Welcome!
On this page you’ll find the full collection of audio and resource archives from Year 12 of our monthly Gathering calls. Speaker bios, call summaries, audios and recommended resources for each month’s call will continue to be added to this page soon after the call.
Our theme for this twelfth year of Gathering together is “The Art of Agility: Navigating the Natural Rhythms of Change.” Along with our Year Twelve offerings, please take some time to explore the past 11 years of program archives. This is a treasure trove of information, insights, strategies and practices to support you as an agent of purposeful change!
Year 1 Program Archive – “Mastering the Inner Game”
Year 2 Program Archive – “Align Your Outer Game with the Inner”
Year 3 and 4 Program Archive – “Integrating the Inner and Outer Collectives: The Dance of ME and WE”
Year 5 Program Archive – “Co-Creating the Global Collective”
Year 6 Program Archive – “Radical Relationship; Embracing the Gifts of Polarity”
Year 7 Program Archive – “Creating Agile And Sustainable Change That Matters”
Year 8 Program Archive – “Love in Action: Connecting for Impact”
Year 9 Program Archive – “Agents of Love; Weaving the Tangled Threads of Irreconcilable Differences”
Year 10 Program Archive – “Dancing in the Space Between; Creating Resilience and Possibility in the Now”
Year 11 Program archive – “Paradigms and Possibilities: Embracing Humanity’s Divine Potential”
Study Materials:
- Download your copy of Tim Kelley’s article that was the foundation for the Gathering’s first year here: Internal Requirements for Change Agents
- Download your copy of Tim Kelley’s additional article Types of Change Agents
- Download your copy of Audrey Seymour’s article that is the foundation for the Gathering’s second year here: 12 Requirements for Embodied Action
Browse the Year 12 archives:
4/3/24: Reflections on the Nature of Change”
3/6/24: Todd Hoskins – Facilitating Change: Your Role in Co-creating a Better World”
2/7/24: Introducing our 2024 theme “The Art of Agility: Navigating the Natural Rhythms of Change”
We hope you can join us for our next Gathering on May 1, 2024. We are delighted to invite Rajiv Mehta, who will facilitate our exploration of “Flowing Through Change with Presence, Awareness and Agility.”
4/3/24: Reflections on the Nature of Change
This Gathering for Change was deeply engaging. Thank you to all those who attended and contributed your beautiful perspectives as we continue to explore this year’s theme, “The Art of Agility: Navigating the Natural Rhythms of Change”. As fellow change agents, we are excited to deepen our collective understanding about change itself.After a beautiful invocation of our fire-lighting ritual by the spirit of Donella Meadows, we opened up space for a dialogue about the nature of change. We discussed the relationship between change and transformation and our own relationships with change.
We started by asking: What is your role in moments of change?
- Visionary – putting together disparate ideas to move beyond old paradigms
- Curious explorer
- I am a big picture thinker of possibilities and ask who do I need to BE to get that result?
- For me, change is following my inner guidance and taking action on the guidance I’m given
- Change to me is when something is unpredictable and unknowable ahead of time, potential for surprise, excitement, delight, joy
In small groups, participants explored their personal beliefs about change and transformation, which we invite you to ask yourself if you didn’t attend live:
- Which are supportive?
- Which are limiting?
- What insights does this give you re: inner work you’d like to do?
Upon returning to the larger group, here are some comments that we heard:
- “Change for me is to understand, see that a lot of things are around in the world – see things we’re not aware of”
- “Convene a space where we can be curious together. Comes from a trust in me that something useful or delicious can arise out of that. One thought that’s stirring around in me is to challenge that notion that change is hard.”
- “It’s hard not to change. More about: how will you move through it, be with it?”
- “Sometimes we fear change because safety can be lost. More fun to explore change when it’s safe.”
- “Are we resistant to change because we fear that we will no longer belong?”
- “Change starts with me. To me, change is following my heart. And working for what my heart wants.”
- “Change is something that happens all the time – you cannot step in the same river twice. Differentiating between change and transformation is a fundamental change in worldview. Change is incremental innovation. Transformation is a whole new path.”
- “Change has a purpose.”
- “Everything is relationship. Relationship is change. Relationship produces change.”
Resources and Next Steps
Here are some Resources and Actions that will support you in taking this topic even deeper:
- Audio Recording of this Gathering
- Go through the small group breakout exercise questions listed above
3/6/24: Todd Hoskins – Facilitating Change: Your Role in Co-creating a Better World
“Believe in the creative capacity within yourself to transform
the world’s social and political relations by beginning to
transform your relationships with the individuals around you.”
~ Grace Lee Boggs.
How do you dance through life?
This was the central question we explored in our most recent Gathering for Change, led by our guest, Todd Hoskins.
Todd has been an organization and ecosystem designer and coach for ten years, at the forefront of business transformation and personal growth. His life and work center around two things … relationships and transformation. In 2009, he launched Canopy Gap – an organizational design firm – which brought together his graduate studies in psychology, interest in network science and ecology, and experience working with organizations and leaders on transformation initiatives. Organizational design is about working and relating more effectively as teams and networks.
As a facilitator, coach, entrepreneur, and gentle provocateur, Todd has helped launch a dozen companies over the last 15 years and worked with organizations from NASA to Microsoft to universities and nonprofits to become more resilient, connected, and fully alive.
Todd began by exploring our relationships with ourselves and each other: “Transforming the ways we move together… how we see ourselves individually and collectively. People show up as their full creative selves, working together on something greater than themselves.”
He discussed the nature of “the mess” of life: “We’re in a time of uncontrollable uncertainty—politically, economically, socially. It’s always been this way, we’re keenly aware of it. No judgment around this—it’s complex. We refer to the complexity as a mess—it’s wild, uncontrollable. We can’t escape the wild, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that all life is interrelated… we’re all impacted by one another and everything.”
Todd contrasted order and chaos: “Life exists at the edge of chaos. We want order, but to focus on order at the expense of chaos is NOT how life happens.”
Our first small group breakout explored the question: “In what ways do you feel the expectations to be like a machine?” Participants returned from their lively discussions with chat comments such as:
- “The dance…we have amazing human minds…so the “get things done” mode is useful sometimes, it’s just having the compassion for ourselves and others as to when to turn off the machine”
- “We try for control and predictability, but that’s not what being human is.”
- “Don’t we move between the ultimate poles of total control and total chaos on each end?”
- “For the first 40 years, I was a component in the machine. The more I follow my heart the greater freedom I feel.”
- “We have been taught to focus on what we don’t want instead of focusing on what we want more of.”
- “An expectation – I want your behavior to change to please me. That’s the same as Conformity, which is expecting my behavior to change to please others. When I have an expectation of someone, I am doing to them what I don’t like being done to me.”
- “All transformations are changes but not all changes are transformations!”
- “It also sounds like you are speaking about the difference between ‘trying to make something happen’ and ‘allowing the unfolding’.”
Todd then took us on a vivid journey to explore change, transformation, shifts and ultimately Facilitation with a Capital “F”. Facilitation is stepping into the center and working with all the partners. Great Facilitation requires that we be better regulated so that we’re not reactive and we can see what’s happening, what’s needed— a recognition that it’s about something bigger than ourselves.
Our second small group breakout posed the question: “What are you facilitating? What would you love to be facilitating?” Here are some of the answers we harvested together:
- “Peace literacy”
- “The passion, the commitment, to facilitate”
- “Reinvention of oneself. A reframing”
- “How human beings have a strong will to transform themselves!”
- “Facilitating the growth of a world that works for everyone—in harmony with nature”
- “Hearing the call to more heart-centered work”
- “Beginning with purpose – creating structures second to move forward with purpose – is how I understood it.”
- “Facilitation that supports and strengthens individual and collective voices.”
- “Tapping into my intuition”
- “I am facilitating (cause I do it like falling off a log) empowering and emergent conversations. I would like to be facilitating the same conversations in more settings where the… facilitators have more power to effect both positive AND empowering/emergent changes in the world.”
Suzanne Taylor shared a future-oriented essay contest she’s hosted called “How the World Got Saved.”
Rachelle Zola shared about her upcoming 754-mile walking pilgrimage from Chicago to Montgomery and her one-woman show called, “LATE: A Love Story”.
Amid comments of gratitude and nourishment, one comment seemed to sum up our experience together: “A coherent story is a massive gift. Appreciated.”
Resources and Next Steps
Here are some Resources and Actions that will support you in taking this topic even deeper:
- Todd’s Beautiful Presentation (PDF)
- Todd’s Website
- Living in a Mess (article)
- Todd invites anyone in the Gathering for Change community to book a conversation with him (this is not a public link)
2/7/24: Introducing our 2024 theme
“I alone cannot change the world,
but I can cast a stone across the waters
to create many ripples.
~ Mother Teresa
Our first Gathering call of 2024 was delightfully engaging, connective, and energizing. Welcome to our new year — our 12th year!
Let’s create some powerful ripples of purposeful change in 2024!
As promised, we announced our new theme for 2024… and generated lots of conversations, ideas, and possibilities for co-creating irresistible topics, speakers, tools, and resources around our new theme.
So…. What is our Gathering theme for 2024?
After lots of contemplation, conversations, and check-ins with our trusted sources of guidance, we’re beyond excited to share a very timely and valuable exploration in store for you entitled:
“The Art of Agility: Navigating the Natural Rhythms of Change”
And… what does that mean?? Take a moment and let these words infuse you. What thoughts, feelings, desires, and challenges does this theme bring up for you? One thing we realized as we contemplated this as a potential theme, is that we… a long-standing Gathering for “Change Agents”, have never explicitly explored the concept, perspectives, or processes of “change”! Imagine!
Here are some of the conversation bits that came up on our call, along with some of the ideas that we generated as your hosting team:
- The idea of change can create both opportunity and dread — simultaneously!
- We yearn to experience a greater sense of flow with the natural rhythms of change; more ease and acceptance
- How can we become more agile in our dance with change and transformation?
- Practicing appreciation for what is + non-attachment to outcomes would help us to be more comfortable with change. How can we bring more of this along with our longing to create purposeful transformation?
- How can we trust the process and embody… even embrace change as a natural and inevitable aspect of nature?
- Let’s learn to “be adaptive, not reactive”
- How can we be more comfortable with the discomfort of change?
- Where do we lean in to change and how can we optimize that?
- Which aspects of change create resistance, overwhelm and “stuckness”?
Your Gathering Hosts
About Beth Scanzani
Beth Scanzani is a highly respected and multi-faceted transformational coach, teacher and speaker. A lifelong student and curious soul, she has enjoyed exploring and integrating a wealth of knowledge, resources, and strategies that draw upon a wide range of psychological, scientific, and spiritual teachings. Prior to her transition into teaching and coaching in support of evolving consciousness, Beth enjoyed a successful career as a human resources executive in the high tech and healthcare industries.
True to her nature, Beth’s studies encompass a purposeful blend of psychological, scientific, and spiritual perspectives. She has attained numerous coaching certifications including True Purpose Coach™, Belief Closet™ Practitioner, Master Career Coach, Dream Coach™, iPEC Empowerment Coach™, Energy Leadership Coach™ and Theoretical Foundations of Coaching with David Rock. In addition, she is a trained facilitator and teacher of the Voice Dialogue™ process.
Beth is deeply passionate about sharing knowledge and strategies that create meaningful and sustainable transformation in service to co-creating a world that works for everyone. Beth has co-developed and/or co-taught many tele-seminars for the True Purpose Institute ™, the Shift Network and others including Voice Dialogue Mastery, Inner Harmony Practitioner Training, Evolving Beyond Your Wounds, Shadow Quest, Purposeful Coach Training, Blessing Yourself, Divine Guidance on Purpose and Purposeful Marketing. Beth also serves as a valued guide for those who wish to explore deeper meaning, insight and guidance through their sleeping dreams and waking life stories. She co-developed and teaches Stories from the Night Shift, a NASW CEU eligible seminar for therapists, coaches and other practitioners who want to increase their competence and confidence in accessing the treasures buried in sleeping dreams.
People who work with Beth value her insightful, strategic, fun and results-oriented coaching which helps them to achieve breakthrough results on short-term goals while simultaneously creating fundamental shifts that build a strong foundation for ongoing success and fulfillment, personally and professionally. Her eclectic approach and natural agility enable her to customize her coaching style, strategies and processes to help clients create a clear vision, navigate their way out of uncertainty and restrained momentum, and successfully achieve their desired outcomes.
Through her work as a teacher and coach, Beth demonstrates her dedication to providing transformative courses, workshops and coaching in service to those who are ready to reclaim their inner wisdom, embrace their life purpose and true nature, and wholly offer their unique gifts to others…and to the world we all share.
About Andy Swindler
Andy Swindler’s brings hearts together. He envisions a world that embraces healthy tensions to nurture dignity and agency for every person. Andy’s Chicago-based practice, Lead From Love, empowers conscious leaders and inclusive organizations to shift the dominant narrative from fear to love through an embodied expression of purpose and values.
He began his entrepreneurial journey at age 24, which led to owning a boutique digital marketing & software development company for 14 years until exiting at the end of 2016. Andy’s journey of studying human interaction and shepherding human flourishing now culminates in FeelReal, which he has incubated and evolved since 2007.
Andy is a Certified True Purpose® Coach & Consultant, Barrett Values Centre® Practitioner, Collaborative Operating System Consultant and Voice Dialogue™ Practitioner. He co-hosts The Gathering For Change Agents each month and is the Strategic Partnerships Chair for Conscious Capitalism Chicago Chapter. Andy speaks and writes on issues of equity and inclusion. He developed The Metamodel framework to visualize the alignment between more than 100 different conscious leadership, business and dialogue frameworks.
About Susan Alexander
Susan Alexander, PCC, is an executive and life coach with an extensive business background. She created her company Rosebud Coaching and Consulting to specialize in helping individuals to create new possibilities for their personal & professional life to fulfill their most important goals and aspirations. Her work focuses on individuals connecting with confidence and clarity to what’s most important to them (their purpose) and removing barriers of beliefs and assumptions that stand in the way of their full and authentic expression. Susan helps individuals be extraordinary leaders in all aspects of their lives. She coaches executives, managers and individuals with a special emphasis on the power of self-perception and communications and their impact on job performance.
She is a certified True Purpose Individual and Organizational Consultant. She is also certified in numerous instruments including Enneagram, Myers Briggs, Gallup Strengthsfinder, Conversational Intelligence, EQi, Positive Intelligence.