ASTD's Interview with Carolyn Foster

The following appeared in the May 2002 issue of the online newsletter of the Silicon Valley branch of ASTD, the American Society for Training and Development. Danielle Fafchamps, the newsletter's editor, featured this interview in a regular column called The Entrepreneur's Corner.
DF: Carolyn, please give us a short overview of your expertise and what your business provides.
Carolyn: Through my business, Creative Choices, I offer coaching, seminars, and retreats to people who want strategies for resilience and goal-achievement in challenging times. I've used my expertise in adult development as an author, professor, and consultant to international organizations for over twenty years, but working with individuals and groups as I do now is my true passion. My areas of specialization include leadership development, thriving through transitions, and constructive use of differences.
DF: You chose a business name that expresses your philosophy that choice is the key issue of men and women today. What does that mean in practice?
Carolyn: Making wise choices is at the heart of professional success and personal fulfillment. Yet we often believe that our choices are limited and unappealing. We succumb to prevailing negative views or fail to see options beyond either-or thinking.

Through dialogue in coaching and through the materials I've developed for groups, I help people use imagination, courage, and persistence to make and carry out more creative decisions. For example, an executive who has been laid off can use the coaching dialogue to delve more deeply into what being a leader means. She can ask: What skills and qualities have I not yet fully developed in myself? What work would best support this new level of expertise?

When we devote time and resources to a broader understanding of what we really want out of life, we become magnets for new opportunities.

The psychologist Rollo May suggested, "It seems there are potentialities within us for health which are not released until we make a conscious decision." In my work, I've seen such fruitful paths open up when people consciously choose to gather inner and outer data and then go after their deepest desires in a step-by-step strategic fashion. Their successes fill me with the enthusiastic conviction that change can be health-enhancing rather than traumatic. Rollo May also inspired me with this definition: "Courage is the capacity to manage the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom." Why not go for freedom?
DF: So many of us are in transition, almost continually it seems! What is the most important thing you would tell a person feeling stressed by transition and change?
Carolyn: Stop resisting what you feel. Transition is an organic process with its own seasons. You can't get to summer's harvest without the winter when it seems nothing's happening. Cultivate deeply, with patience and lots of the resources human beings need to grow – time alone, time with others, time in nature, creative pursuits, and laughter. Take the time, and your new life will blossom and amaze you.
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