Heather Robinson  
Principal Consultant, Coach
Success Across Borders  

Seattle, Washington, USA

Tell us about the context you’re using PL in.

The context I use PL in is my whole life. Within my “whole life” there are at least three spheres where PL plays a significant role: my personal PL practice, my professional consulting practice, and my support of PL practitioners and facilitators.

My professional consulting practice consists primarily of providing coaching to senior executives in global corporations. In my coaching practice, I draw on a variety of methods: Integral Coaching, Wendy Palmer’s Conscious Embodiment and EPIC (the Essential Practice for Intercultural Competence). In the last couple of years, I am finding Marshall Goldsmith’s Stakeholder Centered Coaching an important way to support the leader’s individual development, while simultaneously growing the competence of the leader’s organization in being clear, transparent and accountable. Regardless of the method, however, once the client begins to work their program, PL provides the substrate that makes change sustainable. PL brings the client back from doubt to know their progress matters. PL maintains the client’s balance in the face of challenging feedback. PL gives the client a way back to themselves and a way forward in their development.

Why PL?

PL works for me personally. After a decade and a half, PL is a constant presence. I particularly appreciate the way PL has allowed me to develop ever more subtle awareness of when “something’s up” for me. Increasingly, rather than getting myself into situations where I need to “recover”, thanks to practicing PL, I can “precover”. By “precover” I mean make wiser choices of subtle interior Right Action that prevent me from making unhelpful messes in the world. Arvid John, PL Senior Facilitator, said something that sticks with me, “PL allows us to bring the result of our process to the world, rather than subjecting the world to our process.”

Intellectually, PL is a big tent. PL’s robust framework has room to integrate or connect with new ideas and methods I am learning. Having PL as an organizing framework, makes for both flexibility and integrity in the way I approach my coaching and facilitating. I believe clients benefit from this design integrity, whether they are consciously aware of it, or not.

Performing with ANAR DANA - womens' traditional dance group

What exercise or tool is your favorite and why?

The power of PL micro-practices as we define them in Personal Leadership: A Year of Living the Practices (PLAY-LP) continues to impress me. The six years of co-designing and co-facilitating PLAY-LP has been one of the most surprisingly rich explorations of PL. And, not in the way many who come to the course expect. PLAY-LP is not so much a reaching out to connect PL with other theories, models and applications, but rather a reaching inward to gain a deeper practice-based knowing of PL. It is very gratifying to watch course participants move from an intellectual resonance with PL, to the deeper embodiment that results from their focusing on “simple” practice.

Leave us with one word to describe your personal PL journey in 2017.

Practice!