Competency No. 5

I’m one of millions of people globally who not only love bird watching, I love to do so from my garden. What a treat to interview Jacqueline Crivello, an award winning photographer, author, bird feeding store owner, a birder, entrepreneur and even an inventor of a bird feeder for hummingbirds. (The latter comes inspired from her very first bird feeder she created as a girl in the forest behind her Wisconsin home. She used a baby food jar and nail polish to attract them.)
In our interview, we’re both surprising crisp and sharp given we both woke at 3:30 a.m. that day, drawn from our sleep by the fuller moon and bird song. (Jacqueline hears her from her forest backdrop in Colorado and mine from my Wisconsin garden.)
You’ll enjoy hopefully hearing two entrepreneurial women who’d never spoken prior to our interview and find plenty of through lines and shared loves: birds, nature, reinvention, and finding peace and calm through the outdoors. Also, lessons from our girlhoods, which still guide us today. Join us.
Follow Jacqueline Crivello on Instagram and find her photography and children’s nature books via @jacqueline_crivello_author and her website.
Reach out to me, D G McCullough, for insights on my group coaching and training packages on everything from active listening, public speaking fear, to storytelling. You can find my LinkedIn profile here and my website here.

More coachees are asking me each week how to become an International Coaching Federation (ICF) certified coach and how I became a coach, specifically the decisions before me and the training itself. (I’m delighted they ask, because coaching’s a truly delightful field.)
I’ve found a fantastic home in this new industry, now coaching full-time for an audience I adore and relate well to. (Most of my clients are foreign-born leaders or managers on their way to the top.) I’m training coaches and corporate leaders on active listening, because they realize they must listen well to get places. My training’s broadened what felt possible. Reading from my article on Medium, in this week’s podcast, I’m sharing how I trained to become a coach, letting the most popular questions I hear guide us.
Reach out to me, D G McCullough, for insights on my group coaching and training packages. I’m for hire as a corporate trainer with active listening and public speaking as popular topics. You can find my LinkedIn profile here and my website here.

Certifying with the International Coaching Federation, the world’s largest nonprofit for professional coaches, challenges many coaches because it’s no easy feat. We must speak only 10% of the time, drive clarity, insights, and accountability too. Submitting a recorded coaching call to ICF evaluators for review often erodes our presence with our coachee, who we care about the most, even over the exam itself.
With the calm wisdom of Coach Sathyanarayanan Sethuraman, my friend and peer coach, we unpack and troubleshoot these problems as we pursue our ICF goals. (Sathya’s certifying at the PCC level and I’m pursuing MCC— level two and level three of the ICF’s core credentials.)
Join us for tips on saying less, doing more, and staying calm and present, no matter what. And thank you again to Sathya who had a work emergency amidst our interview which he dealt with midstream and came back to our show! Talk about presence.
Listen for our earlier episode here on taming our monkey brain.
You can reach Sathya on LinkedIn here. Reach out to me, D G McCullough, for insights on my group coaching and training packages and individual packages on reinventing, promoting, and using your voice through refining the written word. You can find my LinkedIn profile here.

Solar eclipse. Mercury retrograde. New moon. Job layoffs. Overwork. No surprise many of us are losing it at home and at work.
But if you’re a mental fitness practitioner with a goal to stay calm and peaceful no matter what, some ways exist to find the ease and flow and stabilize the mood and feeling in yourself and those around you.
In our delightful conversation, fresh after time digging in her garden (where she loves to play the most), Coach Karen du Four des Champs, who has been coaching for several decades, tells us her tips, tools, and asks me some too.

With Gallup reporting most U.S. workers find 50-hour work weeks normal, no wonder many of us struggle maintaining presence as we work. If our typical flow becomes back-to-back meetings, presence (which I'm defining here as peace, calm, and present with ourselves and others) can feel impossible.
As my coaching practice has grown, I've challenged how I relate to time because my job requires (at it's core skill) being present. In this week's episode, I share three small experiments which still help me stay present even when coaching abundantly (often 10 sessions in the one day.)
Next up: How does humor help replace tension with calm, presence—even joy? An interview with UC Berkeley educator and program leader, Amy Azuma.
Book me, D G (Debbi Gardiner) McCullough, by visiting my website and clicking on the Calendly link. Or, write to me on LinkedIn. If you enjoy this podcast, do share with anyone interested in coaching or wanting to find the coach approach to life’s problems through staying more present.