Conversation Among Masters

I have the privilege to be one of the volunteers assisting at a very powerful coaching event recently – read the previous post about this gathering called Conversation Among Masters or CAM. It was exciting and thought provoking for me. Today, I ‘m just going to give you a few highlights from the event – I am sure I will have more thoughts later after the dust settles and my mind clears about all that I heard and learned.

My first thoughts are about how intentional truly great coaches are about their work. They are conscious and learning and stretching to be better even after reaching this point called “master”. They are all about conversation with each other and this type of dialogue has great potential for powerful results. They are talking about what it means to be a master and what obligations go with that.

A second observation is that the event was dominated by executive coaches. There were several business coaches and career coaches as well; what strikes me was the lack of anyone identifying themselves as a life coach. I am curious about this and have asked some of the participants what their thoughts are about where the life coaches are. I hope to have more to say on this later, but what I can say now is that most executive coaches certainly understand business and that this is likely to give them an advantage as an entrepreneur running their own coaching businesses.

One dialogue at CAM was headed by a insightful, very funny man named David Zach. He is a futurist and he led the group in conversations about the future of coaching and its impact in the world. A valuable part of the discussion centered around what about coaching is a fad, what is a trend and what is a principle. My take-away here was that as we become more and more of a wired world, it will be increasingly important for coaches to assist people to truly stay in touch with what is important to them. There is much to be done in the future by coaches and their businesses.