The November issue of The Manufacturer reviewed Bolt-on Solutions. It noted, some boutique ERP providers cautiously embrace the bolt-on model. “Our software supports engineering intensive companies,” says Chuck Stewart, founder and executive vice president of Cincinnati, OH-based Encompix, an ERP provider for companies in the engineer to order, make to order, and project management industries. “Sometimes there is functionality that is needed where it makes sense to use a bolt-on application. We don’t want to reinvent.” Stewart uses the example of project management software as a realistic bolt-on application. “Microsoft Project is an industry standard and most, if not all, of our customers use it. It behooves us to make sure that it integrates easily into our ERP system.” It is an application that Stewart has no desire to reinvent.
Stewart advocates an open relationship with third party software providers so he can keep his service levels high and provide support to his installed base. “I’m happy to see an improving relationship with software providers that allow us to identify integrations issues and advise the customer,” says Stewart. “Customers grow weary of tight integration processes and the trouble they cause, both in cost and time, is unacceptable.” He also sees an evolving open standard developing across the industry that is helping ERP companies and third party providers alike. “The architecture is changing and integration is becoming easier,” says Stewart. “We are much more in the loop when it comes to upgrades and changes in software, including being invited to conferences and having access to design teams when necessary.”
Encompix has filled the manufacturing software requirements of Engineer-to-Order companies since 1992. The company name reflects the commitment to developing business application solutions that encompass the complex areas of project-based and job-based manufacturing.
Encompix www.encompix.com Roger Meloy 513-733-0066
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TITLE: The Difference Between Therapy and Coaching
AUTHOR: Susan Dunn, MA, Clinical Psychology
WORD COUNT: 1173
WRAP: 60
URL: http://www.susandunn.cc
Mailto:sdunn@susandunn.cc
Photo available: http://www.susandunn.cc/images/susaninstripe1.JPG
“The Difference Between Therapy and Coaching,”
by Susan Dunn, MA, Clinical Psychology
“Oh,” said Bob, after listening to me explain what I do, “So coaching’s like therapy for healthy people?”
No, because for one thing there are healthy people in therapy, and for another, coaches aren’t doing therapy. In fact this strikes many of us coaches as funny, because we intentionally chose not to be therapists, and so are many therapists. Over 1/3rd of the members of the International Coaching Federation are therapists! In fact, I fit the hybrid of many coachesI have a master’s degree in clinical psychology, but had a career in marketing and PR. Why didn’t I make therapy my profession? I was waiting for coaching to come along.
GRASS ROOTS
The field of psychology is at least 100 years oldFreud opened up his consulting room in 1886, and the American Psychological Association (APA) was founded in 1892. It is by all accounts experiencing major growing pains right now, and whether it’s labor pains, or death throes remains to be seen. Therapy was originally based on the medical model of disease-there was something wrong with the patient that the expert must find and then fix. As in “cure.”
Over the years, there have been many changes in the field of psychology, with new names (Winnicott, Jung, Adler) and new theories (Rational Emotive, Cognitive, Behavioral), but all assuming pathology.
Martin Seligman’s Positive Psychology is a force in a new direction we’re watching carefully, and the fact that he’s started a Coaching School shows at least some affinity to the coaching philosophy.
FILLING A NEED
Coaching evolved to fill a need that wasn’t being met. Haven’t you looked at least once at a professional athlete and said, “If only…” or “Well, sure, when you have that kind of help.” We may not all be 6′5″ with superb reflexes, but each of us has a unique set of strengths and just as much raw potential to develop if placed in the right hands.
We all know what a professional coach does for an athlete. It’s a combination of teaching specific techniques and skills and a lot of work on “mental attitude,” or whatever it’s being called these days. (I think of it as Emotional Intelligence.) Sports coaches have long been into the mind-body connection.
But 10 years ago, who was around to do this for you when you wanted to build a business, or find a new career, or get unstuck, or create a retirement worth living for, or be a more effective father?
Not that you couldn’t do it alone, but it would probably go quicker and better with fresh insight, perspective, and perhaps some specific expertise. Coaches are “change agents,” but also are specialized. You may want someone who can help you with life balance, who understands your field (engineering), who has actually been a single Mother, who has served on a Board, who has built a successful business, who has been a manager or a professor, who has lost 50 pounds, who has helped someone else lose 50 lbs., or who is himself multicultural.
SO IT’S LIKE FRIENDSHIP?
No. Friends and loved ones have their own issues, agendas, perspectives, and points of view. They also “project”that is, if they are timid, and you want to do something they consider daring, they” try and discourage you, and tell you it’s “for your own good.” I’m not talking about bungee jumping; I’m talking about starting your own business at age 50, or moving halfway around the world, or walking away from a 6-figure job because it’s making you sick.
Friends are not trained to be objective, and the closer they are to you, the less likely they’ll be objective. Everyone involved with you emotionally has a vested interest in what you do. They also, I’m sure you’ve found, do not have the time.
So for those of us who wanted more out of our lives or particularly out of ourselves, who wanted personal and professional development not in the pop-psych short-term-goal way, but as a lifelong proposition, where was there to go?
Reading self-help books gives theory for a mass market, but where could you get a personal and individualized program? It was time for something new for the millennium – coaching!
About 8 years ago, I was burning out of my then career field, and looking for something I didn’t even know the name for. I went to a therapist who said I was depressed. Damn right I was. I said I needed to find a new career that was meaningful, and she said she “didn’t do that,” and didn’t know anyone who did, but we could talk. She asked me about my father, a lawyer, and if I was ’supposed to have been the lawyer.’ There were no female lawyers in 1966 when I graduated from college, my father is long dead, and I was beginning to feel I was and nobody had told me. What I was looking for was what coaching is all aboutfinding your passion (or reclaiming it) and going forward.
USER-FRIENDLY: CONVENIENT, EFFICIENT, EFFECTIVE & AFFORDABLE
Not surprisingly, since it evolved to fill a need, coaching is very user-friendly, mostly done by telephone, from wherever you and/or your coach happen to be. It uses your time efficiently. No wait, no drive time, no dress code, no need to cancel because you’re on vacation. It’s stream-lined, cyber, results-oriented, and becoming more affordable all the time as it becomes more competitive.
AND WHO ARE THE COACHES?
Well, some are therapists, but they come from all walks of life. There are credentialing schools (I direct one, EQ Alive!), but the “requirements” for the field are established by the individual consumer. As Thomas Leonard, the founder of Coaching said, “Check your credentials at the door and leave your Boy Scout badges at home.” He himself was an accountant who had a knack for helping people with the more important things in their lives.
WHAT KIND OF COACH FOR YOU?
Coaches help people, and in the most amazing ways. Soon I think there will be a coach for everything, and I think that’s wonderful. Now there’s a Potty Training Coach. If you’re laughing, you haven’t been there, as I was – thousands of miles from any family member stumbling around with my friends, the blind leading the blind, and confused by the conflicting advice I was hearing and reading, and a pediatrician who said, “You’ll know when he’s ready.” Not this first-time mother!
There are coaches for ADHD (the Canadian Medical Association has recommended coaching as part of their multi-modality treatment plan), Depression, Divorce, Elder Care, Communication, Leadership, Conflict Resolution, Relationships, Intuition, Introverts, eZines, Marketing, Real Estate, Retirement, Breast Cancer Survival, Emotional Intelligence, Fathering, Public Speaking, Career, and Writing. If you can’t find one for what you want, visit Premier Coach Referral- http://www.webstrategies.cc/coachreferralservice.htm . We’ll find one for you.
For those who have the income to invest in personal and professional growth and are used to paying for professional services, coaching makes sense. It’s definitely an idea whose time has come.
About the Author
©Susan Dunn, MA, Clinical Psychology, The EQ Coach, http://www.susandunn.cc . Offering individual coaching, coach training and certification, business solutions, coach products for licensing to jumpstart your practice, distance learning, The EQ Learning Lab, the EQ eBook Library, http://www.webstrategies.cc/ebooklibrary.html , and Emotional Intelligence resources. Mailto:sdunn@susandunn.cc for FREE eZine.
“TWO CELTIC HEADS
The bizarre story of the Hexham Heads had been in the back of my mind for a number of years and exerted an increasing fascination as I became involved in the concept of energy encoding and storage in stone which were to lead to my involvement with the Dragon Project, an ad-hoc group of scientists and others interested in testing the idea that stone circles are associated with anomalous energy, over the period 1977-83 and the experiments at the Rollright Stones described in my book, Circles of Silence.
I had first encountered the story of the heads in the Reader’s Digest compendium Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain in 1973. In the Introduction to this popular work there was a lengthy aside by the well known Celtic scholar, Dr Anne Ross, then of the University of Southampton, where she described her startling and very unpleasant experience with two Celtic carved stone heads, found in the garden of a council home in Hexham, Northumberland, which she had received for description and identification the year before.
Carved stone heads are well known from many Celtic sites throughout Europe and are easily recognized through their distinctive features. Generally they date from either the Iron Age, before the Romans overwhelmed Britain, or the Romano-British period…
In her own account Anne Ross described how, one night shortly after their arrival, she woke up suddenly at 2 a.m. feeling chilled and extremely frightened. At the instant of awakening she saw a tall, jet black wolf-headed figure standing against the faint white of the open door. It then moved out into the corridor and she felt an irresistible urge to follow it.
This she did, seeing and hearing the figure clearly as it made its way down the darkened staircase and along the corridor towards the kitchen. Anne Ross described the figure vividly, reporting not only its blackness and tallness but also its distinct part animal, part human appearance.
As the creature neared the kitchen the spell broke and Anne Ross felt fear overwhelm her and so she rushed upstairs to awaken her husband. Together they searched the house for intruders but found no-one and nothing disturbed by any forced entry and eventually concluded that she must have suffered a particularly vivid nightmare, although Anne Ross notes that she could not reconcile the vividness of the huge werewolf figure with a dream experience. Unsatisfied with this explanation they returned to sleep and since their children fortunately had not woken up they were not told of the occurrence. At this point, of course, there was nothing to relate the event to the presence of the new heads, although Anne Ross notes in her account that she had thought their appearance unpleasant and had taken an instant dislike to them on arrival.
Matters did not end there, for several days later she and her husband, the archaeologist Richard Feacham, returned home together in the early evening from a visit to London to find their teenage daughter, Berenice, already home from school but in a state of considerable distress. It was with some difficulty that they managed to persuade her to explain why, and her story suddenly threw the events of the earlier night into a grim and sinister pattern.
As Berenice eventually recounted, she had returned to the empty house at 4 p.m. and opened the front door with her key. As it swung open she saw something large, dark and inhuman rushing down the stairs (which faced the doorway) toward her. Half way down it had suddenly stopped and vaulted over the banisters, landing with a soft thud like a heavy animal with thickly padded feet…
After these unnerving incidents there were several other sightings of the creature, which the family all described as half wolf, half man, black as a shadow and over six feet tall,… and always with a great deal of noise. Anne Ross was emphatic that the creature was almost palpable, not a lurking shadow seen from the corner of an eye, and was usually seen or heard by several members of the family at the same time. Even when the creature was not in evidence there seemed to be a cold presence and a sense of evil in the house… It was only when Anne Ross made enquiries about the finding of the heads that she learned to her amazement that a similar creature had been sighted when they were discovered in the garden of the council house……
When cleaned, both heads were seen to be about the size of a small tangerine. Both were very dense and heavy, but each had a very distinct appearance. The first head had a vaguely skull-like appearance with the carved lines and pits of features only faint and vestigial. Nevertheless, its features were vaguely masculine, if gaunt and bony, and were crowned by a typically Celtic hairstyle with faint stripes running from front to back on the crown. The carved stone itself was greenish grey and glistened with quartz crystals.
The second head was more rounded and infinitely more expressive. The features were those of a formidable old wall-eyed woman with a strong beaked nose with hair combed severely backwards off the forehead into a bun. Unlike the skull-head the old woman, or hag, showed traces of red or yellow pigment on the hair.” (2)
Notes:
1) Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology, 2nd Ed., Vol. 1, A-G, ed. by Leslie A. Shepard, Gale Research Co., Detroit, includes major use of Lewis Spence’s work as well as Nandoor Fodor.PR.285.
2) The Secret Language of Stone, by Don Robins, Ph.D., Rider, London, 1988 pgs. 4-9.
About the Author
Author of Diverse Druids
Columnist for The ES Press Magazine
Guest ‘expert’ at World-Mysteries.com
