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Janet Steinwedel’s work with groups aims for a net increase in consciousness in the organization or community in which she is working. This is the third book in the Steinwedel Red Book Series–a series focused on the integration of Jungian psychology and executive coaching. In this book she explains her collaboration with organizations to choose a handful of leaders who will benefit from a focus on enhancing their leadership. Janet has focused on balancing the goals side of the coaching process with aspiration and inspiration in an effort to support clients on their path to individuation and wholeness. She has worked with many leaders that have been nudged out of alignment with their values and lose their passion for their work and her process is designed to bring that alignment back.
In her writing she has focused on the experience of opposites including woundedness and healer, student and teacher in an effort to both deepen her personal growth and support others in their growth and development–in the movement toward wholeness. She creates safety in the group for colleagues to try new behaviors–to experiment with being in relationship. While collaboration is paramount today this relationship work is not only about the relationship with workmates, but the relationship one has with one’s self.
We have become a nation of strivers with a one-sided focus on greatness, she says. From one lens this is a wonderful thing, when it is out of balance it can create very dangerous leadership and consequences. The capability of observing oneself in order to be self-aware is a challenge. As soon as we try to observe our self we are no longer our self, but the self, or more correctly, the persona, we wish to be seen as. We are too often socialized to look only at our strengths and capabilities. But this is not the totality. It is not reality. It is disjointed and grandiose. And everyone suffers. Leaders who can effectively serve, guide, collaborate and be directive know their strengths and their weaknesses. They know how to build a team that supports both, providing the right balance of curiosity, experimentation and knowledge for the goals and needs of the moment. This requires, to use Jung’s words, a knowledge of the times as well as a knowledge of the depths. Steinwedel sets the stage for leaders to develop by more accurately knowing their true selves through challenge to themselves and one another. They work at having empathy and compassion as well as a necessary toughness.
This emotional intelligence, popularized at the turn of the new millennium, is important to the framework of Insight Group Coaching and a natural aspect of Jungian psychology. Steinwedel presents numerous ways for leaders to develop their EQ and their engagement–modeling an approach they can take with their own employees.
In his discussions about first half of life and second half of life, Jung queries, is there perhaps a college for forty-year olds which prepares them for their coming life and its demands as the ordinary colleges introduce our young people to the knowledge of the world? Steinwedel believes group work can be a source for that kind of development, we invite you to read this book carefully and see if you agree.
