In the context of achieving success, coaching is not so much about telling you what to do. Rather, it’s about asking powerful questions, and affording you opportunities to examine what you’re actually doing in light of your stated intentions.

  • Narrowing the gap between what you say you want – and the results you’re not yet achieving – constitutes the essence of coaching.
  • Coaching is how YOU go about narrowing this gap

Leaders are in the business of achieving results.  Executive coaching assists you in getting the important things done, while realizing your higher potential.
Engagement begins by focusing on your deeper purpose.  What really matters?

  • Assisting you to paint a picture of your desired future, I direct your energies toward what it is that you really want.
  • Strategic thinking and planning processes then outline pathways toward these objectives.
  • The coaching program centers on equipping you with the means to leverage your assets and resources in the service of achieving your desired outcomes.

Coaching involves a learning partnership that’s designed to unlock your leadership capabilities.  Depending on your particular style, I customize an individually tailored program that both supports and challenges you in your developmental strivings.  That means meeting you where you are.  Right now.

  • Gaining insight into your inherent strengths and weaknesses will aid you in overcoming barriers within yourself, your team, and your organization.
  • New tools wielded with deeper understanding, outfit you to take bold, sustainable steps forward.
  • The core of this partnership focuses on you becoming a generative instrument of service.
  • Of you becoming an ever more finely honed tool in the service of achieving your optimal results.

I facilitate the development of individual talents and skills with real-time practice and training.  In particular, I assist leaders to expand their perspective-taking abilities in order to perceive challenges more readily, imagine multiple solutions more creatively, and to communicate, inspire and act more effectively.

WHAT I OFFER

An integrally informed executive or personal life coach works intimately, in an atmosphere of mutual trust, mutual respect and freedom of expression with clients to help them articulate and achieve the goals they really want in life, the ones that are most in harmony with their highest self.

Coaching helps clients with a wide range of problems, including specific problems, such as how to increase the chances of rising up the ladder in a management firm by developing an impressive portfolio of business, how to overcome interpersonal difficulties with a business colleague, or how to bring a creative vision to practical fruition; and problems that are more general in nature, such as feeling “stuck” or vaguely dissatisfied in one’s life and/or career, wanting to be more effective on the job, or wanting to create more balance and richness in one’s life.

A coach not only holds the client accountable and keeps the client moving toward his or her dreams and goals, but also helps the client make important personal changes that permit the client to remove the self-imposed limits that have been holding him or her back.

HOW IT HAPPENS

An integrally informed coach helps the client effect these changes, first by establishing a relationship of trust, honesty, and support, and second by focusing on the client’s interpretation of his or her current situation, including the client’s self-interpretation.

My approach to coaching recognizes that a person’s effectiveness is directly related to a person’s assumptions, beliefs, and self-concept. Unless one is willing to examine and change one’s self-imposed conceptual limitations, meaningful change is highly unlikely, because one’s beliefs about oneself and the world tend to predetermine the outcome.

Change will occur, however, with the right information and motivation. That’s where having a coach can be indispensable. A coach doesn’t analyze the client, but rather listens, supports, challenges, asks questions, and is committed to helping the client find his or her own truth and then working to take the steps to actualize these goals.

HOW I WORK

Trust and respect:

Front and center, coaching is all about our relationship, which is based on our mutual regard and reciprocity.

Client-centered:

I allow the person being coached to be an individual, and to tell me what is working in terms of supports and challenges. I design my approach to your needs and individual style.

Attuned:

I am by nature caring, empathic and a great listener. I am interested in who you actually are, as well as your goals and objectives. While I don’t want my clients to be dependent on me, I do seek to warmly support you.

Results focused:

I am also very action oriented. I enjoy challenging my clients, and wading into their challenges. It’s great when you surprise yourself by stretching more than you believed you could.

Inspirational:

I’m on your side and in your corner. I let you know how hard you’re trying and how well you’re doing with your change process; especially in those moments where you doubt yourself.

Honest:

I will reflect you to yourself. I will neither whitewash the truth, nor will I harm you with it. Rather, I will strive to communicate situations in a way that will allow for choosing avenues of optimal responsiveness based on your own capacity for truth-telling.

Challenging:

Stretching people in their thinking and actions; asking the hard questions in a non-judgmental way is a key skill that makes coaching effective.

Strategic:

I love brainstorming and creating plans, strategies and devising systems of change. Creative problem solving is fundamental to the process.

HOW IT WORKS

An Integrally Informed Perspective on Coaching:

*I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

“Integral” theory strives to include a wide diversity of ideas and methodologies into a larger, overarching framework. It draws together already existing paradigms into an interrelated network of approaches that are mutually enriching.

The Complexity of the Self, and the Simplicity of understanding it:

As I practice and engage it, Integral coaching aspires to:

  • Bring coherence and responsiveness to the complexity your sometimes wide-ranging and disparate strivings.
  • Cultivate insightful awareness of the range of motivations and intentions with which individuals often wrestle.
  • Become an important step toward designing a life plan or purpose that is in alignment with your deeper intention

Integral insight involves an understanding of all the different sides of ourselves:

  • So as to better be able to consciously relate to elements that we may otherwise be unaware of.
  • It is not only the presenting life conditions that you need to get a handle on, but more importantly…
  • It is the interpretation that you bring to bear on the circumstance that determines outcomes.

Indeed, this process will often reveal hidden “competing commitments”

  • These serve to derail otherwise boldly stated good intentions and heartfelt efforts to change.
  • I employ a process to help the client excavate these hidden immune systems to change.
  • By penetrating unexamined “big assumptions”, based on unconscious fears that hold us back.
  • With support and guidance, you are then more readily able to risk beginning to take small measured steps toward.
  • exploring self-defeating, self-imposed limitations.

In order to help individuals be long-term exceptional performers in relationship and at work,

  • Integral coaching involves looking at both the individual as well as collective dimensions of your life
  • Of both the interior and exterior elements of your world.
  • This means taking into account the “I’ the “We” and the “It” pronouns, in order to refer to first, second and third person perspectives.
  • Exterior dimensions are physically observable, whereas interiors are experienced inside ourselves.

The individual interior dimension (I) of experience has to do with how we make personal meaning.

  • Any person reading this right now is having a unique and individual interior experience
  • Such a perspective involves a unique combination of cognitive abilities, emotional reactions, motivations, sense of purpose, values, moral concerns, aesthetic sense of beauty…
  • This is how we understand ourselves, consciously or otherwise

The collective interior dimension (We) is the “cultural/shared values” aspect

  • These are our shared principles, values, mental models, the sense of being part of something
  • This is where there is a “meeting of the minds” with our groups of others, near and far
  • Where we entertain commonly held ideas
  • Whether we have our own larger perspective on these modes of collective understanding – or not

The collective exterior sides of ourselves involves that which we often talk about in how we see things running or operating

  • Systems and processes
  • Regulatory systems, systems of governance
  • Written rules of engagement, and established codes of conduct that we either operate by, or believe we are supposed to

The individual exterior domain has to do with our physically observable behaviors

  • Personal skills
  • Performance demonstrations,
  • Expressed talents and duties
  • Evident and recognizable health and so forth

An integral coach helps the client to make sense out of all of these disparate dimensions of life. This map, or system assists in more readily making coherent meaning of opportunities and challenges, so as to more adeptly self-initiate or self-adjust in timely and appropriate fashion.

I have benefitted tremendously from Bert over the years. In my role as Dallas YPO Chapter Chair and Board member, I received great feedback from our members and spouses regarding Bert’s forum retreat facilitations. Bert provides both a secure and demanding container to explore personal life and business challenges. Having been in a partnership relationship from the outset with a senior member, Bert helped me expand my perspective so that I was better able to navigate my way through crucial conversations with this partner (with who I had father figure dynamics in play), enabling me to buy him out. The business has been able build into a whole next level of valuation, and is now becoming a national presence.

Brian Schultz, CEO Studio Movie Grill YPO Dallas Chapter Chair

Bert Parlee is an amazing instructor that provided an abundance of content that can be applicable to any profession. As a participant, I was delighted to see our management team move from a group of working individuals to a leadership team that became focused on performance and innovation, while successfully managing change and understanding the human mindset. I suspect Bert’s being a psychologist has something to do with his ability to see hidden dynamics that we weren’t aware of. He helped open our eyes to see one another in refreshing new ways that were both profound and delightful.

Colleen Young, Director of Training Education Sales Management

In my leadership role with YPO (Young Presidents Organization), I have worked with Bert Parlee for the last 3 years in his role Senior Advisor role at the Stagen Group in Dallas. I have found Bert’s insights, experience and approaches to be of the highest value. Bert has been instrumental in digging into what had been intractable problems. He has been able to creatively craft effective strategies and practices to transform these dilemmas into opportunities. His advice and counsel has been nothing less than liberating for me and my team.

David W. Cook, Executive Director, YPO-WPO International Events Team

Bert has helped my senior management team and me personally. He aided each of our executives to become more aware of our strengths and weaknesses, and how to better play to each other’s strengths. He enabled us to see different options to resolve conflicts that we alone could not see. He assisted me personally by encouraging me to grow into the person he believed I could become. His wisdom has helped me see life another way; a fundamentally more beneficial way.

Reggie Dupre, CEO, Dupre Logistics, LLC., Lafayette, LA

Our WPO Dallas Chapter is appreciative of your excellent work in helping to kick off and facilitate the first meetings with new forums (both member forums and also NextGen forums). Members of the young adult forum were inspired, and told me you were terrific in helping them with the need for commitment, mutual respect and confidentiality.  Recently, some of us WPO’ers were reflecting on how you bring a creative blend of support and challenge to forum work, so as to bake the learning without burning it. Thank you for walking us along that edge.

Stephen Lerer, Chapter Chair, Dallas WPO

For the years that Bert has served as faculty in our Notre Dame Integral Executive Education MBA program, he has offered powerful learning regarding the complexity of challenges that accompany real change. His areas of expertise involve his understanding of the hidden dimensions of the growth and development process, and how to bring communication skills, conflict management and taking broader perspectives to bear on otherwise intractable problems. Bert is congenial and well liked by the students and faculty, and his presence as a facilitator is complemented by the depth of his understanding of the nuances and sophistication of the Integral model. He is indeed a world-class expert in these regards, and our program has been fortunate to continue to learn from his many gifts.

Leo Burke, Program Director, Notre Dame

Bert is not only a world-class professional trainer, but he does so with a confidence that is complemented by highly attuned interpersonal sensitivity and empathic attunement. People are drawn to Bert as a person, enjoying his openness, authenticity and warmth. I would be delighted to furnish any further information, either written or via telephone, that might assist you in your decision-making relative to Dr. Parlee.

Rick Fort, President, ESM

As a large enterprise level organization moving towards increased global complexity, we needed larger, more empowering frameworks within which to manage our many complications and contradictions. Bert introduced us to Polarity Management and related Integral mental models, allowing us to have next level conversations with new stage concepts. Over the next few years with Bert serving as coach, facilitator, coach and consultant, our leadership team was much better prepared to negotiate the shift from a print to a digital foundation.

Vince O’Brien, President, ESM

In 2008 I was fortunate enough to participate in one of Integral Institute’s Leadership Seminars that was facilitated by Bert Parlee and other world-class integrally informed thinkers. I was so inspired by Bert’s leadership skills and presentation style that I invited him to participate in a transformative initiative being implemented by the Government of British Columbia’s Ministry of Employment and Income Assistance. By means of executive coaching and staff training seminars, Bert pla…

Wayne Reid, Manager: Transformation and Implementation, Government of British Columbia, Provincial Services

Our “next generation” management team training program has been a much smoother process due to Bert Parlee’s expert leadership. There is no doubt in the owners’ mind that Bert has been successful in ways that went beyond the current owners’ thinking and training methods for their next generation team. We are delighted that things are working much better than expected due to Bert’s leadership.

Clayton Smith, CEO, Smith Management Inc., Dallas