2012 Summer End

Documentație

28 August 2012

Dear friends

I hope this summer’s end will find you well rested, with your batteries fully charged and ready to joyfully waltz with the habitual personal and professional year-end shifts and adjustments.  I am in my starting blocks, and below, you will find updates, news, and reflections.

Zero growth for a sustainable future?

The French economy has unwittingly succeeded to maintain zero economic growth for almost a full year.  Unwittingly, because it is not the concerted result planned by government or by the nostalgic financial community.  This zero GNP growth is simply the result of a general popular trend away from consumerism.  It seems that more and more people are buying less, more intelligently, focusing on simpler and cheaper pleasures, valuing more free time, life balance, personal and spiritual development, nature, meaningful relationships, local social commitments and community development, peer networking projects, etc.  This fits right in with basic coaching values.

In spite of depressive news, alarmist headlines and passé governmental GDP ambitions focused on growth at any cost, it seems the public at large is choosing a different path.  Times are indeed harder, mainly during the time it takes for some to adjust.  Lowering personal debts, cutting out superfluous expenses, weeding out compulsive shopping and simply focusing on living a more meaningful life is an important personal shift.  It seems, however, that by accomplishing these changes, people are actually discovering that they are much happier.  This may in turn feed and reinforce the trend.

Next step, accompany government policy to make sustainable zero GNP growth a national ambition.  The pre-crisis years have greatly increased the gap in wealth distribution and social injustice.  This needs to be repaired.  Excessive public expenditures need to be seriously capped in order to lower taxes, and the public sector needs to be intelligently reduced.  The fundamental goal is to eliminate national debt to ensure sustainability without 3% yearly growth.  This country needs to start modeling on the shifts exemplified by the population at large.  Could France unwittingly be in the process of finding a new economic model?  Is this trend another form of grass-root revolution?  Maybe interesting perspectives for other populations and countries, once their economies stabilize.

Innovation in Metasysteme Coaching

In Bucarest and France, Metasysteme Coaching‘s specific approach is meant to be an original contribution to the profession’s development, by also focusing on the fact that less is more.  Our approach has significantly evolved over the past few years and merits clarification. Very briefly, Metasysteme Coaching is presently developing a fundamentally systemic and increasingly synchronic coaching attitude and practical skill set.

This professional posture and the corresponding coaching tools embrace obvious evidence that a-causal coherencies and resonances bridge our inner worlds with our material reality.  These apparently distinct worlds are in fact mere expressions of one same underlying universal unity.  That is why in our lives, we regularly experience co-incidents that bridge our inner, psychological reality and the external, material environment.  This fundamental unity occasionally manifests itself through unexpected peak experiences where obvious shared meaning and echoing patterns emerge to link our personal quests with seemingly accidental environmental occurrences.

Today, coaches can regularly and more tangibly access this synchronic reality by refining their personal posture and presence and by practicing precise minimalist relational and communication tools.  Over the years, this specific posture and skill set has been developed through work with clients and within the Metasysteme Coaching coach-training programs. This work and progress isachieving ongoing progress.

Today, the “Fundamentals of Systemic Coaching” program followed by the “Coach Supervision Cycle” offer a training architecture that allows participants to become proficient in this extraordinarily powerful and practical, systemic and synchronic coaching approach.

These are all ICF validated ACSTH courses, as usual.

By the way, I am continuing to write.  What may become a new book is still in progress and concerns paradoxes in coaching and change management in organizations in general: https://www.metasysteme-coaching.eu/english/paradoxes-in-executive-coaching/  I am also still investing in an ongoing longer-term web project (teasing), and I continue to post numerous coach systemic coach resources on the Metasysteme Coaching Facebook page on: https://www.facebook.com/groups/metasysteme.coaching/

Please do spread this information to coaches and others who you think may be interested by such developments.  We count a lot on your kind word-of-mouth.


 

More personally

Those of you who have followed my personal Facebook photo postings know that our culminating summer event has been my son Guillaume’s Ibiza wedding with beautiful Delphine Robert.   That was early July.  Since then, we have vacationed off the northern coast of Sicily for a week, spent two cool and cloudy weeks in our Paris home writing and just resting, followed by another week in Ibiza to get some warm sun. 

Travel-wise, we plan to reasonably continue our monthly round trips to Bucarest, to be in London for the ICF conference in October, followed by a hop to Lisbon (fun & work), and we have (still very open) plans for more US and Middle East professional trips later in the year or early 2013.

That’s all for now, so take good care, until we meet again.

Alain Cardon