The outcome will be to tap into your strengths, discover your personal power and energize you in ways that are fully aligned with your own authenticity and integrity.

Up until now, Appreciative Inquiry has been available only in face-2-face interview situations, and in small or large groups, and organizations all over the world. In your own privacy, and in a reflective, self-directed way,  you also can experience this empowering, strength-based approach to change.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeZgZEyAy7k

The Approach

You will be coached through 4 steps to:

• Discover your existing strengths and talents
• Dream what more is possible in your life
• Design the pathway to realize your deepest desires
• Sustain the energy and momentum to live the destiny of your choosing

As you read and participate in the content of Embracing Change, I will be your coach. As a professional Appreciative Inquiry practitioner, I will guide you through the question sets to develop in the ways you truly desire. You will discover you own strengths and best qualities. You will tap into your “positive core” to unleashed your fullest potential. You will be guided to tell your own story in the most life-affirming way. From the seeds of your own grounded reality, you will create and design new possibilities.

What helps you to make real commitment to yourself is the ability to write your story, dreams, insights and learnings right inside the app in the specially integrated text editing tools. In addition, you can email your notes to yourself for reference. You’re able to revisit and change your notes on demand. And, when faced with a new change, you can tap the reset button and be coached anew. You could also take on the role of coach, or facilitator, or interviewer to use the 4 steps to help others make changes they want.

A great value of this app is to be able to use it again and again to help you reconnect with your own power whenever you need to be reminded. What is extra valuable is that you could also guide a friend or colleague through this appreciative inquiry when they might need a strength-based, developmental conversation to overcome a challenging situation.

The richness of the compelling content is augmented on the tablet device.

• You will be amazed how much more personalized and engaging the experience is when content comes alive in this format compared to reading static content or a pdf file.
• You will experience all the multi-touch abilities such as tapping, swiping, expanding, rotating, and your senses will be activated further with attractive imagery, videos, slides shows and audio files.
• In addition, Embracing Change gives you the functionality to write your own notes and email them right from within the app.

FAQ

What is Embracing Change and how does it work?

Embracing Change is a self-development app following the framework of a highly successful and world-acclaimed positive change methodology called Appreciative Inquiry. Up to now, what this app delivers has been available only in the context of organizations where consultants or practitioners design workshops and conferences to help their clients in facilitating change. Coaches also use the methodology to help their clients move forward.  This app takes the methodology, Appreciative Inquiry (see below) and has designed the experience in a way that individuals can now participate in this most valuable inquiry for themselves.

What is Appreciative Inquiry (AI)

Appreciative Inquiry is a change methodology and, as a change methodology, it is first and foremost an inquiry into discovering what already works well before any change is introduced.  We are educated at home and at school and in our workplaces to ask “what’s wrong” with a situation.  That sets us off in a certain direction – usually, looking for things that don’t work, or block us from achieving that which we want.

Within the framework of Appreciative Inquiry, we start with the premise that in every human being and organization, something already works well.  So we ask, “What’s already working here?” Or, “What’s a high point for you?” With the Appreciative Inquiry lens, we seek to discover “what gives life to a living system when it is most effective, alive and constructively capable in economic, ecological, and human terms” (Cooperrider, Whitney, & Stavros, “ In the Appreciative Inquiry Handbook, 2008, p. 3)

Why did you create Embracing Change: the app?

All of us live and work with change every day, so it’s a really important topic; and it isn’t going away!  Not all of us are in situations where we can attend workshops and trainings to learn the latest thinking and methods to help us grow and develop greater capacities to live to our fullest potential. People are living busy lives. I wanted to bring to individuals resources they may not be aware of, and they can have access to when it suits them and they can fit into their own busy lives.

In designing this app, readers have access to an empowering worldview that potentially can put them in the driver’s seat of their life, not the passenger’s. To be at cause rather than at effect in life is liberating. Moreover, the technology is so cool.  Learning and interacting with great content in this way is highly enjoyable and totally immersive.   I am convinced that just as personal development books are a huge market in print, they will also become a huge market in apps.  I am so excited with this shift in engaging with knowledge and content that I have other apps in the pipeline that focus on developing us all to be the best we can.

What’s the value of the text-edit tool?

You are working through a learning and development process. As you read through the 4 steps and respond to the reflective questions, you will get in touch with some really rich and valuable content of your own. You don’t want to gloss over it or lose it. If you write down your own high point stories, what you value about yourself, others and the situation, the very act of writing it down, will be a far more meaningful and lasting experience. You learn to value yourself more and savor the best of yourself. So being able to record your thoughts right here in the app, and reflect on your insights, and then go back and refine your own content as you choose, is really helping you get greater clarity about what really matters to you.

• The system saves your note-taking automatically. You can edit your notes right there on the page where the original sticky notes are, or you can edit your notes on the summary-sticky-note page, which is the page immediately after Step 4.
• You can tap the email icon on the summary-sticky-notes page to activate your email program so you can email your thoughts to whomever you wish to share them.
• The only way you can lose your comments is to tap the reset button.

How do I engage with the community of users?

Embracing Change will have a Facebook Page once the app is available, where you can read updates and meet others who are embracing change. Please befriend us there, stay up to date and show that you like us!

How can I learn more?

A starting point will be to visit our blog, www.positivematrix.com to read stories of Appreciative Inquiry in action.  My book, Appreciative Inquiry for Collaborative Solutions is also available from my website.
You can fill in the contact us forms to learn more about our seminars and trainings and sign up for our webinar series of how you can use Appreciative Inquiry in many, many contexts for many, many outcomes.  Examples include:  The Power of Women’s Leadership, The Gift of Relationships, The Joy of Intergenerational Dialogue, Caring for our Environment, Performing at Peak, Working with Integrity, Making Strengths Productive,  The Language of Power and others.

My New York Cab story:

I’m in New York City and when I get into a cab, after I put on my seat belt and settle into the backseat, I ask the driver casually. “What’s the best thing that’s happened to you today?” It could be any time of day. It could be snowing, sleeting, or sweltering with heat and humidity. The traffic is usually at a stand still and horns are honking and sirens screeching. And, every single time, I get an almost identical response …. the driver suspiciously raises his eyes and looks up into the rear view mirror to check out who is this kook in the back of his cab. Then slowly a smile comes across his face, his eyes twinkle as they make contact with mine and he repeats: “The best thing that’s happened to me today?” And he begins to tell me. There is more. Through my appreciative inquiry I get to hear more of his story – where he comes from, who is family is, what he does in his spare time, what life is like back in his country of origin and much more. Over these last years, I have connected with the most wonderful and extraordinary people simply by asking an unconditionally positive question.

Every person, whose story I’ve heard has touched me and I know I have touched them. Perhaps, most illustrative of the power of inquiry is the driver who was so moved by our generative conversation, driving me from Wall Street to Park Avenue said, when we reached my destination, “Ma’am you do such good work in the world, you don’t pay me!” I thanked him and responded he also was doing such good work in the world. Then as I got out of the cab, I mentioned to the next passenger who was already impatiently holding the cab door, “He’s a good guy”, flicking my head in the direction of the driver. Before the cab pulled away from the curb, I heard the driver laugh out loud when the new passenger said, “I hear you are a good guy.”

Appreciative inquiry, it works every time.

Five actions using appreciative inquiry to shape your experience

1. Pay special attention to your first question, it determines what comes next.
2. Ask what works, rather than what’s wrong?
3. Notice, the more positive the question, the more it will create the possible.
4. Stay in the inquiry to help people think and feel.
5. Believe in the goodness of people to see the goodness of people.

What are your positive stories about shaping your experience to bring out the best in you and others?

image courtesy of berkessel.com

My publisher had emailed me 3 days earlier with the following heartwarming message:

It’s here and it’s beautiful!!!!
Congratulations.  You should get your copy soon.

I am really happy, as my book is a unique application of Appreciative Inquiry to the world of learning and development.  Amid global challenges and complexities, the Appreciative Inquiry worldview asks, “What is it that we do already that is working for us, and how can we leverage our strengths going forward?”

The twenty-one workshops in this book are on topics of strategic importance, addressing the desire and need, in our interconnected world, for greater participation and active collaboration in meaning making and resource sharing.   This book is for change agents, leaders, trainers, facilitators, organization development professionals, and consultants.

All 21 workshops are ready for delivery; the topics are all highly relevant in today’s world, and with the Appreciative Inquiry design, they are equally applicable in global corporations, local communities, schools, colleges, universities, government agencies, non-profits, non-governmental agencies, special interest groups, communities of practice, and small business.

Workshop titles include classic topics, such as team building, leadership, and change, as well as on newer topics, such as cultural diversity, corporate social responsibility, intergenerational mix, and social media, to name a few.

This book takes Appreciative Inquiry principles and processes and applies them to real, everyday work and relationship issues in a workshop format that allows organizational members to resolve issues and create solutions from a strength-based perspective.

See larger image Appreciative Inquiry for Collaborative Solutions: 21 Strength-Based Workshops (Paperback) By (author) Robyn Stratton-Berkessel List Price: $60.00 USD New From: $43.51 In Stock Used from: $43.53 In Stock

The decade beginning 2000 was a good decade for me.  I married a wonderful human being in 2000; we have enjoyed great fun and a wide range of intensely pleasurable physical experiences; we have grown together and independently through many stimulating, engaging intellectual learnings;  and we have both experienced deeply meaningful emotional times.  We have traveled a lot and created a home we love. I am blessed in my relationship.

So, in this last decade, I have continued to change, as has the world around me.  A dominant and exciting force that is enabling this rapid growth rate of change is social media. We have new and additional ways in which we communicate and connect with people and we have many more topics and stories to share.  My sensitivity has been even more heightened as to how alike we really are across the globe.  How vulnerable we all are, and how much more we can become together.  I have been moved by so many stories shared in private and in public places – face-to-face, virtually, in books, on TV, in film.  All my senses have been sharpened.  For example, in Italy, I savored during and for months afterwards the landscape and the smells and sounds; the sensations and the tastes:  I admired the art work and architecture and imagined what it was like when armies of ancient Rome traversed the land battled against the Carthaginians and the Gauls;  I imagined the beauty of the Etruscans, even before the Romans, and then I imagined what life may have been like during the Renaissance when art and commerce flourished.  History and culture revealing how peoples continue to shape the future and leave their legacies.

I experienced similar emotions and wonderings while traveling in India and visiting Kathmandu Valley in Nepal.  My curiosity and interest is always aroused to learn how people get to where they are and what has shaped their current situation.   What are their stories?  My own birthplace, Australia, has untold stories that the land longs to share.  The more stories we can hear of all peoples on this planet, the richer we all will be.

I love to find the themes and connect dots.  What keeps coming up for me?  My filtering system is constructed to find the beauty, the goodness and what truths endure across time and space.  Horror and evil also endure across time and space. They co-exist.  History and the arts are full of co-existence. The victories of love overcoming fear, and good overcoming evil and beauty overcoming horror is the human story.

I learned at Christmas time, a dear colleague, whom I haven’t communicated with since 2002 has Stage 4 cancer in her brain and has very little time left in her present form.   Going about my business (busy-ness), I thought about her a lot, but didn’t call.   After Christmas, I learnt her condition had worsened.  I felt remorseful that I had not acted on my best intuition to call her when I wanted to.  I actually feared I had missed my opportunity to let her know I cared for her.  I had weak excuses, like a 14 hours time difference, Christmas was an awkward time, etc. etc.  Finally, I did call and our conversation was truly meaningful.  I also send the flowers I had been thinking about sending for four days.  I decided that moving beyond thought to action would be my commitment to myself in 2010.  To move beyond dreaming and thinking into action – action that serves others, and in doing so, serves me.

All plans can change.  So when the world changes around you, what constants provide you with a sense of safety or equanimity that enables you to go on?  The tiniest belief in oneself helps; some hope for a future; the support of others.  I have been in that state, when I had no self-confidence, despaired of any future and indifferent to the support and love of others.  How I’ve pulled myself out of such low points is my story and some parts of the dark story I am not proud of and some parts I am.  I realize the parts I am proud of are when I found the inner strength to shift my perspective enough to make a different choice.  Through the tears and the pain (both physical and emotional) I could sense a faint awareness that I wanted to feel/do something different.  In such times, I open up enough find an inner resource that offers a glimmer of hope and possibility that I am willing to admit there is a different way and I will do something about it.  I also believe that having experienced the intense discomfort of chemotherapy and radiation, that in the future, and if in a conscious state, when faced with death I can have the same experience.  I will find an inner resource that offers a glimmer of hope and possibility that I am willing to admit there is a different way and I can find it.  I know I will seek peace and love over fear.

What is your story?  What victories, celebrations and joys have you experienced in the past decade?  In telling your story, what have been highpoints of your first ten years in the 21^st century?  What will you remember with a smile on your face, a warmth in your gut, a tenderness in your heart?  What are you most grateful for or even a little bit grateful for – personally and professionally?  Who have you met in the past 10 years that has influenced your life in a good way?  What have you done for others that you know has been of service to them?  What thoughts may inspire you for action in 2010?