By Courtney Feider

My career has had many threads, all of which relate back to balance and focus, and to helping people use personal expression and creativity to experience transformational change. In addition to my corporate experience my background in psychology and massage therapy often come up when I am coaching executives, as we look more deeply at the root cause of some of the communication issues they experience with colleagues and within themselves.

Over the last few years, I have been grateful to participate in and receive certification in several assessment and training tools from TTI and those have provided a wonderful foundation for my work with individuals and teams. I found that I wanted to add to that with something that took developmental and cognitive psychology, adult development, and ancient traditions and merged them into an intuitive view of self. I found just what I was looking for with The Leadership Circle® program.

This certification is immensely important to my programs and my body of work because it deeply connects to heart and intuition, and backs these things up with empirical validity. It challenges those being assessed with how they view themselves, how others view them, and the gaps between while remembering that we all reveal gifts with both our strengths and our weaknesses. It plots a tangible line between the personal history of an individual and how their actions manifest this in their view of self and their daily work. It allows people a vulnerable opportunity to explore their challenges without judgement and to see where they may have capacities they don’t see in themselves which are reflected by those around them.

The Leadership Circle Practitioner Certification® course starts well before you show up to learn. Before ever attending the certification workshop, each participant is screened for professional credentials and relevant experience by members of The Leadership Circle® staff. Then each candidate has to participate in a 360o review and debrief themselves for the greatest understanding of the tool and it’s practical application, as well as an empathetic perspective on what their clients will go through with the assessment and the coaching review. I carefully chose my certification class and location in order to walk through this experience with a global group who have worldwide reach. Most of my class was Canadian, but we had one colleague from Peru, one from South Africa, and one from China.

This assessment and the debriefing model work to help each high potential leader understand their own perspective about their talent and leadership capacities related to relationships and tasks, viewed through “creative” and “reactive” lenses. “Reactive” tendencies exist in a vast majority of the population and they can produce some valuable results related to time management and pace. But it’s been empirically proven through external validity studies that the “creative” tendencies more closely correlate (with high statistical significance) to a deep and broad leadership capacity. Where a “reactive” leader will grind away and do an excellent job getting a project done, a more “creative” approach to the same task capacity will reveal systems awareness, mentorship, the ability to delegate, and community concern.

For those interested in the system but not ready yet for the assessment and coaching, I recommend reading Mastering Leadership, by Robert J. Anderson, The Leadership Circle founder and creator. As a Certified Practitioner, I have the capacity to offer my clients another perspective and a new, deeper layer. Given the extraordinary group of people I met at my training in Toronto, I have 13 new friends for life.