In this episode of Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee, Coaching.com CEO Alex Pascal discusses the Hero’s Journey, handling complexity, and navigating client intersectionalities with Vernice Jones, director and Faculty of Adult Development at Georgetown University’s Institute for Transformational Leadership. 

During their conversation, Vernice recounts her experiences as an African American woman coaching mainly men in South East Asia and especially China. She has coached people with varying levels of English proficiency, and she describes how she was able to attune her listening skills to overcome contrasting cultural cues and language barriers. 

Having worked with diverse client bases, Vernice is perfectly equipped to provide advice on beginning an engagement with someone from a different cultural background. She tells Alex how she distinguishes between information she receives at the narrative level and the meaning-making level to uncover both the context and the human before her. 

Alex and Vernice also analyze the factors that make a situation complex rather than complicated, agreeing that we often wrongly apply complicated solutions to complex contexts. Recognizing that work with human beings is complex by nature, Vernice explains why she believes in the importance of “safe to fail” experiments in order to better understand how different environments organize themselves around people and challenges before taking action.

Vernice is a coach, facilitator, and consultant at Cultivating Leadership. To learn more about the assessments and frameworks that Vernice uses while coaching clients at different intersectionalities, listen to this episode of Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee.

Resources:

Vernice’s Website:           https://www.cultivatingleadership.com/team-member/vernice-jones

                                                    https://theleadershipcompass.org/about/

Vernice’s Linkedin:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/coachvernicejonesmcc

Vernice's Twitter:            https://mobile.twitter.com/tlcompass

Vernice’s Youtube:      https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVKsIUgx-OWGX1L0VZutElg 

Vernice’s Pinterest:    https://www.pinterest.ph/vernicejones/_saved/