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05/08/08 |
     
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Welcome to LeadersWithIntegrity.com
What is Ethical Magic?
Ethical Sleight-Of-Mind by Philip H. Henderson, Ethical Magician, Oxen Teamster, and Inspirational Listener  I hope 2008 will be an exciting year full of love and peace on the planet. We have major elections this year and will select a new president. Some of you are political junkies and cannot wait for the November ballots, others are dreading every moment of the political campaign. However, for us to remain a free nation we must have the active participation of our citizens in the selection of those who will lead our nation, our states, and our local governments. I hope you will go to the bookstore and read about the candidates you are most interested in and make an informed choice about who shall lead our nation. There is a great deal at stake, please use your right to vote intelligently. Think about the people in other countries who would love to be able to vote in a free election process. Think about the people who fought for civil rights in this country to insure the right of people of color to vote. Think of Susan B. Anthony who spent many nights in jail because she wanted women to have the right to vote. Susan died more than ten years before all women could vote in this country, less than 100 years ago. Our great citizens fought hard just to get the right to vote--all you have to do is participate. A Salute to Spring 2008 Spring is my favorite time of the year. I enjoy Spring because it promises so many new gifts. New life blooms as the planet comes alive with the birth of hope along with the pollen from Rye grass. I developed allergies about twenty years ago. Now, every Spring I am greeted with hay fever. Four times my hay fever turned to vertigo. Vertigo is an illness I wish on no one. The first time I had an attack my first thought was that I had been poisoned and was dying a slow and painful death. It has been several years since my last vertigo attack, I will be happy if I never experience that again. Even with the vertigo and the hay fever, Spring is still my favorite season. I enjoy the Spring floral displays; I enjoy the songbirds and the earth reawakening after Winter. Despite my hay fever I am in love with Spring. This Spring I was honored to serve the California Management Institute (CMI) and taught a course for them at Phillips Graduate Institute. Twelve of the twenty students from CMI who I taught last Fall participated in the Spring Intensive Course called, Introduction to Executive Coaching. We conducted the course using Andragogy and created a rich learning environment for the students from CMI. We packed a lot of good work into six days together. Several students enjoyed transformative coaching experiences in the course. We learned the power that coaching has on developing the spiritual life of the coach and her client. I have been teaching the same course to Phillips Graduate Institute students enrolled in the Organizational Consulting doctoral program since January 2008. Finding a way to condense the four plus months we enjoyed studying coaching into six days was a formidable challenge. I reached into my Ethical Leaders Toolkit and developed several new exercises that created magical learning experiences for the CMI students. I used Shakespeare's play Othello, the Moor of Venice, for both classes. Each student chose a character from this play to serve as his "virtual client" to practice coaching. Literary characters make excellent practice people for coaching. It appeared that everyone chose as their virtual client a character who possessed personal traits that were in many ways similar to the person who chose them. There were no random choices. There were no accidental choices. My students were "drawn to" characters whose character mimicked their own. My favorite holiday every year are the days devoted to acknowledging our gratitude. We do not live in a perfect world. As the late Dr. M. Scott Peck wrote in The Road Less Traveled, "LIFE IS DIFFICULT!" Yet, it is wonderful to be alive. It is wonderful to be alive and to be able to behave ethically and do what is right. I am grateful for the opportunity to serve others by offering them gifts of my love. I am grateful for my wonderful wife, Merna, who brightens my day everyday. I am grateful for my health and sense of grace that allows me to bring happiness into the world. I am grateful for the loving friends who return my smiles with their own special gifts. I am grateful for the oxen, for magic, for love, for music, and for the tired firefighters who toiled the wildfires in California. I am grateful for men and women of peace who will not stop until the killing ends in Iraq and Afghanistan. I am grateful for new born babes who represent hope for the future. I am grateful to Al Gore who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his decades of work to preserve the environment as a healthy place to live. I am grateful to my clients and students who teach me more than they learn from me. This is a wonderful creation, the world we live in. ETHICAL MAGICIAN I am a leadership coach. I work with successful business people and help them to become outstanding ethical leaders in their home, work, and community. I work with individuals, often owners of businesses. I help them learn to behave to earn the respect, trust and caring of the people in their business. This work blends my passion for understanding human consciousness and ethical behavior. I am sixty years old, and live with my wife and two cats in Irvine. I choose Ethical Magic to describe what I do because I use the same principles I would use if I were performing a magic trick (I am an amateur magician.). About fourteen years ago, I began to study the Performance Art of Magic to improve my public presentation skills. I learned to use the psychological principles employed in the performance of magic to assist my clients (and students) to see their character and future. I am the world’s first Ethical Magician. I was trained by Michael Josephson, founder and director of the Josephson Institute of Ethics, to teach workplace ethics. I earned a Bachelors degree in Economics and an MBA from UCLA in 1969, and 1970 respectively. I am an eternal student of life. I constantly study human consciousness, the human brain, leadership, magic theory, management. Last year I read and studied 42-books. I have an undying interest to learn all I can about human consciousness and ethics. My previous careers include: Four-years managing live theatre as an Auditorium Manager at UCLA, four-years studying public school finance including lobbying Sacramento legislators, fourteen-years managing law offices, and eight-years as an Assistant Dean for Operations and Finance at UC Irvine. My various roles called for me to manage and lead a broad range of business processes including: accounting, finance, facilities, human resources, computer technology, construction, and creative problem resolution. From 2000 to 2003, I developed and taught a Leadership Certificate Program at California State University Long Beach. I taught the students to become ethical leaders by first coaching them to become expert empathic listeners. I use Ethical Sleight of Mind to promote andragogical learning with my clients and students. This is Ethical Magic. In the fall of 2007 I began teaching Empathic Listening at the Phillips Graduate Institute in Encino, California. Phillips Graduate Institute (www.PGI.edu) prepares students to earn a doctoral degree in Psychology or Organizational Consulting. PGI is celebrating its 35 year of operation in 2007. I will tell you more about this wonderful institution later. OXEN TEAMSTER
In the photograph Bill is on the far left, then Bob, next to Bob is my wife, Merna Henderson, and I am standing next to Merna. Bill and Bob are thirteen years old. Each animal weighs about 2,000 pounds and has a four foot spread on his horns. Bill and Bob are American Milking Devon cattle who were trained to work as oxen by Eric Johnson when he was a high school student. Bill and Bob were bulls when they were born. They are smart and gentle. We use the animals to educate school children so Bill and Bob do not do the work they were trained to perform. Bob died of an infection in late February 2007. We are saddened by our lost, most of all, Bill is missing his best friend. Bill and Bob came from New Hampshire; the new team calls New Hampshire their birthplace too. I learned a great deal about leadership from these oxen.
In mid-May 2007 Evy Edelo Young and I
visited New Hampshire to select a new team of oxen to join Bill the ox
at the Centennial Farm. The new oxen team are Patches and
Freckles, 4-year old Lineback cattle. They arrived on the farm the
afternoon of June 20, 2007 after a nearly five-day trip by trailer from
their ancestral home of New Hampshire. Patches and Freckles were
trained by a 4-H student, Brianna Bodwell. They are perfectly well
trained and will be the stars in the 2007 Oxen Presentation at this
year's Orange County Fair. We are pleased to have the new team; no
one more pleased than our solo ox Bill. He is enjoying having
someone new to boss. Below is a photograph
of Freckles, Patches and Brianna Bodwell, taken in New Hampshire.
In July and August 2007 Patches and Freckles made their first appearance with Bill at the Orange County Fair in the Livestock Arena. They were the stars of more than 20 performances in the three week long fair. After the fair Patches, Freckles, and Bill returned to the Centennial Farm. Beginning in September all three oxen were part of our daily demonstrations to school children. Patches and Freckles adapted to the daily schedule of being yoked and toured around the farm. Most days Bill remained alone in his corral for visitors to admire. On April 29, 2008 Huell Howser visited the Centennial Farm and shot video tape of our daily school tours. Some of the footage shows Bill in a single yoke; Patches and Freckles pulling the Studebaker Ox Cart; children handling baby chicks, and the sights and sounds of the Centennial Farm. The video is schedule for its first airing on Tuesday, May 20, 2008 at 7:30 pm on local public broadcasting station KCET. Patches and Freckles will become instant television stars.
INSPIRATIONAL LISTENER When I give a keynote address, instead of giving a Motivational Speech, I speak as an Inspirational Listener. My gift to the community is to inspire people to greatness by listening to them. I bring more goodness into the world merely by listening to the people I meet. Most people are more interested in speaking than listening. In March this year, I spoke to a group of Orange County business leaders about the state of Ethical behavior in business conference rooms. I allowed them to complete the Henderson Ethics Inventory to get the conversation started. Before long participants spoke about the ethical conflicts they experienced in their work in Orange County businesses. The thirty people in the seminar concluded that they observed two kinds of ethical rules at work. There are the public rules that appear in official publications and there are the informal rules that only appear in practice. The public rules apply to everyone at the corporation except for the top executives. Anyone at a middle or lower level will be held strictly accountable to the published rules; those at the top can abuse the rules without suffering negative consequences. They unanimously agreed that there was a double standard. I urged the executives to begin to practice the art of empathic listening. This caring way of being with others encourages them to be the best they can be. There are too few listeners—I want to improve my ability to inspire by listening. I practice listening with empathy at every opportunity. Sometimes I listen to people I know I will never see again. Often my inspirational listening transforms the lives of those I listen to empathically. I am a member of the International Listening Association. ILA is committed to developing empathic listener’s world wide. You can take control of your destiny by becoming an expert empathic listener. empathic listeners develop enduring, loving relationships with the people most dear to them. Empathic listening is hard work. When I am hired as a leadership coach, my first objective with a client is to teach him or her to become an empathic listener. When they learn to listen empathically clients are much easier to coach--they can listen to me while I am listening to them. I have coached shy people to become outstanding empathic listeners. They remained shy but their ability to be empathic listeners transformed them into powerful ethical leaders in their home life, work place, and their community. Listening is the most important communication skill you can possess. Contact me when you are ready to become a leader and I will coach you to listen to the most important people in your life. For more information, send an email to PhilipHenderson@LeadersWithIntegrity.com and ask me how we can get started. Empathically yours, Philip H. Henderson, Ethical Magician
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This site was last updated 05/08/08
