Blog
If You Want a Foundation to Stand On, Choose Brilliance
Our work at Crafted Leadership provides a platform for leaders to know, claim, and contribute from the wellspring of their unique talents. This skill is paramount for leaders’ personal mastery and is of service to their organizations. We call this skill “choosing...
Win With What You Have
Whether you’re working on developing your leadership or developing your tennis game, you’re faced with the same two competing choices: work on your weakness or work with your strength. A couple of years ago, determined to improve my tennis game, I identified seven...
Responsibility Reset: An easy 3-step action plan
Crafted Leadership team asks leaders to describe how they feel about the word responsibility, common responses include burden, heavy, and tired. Our own research and experience suggests that this sort of “responsibility fatigue” is pervasive, leads to burnout, and...
Conscious Leadership: My Unexpected Purpose
Conscious leadership is not an academic pursuit for me. I’m wholly invested in it for personal reasons. I’ve written before about my 23-year-old son Austin, who is on the autism spectrum. Austin depends on others for all of his daily life activities and he always...
Giving the Gift of Observational Feedback
Over the years I’ve worked with many tennis coaches and some still stand out. A skill my favorite tennis coaches share is an ability to provide incisive instruction with minimal words. For example, when I repeatedly try to drive the ball down the line but it sails out...
Hey leader, what’s your fuel?
Julianna Christie and I are currently attending Evolutionary Playground, a five-week virtual course created and led by Kathlyn (Katie) Hendricks, PhD, founder of the Hendricks Institute. On the first night of the course, Katie posed a question that I’ve been returning...
Want Team Unity? Try a Weather Report
How do you quickly establish team unity? As trainers of teams, Julianna and I engage with this question constantly. We know from research and common sense that groups perform better when a sense of team is in place. A method we sometimes use to foster a team feeling...
3 Benefits of Leadership Training
I’ve read that Warren Buffet writes his annual letter with his sisters in mind. I can relate. When I write about conscious leadership, my imagined audience is my mother and three brothers. If they think an idea doesn’t make good sense, lacks an ethical basis, or...
5 Questions For Leaders to Ask Themselves
At Crafted Leadership we make the case for the art of skillful questioning. By asking themselves good questions, leaders can discover what's true for themselves and increase their self-confidence and vitality — a state we refer to as Above the Line. Not all questions...
Conscious Leadership Explained: Building Off What’s Missing in Leadership
Leadership development takes many forms. At Crafted Leadership it manifests, counterintuitively, in a question: Are you willing? We ask the willingness question of clients, over and over, in different forms: Are you willing to take healthy responsibility for what you...
3 Steps to Set Yourself Apart as a Leader
Early on, most of my leadership training came on the job through trial and error, with emphasis on the error part. Knowing I needed to do things differently, I spent years studying with prominent psychologists in the field of human behavior, became a board certified...
Part 9 – The Present World: An Interview with Julie Colwell and Katie Hendricks
Kathlyn (Katie) Hendricks, PhD, BC-DMT, and Julia (Julie) Colwell, PhD, are pioneers in the field of human consciousness, conscious leadership and human potential. Nancy Kepner, co-founder of Crafted Leadership, LLC, sat down with Katie and Julie to get their...
Part 8 – Courage: An Interview with Julie Colwell and Katie Hendricks
Kathlyn (Katie) Hendricks, PhD, BC-DMT, and Julia (Julie) Colwell, PhD, are pioneers in the field of human consciousness, conscious leadership and human potential. Nancy Kepner, co-founder of Crafted Leadership, LLC, sat down with Katie and Julie to get their...
Part 7 – Flags: An Interview with Julie Colwell and Katie Hendricks
Kathlyn (Katie) Hendricks, PhD, BC-DMT, and Julia (Julie) Colwell, PhD, are pioneers in the field of human consciousness, conscious leadership and human potential. Nancy Kepner, co-founder of Crafted Leadership, LLC, sat down with Katie and Julie to get their...
Part 6 – Trauma and Wholeness: An Interview with Julie Colwell and Katie Hendricks
Kathlyn (Katie) Hendricks, PhD, BC-DMT, and Julia (Julie) Colwell, PhD, are pioneers in the field of human consciousness, conscious leadership and human potential. Nancy Kepner, co-founder of Crafted Leadership, LLC, sat down with Katie and Julie to get their...
Part 5 – Emotions in the Workplace: An Interview with Julie Colwell and Katie Hendricks
Kathlyn (Katie) Hendricks, PhD, BC-DMT, and Julia (Julie) Colwell, PhD, are pioneers in the field of human consciousness, conscious leadership and human potential. Nancy Kepner, co-founder of Crafted Leadership, LLC, sat down with Katie and Julie to get their...
Part 4 – Fear: An Interview with Julie Colwell and Katie Hendricks
Drs. Kathlyn Hendricks and Julia Colwell, pioneers in conscious leadership, have been friends and collaborators since 1995. Kathlyn (Katie) Hendricks, PhD, BC-DMT, and Julia (Julie) Colwell, PhD, are pioneers in the field of human consciousness, conscious...
Part 3 – Julie’s Work: An Interview with Julie Colwell and Katie Hendricks
Based in Boulder, psychologist Julie Colwell's body of work extends over 30 years and brings together science, wisdom and applied work with thousands of people. Kathlyn (Katie) Hendricks, PhD, BC-DMT, and Julia (Julie) Colwell, PhD, are pioneers in the field of...
Part 2 – Katie’s Work: An Interview with Julie Colwell and Katie Hendricks
Kathlyn (Katie) Hendricks, PhD, BC-DMT, and Julia (Julie) Colwell, PhD, are pioneers in the field of human consciousness, conscious leadership and human potential. Nancy Kepner, co-founder of Crafted Leadership, LLC, sat down with Katie and Julie to get their...
Part 1 – Finding Each Other: An Interview with Julie Colwell and Katie Hendricks
Kathlyn (Katie) Hendricks, PhD, BC-DMT, and Julia (Julie) Colwell, PhD, are pioneers in the field of human consciousness, conscious leadership and human potential. Through Katie’s work at the Hendricks Institute (which she co-founded with her husband Gay Hendricks)...
The Story With the Tiger
Several years there was a best-selling novel called The Life of Pi by Yann Martel. It’s a tale of a man who is the sole survivor of a shipwreck and gets lost in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger in it. Strange and incredible events happen until he lands on a shore in...
Building Emotional Literacy in Leaders and Why It Matters
One of the key skills we teach leaders and teams at Crafted Leadership is that of emotional literacy. Emotional literacy is the ability to accurately locate, describe and feel emotions. Why is being emotionally literate a valuable leadership skill? Because a common...
An Interview with Wynne Odell — Part 3: Growth, Values, Community
Photo courtesy of Odell Brewing Co.Nancy Kepner, CEO of Crafted Leadership conducted an interview with Wynne Odell, the CEO and co-founder of Odell Brewery on June 22, 2018 in the tasting room of Odell Brewing Company in Fort Collins, CO. Together with her husband,...
An Interview with Wynne Odell — Part 2: Leadership
Nancy Kepner, CEO of Crafted Leadership conducted an interview with Wynne Odell, the CEO and co-founder of Odell Brewery on June 22, 2018 in the tasting room of Odell Brewing Company in Fort Collins, CO. Together with her husband, Doug, and her sister-in-law Corkie,...
An Interview with Wynne Odell — Part 1: Owning Your Brilliance
Corkie Odell, Wynne Odell, and Doug Odell in the Odell brewhouse. The trio founded Odell Brewing Co. in 1989. Photo courtesy of Odell Brewing Co.Nancy Kepner, CEO of Crafted Leadership conducted an interview with Wynne Odell, the CEO and co-founder of Odell Brewery on...
Leadership Tips: Operationalizing Responsibility
The responsibility scale below is a way to help leaders and teams identify personal and organizational patterns around taking responsibility. Unhealthy work cultures reward and reinforce one end or the other.Created and used with permission by Anna McGrath,...
Healthy Responsibility Explained with Examples
"You are not responsible for your circumstances;you are response-able in the face of your circumstances."Fred Kofman, Conscious Business We’ve written quite a bit about the concept of healthy responsibility as a sustainability practice for leaders and teams. It’s the...
Leadership In Action: Giving and Receiving Feedback
Helen Nychka, MS, CCC-SLP, is a speech-language pathologist and a director at Thrive Autism Collaborative. She's a model in giving and receiving feedback. I worked with Helen in my 30's and 40's at a new autism center in Colorado, now known as Firefly Autism. I was a...