By: Robert Radcliff on February 6, 2025
I remember learning about the Hero’s Journey in elementary school. Part of it stuck: We learned that heroes go through the stages of leaving, trial, success, and returning home. As an elementary student, I got an elementary version of the Hero’s journey. This week, I read the origins of that knowledge from elementary school –…
By: Rich on February 4, 2025
The reading for the week is Hero of a Thousand Faces.[1] Joseph Campbell details his insights in finding a common pattern throughout the heroic stories of myths, legends, and religious writings. As he defined the formula of the monomyth, Departure—Initiation—Return, I found myself reading along with examples from contemporary works, whether Lucy blundering through the…
By: Mathews Manaloor on February 2, 2025
I feel this is again one of those books that would come under the category of action poetry [1]. In the Christian circles this would be quite transformational and adding coaching to leadership must have been a radical idea for the time it was written. It looks at leadership with a fresh lens. We have…
By: Judith McCartney on February 1, 2025
A Baby Blessing Threshold We ran a wonderful ministry in the projects of Toronto. We called it ‘The Drop In.’ The Drop-In was a basketball drop-in at our local church on Monday nights. I had a group of 10 volunteers from that local church that would run this exciting program. Young men and their girlfriends…
By: Christian Swails on January 31, 2025
In a spiritual direction session, the only posture that allows me to remain open to the Spirit and the person seeking direction is a posture of love, a visceral ‘willing the good’ toward the person in front of me. That may sound obvious, but for a chronic self-preservationist like myself, it is one of the…
By: Ivan Ostrovsky on January 30, 2025
For most of my life, I was a people-pleaser. It was hard for me to say “no” to others. I wanted to be liked and hoped that everyone around me would view me positively. As a freshman at Pacific Union College in California, I found this school to be much larger than the high school…
By: Jess Bashioum on January 30, 2025
It has been uncanny how many areas of my life have been overlapping. The concepts from Mining for Gold: Developing Kingdom Leaders Through Coaching[1] have been contemplated on in both my work and my personal life. Therefore, I will be talking a whole lot about myself more than I normally feel comfortable with. I work for…
By: Judith McCartney on January 30, 2025
This IS GOLD! I was all bright eyed and bushy tailed as an 18-year-old that just entered bible college. I had such aspirational dreams of being a missionary in Indonesia. I did not find myself in my family’s place of origin Papua, New Guinea rather I found myself in the urban setting of Toronto. While studying…
By: Alex Mwaura on January 30, 2025
The other day, I was reading the “Future of Jobs Report 2025, by the World Economic Forum (WEC) which provides highlights on skills that will be required for the future. Of course, Generative AI featured as a disruptor in different sectors, but I was mostly intrigued by leadership and social influence as a skill that…
By: Jeremiah Gómez on January 30, 2025
And it saved me for ministry. I know that sounds like hyperbole, but it’s true. I was neck-deep in the stuff of a turnaround ministry environment, and I was lost. I was young (with three whole years of vocational ministry under my belt), newly married, and overwhelmed. The little church on the brink of closure…
By: Betsy on January 30, 2025
When I was four, I hid under the table to avoid being told off and found the tiniest book with a pretty pink and blue watercolour image on the front of it that I can still picture. It was the book of Matthew, and so I read the Bible out loud for the first time…
By: Darren Banek on January 30, 2025
I had a goal and a plan, and it was all starting to come together. I knew I wanted to internalize this week’s material and write better than last week, hoping that last week’s blog post was slightly better than two weeks ago. All that needed to happen was to start typing out my introductory…
By: David Weston on January 30, 2025
Sir Francis Bacon once posited, explaining his quote above, that “much like the sun’s heat, it has the ability to transform and reveal the underlying qualities of people and things, making them pliable and firm and exposing inherent characteristics.” [1] Tom Comacho’s Book, Mining for Gold: Developing Leaders through Coaching, is a wonderful treatise on…
By: Mika Harry on January 30, 2025
I’ve not been a good coach in the past. As a strong one on the enneagram, justice is my word, and doing things “correctly” is my high priority. So, it may be no surprise that I find it incredibly frustrating when someone asks for my advice and then doesn’t do what appears so obviously correct.…
By: Robert Radcliff on January 30, 2025
This week, I read Tom Camacho’s Mining for Gold. It is a primer on coaching to help leaders draw out the God-given talents from their team so people can flourish. I want to extend an idea that Tom Camacho developed in his book that he didn’t fully develop. Camacho says that our Sweet Spot is…
By: Rich on January 29, 2025
I come from a long line of teachers. My grandfather taught languages on the high school and college levels. My dad earned a D.Ed. and was a high school principal. My mom and sister taught elementary school. My sister was born to teach. She taught me to read when I was three. She was five!…
By: Joff Williams on January 29, 2025
“Where we see ordinary people, God sees a rich deposit of gold waiting to be brought forth.” Camacho [1] I enjoy coaching and mentoring. I have had several wonderful people generously share their thoughts, wisdom, and experiences with me. They had helped me seek the Lord in discovering the gold in me, and I wish…
By: Michael Hansen on January 29, 2025
I met Pete during my first week at the company. My direct reports and I walked through an assimilation exercise, and I was able to ascertain a few points about their behaviors, backgrounds, and overall company culture. I then transitioned to a series of one-on-one interviews where we dove deeper into their roles, hobbies, family,…
By: Mathews Manaloor on January 28, 2025
Reading the Overcoming barriers to student learning: threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge [1] on the heels of our first book How to Read a Book [2] certainly made reading and understanding of this book easier. By following the outlines of looking at the publishing data, table of contents, background of the contributors, index, foreword and…
By: Alex Mwaura on January 24, 2025
I don’t know where my passion for serving the most vulnerable emanated from. Perhaps it’s because I was at some point in life equally vulnerable and living on the edge but experienced how kind-heartedness can positively affect human lives. Or maybe God just planted a seed in my heart to care and support the less…
