A Coaching Session with 'The Pharmacist Coach'

Recently, one of my alma maters, Coacharya invited me to coach a client as part of their 'Masters in Coaching' series. 

I have been asked many times 'What is Coaching?' And of course, there is no 'one right answer!' Sometimes an experience speaks louder than words. If you enjoy being a fly on the wall, and you are curious about how a 'leadership and well-being' coaching session with me might evolve, here is your chance!

Recently, one of my clients and I agreed to the vulnerable choice of having one of our coaching sessions recorded in front of a live audience of coaches.

CLICK HERE for the link to the recording.

The client's situation relates to challenges she was experiencing in relation to her rate of recovery post-surgery.  

As you listen to this session, I invite you to share on LinkedIn

• What surprised you?
• What most resonated for you?  What did not?
• What skills did you observe demonstrated?
• What one key skill did you observe that you could transfer into your personal and professional roles? 
• What difference would it make to your personal, professional and leadership performance if you mastered this skill?
• How could you develop mastery in this skill?

In sharing our skills, experience and learning with others, we clarify our own learnings and inspire others to deepen theirs. 

For Coaches, you could use the ICF Core Competency Framework for Coaches as inspiration to observe demonstrated skills.

For Pharmacists, you could use the PSI Core Competency Framework for Pharmacists as inspiration to observe demonstrated skills.

Where do you stand in the 6Ps of Professional Excellence?

 Having worked with 100s of professionals, we have created a short self-assessment tool aligned with 4Front's 6Ps of Professional Excellence. 

CLICK HERE to take this self-assessment. 

I look forward to hearing what you learned by completing this self-assessment.  Click here to schedule a conversation with Rachel.  I am so curious to hear from you!

• What is your #1 area of focus? 
• How do you plan to grow in your area of focus? 
• What will be the benefits of you growing in this area?
• What will be the negative consequences if you don't grow in this area?

Article Download: A Prosperous Future for Pharmacy

IPN’s Pharmacy Business Excellence Series is for community pharmacists committed to growing their professional and business knowledge and skills to overcome challenges and thrive as a community pharmacist.

4Front Pharmacy is proud to partner with the Irish Pharmacy News (IPN) to bring you the ‘IPN/4Front Pharmacy Business Excellence Series.’ In this series, you will learn how to apply 4Front’s 6P’s of Pharmacy Excellence to navigate the ‘Future of Pharmacy.’

4Front’s 6P’s of Pharmacy Excellence are

1. Personal Leadership

2. Purpose

3. Professional Practice

4. People (Relationships)

5. Products and Services

6. Prosperity (Profit and Time)

This month's download focuses on 'A Prosperous Future for Pharmacy ' and includes an example of a CPD Cycle that you could write based on your engagement with this article.  

Click here to download the full article.

Envision, Plan and Achieve your Vision for 2023

One of the challenges I hear many pharmacists, leaders, employees and coaches articulate is that they are ground down by the incessant grind of day-to-day life.   But is what you are doing aligned with your personal vision for your life?

As you know, I am committed to finding the very best resources and programmes that solve problems you care about solving and offer them to you.

Lifebook is a complete personal development system that guides you step-by-step to ENVISION, PLAN, and ACHIEVE your very best life.  

A healthier, happier, more fulfilled person is a healthier, happier more fulfilled team member, leader, employer or employee.

CLICK HERE to learn more about Lifebook

If having read the details, you still have questions or you are curious to learn more, please email me, or click here to book a complimentary conversation with Rachel 

Personalised Resources to Help Identify your Conflict Kryptonite and Super-Powers

Far more is within your control than you may realise.  Focusing on what IS within your control is where your power lies.  It is our Saboteurs' fear-based coping strategies that keep us trapped in less than optimal behaviours, such as taking on a blame-oriented victim stance, a rescuer/pleaser role or maybe command and control tendencies.  Any of these survival strategies ultimately damage relationships, create resentment and negativity and are disempowering. 

In pharmacy, in coaching, in leadership and in life, being willing and able to have productive conflict is a critical and valuable skill.  In fact, according to WBECS Speaker Patrick Lencioni, Productive Conflict is one of the 'Five Behaviours of a Cohesive Team.' 

Think about it - what impact does it have on performance, emotions, self-talk and relationships when we lack the courage and/or skill to offer a colleague, patient or team member feedback, for fear of conflict?

Since we cannot change or develop anything in our blind-spot, all personal and professional growth begins with self-awareness.  These profiles can help.

Values In Action (VIA) Strengths Profile

Do you know your unique STRENGTHS?  If not, what are you waiting for?  Your strengths are the source of your inspiration, your power and your contribution.  

If you would like to discover your Values In Action, you can take your FREE VIA strengths survey CLICK HERE

Productive Conflict Styles

One of the most useful ways to gain self-awareness about our conflict style is to do a psychometrically validated behavioural style profile and to debrief that profile with a professional who is trained to debrief psychometric instruments.   

I am certified to administer a number of psychometric instruments, including the PQ Saboteur Assessment and Everything DiSC® behavioural style profiles (including their Productive Conflict profile) 

These provide

• invaluable insights into our idiosyncratic destructive habits,
• increased awareness of the conflict behaviours that help and those that hinder desirable outcomes
• individualised guidance to respond more productively.

Positive Intelligence Saboteur Assessment

Another great self-awareness tool is the Positive Intelligence Saboteur Assessment. Click Here! to gain access to the Saboteur Assessment to identify how YOUR Saboteurs might fuel conflict. You can also discover your Positive Intelligence Quotient (PQ Score).  The resources include links to assessments and videos:

• Learn more about how Positive Intelligence mental fitness can improve productive conversations by watching the Positive Intelligence TED Talk
• Discover the saboteurs that are negatively affecting your impact and influence by taking the Saboteur Assessment.  Remember - conflict is not only about conflict with others.  We also experience inner conflict between our Sage Self and our Saboteur Selves! 
• Discover your Positive Intelligence Quotient (PQ Score)
  

Five Behaviours of a Cohesive Team

For those of you who lead teams, as a licensed facilitator of Patrick Lencioni's model using Everything DiSC® behavioural style profiles, I offer intensive workshops to help optimise team performance across the five domains. 

If fostering high performing teams of interest to you, please email me at rachel@racheldungan.com and I can send you a free 'Five Behaviours of a Cohesive Team' Self Assessment. 

You can see some signs and consequences of team dysfunction in the image shown. 

Register for our Next Cohort which starts November 7

Curious to recognise ways your fear-based Saboteurs create and sustain conflict? 

Are you also seeking ways to intercept their counter-productive impact and respond from a more loving, Sage perspective instead? 

If you are committed to doing what is within YOUR power to grow and to move beyond your default conflict patterns,then The Positive Intelligence Program® could be a great fit for you (and your team).   It is an evidence-based methodology to 

• identify your unique Saboteur behavioural patterns that tend to either fuel or avoid conflict
• intercept those Saboteurs and develop conscious self-command of your thoughts, emotions and behaviours 
• empower your Sage self to handle the conflict with courage, compassion and curiosity. 

The programme grows your three core mental fitness muscles within six weeks, installing the foundational mental fitness operating system, on which mastery can be built.  The Breakthrough app delivers neuroscience based, personalised daily practices that result in powerful new habits for a positive mind.

Intentional on-going focus on building your three Core Mental Fitness Muscles allows you to prioritise mastering your mindset as a fundamental, lifelong leadership practice.  You develop the neural pathways to consciously intercept Saboteur generated, unproductive conflict and respond instead with Sage Inspired Courageous Conversations.  Mastery of productive conflict starts with self-mastery which occurs DAILY, not in a day.  

To equip you to optimise the benefits from your initial six- week intensive mental fitness training, the 4Front Positive Leadership Programme facilitated by Rachel Dungan, Certified PQ Coach® includes an additional four months of support to engrain your PQ practice so that you sustain your momentum, assume a steady, sustainable pace going forward so that you (and those with whom you interact) reap the rewards of your ever strengthening mental fitness muscles.   

Rachel's next cohort starts on November 7, 2022.  Click here for further details.

If having read the details, you still have questions or you are curious to learn more, please click here to book a complimentary conversation with Rachel 

• If you are curious about potentially offering a Positive Intelligence Programme company-wide, click below for more details about Positive Intelligence in Healthcare in Ireland. 

This month's 25hr Yoga Teacher Training is 'Yoga for Conflict'.  

As this topic infers, yoga is an 8-limbed system for personal leadership in all areas of life, not just in the realm of physical fitness.  It can be one of the support systems we can use to help us to handle stresses, cultivate calm in the presence of conflict and calm a dysregulated autonomic nervous system. 

In order to bring out the best in others, you must be able to clearly and empathically receive what others communicate to you and also communicate clearly and empathically to others.  This is why the S, T and E parts of 4Front Pharmacy's STEPS Consultation Framework include Seek to Understand, Then be Understood and Empathise. To show up and lead people through change, we need to be able to centre ourselves in the midst of conflict, so that we can focus on the issue at hand and not get derailed by saboteur driven strategies in ourselves or others, such as judging, avoiding, controlling, pleasing, distracting, busy-ness etc.

I have found that incorporating yoga teacher training and personal practice in my Pharmacy and Coaching CPD plan continues to be a powerful way to nurture my Sage's physical energy, mental focus, emotional bandwidth and purposeful living.  In doing so, I continually deepen my professional capacity to embody the essence of 'The Pharmacist Coach.'

• personal skills (such as leadership, communication & informed decision making), 
• professional practice (such as adapting to change and innovation),
• organisation and management skills (including managing self, others, risks and quality),
• public health (including personally living a healthy life and advocating public wellbeing)
• client care (including education and coaching for personal and relational wellbeing) 

If you feel inspired to learn about how my yoga teachers approach 'Yoga for Conflict,' CLICK HERE to join Happy Jack's Yoga for Conflict Course.  It is led by one of my colleagues from HJY Yoga Teacher Training Amy Pruett.  Amy is a practicing yogi, attorney, conflict resolution mediator, professor, Mum and musician.  The course she has designed includes a variety of transferrable leadership skills, including identifying conflict stories, self-management tools in the midst of conflict and communication strategies and skills to engage in productive conflict, at home and at work.  

Managing Conflict must be in the air, because the IIOP is also running a Managing Conflict in Pharmacy Practice Training Programme, in November. 

After three years of virtual meetings, it was inspirational to meet #pharmacist colleagues from all practice areas at the peer support pharmacist event, hosted by the Irish Institute of Pharmacy.
As one of the founding peer support pharmacists and a pharmacist mentoring ambassador, to be in the presence of diverse colleagues blossoming, sharing perspectives and passions and whole-heartedly contributing is inspiring to me.
A thank you to Catriona Bradley, Sarah Chambers MPSI and the IIOP team for providing a lively forum for a discussion for pharmacists to

• share stories,
• explore pharmacists' needs and
• contribute to shaping our professional future
• creating a collective impact.

Thank you to Emily Kelly, Mike Whelan, Ellen Martin, Anne Marie DeFrein, Niamh McMahon, Clare Fitzell, Dec Kerins, Alison McKeon and James O'Hagan for sharing your stories.  Your active contribution to the work of the IIOP and how that is positively impacting you, the pharmacy profession and the causes you care about.

Another one of the joys of IIOP events is the opportunity to learn from people outside the pharmacy field, who have expertise to expand our thinking. Valerie Pierce hosted a session on 'Using Constructive Contribution to Shape Our Future.' She invited us to think differently about HOW we think, which framed our inquiry in the afternoon related to exploring the future direction of peer support in pharmacy. Exciting times ahead.

The photo below is a snap shot of the words pharmacist attendees used to describe how they felt at the END of the day. Even though I had left home at 5am to attend, I too felt optimistic, reinvigorated and grateful to have met colleagues, many of whom I had not seen in person since COVID.   I'd love to continue the conversation, so if you feel inspired, let's connect!  Here is my Calendar link.

Tech Tools|Where does your attention go?

Focus Calm Uses Brain-Machine Interface Technology to Help Us Discern between when we are feeding the Sage Inspired Mindset and when our Saboteur's Fears are getting the Lion's Share of our attention!

I have been deeply diving into how to optimise human potential for over a decade.  I have learned, practiced (and in some cases mastered) a wealth of evidence-based tools to help my clients live their life consciously, fulfil their potential and inspire others to do the same.  Learn More.

• Imagine the confidence you would have if you learned how to operate primarily from a Sage Inspired Mindset?  
• Imagine the CPD you would be inspired to complete (rather than CPD you push yourself into doing) by cultivating a Sage Inspired Mindset?  
• Imagine the difference in the quality of your ability to connect with people who have a different point of view when it is informed primarily by your Sage Mind and not limited by your Saboteur Driven Mind's Exaggerated Fears?

CLICK HERE if you are inspired to learn more about the FocusCalm Headband and how you could use it to to help you develop your Sage Inspired Mindset and intercept your Saboteur-Fueled worry, anxiety or negativity.  

If your Sage feels inspired to take transformative action to master your mindset, so that you reap benefits in multiple areas of your life, including conflict management, our Positive Leadership Academy could be a perfect fit for you.  Our next cohort starts on November 7, 2022.

4FrontPharmacy Online offers all pharmacy staff OTC pharmacy specific training, in medical conditions, product knowledge and consultation skills.   4Front's STEPS™ Consultation Framework offers a proven strategy to host productive pharmacy consultations and reduce the risk of unproductive defensive, aggressive or passive consultations. 

Start your journey with 4Front Pharmacy Online for FREE and experience every course with four easy-to-follow steps:

• Step 1: Choose your course and review learning outcomes
• Step 2: Watch course video at your own pace
• Step 3: Review resources, references, and reading materials
• Step 4: Take the Course Assessment and get a certificate (Premium Membership required)

Once you are a registered member of 4FrontPharmacy Online, you can also enrol for 4Front's Positive Leadership Series - a free member benefit. 

In keeping with our Managing Conflict theme this month, the topic for our next LIVE Zoom Call is 'Optimise Relationships - Connecting with People You Find Difficult.'  Click https://www.4frontpharmacy.ie/leadership-series to register to attend LIVE for free.   

Sleep and Insomnia Webinar

**Pharmacists**Called for CPD ePortfolio Review in Jan 2023?

We provide learning and development tools for individuals, professionals and for business leaders and their teams.  If you are a pharmacist called for ePortfolio Review in Jan 2023 and you would like support to avail of 4Front's CPD Mentoring Service, CLICK HERE.  In just 90 mins together, pharmacists say they:  'Gain confidence that I am meeting the standards' 'I now feel Ready, Prepared and Motivated to continue (rather than wanting to give up)' 'It feels so satisfying to get my CPD requirements OFF my intention list and onto the 'COMPLETED' list' 'The biggest thing for me is the peace-of-mind associated with being prepared and getting things done efficiently' 'Getting it done is just such a relief from the stress of having it hanging over me' 'I thought I wouldn't be able to write up any CPD because I have been on maternity/parental leave for nearly a year.  I was wrong!'  'It felt great to stop procrastinating, get out of my head and just get it done' 'I did not believe it would be possible to write up my CPD that quickly, but I was wrong.  It amazed me how productive Rachel and I were, with 100% focused attention and no interruptions!' 'Not only am I prepared for ePortfolio Review but I am so have a personal plan and purpose for my CPD going forward'

Successful Teams in Healthcare | International Best Practices 

For Leadership Coaches, WBECS by  coaching.com is a leading CPD resource.

I am proud to share that I have been selected as an Implementation Mastery Facilitator at this year's World Business and Executive Coach Summit (WBECS).  For your inspiration, I share the topics and speakers of the Implementation Mastery sessions I am facilitating in November.

In the past week, I have had the honour of facilitating two powerful and relevant masterminds with fellow #leadership and #team coach members of WBECS at Coaching.com.
The first was following Mo Kasti's session on 'Strategies for Successful #Coaching in #Healthcare.'
The second was following Jo Keeler's session on 'Recognising and Appreciating Behavioural Diversity in Teams.'

As an Implementation Mastery Facilitator, I get to host deep-dive discussions, learning with and from business and executive coaches from around the globe.  We share insights and explore ways to apply insights gained from the expert session into their professional practice.  We often discuss how to support ourselves and our clients to address the gap between best practice and existing practice.  In lively discussion, we share experiences, challenges and successes we have discovered work in practice to empower our clients to successfully lead in a world of exponential change.  Given our global community, you can imagine perspectives, cultures and experiences differ.  We get to discern pros and cons of different points of view.  This creates a learning experience that expands perspectives and exposes previously unconscious biases.  By doing so, the quality of decision making improves.  

Are you regularly prioritising time for Reflective Practice? 

The busy work environment is a barrier to strategic thinking and reflective practice.  For this reason, unless a practitioner consciously chooses to prioritise and schedule dedicated time for reflective thinking, it is unlikely to happen, EVEN when it is critically important and EVEN when the consequences of not doing so mean we are destined to continue to repeat the mistakes of the past on auto-pilot. 

This is why the busiest, most productive and most inspiring professionals schedule regular time for reflective practice. 

They are

• less prone to burn-out,
• more fulfilled in their career and
• have fewer blind-spots when it comes to wisely navigating challenges and dilemmas. 

If you are a practicing mentor, coach or pharmacist interested in Structured Reflective Practice as part of your Continuing Professional Development, 

CLICK HERE for further details.