We long to find our true voice, to lead with purpose and to embody the authentic traits that engender followership. Have you ever felt like the leadership path you’re on isn’t the one you imagined? Are you finding your intentions are not having the impact you’re seeking? Our Original Blueprint® coaching model peels back the layers of survival strategies and conditioning to help you fully discover and integrate the leader you were meant to be.
Our unique coaching approach has 3 phases:
Phase 1: Conditioned Shape: We help leaders at all levels peel back the weighted layers of heavy conditioning (e.g. survival strategies) they’ve come to inhabit in order to succeed. We clarify existing beliefs and behaviors and how the leader is experienced by others. We discover this using a 360 inventory, self-assessment, and take a complete inventory of the leader’s historical influences. Between coach and client, a collaborative assessment of the current shaping is made with new insights about what this shape has taken care of and how it’s limited the client’s growth.
Phase 2: Practice and Experimentation: Once we’ve gained the insight from historical shaping and defined the coaching goals, the core of our individual coaching focuses on shaping healthy mindsets, beliefs, and behaviors that work in service of the leader, team, and enterprise.
Transformation of these core areas is highly dependent on identifying and repeating practices. As neuropsychologist Donald Hebb said, “neurons that fire together, wire together.” What this means is that it is not enough to change our thinking, we only embody change through the repetition of observable, behavioral practices. For change to happen, we have to change how we think, feel, and act.
With the practices identified, our coachees will experiment with these new behaviors in between coaching sessions. Once the new behaviors become observable to others, we know that the change the leader is seeking is enduring—it’s becoming embodied. These changes will influence the leader’s ability to influence, collaborate, and actively participate as a full member of the team and enterprise.
Phase 3: Integration and Embodiment: In the final phase of our coaching program, we ask that our coachees begin to openly initiate feedback from others about their observations of behavioral change. In this phase, we also review what the coachee can do to continue along their growth path, refining the practices so that the change becomes their new normal.
How is this model influenced?
The Iris Institute’s coaching model is deeply influenced by a number of thought leaders in the fields of psychology and management. The model integrates work from Bowlby & Ainsworth’s attachment theory, Janina Fisher’s structural dissociation, Ken Wilbur’s integral theory, Bob Andersen & Bill Adam’s leadership circle, Kegan & Lahey’s adult development theory and immunity to change, Murray Bowen’s systems theory, Richard Strozzi Heckler’s embodied leadership and Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing®.
What makes our work so different?
It’s our unmatched experience of working with the complex human psyche on all levels. Rebecca Ward, Founder of the Iris Institute, has extensive experience and training in a number of psychology and leadership models. She is a licensed somatic therapist, a 25-year veteran in the management consulting field, and an expert at transforming reactive leaders to creative ones by working along cognitive and somatic lines to support full and complete embodiment. Where it’s needed, Rebecca can pull in a team of expert coaches to coach systemically across leadership teams.
Whether a leader needs to expand industry skills and knowledge, or deepen their ability to lead through complexity, this approach meets the leader where they are to accelerate growth. It draws upon neuroscience and neurophysiology by addressing change in both beliefs (brain-to-body interventions) and behaviors (body-to-brain interventions). In doing so, change returns us back to our embodied, Original Blueprint.
Rebecca A. Ward, LMFT, SEP, PCC
Founder, the Iris Institute
Psychotherapy, Executive Coaching & Consulting