After 10 years in business with minimal success, she got crystal clear on how to talk with her prospects and clients and as a result she repositioned her entire business and is now realizing her full potential.
Presenting Bootcamp STAR Graduate – Kim Parrott, Sea Change Resources
Kim is one of our Top 10 students in this past session—the “cum laude” of the bunch who launched her businesses with our support and who is now thriving!
Kim offers executive and team coaching for senior leaders & emerging leaders.
Gratitude
I feel so fortunate to work as a coach and facilitator because it enables me to be my best self, while helping others realize their best selves. As a coach I get to help people identify what really matters to them at both a professional and personal level. As a facilitator I get to help groups achieve results beyond the sum of their individual efforts. That’s fun adventurous stuff, which I’ve always enjoyed.
Some background: I grew up overseas in a diplomatic family in East Africa, Soviet Union, England and Belgium. After college I went to sea for seven years as a coast guard licensed officer aboard square-rigged ships. Eventually my seafaring husband and I moved ashore to start a family. Soon thereafter I launched a consulting business with my mother, which has evolved into what is now SeaChange Resources. My mother continues to be a mentor, partner and inspiration.
Our Quest: Accelerated Wisdom
“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” –Isaac Asimov, Writer and Biochemistry Professor
This melancholy quote has been a motivating challenge for us at SeaChange—how do we accelerate the development of wisdom in leaders and teams? The commitment to that quest is embedded in our logo.
If the answers were self-evident, we’d all be enlightened by now. Clearly we’re not. IS there a way to fast-forward the acquisition of wisdom?
First of all, a distinction needs to be made between knowledge and wisdom. At its simplest, the former pertains to the information and skills that a person gains through experience and education. The latter is how well that knowledge is applied.
Wisdom is grown, not manufactured. It often originates from deeply personal experience, usually in the form of a challenge or hardship. It involves gaining a larger perspective that transcends the boundaries of self, in other words, a meta-awareness of awareness itself.
New Applications of Age-Old Wisdom
For the last five years we’ve been designing the Quest for Excellence framework–an intensive learning environment that naturally seeds and feeds wisdom. None of the ideas are new. Indeed most of the elements have ancient pedagogical roots.
The formula is simple: the pursuit of holistic excellence both in input and output.
Where we are breaking new ground is in the integrated application of these age-old modalities to the development of a modern leader.
The original Greek word for wisdom is sophia, which means clarity. Enabling society to gain wisdom apace with the surging knowledge of science is dependent on the clarity of our focus in evolving whole-minded and whole-hearted leaders.
A Lot to Ask
It’s a tall order, we know, and still aspirational at this point. However, that’s what coaching is about—encouraging our clients and ourselves to set beautiful and mighty goals that we can grow into.
There’s also serendipity involved. Several months ago I chanced upon the Coaches Console website while looking for an online calendar tool to share with my clients. I soon discovered that I had bumped into a whole system approach that would enable me to take my business to the next level. An Easy Breezy Bootcamp later I am much further along on my own business quest than I would have dreamed possible.
So I’ll end where I started—grateful to be surrounded by a community of coaches committed to bringing out the best in each other.
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Kim Parrott is the principal of SeaChange Resources, LLC. Kim has 20 years of experience of leadership development, executive coaching, strategic planning and facilitation for a broad range of organizations including corporations, colleges, government agencies and the non-profit sector. She also serves on the faculty of the Center for Creative Leadership, a globally ranked provider of leadership development and research, and is a Senior Consultant for The Cradlerock Group providing leadership training and coaching for multinational companies. Kim holds a in BA History from Yale, a MA in Teaching from Brown and is an ICF certified coach. Kim lives with her husband and two children in Blue Hill, Maine. Learn more about Kim.
Get your free copy here of Kim’s Free Gift: 5 Steps to Unleash Your Team
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