Monthly Archives: June 2011

Everybody Needs a Coach at Some Point


Coaching, in its many forms, is simply creating a trust relationship with someone for the purpose of optimizing relational exchanges, thereby, facilitating learning, building more self-awareness, sharpening personal and leadership skills to produce excellent outcomes.

Coaching transforms lives by giving on the spot real time feedback, where the person being coached can make reasonable choices in the moment to adjust decision-making and behavior. Effective coaching facilitates a person’s transformation by producing new thinking coupled with new actions. If you desire to advance from your current state of “being and doing” you will most certainly need a coach to launch you to the next level. Latino Townhall offers the following coaching services:

Life Coaching: This type of coaching identifies personal restraints, then seeks to build strategies to bring the individual into greater realms of self-awareness and life purpose, so the individual can access and experience living at a higher level.

Leadership Coaching: In the end results matter to your supervisor, shareholders and consumers. To lead others you must gain their respect and trust so you can harness their collective power to garner greater results. A leader must learn to create an environment where team members can be empowered to enhance overall team performance, thus moving the agenda of the organization forward with superiror performance.

Strategic Coaching: Learning to gain perspective is everything! This type of coaching increases strategic thinking and implementation skills, which helps the individual move his or her business in the right direction by going through a three-point process to gain greater depths of perspective; these three perspectives are mastering hindsight, foresight and insight principles.

Transitional Coaching: Many individuals are challenged while transitioning from High School to college, from one job to another, mid-life crises, even transitioning from a career into retirement. Transitional Coaching helps individuals think through the ramifications of transition, then finding solutions for moving with success through these cyclical and common transitions. Transitional Coaching is about understanding and coping with loss, then engaging new strategies as you move into the next phase of your life. The goal of Transitional Coaching is helping individuals experience a “culture shift” rather than a “culture shock” as they move into a new season of their lives.

7 Reasons to Acquire a Coach:
1. Coaching engages your untapped potential.
2. Coaching increases self-awareness.
3. Coaching builds your confidence as a leader.
4. Coaching increases learning capabilities.
5. Coaching sharpens your personal skills.
6. Coaching fine-tunes your social competencies.
7. Coaching takes you to a whole new level in “doing” and “being.”

Email Joel at LatinoTownhall@gmail.com (cut and paste email) for more information.

The Integrity Wheel


We should all seek wholeness and emotional health through the proper channels of course. For some of us, the process to become “whole” and “healthy” is discovered through spirituality, counseling or other areas dealing with the inner self, which brings about personal healing, growth and maturity within. In other words, you and I should strive to become a better version of self where all of our parts (spirit, soul and body) function at greater levels of personal performance. I choose the “circle” to exhibit this model since a circle is symbolic of something that is perfect and whole.

The Integrity Wheel is an idea or concept I developed a few years ago to assess one’s personal integrity in four areas, where you and I live and function on a daily basis:

1. Our Private Life
2. Our Personal Life
3. Our Professional Life
4. Our Public Persona

Each level has at least three areas to probe and evaluate (Go to link: Integrity Wheel). For instance, your personal life consists of many things. In my opinion, the most important areas is your marriage and family life, the way you view and practice financial planning, and your transparency (truthfulness, honesty, and openness) within the relationships that are most important in life.

Assessment Questions:

1. Private Life
a). What is your source of truth? Bible, Pagan Philosophy, other texts. Is your truth dynamic or static?

b). Is character important to you? If so, how do you go about cultivating character? Do you have mentors, who you allow to speak into your life? Are you constantly seeking self-improvement or just live day by day?

c). When searching the web, have you ever put your browser on “private settings” to view sexually illicit material? Is keeping your thoughts pure and unsullied important to you? What do you with a lustful thought?

2. Personal Life
a). How healthy is your marriage? Communication, Intimacy, Resolving Conflict, Openness, etc.

b). Is spending time with your children a priority? Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Annual Vacations. The common cliche’ is “Love is spelled T.I.M.E.?” This infers that time spent with your kids is loving them. I differ, you can spend time with your kids and have a true connection with them. How do you spell LOVE?

c). How do you view debt, and financial planning? What’s your view of wealth? 

3. Professional Life
a). How close are you with other employees, direct reports, even your supervisor at work? Are you relationships improving? Do you avoid opportunities to grow in your relationships?

b). Is speaking out for just causes and doing things right important to you at work? Do you cut corners to get work accomplished? 

c). Is there a secret relationship developing in your life at work (emotional affair, flirtatious relationshp, etc.) Does your wife know about the “opposite sex” relationships in your workplace?

4. Public Persona
a). How involved are you with your community; neighbors, civic organizations, etc.? What do these people say about you behind your back?

b). Reputation: How do you build one? How important is having one out in public life?

c). What’s your involvement in your “house of worship”? Would people in this setting vouch for your reputation?

Take a few moments to reassess your integrity. The quality of your life just may depend on this assessment.

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The Integrity Wheel, all rights reserved (c)2008 by Joel Garcia, Founder and President of Latino Townhall, Inc.

Are You Having An Emotional Affair?


“A touch creates heat, heat creates a spark, and a spark turns into a fire.”
-Rev. Paul Goulet, Senior Leader ~ International Church of Las Vegas

It doesn’t take a Rocket Scientist to tell you that you’re having an emotional affair at work. Those who are having one should know better yet they continue in their risky behavior, thinking they can get by undetected and unscathed. According to Gail Saltz:

“Emotional cheating (with an “office husband or wife”) steers clear of physical intimacy, but it does involve secrecy, deception, and therefore betrayal. People enmeshed in nonsexual affairs preserve their “deniability,” convincing themselves they don’t have to change anything. That’s where they’re wrong.”[i]

It’s this “deniability” that blinds them, and sooner or later, their clandestine affair is exposed. Emotional affairs are more prevalent in the workplace than you may think. In a study looking at infidelity statistics in the United States, the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy revealed 15 percent of wives and 25 percent of husbands engage in sexual relationships outside of marriage. That’s quite alarming by itself, but when emotional affairs are thrown into the equation, the numbers jump by more than 20 percent. In this day and age, it seems no relationship is safe from an affair. Emotional affairs at work tend to make up a large percentage of these numbers, and some research shows over 50 percent of opposite sex, work friendships end up turning into something more. [ii]

I remember sitting in a meeting with a high profile public leader, discussing his embarrassing exposure. The affair started subtly until they were alone and the rest is history. Once exposed it was a BIG disappointment to all involved. An emotional affair starts with a simple wink, then a compliment, an accidental bump in the hallway, and an innuendo here and there. Then all the sudden strong “feelings” take over and an uncontrollable urge and curiosity sets in to experiment further. Boundaries are then tested until it’s too late, you’ve gone over a boundary line. So what actually is an “emotional affair”? An emotional affair is an affair of the heart and mind, where a person sends subtle messages to another conveying a playful purpose yet keeping the relationship secretive in nature. If you want to know you are having an emotional affair at work, take the following assessment:

An Emotional Affair Assessment:

Is it your custom to…

  1. ask a particular person of the opposite sex out to lunch or coffee?

  2. purposefully go “out of your way” to talk to someone of the opposite sex each day?

  3. have closed door meetings with a person of the opposite sex?

  4. share marital problems or details about your marriage to the opposite sex that your spouse would not want others to know?

  5. look forward to seeing a particular person of the opposite sex at work each day?

  6. playfully text or email a particular person of the opposite sex on a regular basis?

  7. use innuendo language with a person of the opposite sex?

  8. be consumed in thought about a particular person of the opposite sex during or after work hours?

  9. inappropriately touch someone of the opposite sex at work by rubbing up against them or hip bumping in the hallway?

  10. write a private message to someone of the opposite sex, whom you happen to work with, on Facebook, Twitter, etc., without your spouse’s knowledge 

- If you answered 2 in the affirmative, you maybe a little misguided or just a big flirt, be careful!

- If you answered between 3 to 4 questions in the affirmative you’re in serious danger or on the boderline of having an emotional affair, and need to reconsider your boundaries before something more serious happens.

- If you answered 5 or more questions in the affirmative, then you are having an emotional affair at work, and need to reassess your behavior; seek counseling or speak with a mentor.

What boundaries can you design (personally or in policy form) to curtail an emotional affair in your workplace? Does your workplace have a code of ethicis in place addressing this type of behavior?

Footnotes:
[i] Could you be having an emotional affair? By Gail Saltz, May 21st, 2009.
[ii] Emotional Cheating Signs – Could These Be Signs Of An Affair? Monday, February 21st, 2011.