Start the year right. Join this group for Obstacle Course^SM participants.

• Bring the goals you’re not moving on.
• Choose new ones.
• Identify what stands in the way.
• Develop strategies for getting past the obstacles.
• Choose the actions you’ll take.
• Then do it.
• And celebrate!

We’ll help you and support you.

THE SUMMARY

Many participants in The Obstacle Course^SM have told me how energized they were after taking the course—how they became ready and got in motion to accomplish goals and eliminate tolerations that they had not been tending to. Some were able to break through obstacles that bedeviled them for years. This group experience will be even more effective in producing action.

What You’ll Learn

• Deepen your understanding of your obstacles.
• Improve your skill at getting past your obstacles and helping others get past theirs.
• Increase your self awareness.
• Lower the energy level around things you can’t control.
  
• Recognize habits before they kick in, rather than when it’s too late.
• Create more mind space to create options and make real choices.
  
• Act in the face of fear and other strong emotions.
• Cultivate your natural bravery.

We’ll learn from each other and work together to develop alternative strategies, choose the actions that will work for us and experience the success of putting it all in practice.

• We’ll expand our range of strategies for getting past obstacles.
• We’ll increase our self-awareness—a necessity for identifying obstacles, creating strategies that work, and be able to have and make choices.
• We’ll change habits by learning how to see them before they occur, while we’re still able to interrupt them and do something different.
• We’ll learn ways to deal with fear and cultivate our natural bravery.

What’s Included

• Meet twice a month for one hour—2nd and 4th Wednesdays, time to be determined.
• Minimum of 5, maximum of 11 group members (including me).
• Duration: 3 months with the possibility of extending if there are 4 members willing.
• Bonus 1: one-half hour private coaching session with me each month.
• Bonus 2: Session notes in advance of many sessions to introduce new concepts.
• Bonus 3: Awareness exercises introduced in session notes.
• Bonus 4: CD, Reminders of Awareness™ to support increasing you self-awareness.
• Bonus 5: Each session recorded for later review in case you miss a session.
• Bonus 6: Monthly 2-hour Obstacle Challenge. (See below.)
• Bonus 7: email support.

I promise to deliver a practical, goal oriented experience aimed at moving members ahead in whatever areas they choose to bring to the group.

This is a productive, cost-effective way to get the benefits of coaching. The fee, covering everything described in this email—including the extras described below—is $150 a month if paid monthly; $400 if paid in advance. A limited number of scholarships are available.

Read on if you think you think you’ll be interested.

MORE DETAILS

What is Group Coaching Like?

The emphasis in group coaching is taking individual action to cause forward movement. This focus on creating the future, as opposed to healing the past, is what distinguishes it from a support group.

In group coaching, the group sets the agenda in the same way that clients set the agenda in individual coaching. While we’ll be working the group’s agenda, I’ll introduce concepts, often in written form, to add to the tools the group has to work with. We’ll talk about those when it’s appropriate, but mostly we’ll work on designing strategies to meet our goals and committing to actions that will move each member forward.

A coaching group uses the wisdom of all of the group’s members and the synergy of the members’ experiences, insights and interactions. In other words, we’ll coach each other. I’ll help. I’ll keep us on track and introduce new techniques and insights, but the group will do the work. Each of us will learn from the others’ insights. We’ll learn from seeing each other work with our obstacles. We’ll learn by experiencing how we help each other and how we create a safe space in which to interact and bring forth our individual and group creativity. We’ll witness each other’s success and celebrate together.

Most important, we’ll experience and celebrate the success of achieving our specific, individual goals—success energized by the group’s non-judgmental support and synergy, a solid conceptual framework, increased self-awareness, and the accountability all of us feel when we make commitments to ourselves in front of our peers. It works!

Group Coaching is great because,

• You learn more because you are exposed to the situations faced by others, not just your own stuff.
• You get to see a number of different approaches to problem solving.
• You experience unconditional support from group members.
• You see that others face the same obstacles.
• You feel less pressure, because sometimes you can just watch and learn rather than feel you have to do something (but not always—please).
• This is an easy and inexpensive way to see what coaching is like.
• It is very cost-effective.

About the Obstacle Challenge. On the last Friday of the month, each member who wants to will be able to join the Obstacle Challenge. It’s a three call “do”, that takes two hours. It works this way.

• Everyone who wants to—the Challenge is optional—will call into a bridge (teleconference) line during the first 15 minutes of the first hour.
  
• We’ll name our individual goal for the Challenge and the actions we’re going to take in the next 45 minutes. (Everyone on the call will help in defining the actions, if we want the help.)
• ·We’ll hang up, do what we committed to do and report back at the beginning of the next hour.
• On the second call we’ll commit to action for the next hour.
• 45-minutes later we’ll report back and celebrate. (If further action is needed to reach the goal, we’ll help with that.)
  

The Obstacle Challenge is great for writing that letter, outlining a project, making cold calls, clearing a toleration, designing a boundary—you name it. If you don’t get it, ask and I’ll give you more details.

Safety

We’ll have ground rules to protect the safety of the group. I’ll put together people who want buddies, but members who don’t want buddies will be able to be anonymous if they want. We’ll all contribute to making it safe by modeling qualities like this:

• Etiquette - taking turns and identifying who is speaking.
• Listening to what is being offered openly and non-defensively .
• Making suggestions or sharing ideas in positive compassionate language.
• Supporting and acknowledging.
• Asking questions to clarify and to stimulate other ideas.
• Providing feedback to the group on what was particularly helpful.

We’ll speak from personal experience.

• We’ll make suggestions with words like, “May I make a suggestion?”, “Would it be helpful to ..?”
• We won’t use words like, “You should….”, or “I would..”, or “Why don’t you.”
  
• We’ll celebrate the positive.
  

The Cost

The fee for everything described above, the two, one-hour group sessions, the half hour of private, individual coaching, and all the extras described above, is $150 a month if paid month-by-month. Payment is due monthly, in advance, by credit card or check.

Extra: If you pay for all three months in a single payment, in advance, the fee is $400. In either case, members will be responsible for their telephone charges for group calls and when listening to the podium. (I’ll direct you to phone cards costing less than 3 cents a minute, if you’d like.)

I’ll make available a limited number of scholarships. Call me if you need that assistance. The two questions I’ll ask you are “What is your situation?” and “What can you afford?”

Next Steps

If you’re ready to register, or just think you might be interested, email me with a time and phone number to call, or call me and leave a message with the same information if you don’t reach me.

This is a great thing to do for yourself—especially around this time of the year when many of us are choosing New Year’s resolutions and know we’ll encounter obstacles to keeping them.

Contact me soon if you’re interested. Places will be assigned on a first-come, first-served basis. A $75 dollar deposit is required to hold your space.