Business powerhouse Christine Comaford shares her insights for leading from the inside, and offers tips for inspiring, personal storytelling that is filled with emotion and meaning. Christine is an accomplished business woman, leadership coach, and the driving force behind helping many of today’s most influential leaders and organizations manage change and navigate growth. Pull up a chair and enjoy the show…
Time Codes
- 02:57 Welcome Christine Comaford.
- 04:00 Christine Comaford’s story: How she figured out that life is what you make of it at age 15, and then became a Buddhist monk at age 17.
- 07:55 Who influenced Christine the most when she was young?
- 10:22 What is Christine Comaford doing now? Smart Tribes Institute, where they focus on three key areas: Leadership, Culture, and Sales & Marketing
- 11:20 How Smart Tribes Institute helps leaders create deep and meaningful connections with their teams, so that their people feel safe, that they belong, and are important.
- 12:39 How the inside game and persona meaning guides conscious leadership. Unpacking the idea that leaders must be aware of social context and how it helps you recognize if someone is craving safety, belonging, or mattering.
- 15:06 Translating destructive behaviors into understanding of the core needs is not being fulfilled.
- 16:41 The exquisite mirror that the Universe provides to help us understand what we are creating around us as leaders, and how the culture of the organization reflects our inner work.
- 18:50 The secret key to effective leadership: looking inside. Christine Comaford’s poem “Call off the Search.”
- 20:17 The power of storytelling and being vulnerable, doing the introspective personal work that enables us to bring ourselves to the story. How our judgments about things outside of us prevent us from getting in touch with what’s inside us and the deeper meaning for us.
- 22:30 The roots of courage and how Christine Comaford turned a difficult moment at age 7 into a powerful motivation to take charge of her life, how those early experiences prepared her for her Path.
- 24:18 Christine’s tips to leaders who want to be able to open themselves in storytelling. What happens in the brain and how it creates the experience of connection with others. The brain science of storytelling.
- 26:44 The ways that learning and memory are connected to emotions. The critical connection betwee the powerful emotions in your company’s values, mission, and purpose and your ability to inspire.
- 28:05 Steps for personal storytelling success. Bringing authenticity to a story, especially by including the hero’s journey, insights, and deep feeling. Christine Comaford’s list of five important factors to successful storytelling – you must have three of them!
- 29:40 How can leaders get past the storytelling “formula.” It’s all about beliefs about those three core needs. Our vulnerability is our strength because it helps people see that we are all the same, no matter where they are in the org chart. Creating a self-nurturing culture.
- 32:40 An early quote from Christine Comaford – “…I have to be in the world to help people remove their own pain.” On being in service to humanity and Christine’s personal journey as a leader.
- 36:48 Speed round!
Today’s Guest: Christine Comaford
@comaford
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/comaford
For over 30 years, Christine Comaford has helped leaders navigate growth and change as a leadership and culture coach. She has built and sold 5 of her own businesses with an average 700% return on investment. She is the author of two New York Times bestselling business books: SmartTribes: How Teams Become Brilliant Together and Rules for Renegades. Christine was recently named one of the Top 50 Human Behavior Experts to Follow in 2017 and one of the Global Employee Engagement Influencers in 2017.
Christine helps develop strategies that shift executive behavior to create more positive outcomes and helping organizations and teams align during times of change. The potent neuroscience techniques she teaches are easy to learn and immediately applicable to help leaders see into their blind spots, expand their vision, and more effectively influence outcomes. Her coaching, consulting, and strategies have created hundreds of billions of dollars in new revenue and value for her clients.
She has appeared on Good Morning America, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, FOX Business Network, PBS, CNET and Stanford Graduate School of Business has done two case studies on her unconventional rise to success as a woman with neither a high school diploma nor college degree.
Christine believes we can do well and do good, using business as a path for personal development, wealth creation, and philanthropy
Links mentioned in this episode:
- Smart Tribes Institute – Christine Comaford and Smart Tribes Institute has a mission: We believe every company can forge a culture of safety, belonging and mattering. We help leaders to create this, to see into their blind spots, to expand their vision, and to help themselves and their teams to perform at new levels, while fostering deep fulfillment in their work. Discover how Smart Tribes Institute can help you with training, coaching, and change management support.
- Smart Tribes Institute Free Tools – The ones Christine promised you!
- “Call off the Search” (video) – A poem by Christine Comaford that reminds you to look inside.
- Why Leaders Need To Be Great Storytellers (Forbes Article) – The power of storytelling and how it affects the brain. Christine Comaford describes a four-step process and offers tips to make a story compelling.
Books mentioned in this episode:
SmartTribes: How Teams Become Brilliant Together
Words at the Threshold: What We Say as We’re Nearing Death
