Meet Karen, she’s been coaching for over 20 years.

She helps executive leaders and their team build a culture of trust.

A Culture of trust includes accountability, collaboration and alignment.

Karen is part of the CreativeCubes.Co community. 

She’s also a believer of the practice of being present.

Being present is our ethos to serve and listen.

Karen shares some wise words about being human.

– We are meaning-making machines.

– We add meaning to everything that happens to us.

It’s the meaning that we react to and it can disempower us.

Still, that’s an opportunity to control our narrative.

Be powerful.

Be human.

Thank you for your kind words Karen!

Transcript

Karen Williams: All day, every day things are happening to us. Life’s coming at us. And as human beings we add a meaning to everything that happens. And it’s the meaning that we react to and that can disempower us. And so as humans we usually add disempowering means rather than empowering means.

I’m Karen Williams. I’m a coach. I’m also a trainer, a speaker and soon to be a first author. So my first book coming out early next year.

And I’ve been coaching nearly 20 years and I work now with senior leaders and teams and helping them to build cultures of trust. And that is… looks like accountability, collaboration and alignment. So I do coaching work with the leaders and I also do programs with their teams.

I was looking for about a year to find the right coworking space. I’ve visited quite a few that made a lot of great promises. And when I walked in the door I didn’t feel like they were delivering on the promise and I couldn’t put my finger on it.

A colleague referred me to Creative Cubes and I thought, “I’ll check it out.” So I went to Richmond and had a look and met Lyndon who was fabulous. And just one thing that stood out for me with everyone CreativeCubes is the ability or their practice in being present. And it’s one of the foundations of my work and something that I really work on myself. So that really impressed me because it’s very rare.

And so that was true when I met Lyndon and then he said, Hey, check out Hawthorn.” So I came here and Tobi gave me the tour, which was really, really amazing. And that’s what stuck out for me is his presence. He wasn’t rushing me, he wasn’t distracted, he wasn’t looking to move on to the next thing, which I’m sure he had many next things to do. And that’s the thing that’s really stood out for me. And I thought, “If this is the experience for me, then this will be an experience for my clients.”

It was really important for me to find a place where my clients will feel welcome and valued and respected and that I could count on people who will welcome my clients, to treat them the way that I would treat them. So that’s what really stood out for me about Cubes to start with.

So one of the distinctions I use in my business and when I’m working with teams especially is the fact that human beings are meaning making machines. And it’s something that I learned a long time ago and still have to catch myself doing it. And so what that means is all day, every day things are happening to us. Life’s coming at us. And as human beings, we add a meaning to everything that happens. It’s the meaning that we react to and that can disempower us.

And so as humans we usually add disempowering means rather than empowering means, which means something happens. We make it mean something. We go down a tunnel. Something happens, we make it mean something, we react. And if we can uncollapse those two things, the what happened and what we made it mean, then we can actually become even more powerful, and we’re back in control of our day rather than reacting to our day.

And I’d call us, you know, we’re like the pinball in pinball machines. You know, bouncing off each other in life all day, every day. So that’s what we’re like and we don’t realise it.

So if we can have these tools that help us become more conscious and uncollapse those things, then we can make healthy choices. We can lead with presence, we can be conscious in how we communicate. So that’s something that I use in life and when I work.