Psychology 101 for Change Agents: A Self-Guided Coaching Curriculum

A little bit of background 

 These videos are excerpts from group coaching sessions I do as part of a livecast series for the social entrepreneurs who are part of our Joyful Impact Accelerator.  Along with the videos there are worksheets that go with each session.  We wanted to share this material with as many of you as want to make use of it. I hope these sessions can generate some deep insights and breakthroughs for you in your journey to more fully answer your own call to serve.   Additional sessions will be posted every other week to the Joyful Impact blog as the livecast series makes it way through the 12-session curriculum.  To download the worksheet for this session, click here.  And if you missed Session 2 from two weeks ago, you can catch it here.

Session 3: Getting Clarity on Your Purpose

What is your highest expression of your self?  If...

Have you ever been frustrated with the ineffectiveness of so much philanthropy? 

Have you ever looked at the grant-making that's being done on an issue you really know well and thought, "Wow, that's not how I would spend my money..." 

Have you ever wished that you had more of an opportunity to genuinely share what you know about how to really make change in the world with the people who are giving away all that money?   

How much good could you do if you had a straightforward relationship with someone who was giving away resources that could make a real difference on the issues that matter the most to you both?  Imagine a partnership where you both knew that you were on a shared voyage of discovery, and that you trusted each other to learn continuously, and to put impact out in the world above ego driven interests...  

Psychology 101 for Change Agents: A Self-Guided Coaching Curriculum

A little bit of background 

 These videos are excerpts from group coaching sessions I do as part of a livecast series for the social entrepreneurs who are part of our Joyful Impact Accelerator.  Along with the videos there are worksheets that go with each session.  We wanted to share this material with as many of you as want to make use of it. I hope these sessions can generate some deep insights and breakthroughs for you in your journey to more fully answer your own call to serve.   Additional sessions will be posted every other week to the Joyful Impact blog as the livecast series makes it way through the 12-session curriculum.  To download the worksheet for this session, click here.  And if you missed Session 1 from two weeks ago, you can catch it here.

Session 2: Understanding and Taming Your Stress Response

Too many of us have learned to cope with a...

When you feel a deep call to serve others, your personal sense of joy and fulfillment is inescapably linked with your impact out in the world.   You feel called to serve as powerfully as you possibly can--and that call won’t let you alone.  How great would it be if you figured out and “installed” a daily and weekly productivity routine that made sure you were making concrete, substantive steps towards that ultimate vision every day?  

This video and the worksheet that goes along with it is about connecting your ultimate vision for making change in the world with the kind of productive routine that gives you a sense of fulfillment and progress--and yes, joy!-- every day.

 It’s so easy to get overwhelmed by all the competing priorities and demands in your world  that you feel like your work is never done and you’re always a day late and a dollar short across all the areas of your life.  No matter how...

What is your mental operating system and how well is it serving you in your work as a change agent, and in your life overall? 

Are you ready to make some upgrades?

Welcome to Psychology 101 for Change Agents: A Self-Guided Coaching Sequence

With this post I'm sharing  the first segment of a 12-session coaching curriculum called "Understanding and Evolving Your Psychology."  This is a coaching sequence that we use with the social entrepreneurs in the Joyful Impact Accelerator.   It's all  about taking a self-guided journey towards greater insight about what truly makes you tick.  Getting familiar with a working model of human psychology and self development gives you the chance to re-wire yourself to better advance your goals, break negative behavior patterns, and positively engage with other people and world around you. 

This kind of insight can be valuable for anybody, but it's especially important for all of us who feel that deeper...

In the 14 years of his professional career, from 1954 to his assassination in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote five books, delivered 2500 speeches, all while traveling 6 million miles across the country and the globe as an iconic leader of the civil rights movement.  He left behind tens of thousands of pages of writing, notes and correspondence--the project of publishing these curated papers will run to 14 volumes.  

How did he manage to create so much in such a short lifetime?  And what can all of us looking to answer our own call to make the world a better place learn from his creative process?

In this post we explore the deliberate process behind MLK's creative genius, along with what we can learn  from recent research on the art and science of creative productivity.

MLK's Creative Process

• Deep commitment to a hugely important goal--as he put it himself in words that ring out to this day: "I have a dream that one day this nation shall live out the true...

What level of self awareness and are you bringing to your work as a change agent? 

Have you figured out how to get past your own blindspots, particularly around the larger systems that are perpetuating the inequalities and bias you are working to change?

If you're someone with a calling to make the world a better place, whether you're giving money away as a philanthropist, raising money as a social entrepreneur, or just getting started on your journey, chances are that whatever you're not able to see about yourself and the systems around you is getting in the way of realizing your full potential for creating more impact and more joy.  

What I want to share with you in this post is a framework for thinking about levels of personal development, and how this relates to doing the work of social change, particularly if you are trying address systemic inequalities that you yourself are not directly suffering from. 

You could think of these five levels of personal...

 When we lift up heroes of social change, from Mahatma Ghandi, to Nelson Mandela to Diane Nash we often think in terms of the extraordinary impact they have had over the course of their lives. 

But in reality, these icons live their lives from moment to moment, just like every one of us. 

Ultimately, a life of extraordinary impact is very often rooted in stacking up any number of every day moments in which you take positive action.   

As someone with a calling to bring as much impact and as much joy as you can into the world, how do you build up your ability to take more positive action, more consistently, from one moment to the next?

That's the question this post explores, looking at findings from the last 50 years of research on willpower and self regulation.   

Just What is Willpower Anyway?

A helpful place to start is with the model that taking action depends on lining up our knowledge (what to do), our skills (how to do it), and our mindset...

What would make 2021 an EXTRAORDINARY year for you?  Could it be that you're not exactly sure? 

If you've got a calling to make the world a better place, chances are you've got some compelling visions and dreams for the year to come.  But have you actually asked yourself a powerful enough set of  questions about your impact and your joy in the coming year, and given yourself the gift of reflecting on the answers? 

Here's what I've found for myself, and for the funders and social entrepreneurs I coach: for all of us with a calling to make the world a better place, spending as little as 60 minutes just once a year going over the questions I'm going to share with you in this post is a game changer.  

No question, there's plenty of work you need to do on a daily basis to serve at your highest level and reach your greatest levels of joy and personal fulfillment--but getting clarity on the fundamental questions in this self-assessment is the foundation...

If you are in the business of giving money away--or raising money to drive your mission--chances are you already know there's a whole lot  wrong with how most philanthropy is traditionally practiced.  

If you want to show up differently in philanthropy and work creatively with others to make truly lasting, systemic change on the issues that matter most I hope this post will speak to you.

It's no secret that the last few years have seen an increasingly public critique of philanthropy, from Rob Reich (Just Giving), to Edgar Villanueva (Decolonizing Wealth) and Anand Giridharadas (Winners Take All).    All of these books are well worth reading closely, whatever seat you occupy in and around the world of philanthropy.  

At the heart of these critiques is an indictment of the whole structure of philanthropy and the power dynamics that pervade it.  As Edgar Villanueva puts it: "The field of philanthropy is a living anachronism. It is (we are) like a...