Female Disruptors: Dorothy Siminovitch of Gestalt Coaching Works On The Three Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry
An Interview With Candice Georgiadice
“Many roads lead to Rome.” Whatever we do, whatever choice we make, whether in the moment or for the long term, we should do so with aware intention and appreciation for the possibilities. We don’t know if any encounter with another person might be life-changing. But I’ve discovered that when we meet others with our best intentions, and with appreciation for the moment, we could be opening doors to untold richness. Appreciation for the complexity and possibilities of life is the nourishment we need to grow and change.
As a part of our series about women who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dorothy Siminovitch.
Dorothy Siminovitch is a world-renowned ICF Master Credential Coach who specializes in personal, executive, and team coaching. Her focus is on cultivating the power of presence and supporting people by using oneself as an instrument. With a PhD in organizational behavior, Dorothy is able to translate complex theories into working wisdom where she creates a safe environment for clients to consider new options or retire outdated habits. In her workshops and coaching sessions, clients find greater self-awareness and are able to dig deeper into issues which can be transformed. Dorothy uses the environment of psychological safety to promote more creativity enabling her clients to feel like “instruments of possibility”. Her clients report being able to harness more creativity and appreciation for themselves and others. Techniques for mindfulness, resilience, and adaptability are used so that clients can learn to view disruption as an opportunity towards positive change.
Dorothy partners with clients in a collaborative manner and her message is simply this, “You know more than you think you know, and you can do more than you think that you can,” which ignites mobilization through innovation and intervention. As a pioneer of Gestalt coaching, Dorothy authored A Gestalt Coaching Primer: The Path Toward Awareness IQ, a book used in many coaching schools and business schools looking to teach the process for greater self-mastery and transformative human development. As an expert in the coaching field for over twenty-five years, Dorothy has been featured on numerous radio shows and asked to speak at conferences including ICF conferences, The Coaching Conclave, The OD Network, and The Embodiment Conference. She is the founder of the ICF accredited Gestalt Coaching Program in Toronto, Canada and Istanbul, Turkey. She is passionate about facilitating conversation, creativity, and authenticity that results in pushing the boundaries of perspective and possibility. She is a fitness devotee and uses mindful practices for well-being, joy, and innovation. She loves cultural differences, communication excellence and creative story-telling and sees all leadership as an evolutionary response of possibility.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
Frederick Buechner, a wonderful theologian, defined vocation, or what I call, “a calling” as the place where “your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
I’ve always had a sense of “a calling” by my interest in understanding individuals and supporting a sense of moving forward to new possibilities. In fact, I began my academic career with a degree in psychology, always looking to cultivate the deep skills for understanding people and inspiring desired development. The fascination in studying people started in early life where I grew up in the beautiful multi-cultural city of Montreal, which was also a troubled city. The cultural differences between the French-speaking and English-speaking inhabitants led to various everyday tensions that had to be considered and managed. I was both fascinated with and personally inspired to understand the management of differences between people. I chose to get my PhD in Organizational Behavior in the U.S. and became an organizational consultant. But I came to feel that organizational development work couldn’t allow for the kinds of conversations and meaningful change I was most drawn to. I eventually realized and recognized that the relatively new field of executive and team coaching was where I felt most energized and most useful. Coaching encounters are powerful because they invite profound conversations that can be transformational. They can bring clients to a new awareness, often obscured or suppressed about themselves, others, or their situation that enables them to take confident action leading to satisfaction. There’s an intimacy to coaching work that allows clients to voice their values and challenges safely to the coach as a trusted confidant. For the coach, that’s both a deep ethical responsibility and an extraordinary privilege. Taking both dimensions seriously, we have the opportunity to facilitate and witness remarkable outcomes. I think of coaching as a transformative intervention designed to support people in their dreams and untold possibilities.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
Becoming aware of something important that we’ve overlooked, suppressed, or denied is disruptive to our sense of what we can and cannot do or say. I think of myself as “an awareness agent” — that is, my work is to help clients see habitual patterns of behavior or lost awareness that block or limit their ability to satisfy their needs or wants. These patterns become visible to me through their body language and/or word and their expression or evasion of either. Bringing these patterns to their attention is often surprising, and also often results in anxiety and a feeling of vulnerability. This is actually the optimal zone of learning, what my dear colleague, Marcia Reynolds, has called “the discomfort zone.” Clients may need to learn new ways to express themselves, to interact with others, to take action. New learning is always awkward. We have to start at the beginning, with small steps, and practice in order to gain confidence and fluidity. It takes commitment (even courage) to let go of what hasn’t been working and try different ways of something new. Even though it’s clear that what a client has been doing hasn’t worked, the worry of failure always looms. As coach, my role is to offer rationale, support, encouragement, and validation as clients take these learning steps toward meeting their wants and needs and their desired goals. I like to suggest that what I offer is intentional disruption in service of what learning offers — more satisfaction.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
A coach has to be skilled regarding the timing of feedback, and just how much can be tolerated by the client. But the coach also needs to be adept at turning a moment of perceived disaster into a learning experience, for both themself and others. I was giving a training program on group leadership, and our participants were practicing their skills with a volunteer client in-group of university students. I was part of the senior faculty, and the participants respectfully called me “Dr. Siminovitch.” I would watch the leaders facilitate their assigned group for 20 minutes then sound a bell to interrupt the learning session and give my feedback. After three rounds, as I stood to offer my observations, one member of the in-group interrupted with offensive statements devaluing the observations and teaching points I had been offering. These statements were so strongly-worded and disrespectful that my participants were taken aback, and feared the entire program was in jeopardy of being canceled. I, too, was shocked at being confronted in such a negative and combative manner. Yet, from somewhere within myself, a strange thought emerged: “Appreciate what he’s saying. Join him where he is.” That is, don’t fight against what he’s saying — try to make sense of it and use it. As I desperately considered this, I remember standing straight and tall. I then smiled at the participant who had spoken so rudely about me, and addressed the group: “Isn’t it great that this young man has questioned leadership? It’s healthy. It’s true that as senior faculty, I keep interrupting and no work seems to get done because of that. Isn’t this like what’s going on in this country? As leadership keeps changing, it’s hard to trust them and move forward. We need to make room to hear this kind of resistance. There is a message that we all need, so let’s thank him.” Then I called for a 10-minute break. For me, that was a turning point. I had met a personal challenge with creativity and self-assurance. That story always reminds me to have faith in myself in the moment, and then to allow for a “breather” to assess and try again. I’m grateful to that young man, whose anger and scorn gave me the opportunity to show my adaptive strength, my creativity, and my sense of humor. And, for me, it illustrated how a challenge is the opportunity to find one’s strength.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
We never forget the people who have brought us to a new place, opened a new door, or helped us resolve a difficult challenge. I was lucky enough to have met fascinating people throughout my journey of becoming, who offered knowledge, experiences, and guidance that I’ve used to influence others. Perhaps, my most powerful personal mentoring came from my mother, whose wisdom I came to value more deeply over time. My mother, an immigrant to Canada after a devastating life experience of loss, was a pioneer for all working women. Though her English skills were poor, she pushed herself to learn to be a real estate agent and was a trusted residential broker for almost fifty years. From my mother, I learned what endurance and the capacity to earn people’s trust “looked like.” Yet much of my “mentoring” comes from thinkers, poets, and philosophers whose excellence inspires me to learn from their brilliance and courage. I’ve always admired Albert Einstein, and I find that taking his theory of relativity as a metaphor for human relations is valuable. What is that person seeing or hearing from where she stands? Poets like Mary Oliver or William Stafford often offer depths of emotional intelligence more visceral and useful than any theoretical explanation. When clients are feeling shy or defensive, I like to quote famed psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott: “It is a joy to be hidden but a disaster not to be found.” I find they are willing to share more after pondering that masterful phrase. We can learn from anyone if we are paying attention even if it’s what not to do as well. I have also learned what not to do from those whose behavior was lacking in ethics. Earning people’s trust and delivering on that trust are critical lessons of personal integrity that I work to make part of my brand. Ask yourself, “What am I learning? What do I want to learn? What do I need to learn?” Then find your resources in whatever form it takes. Find the people who have the knowledge, experiences, and wisdom you seek to learn.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
Disruptive innovation has been an organizational buzzword since Clayton Christensen introduced it in 1997. Essentially, it takes the form of a smaller start-up company beating out its bigger, well-established competition by offering a cheaper, more efficient product or service targeting those customers that the larger company is ignoring. Eventually, that product/service moves its way up-market, attracting more and more of the bigger company’s mainstream customers and finally luring them away. One example of this kind of successful disruptive innovation is Uber, which challenged the mainstream model of taxi service. The Uber model proved adaptive globally, and it suited drivers working in an expanding gig economy. Being disruptive can invite new thinking and new practices that answer emerging needs or wants. But not all disruptive innovation is either necessary or useful. I’d suggest that health care, for example, is one field where such endeavors might prove damaging, and simply exacerbate the ongoing challenge of delivering a quality of care that meets rigorous standards.
In 1996, when I first proposed that Gestalt thinking and practices were compatible with and complementary to the emergent field of professional coaching, many colleagues were skeptical. “Gestalt Coaching” was disruptive to traditional Gestalt fields of practice, but it occurred during the early days of the coaching boom and had the space and support it needed to prove its value to executives and organizational teams around the world. When there was a challenge to our program delivery, I decided to disrupt our delivery model by bringing the program to Istanbul and creating a new partnership and a new center. Our program is now in its thirteenth year of delivery, and we are known as a global coaching program. We are part of the professional coaching billion-dollar industry that is still growing. I also never saw myself as an author, but I wrote what became an instant classic, A Gestalt Coaching Primer: The Path towards Awareness Intelligence which was published in 2017 and will be re-issued as a second edition in the second quarter of 2022. To see myself become a trusted author, speaker, coach, and noted lecturer has been the realization of a dream that many say is inspirational. For all of that, I am deeply grateful.
Can you share 3 of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.
- “You know more than you think you know.” That comes from Michael Polyani, who championed “tacit” forms of knowing (intuition, informed guesses, hunches). Whenever I find myself in an ambiguous situation, and I see that others are also unsure of what to do, I look for something from inside myself — a feeling, a memory, a phrase — that I can use to move us forward. The story I told earlier of the young man who challenged my authority is, again, an applicable example. I chose to turn the situation inside out, as it were, and to “join and appreciate him” rather than take offense or turn away. This ability is a demonstration of so-called “soft skills” or competencies that are often the key to re-framing and re-directing difficult situations. Under stress, people tend to be less inviting or validating of others. They “contract” in the very moments when they need to be more expansive and innovative. These are the moments I remind myself that I know more than I think I do and to trust my soft skills to help me connect with others and bring a new awareness into play.
- “Wisdom begins in wonder.” — Socrates. We can trust that creative possibilities are hiding in the obvious. When I or others seem to be stuck, I take a moment to practice recentering, which involves breathing slowly and consciously until I feel a state of relaxed awareness. In this state, curiosity can emerge, leading to more creative thinking. Creativity is a form of playfulness. It’s allowing yourself to experiment with new ideas and to tolerate the chance of small failures in service of learning. When I feel I’ve reached an impasse and can’t go further, I sometimes find that by considering the situation without judgment, just being curious about it and appreciating all its dimensions, then a new awareness or possibility will occur to me.
- “Many roads lead to Rome.” Whatever we do, whatever choice we make, whether in the moment or for the long term, we should do so with aware intention and appreciation for the possibilities. We don’t know if any encounter with another person might be life-changing. But I’ve discovered that when we meet others with our best intentions, and with appreciation for the moment, we could be opening doors to untold richness. Appreciation for the complexity and possibilities of life is the nourishment we need to grow and change.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
“To thine own self be true,” is an age-old mantra that few of us really understand. Brené Brown, a powerful thinker on leadership and self-discovery, speaks about the importance of being vulnerable enough to say one’s truth without shame. The act of self-ownership leads, in turn, to self-empowerment. I love her work. I’ve been working on these issues in my coaching and in my life, and I recognize how deeply challenging it is to be truthful not just to others, but to oneself. Self-discovery isn’t easy. But while we need to do our own exploring and find our way to self-ownership, we need to be in good company to succeed. We need to learn to invite feedback to know how others perceive us. If I’ve learned anything from this pandemic, it’s that the isolation from others is perhaps as devastating an illness to overcome. We’re “wired” to be in some form of relationship with others, for our physical and mental well-being, and for the more transcendent joys of life. We need to remember that. If we intend to “shake things up,” we also need a trusted group whom we can turn to for advice, guidance, and support. Anthropologist Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” We may have many wonderful individual strengths that bring us influence and success, but we do well to remember to nurture relationships with others as a way of moving our agenda and our lives forward.
In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges faced by ‘women disruptors’ that aren’t typically faced by their male counterparts?
Men have their own invisible cultural rules that limit them in some ways, e.g., in friendship, colleagueship, and emotional expressiveness. But they’re taught from an early age how to “play the game,” how to gain and manipulate dominance and power. Today, though, masculinity is undergoing shifts even as women’s traditional roles have also been changing particularly in America. It’s just a short 100 years since women got the legal right to vote, and we still see more men in leadership positions, continuing pay disparities, and even a resurgent debate over women’s right to control their own bodies. Women’s fight for self-ownership and self-authorship is ongoing and not always clear. No matter which ideological arguments we consider, what women will always need is more cultural and economic support for the right to choose for themselves, to counter the ego-annihilating dictates of what they should do or what they can and cannot do. We need greater institutional support to allow women to dream big and to choose with greater freedom, to define themselves for themselves under challenge. During the pandemic, it was the women who felt they needed to leave their careers and return to child care, elder care, or home care. We need to welcome women’s voices into senior decision-making processes in corporate, not-for-profit, and governmental organizations. We need women’s voices and wisdom to be heard in thinking about all humanitarian crises, whether the climate or the outbreak of war. Women constantly must prove themselves. How do we make space for their voices and experiences? How do we invite them into more critical decision-making? Let the proof come commensurate with the power and influence they are afforded.
Do you have a book/podcast/talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us?
There are so many that this question almost feels unfair! I’ll just say that I’m currently reading The Happiness Advantage: How a Positive Brain Fuels Success in Work and Life by Shawn Achor. I’m enjoying his wit and clarity in articulating principles for increasing our positivity and optimism, which in turn influences well-being, creativity, resilience, and success.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I would love to inspire a movement of appreciation as an act of interpersonal creativity. A finding from the Gottman Institute, which studies marriage/couples relationships, intrigues me: “The difference between happy and unhappy couples is the balance between positive and negative interactions during conflict. There is a very specific ratio that makes love last. That ‘magic ratio’ is 5 to 1. This means that for every negative interaction during conflict, a stable and happy marriage has five (or more) positive interactions.” I’m often surprised by how uncomfortable being appreciative makes some people feel, as though they’re somehow being inauthentic or that “being nice” somehow makes them vulnerable. There’s a related saying, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” But I think we can all find something positive to say, however small, and that we can find ways to say it in a manner that feels congruent with one’s self. Expressed appreciation invites a sense of security and joy, which opens possibilities for new ideas and for new learning.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
My life lesson learned over time and through long practice is: Trust Yourself. If you can’t trust yourself, it’s unlikely anyone else will trust you. We are our own oldest and best allies. I recommend taking time for reflective observation, particularly in stressful or charged situations, to check in with ourselves on what we are feeling and what we are thinking. What truths are waiting for you within? Often, a very small or brief idea has great value that emerges only when I stop and listen to myself. So listen to yourself. Trust that you know more than you think you know.
How can our readers follow you online?
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dorothysiminovitch/?originalSubdomain=ca
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Female Disruptors: Dorothy Siminovitch of Gestalt Coaching Works On The Three Things You Need To… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.