A live coaching-session excerpt from the Optimize Coach program featuring Shannon Polly. Polly describes a practice from her book where participants read poems, speeches and monologues aloud to embody character strengths (e.g., Mother Teresa, Oprah, Shakespeare). She discusses coaching techniques, cultural adaptation of material for an executive presence program for women in tech across multiple countries, and the physical/embodied aspects of practicing virtues aloud.
The content you're about to hear was captured during a live coaching session in the Optimize Coach program. Multiple times every month, Coaches connect live with Brian, Michael, Alexandra and members of our world class luminary guest faculty for wisdom, guidance and encouragement. For more head to Optimize Me Coach.
So, you know, in the book I have the poems and monologues and speeches that go with each of the character strengths and reading them aloud is the practice in the book of embodying that character strength. So basically you're embodying the strength of a. Of a paragon of that virtue. So there are speeches from, you know, Mother Teresa and Oprah and Lou Gehrig and there are poems from Shakespeare. And I think a lot of times people, they feel weird about reading things out loud. They say, oh, well, I read out loud to my kids, but I'm not going to do that for myself. Or, you know, I'll coach them on presentations and they'll say, well, I didn't do it out loud. I practiced it in my head. And I was like, yeah, you can't really do this with just doing it in your head. So I think that that's part of the acting. As if is how do you express that and try it on and what does it feel like physically? What does hope look like in your body? What does bravery look like? Sometimes I use the speeches in the book for reference, but also having people search for culturally appropriate speeches that might resonate with them. So I'm designing a program on executive presence for women in tech and it's being rolled out in like five countries. And I am going to have to source what's an inspiring speech for someone in Shanghai or Manila or Kolkata. So I think that as coaches we have to make them do their work too, right? And figure out what really resonates with you and where does your curiosity go.
We hope you enjoyed that. Part of a live coaching session from the Optymyze Coach program. For more info, head to Optimize Me Coach.
