Coach Express

By Bronwyn Bowery-Ireland, CEO, ICA

I am writing this as I sit in Shanghai. It is cold today and the wind really blows through you. I have left behind the warmth of summer in Australia and so the winter winds are quite a climate change for me.

I was reading the local paper and found a most unusual article. It talked about how woman are taking on more senior management roles in China. The article described how a CEO recognised the importance of needing women in his senior management team. He used an analogy which I found particularly interesting. He described how he was playing chess and recognised that he needed a ‘queen’ in his company. The queen he believed was the most powerful piece on the chess board and is the best piece for coordinating and leading battles, because unlike other chess pieces a queen has no restrictions on her movement.
I began to think about the game of chess and what can we glean from the game. I immediately began to think about the pieces on the chess board and whether they can used to draw an analogy to our life. Are you a pawn or the rook or the bishop or the knight? All of these pieces are restricted in how they can move. Yet the queen is able to move freely around the board. So lets use this analogy which is a particularly good one I think for seeing how we move and play out the game of life.

Are you living your life in a restricted way – are you a pawn in a game? What moves would you need to take in your life to be unrestricted? Perhaps the starting point is to list all of the ‘moves’ in life that restrict you. I usually find people refer to work moves or behaviours or expectations relating to their work. I also hear people refer to moves that have been created by their family since they were children. These moves have stayed with them all their life. So list all the moves or behaviours that restrict you. This could be certain habits or customs that you have had from your family or ones that you have developed over time. I am sure you will know these restricting moves as we usually find the restrictions create side effects. We may feel a tightening of our chest when we do them, or we stop breathing, or our shoulders creep forward and our posture is bent.

Once you have listed these behaviours that restrict you, take a large deep breathe, notice your posture and ensure it is upright and strong. Then beside these restrictive behaviours list the behaviours that you would like to have in order to feel unrestricted. Describe what the behaviours would look like. Feel yourself grow in stature as you feel the freedom that comes from these new unrestricted moves. Beside this list of unrestricting behaviours draw up another column. This column is to describe what you look like when you are acting out these unrestricting behaviours. Try and see your face, your posture, how you are at work or at home or with your family.

At the end of this exercise you should have three columns - your restricting behaviours, your unrestricting behaviours and what you look like when you are free to move around. Now do you feel like a queen on the chess board?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 at 11:40 am and is filed under Coaching Insights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.