choice Magazine

Send us Fan Mail If you’ve ever left a leadership team session thinking, “We talked a lot but nothing really moved,” the missing ingredient might be presence, not preparation. Garry Schleifer sits down with executive and team coach Michelle Chambers, author of “Beyond Paying Attention: Presence as a Systemic Practice in Team Coaching,” to unpack what presence actually looks like when you’re workin...

Send us Fan Mail The moment you walk into a room, leadership is already happening. Before you share the first slide, answer the first question, or say hello, people are reading your posture, your pace, your face, and your energy and that “quiet data” shapes how everything you say will land. I sit down with executive coach André Politzer, author of “Before the First Word: Designing Empowering Conve...

Send us Fan Mail Presence gets talked about like it’s the gold standard in coaching, but we’ve both felt the gap: the client looks engaged, the questions sound “right,” and somehow nothing truly shifts. Leadership strategist Scott Drexler joins us to name what’s missing and to make it usable: attunement. It’s the moment when coach and client stop operating on parallel tracks and start transmitting...

Send us Fan Mail A coach can look present and still miss what matters. Garry Schleifer sits down with DEIB leader, educator, and PCC coach Dr. Aikyna Finch to get concrete about what coaching presence really is and what it is not. We dig into the difference between a calm “presence pose” and the active, grounded attention that tracks a client’s words, tone, pacing, body language, and meaning in re...

Send us Fan Mail The fastest way to change might be the last thing most high-achievers want to hear: stop trying to fix yourself for a moment and let yourself be loved. We sit down with master certified coach and Awaken Coach Institute founder Christi Byerly to talk about her Choice Magazine article, “The Loving Gaze,” and the lived reality behind it: what happens when a coach meets a client in th...

Send us Fan Mail Your best coaching is not the moment you land the perfect question. It is the moment you stop performing and actually meet the person in front of you. Garry Schleifer sits down with social leadership coach Gloria Custodio to unpack what she calls “The Presence Problem” and why coaching presence is less a trait you have and more a practice you return to, over and over, in real time...

Send us Fan Mail Some clients say all the right things and still leave you with a quiet feeling that something is missing. That gap is where real coaching happens, and it starts with how you listen. We sit down with master certified executive coach Cheryl Procter-Rogers to unpack her core idea from choice Magazine: listening beyond words. Together, we walk through the three levels of listening, fr...

Send us Fan Mail You can be a technically solid coach and still feel that something is missing and your client can feel it too. That subtle gap is what we dig into with leadership and executive coach Nancy Hauschild, author of “The Observed and the Observer: Stripping Away the Layers to Find Your Deepest Presence,” from Choice Magazine’s theme on The Gift of Presence. We talk about the difference...

Send us Fan Mail You can hear it when someone is technically “on the call” but their body is still sprinting. That gap between showing up and actually arriving is what we dig into with executive and team coach Susan Weiss, author of Active Presence: How to Bring Yourself and Your Client Fully Into the Now. We get practical about what presence looks like in real coaching sessions, why it slips, and...

Send us Fan Mail Your best leaders can look calm and still be in trouble. When uncertainty stops being a short-term disruption and becomes the water everyone swims in, “stay strong and push through” turns into isolation, second-guessing, and a constant fight with their own internal signals. That’s the heart of our conversation with executive coach and coaching supervisor Maria Wade, author of “Hol...

Send us Fan Mail Chaos has a way of shrinking our thinking. One tough email, a headline, a sudden change at work and we grab for the fastest fix, the familiar answer, the script that used to work. Then the brain locks onto worst case scenarios, confidence drops, and even strong leaders start feeling stuck. We sit down with Marcia Reynolds, Master Certified Coach and pioneer in the ICF community, t...

Send us Fan Mail Feeling stuck is not always a sign you’re failing. Sometimes it’s a sign you’re crossing a threshold where the old version of your leadership no longer fits and the next one hasn’t come into focus yet. That space can feel restless, urgent, and confusing, which is exactly why many of us try to force clarity and rush into an action plan.  We sit down with leadership coach and organi...

Send us Fan Mail Chaos can feel like whitewater: loud, fast, destabilizing, and impossible to control. That’s why I invited award-winning change agent and master coach DJ Mitsch back to Beyond the Page to talk about what it really takes to find peace amid chaos and lead through meta change with courage and compassion. We explore a practical metaphor that sticks: change as a river, where rapids tes...

Send us Fan Mail The world does not change because we agree with the idea of change. It changes when we show up differently on an ordinary Tuesday morning, in the meetings we dread, the choices we rush, and the habits we repeat. That is the heart of my conversation with master coaches and authors Janet Harvey and Silvia Tassarotti about their book, Regenerative People, and why regeneration is not...

Send us Fan Mail Chaos has a way of making smart people reach for old tools harder, even when those tools stop working. We sit down with Coach Carrie Sackett, author of “Saying Yes And To Chaos: Building Resilience with Our Clients in Uncertain Times,” to explore a surprisingly practical answer: improv. Not stage improv, but structured, embodied exercises that help coaches and clients get out of t...

Send us Fan Mail Chaos is no longer a rare event. It is the default setting for leaders who are trying to deliver results while information, technology, and expectations accelerate around them. I sit down with coach Scott Drexler, author of “Coaching on the Edge: Helping Leaders Perform When Chaos is the operating environment,” to get practical about what actually helps when there is no time, no s...

Send us Fan Mail Chaos at work doesn’t just scramble priorities, it shrinks a leader’s ability to think. We sit down with coach and author Madeleine Blanchard to get intensely practical about what helps when everything feels urgent and noisy: classic coaching tools, simple models, and the kind of questions that create instant clarity without turning coaching into advice-giving. We dig into why lea...

Send us Fan Mail Your brain loves predictability, but leadership rarely offers it anymore. When stress and urgency become the norm, even the most capable leaders can lose access to their best thinking and default to old autopilot patterns. That’s not a character flaw, it’s a nervous system response, and it’s exactly where executive coaching can create real change. I’m joined by executive coach and...

Send us Fan Mail Disruption doesn’t “settle down” anymore. It stacks, spreads, and speeds up until leaders start feeling like the only stable thing is the chaos itself. That’s why I sat down with leadership, team, and organizational coach Dorothy Seminovich to unpack a powerful concept gaining traction: meta-ruption, the relentless convergence of disruptions across technology, geopolitics, climate...

Send us Fan Mail Chaos doesn’t just interrupt our plans. It rewires our attention, shrinks our options, and convinces us we’re out of control. That’s why I’m thrilled to sit down again with Master Certified Coach Laura Berman Fortgang, author of “Coaching in Chaos: Navigating a Rapidly Changing World,” to unpack what actually works when clients feel overwhelmed, reactive, and stuck. We get practic...

Send us Fan Mail Your client’s “I can’t decide” might not be a mindset problem. It might be a nervous system problem. We sit down with cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Irena O’Brien, founder of the Neuroscience School, to unpack a deceptively simple idea with big implications for coaching: choices are shaped by nervous system state, not just logic. When the brain is under threat or running low on ener...

Send us Fan Mail Choice usually sounds like a simple decision, but the more we coach leaders in real life, the more we see how messy it gets under pressure, noise, and competing priorities. Garry Schleifer sits down with ICF Master Certified Coach Subash, author of “From Conditioning to Conscious Choice,” to make a bold claim feel practical: choice is not an action. Choice is a state of awareness,...

Send us Fan Mail Choice is easy to praise and surprisingly hard to access when stress, habit, and old stories take the wheel. We sit down with cognitive psychologist and ADHD coach Eliza Barach, author of “Designing for Agency: Coaching the Moment of Choice,” to get concrete about what agency really looks like inside real decisions, especially for high-performing people with ADHD who often feel tr...

Send us Fan Mail You can feel it when a coaching conversation reaches a crossroads: do we stay with what’s emerging, or do we introduce a tool, challenge an assumption, or name a pattern out loud? Garry Schleifer sits down with executive coach and coaching supervisor Jeremy Lewis to explore how we make those calls with intention, not habit, and why “choice” is a real professional competency in bot...

Send us Fan Mail The fastest way to change a coaching conversation isn’t a new tool it’s helping someone see they have options. I’m joined by executive coach, educator, and author Jenn Chloupek  to talk about the power of choice and the ABC framework she built to make transformation feel clear, human, and repeatable: Awareness, Behaviors, Connections. If you coach leaders, build a coaching culture...