An Interview with David Dibble and Joanne Dunleavy

Mastering Intent – An Interview with New Agreements Pioneers

Joanne Dunleavy

David Dibble

Welcome! I’m talking with David Dibble and Joanne Dunleavy.  David is the author of The New Agreements in the Workplace  - Releasing the Human Spirit and Joanne, you are the co-founder of the New Agreements Coach Training Institute.  David, I’m going to direct the first question to you, which is, why did you write the New Agreements?  

I have been on a spiritual journey for about 20 years.  I’ve studied systems theory and become a systems thinker; I saw how 90 percent of the results we experience, particularly in the workplace, are a function of the systems we work in and not our individual efforts.   

It became very clear to me how few of our leaders were privy to this information and there might be a huge benefit in the area of leadership, business, and coaching if we could become systems thinkers.  One day in meditation, I realized that it was time to write a book that would be a roadmap for change at the levels of leadership and coaching based on this combination of universal or spiritual principles and systems thinking.  

I know that Don Miguel Ruiz’s work, including his book, The Four Agreements, has had a lot of impact on you.   

(David)  Yes, I mentioned that I had studied a number of spiritual traditions and practices, and I’ve been very fortunate to have some wonderful teachers.  One of my teachers was Miguel Ruiz.  Miguel was my teacher for about 8 years, until he gave me the boot and said, ‘It’s time for you to go out in the world’.  He’s still probably one of my best friends. I was able to integrate a lot of the things I learned from Miguel into The New Agreements as well, so I feel that it was just a huge gift.  

Please describe The New Agreements for our readers.  

(David) The first New Agreement is to Find Your Path.  If we have a clear vision for ourselves that is meaningful, we have a tendency to move much more quickly.  The second New Agreement is to Love, Grow, and Serve Your People.  If you look at organizations, they’re actually a group of people who have come together to do something. People bring the energy to literally animate the organization. They bring life and energy to an organization, so when we love, grow, and serve our people, we are really serving the organization.   I feel that particularly for leaders and coaches, this is a very important New Agreement.  

The third New Agreement is to Mind Your Mind in the Moment.  This is really the practice of the Mastery of Awareness.   The mind creates our individual realities.  We have 6 billion people on the planet, and if you spent any time with any of those people, you’d see that each of us sees things a little differently.  If we want to change our reality, we have to change our minds.  The first step in changing the mind is to be aware of what the mind is doing in the moment. This is a magical moment when we have the possibility of making new choices that will change our reality.  

The fourth New Agreement is to Shift Your Systems.  I mentioned that 90 percent of the results we experience in the workplace and in our lives are created by the systems in which we work, not by our individual efforts.  If we can become systems literate, and learn to shift our systems, we can accelerate the potential results created in the workplace and with our clients. The last New Agreement is to Practice A Little Every Day.  We know that anything worth doing well requires a little practice. Practice is a rocket sled for change.  

How did the New Agreements Coach Training Institute come about and what is the philosophy of your training program?  

(Joanne)  Having been an Executive and Business Coach for over 16 years, and also President of an organization, I know how effective Coaching is.  I have seen over and over again that it can be the difference in the success of an executive or business owner.  We had been working with individual clients and organizations as New Agreements Coaches with Intent for several years, and what we saw happening got our attention.  Something was happening beyond the normal powerful possibilities that coaching provides.  We saw that equipping Coaches with the awareness, skills, and knowledge to make systems visible, could greatly accelerate the change process.  We knew that we needed to share this with coaches and business leaders, and decided to launch The New Agreements Coach Training Institute in order to teach and train other coaches.  

It’s so intriguing to me because I love systems and I love the work of Peter Senge who wrote The Fifth Discipline.  Tell me more about what New Agreements Coaching with Intent means.  

(Joanne)  We as coaches are usually trained to work with the WHO of the client.  We are trained to work with creating shifts in the attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs of our clients.  When we can “see” systems and make decisions to “shift systems,” we have BOTH Coaching eyes open – one on ‘who’ and one on systems.  This greatly expands our coaching ability. Can you imagine, being able to make visible the systems that are constraining our clients’ effectiveness and performance?  Now, we are working with the ‘whole’ client.   

New Agreements Coaching with Intent combines several unique perspectives.  We have the relationship, which we hold sacred between client and coach, Systems-Based coaching, Universal Principles, and The Path of the Coach.  A New Agreement Coach chooses a path and a set of spiritual practices for the purpose of accessing intuition, inner wisdom and knowing.

You say that there are powerful new tools and true magic in the Masteries. Why is it important that these become an integral part of Coaching now? 

(David)  The Masteries are where the rubber meets the road.  They are the practices and tools, which allow us to rapidly change the mind.  From a transformational standpoint, the Masteries are what actually cause this change to happen, in sort of rapid-fire sequence.   

There are three Masteries.  The first is the Mastery of Awareness.  This Mastery is to wake up to the fact that we’re not our minds.  The mind is made up of our  thoughts, beliefs, and memories.  We spend most of our time believing that we are what we think, what we remember, and what we believe.  The truth is, we’re much more than that. If we want to change our experience, we have to get control of our minds.  If we want to control the mind, the first thing we must do is to slow it down.  Awareness in the moment is the first step in slowing the mind.

And it’s all about the NOW. 

Exactly!  The second is the Mastery of Transformation, which is to choose different thoughts, beliefs, and memories, which will create a different experience.  Most people are might say, ‘What? How am I going to choose a different thought or a different belief or a different memory?’  Well, because the mind is naturally creative and you made up the first ones, you can make up different ones.  This is about proactively making different choices about thoughts, beliefs, and memories, and when you do, you will literally change your experience.  

Then, the final Mastery is the Mastery of Intent.  This could also be called the mastery of life, the mastery of love, the mastery of energy.  When you master Intent, you master life.  The first two Masteries really lead to the third Mastery.  When we talk about Coaching with Intent, for instance, we’re talking about proactively using the energy that comes from love to help both coach and client accelerate. 

As you’re talking, it makes me think back to The Four Agreements, when Miguel talks about the “parasite” of the mind. 

(David)  Exactly!  If we really boil it down, the “parasite” of the mind refers to  fear-based thoughts, beliefs, and memories that deplete our life energy. We made all of them up.  They’re not true. What’s true and real about human beings is that we’re all okay.   The Masteries offer each of us wonderful tools for changing these thoughts about ourselves. 

(Joanne) Coaching is really the opportunity to raise awareness, to get control of the mind, to make new choices, and to change our experience. 

How powerful for people reading this to realize that the fear-based thoughts, beliefs, and memories are a choice, that they’re not true and we can choose today where we focus.   

(David)  But you know what’s interesting, Kim?  In the beginning, we really didn’t have a choice. In the beginning, many fear-based thoughts, beliefs and memories were imposed upon us. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just the way it is.  Being an adult now and having these tools, there’s no reason we can’t begin to shift these untruths and proactively clean them up.   Now, we’ve become masters of the mind, and masters of our reality.  

You’ve talked a lot about systems thinking and the magic within the Masteries.  Why do you believe that these must become an integral part of coaching today?  

(Joanne)  The Masteries are practices that allow the Coach to gain control of the mind.  We see it becoming an integral part of coaching because the more a coach can practice being present, in the now, the more possible it is for something amazing to happen in the spaciousness of the coaching relationship. I think it’s time; it’s time for Coaching to embrace these powerful ways of connecting to Self and inner wisdom and to bring it into the workplace.  The work is always with the Coach. The more that the coach becomes aware, gains control of the mind, and masters his or her own life, the greater the possibility the Coach brings to the coaching relationship.  

The more that Coaches can begin to work toward personal mastery, the better Coaches we’re going to become, and the more tools we’re going to have available.  The critical path of coaching requires that we ‘walk our talk’ and that we be what we coach. 

So our own stuff as coaches can get in the way.  I’ve heard many coaches say that you attract clients that have similar issues that you’re working on.  

(David) A great point, Kim. What we’re talking about is the Law of Attraction. We pull to ourselves those things that exist in our minds, including the challenges we face everyday.  It’s profound.  

Do coaches with previous coach training enroll in your program? 

(Joanne) Yes. We launched our 6-Month Certification Program in January and we’re now moving into our 2^nd on-site weekend, which will be in April.  We have amazing people being pulled to the Program.  Some are beginning coaching, and are accomplished in other areas of their life.  We’re also having people come to our coaching certification who are certified Coaches looking to take their coaching abilities and practices to the next level.   

You’ve mentioned that leaders and managers are attracted to this training, and integrating it into their positions and work environment.  Tell me more about that.  

(Joanne)  What we find is that managers, leaders, and CEOs are coming to our Institute to learn how to coach as a way to enhance their leadership styles. They are experiencing tremendous growth.  

(David)  Although, this is new, I feel like this is something that’s really wanted and needed for leaders, managers and coaches.  They’re trying to figure out and solve problems that they can’t be solved in the same old way. It’s going to require new and enlightened approaches from leaders and coaches in order to solve the problems we face today in our rapidly changing workplace environment.  

(Joanne)  Good leaders and managers are good coaches, in the sense that they work with people in unique and empowering ways.  From the perspective of profitability and organizational effectiveness, managers and leaders know – I’m talking about the ones that we’re working with – that if they can co-create with their employees healthy, empowered workplaces where creativity abounds, where people feel that their vote matters, where people feel that they’re valued, there will be profitability.  Enlightened companies are becoming clear that managers who know how to coach employees are going to be more effective and more productive. 

And how might this next step in your training assist coaches in building their practices?  That seems to be the hot topic today! 

(David):  We’ve seen many wonderful and highly skilled coaches who are not effective in marketing, sales, and building their practices.  The New Agreements Coach Training Institute provides training, structures and tools for building a practice within the context of The New Agreements, the Masteries, Systems-Based Coaching, Universal Principles and The Path of the Coach. 

We see a lot of Coaches who are marketing, but how effectively? We know that leveraging is absolutely critical.  If you have an opportunity to talk to 5 people, or 500 people, there’s obviously a lot more leverage in talking to the 500.  Joanne, would you like to talk a little bit about positioning and the multiplier effect? 

(Joanne)  I would say one thing about a multiplier.  One of the ways that I built my practice is that I realized that if I began working with one person in a company or the owner of a company, then I could work with the whole team. Fairly quickly, instead of having 5 clients, I had 25 clients.  I’ve learned that in developing business and in building a successful coaching practice, there are ways to multiply the relationships from 1 client into 5.   That’s also what we’re teaching our coaches – how to create clients –and how to create and leverage our partnerships and alliances. 

(David)  Can you imagine what might be possible when we harness the Law of Attraction? Like attracts like.  When you put out the emotional energy that comes from love, you become attractive.  You attract like-type energy in the form of people.  When we’re sending good thoughts and love in all its different forms out into the world, we find that we actually become attractive - a little magnetic – and we will literally begin to pull people who are resonating at the same levels. 

That is what the Mastery of Intent is all about; it’s about working at these energetic levels so we produce the types of results we want to.  The other thing we focus on is synergy – I really believe that when two or more people are working together, we can create much more value than 2 individuals working alone.  This is part of the community being created where people are supporting and encouraging each other, and looking for opportunities to partner, as opposed to feeling like you’re all alone.  

(Joanne)  We’re working with Coaches to build fulfilling and full practices that are based on leveraging mutually valuable relationships into income generators. 

The two of you are speaking at the 3^rd annual CoachVille Conference “The Coaching Business:  Create Your Own Magic” in June.  Can you give us a taste of what you’re going to be talking about?   

(Joanne)  We love magic!  I was especially struck by the title of the upcoming conference.  Coaches create magical and amazing relationships with clients all the time.  We plan to create a very interactive experience at the Conference for participants to observe their minds in action!  We’ll have an opportunity to change our thoughts to create new experiences.  We look forward to creating an environment for practicing the Masteries of Awareness, Transformation, and Intent. We’ll practice Coaching with Intent.   

What advice would you give to coaches building their practices? 

(Joanne)  Be as excellent as you can, be willing to grow, and put yourself out there.  Take risks.  Surround yourself with people who have a desire to grow.  Leverage your opportunities.  Make wise choices.  Remember, you are building a business!  And, love yourself.  Go for it! 

(David)  What I would add is that whatever we’re doing now is creating the results we’re experiencing now. If we want to build our businesses, we have to do some things we haven’t done and that we’re not comfortable doing.  So, again, we’re right back to: Is the coach willing to grow?  Are coaches willing to go through their fears to have what they want in their lives and live their dreams?  It’s energetic; let’s get going!   

It’s very simple.  Make stuff happen, right?  

(David)  We have to get out of our own way, and turn around the fears that keep us from doing what we should be doing. When we transform the energy that comes from fear to love, we find ourselves freed up to do the things that grow our businesses and make out hearts sing. This transformation is true magic. 

I’ve been interviewing many successful coaches for Today’s Coach and when I ask, ‘How have you grown your practice?’ they’ve all said ‘I just did what I had to do – whatever it takes, I did it.’  It’s not rocket science, but a willingness to explore yourself and then do what it takes.  

(Joanne)  Kim, this often means doing that one thing—the one you did not want to do!  Go through your fears.  Stretch. Do whatever it takes and know that you are an amazing work in progress. 

And often, it’s that one thing that brings you to a whole new level of awareness and joy, if you can get yourself to do it.  

(David)  That’s why ‘Practice a Little Every Day’ is so important. Huge changes take place in little steps done every day.  You can use the New Agreements as a road map for transforming your life, including the business of coaching. 

(Joanne)  Let’s not underestimate the power of communities, the power of connection, the power of having others aligned with us. In those moments, when we may want to go back to what’s comfortable, how great it is to have others holding us to our best.  This makes such a difference in our lives as coaches, because that’s what we are also being for others. We need to have it for ourselves, too.

Learn more about The New Agreements by visiting www.thenewagreements.com.  You can contact David at david@thenewagreements.com and Joanne at Joanne@thenewagreements.com.  For more information on the 3^rd annual CoachVille conference, check out www.coachvilleannualconference.com.