Welcome to "courage"
a professional coaching practice with services provided by Phyllis Beck Kritek, RN, PhD, FAAN
Coaching with Hope*
& Toward Possibility**
I am Phyllis Beck Kritek, and invite you to consider me as your personal coach. My story as a coach is unusual. I am living and enjoying my 80th year of life. After careers in nursing, nursing education, conflict resolution training and leadership development, I chose to become a professional coach. I believe the many dimensions and experiences of my prior work complement my preparation as coach. I am a resource for others who hope for personal change and intuitively sense their own unrealized personal potential
* Hope: the feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen
** Possibility: the state or fact of being likely
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.
Desmond Tutu
Why "courage"?
“courage” is the “recycled” name of the sole proprietorship I started at the age of 60, leaving behind over 30 years of academic service to encourage creative and constructive conflict engagement. It fit that enterprise; I think it fits this one too.
I named it “courage” because I think this concept, courage, is misunderstood. I believe courage is a trait one develops, and emerges from feeling and facing fear, and acting in spite of the fear from a personal conviction about right and wrong.
It is not fearlessness, a trait I do not have. But I do understand the call to courage, and have used the lower case to indicate that I do not suppose that courage is always large and powerful but is often modest and even shaky. Nonetheless, it is courage. If presented in lower case, it alleviates the discomfort of recommending courage to others: it is better to manifest courage in a modest and shaky way than to fail to manifest courage at all.
I think the clients who seek out a coach are making a decision about their fears, about acting in spite of those fears, about being courageous…and I applaud them. The name of my coaching practice is that applause.
We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist and forever will recreate one another.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Why Seek a Coach?
That question is important, and finding your answer is an achievement. For me, coaching requires a relationship, a partnership crafted to make change possible. You determine where you want to go and how to get there; as a coach, I travel with you, providing the process and tools to make the journey more purposeful and more likely to succeed.
Do or do not. There is no try.
Yoda
How Does it Work?
Our partnership starts when you send me an email indicating your decision to seek a coach. The next step is a scheduled phone call where you and I both decide if our partnership can work. If our answer is “Yes”, we negotiate the details which include number, length, and frequency of sessions, pricing, and any unique factors that will shape our shared commitment to coaching. My belief in the uniqueness of each human is a central factor in crafting this plan.
...to begin always anew, to make, to reconstruct, and to not spoil, to refuse to bureaucratize the mind, to understand and to live life as a process—live to become...
Paulo Freire