

Do You Know What You are Really Saying?

October 21, 2013

Monday Morning Business Coach

We have all been in situations where we are trying to communicate something clearly and effectively and we don’t get the response we expected. While there is a chance that the person you are dealing with is having a bad day, there is also a chance that your communication is not as clear and clean as you’d hoped. When you are in an interaction that is not going as you’d hoped, take a moment to: 1. Listen to the tone…

Focus Your Efforts

October 14, 2013

Monday Morning Business Coach

Each week at least one of our coaching clients will talk about how challenging it is to get anything substantial done during the course of a day. Meetings, email and crises drive any hope of real productivity out of their day and they are left feeling defeated and resentful. One simple but effective way to move the needle is to focus on what is most important first. In other words, we encourage our clients to spend the first 90…

Three Ingredients of a Great Conversation

October 7, 2013

Monday Morning Business Coach

A great conversation is a powerful way to build relationships at work, at home, and in your community. Great conversations happen when both parties have an equal opportunity to participate and to be heard. Remember, all humans desire to be seen and heard. It’s hardwired into our beings to engage with other beings and nothing satisfies that need nearly as well as conversation. We’ve been asked over the years by our executive coaching clients to describe for them the ingredients of…