Top Executive Coaching with Tony Mayo

The Harvard Business Review reprinted a wonderful speech by Harvard Business School Professor Clayton M. Christensen titled, “How Will You Measure Your Life?” Along with plenty of great advice for new graduates he shared some keen insights on executive coaching.

If I had been suckered into telling Andy Grove what he should think about the microprocessor business, I’d have been killed. But instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think—and then he reached what I felt was the correct decision on his own.

That experience had a profound influence on me. When people ask what I think they should do, I rarely answer their question directly. Instead, I run the question aloud through one of my models. I’ll describe how the process in the model worked its way through an industry quite different from their own. And then, more often than not, Read the rest of this entry »

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One of the most popular posts on this blog is my commentary on the 2008 Conference Board survey of worldwide top executive coaching rates and budgets. The Conference Board has recently released its 2010 update and revision to that report. Unfortunately, the report no longer contains information on the amount organizations are paying for executive coaching per hour or by engagement.

The most interesting tidbit is that most organizations are compensating executive coaches for travel time.

You can visit the Conference Board site and purchase the report by clicking here.

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Trust is increasingly recognized as an essential element of successful personal relationships, effective teamwork, and large-scale commercial relationships. The amount citizens of one country trust the residents of another has even been shown to correlate with the amount of trade between the countries.

Evaluating the level of trust in a relationship is an often evaded and sometimes sensitive task. My work coaching top executives and facilitating work groups has taught me that the “trust topic” is much easier to discuss once we realize that trust has at least five to constitutive components. Examining each aspect of trust,one by one, leads us to better judgments and more fruitful conversations.

When we say that we trust or mistrust a person it means that we have evaluated their:

1. Sincerity – Does what the person says match their internal conversation? Are they telling us what they honestly believe and truly intend? Once a person establishes a reputation for Read the rest of this entry »

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“How is it that when I make these noises I succeed in performing speech acts or communication?” he asks. “That’s the philosophy of language.” That investigation led to an exploration of consciousness. “How is it possible that the stuff inside my skull can cause consciousness, and I can direct thoughts?” he asks.

That pursuit led to considerations about society. “We create society with language. We use language to create marriage and cocktail parties and money and so on,” says Searle. “These things all exist, but only because we think they exist.”

–Philosopher John Searle
Reflects on Half Century at Berkeley
College of Letters & Science

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Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) consists of multiple forms of mindfulness practice, including formal and informal meditation practice, as well as hatha yoga.

Although there is no explicit instruction in changing the nature of thinking, or emotional reactivity, MBSR has been shown to:

• diminish the habitual tendency to emotionally react to and
  ruminate about transitory thoughts and physical sensations;
• reduce stress, depression, and anxiety symptoms;
• modify distorted patterns of self-view;
• amplify immune functioning;
• enhance behavioral self-regulation; and
• improve volitional orienting of attention.

Recent functional neuroimaging studies of MBSR have provided evidence of reduced narrative and conceptual and increased experiential and sensory self-focus at post-MBSR and decreased conceptual–linguistic self-referential processing from pre- to post-MBSR.

The formal practice consists of:

• breath-focused attention,
• body scan-based attention to the transient nature of sensory experience, Read the rest of this entry »

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I had the great privilege of talking with eminent psychoneuroimmunologist Dr. Lydia Temoshok last night in Reston, at a Chez Nous event. Dr. Temoshok has been a pioneer in the scientific study of stress on our immune systems and its impact on the progress of diseases, especially HIV/AIDS.

She reviewed for us the classic result published in Science in 1983. Three groups of rats were studied. One group was subjected to shocks administered from the floor of their cage but they also had a lever that, when pressed by a rat, would stop the shock. A separate group felt exactly the same shocks as the first group but had no relief lever to press. The third group of rats had no shocks. The rats subjected to uncontrollable shocks suffered suppressed immune systems. The rats subjected to shocks with some control over their environmental stress, group one, not only did better than the rats without control but–by at least one measure–had a better immune response than the control group of rats with no shocks at all. The conclusions of the study have been repeated and extended by many other experiments, including some that showed this change in immune system response affected the speed at which cancer tumors grew.

I asked Dr. Temoshok if it was sensible to compare these conclusions with the famous Whitehall Studies of British civil servants. These long-term studies Read the rest of this entry »

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