Nancy Wonders
Dear Nancy,
This past weekend my team gathered in Dallas once again for the March Gift Show and your name came up many times during my one-on-one meetings with my reps. We have now had 3 team meetings with your facilitation and I have had nothing but positive feedback from my team on the meeting content and your innate abilities. As you know, I have been doing quarterly meetings for over 7 years and you are the first facilitator who has related to both my inside and outside sales teams. Everyone here looks forward to a long relationship with you as our coach. Leslie Horry commented that she did not know how you created an atmosphere in which real conversations could be had, but that it worked and it has propelled her to explore her own personal frontier.
Why does your professional style and meeting content work with Taylors on Ten? I have my own theory that I would like to share with you. Many of the highly touted professionals I have paid thousands of dollars tried to use their same old routine on my team without support or success. That just does not work with independent contractors who have an entrepreneurial viewpoint. Your approach involved more one on one time getting to know my approach and goals, and then allowing the direction to evolve as the day progressed. It takes a lot of work for a sales team to have the real conversations, but the safe container you are able to create opened mouths of employees who had never spoken up at a off site meeting before! I applaud you for encouraging my team to aspire to a more honest working environment.
You and I have looked at my own frontier in our private sessions and I am finally able to concentrate on the parts of the industry and business which I enjoy. I have been able to voice my needs to my employees to be more of a mentor and turn the day-to-day over to my managers. The 15 people who make up Taylors on Ten are scared, challenged, thinking, feeling, human beings caught in a transition in the home accents industry and we can’t wait to greet the future with your insight and guidance. Bring it on!
With regards,
Jane Murray Kieke
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Dear Nancy,
On behalf of the Greater Dallas Community Relations Commission, I would like to thank you for the work that you have performed for the Commission and share with you some of the impact that your work has made on our organization.
As you know the Commission’s work involves improving race relations, and the vision of the Commission is to become the recognized leader in strengthening communities to embrace fairness, justice and equity… piercing the veil of structural exclusion.
I believe that you have done quite a bit to move us closer to our rather ambitious goals over the last couple of years. Your willingness to serve as a dialogue consultant or, as you put it, a “thinking partner,” providing meeting design consulting as well as facilitation for several of our events, including our mayoral forum, our Unity Conference and a very challenging dialogue on the September 11 tragedy, made them much richer and more successful.
Working with you as part of the First Unitarian Church’s anti-racism team has also provided me with lots of opportunities to learn. I am particularly grateful to you for showing me and us how to:
* Create a meeting environment where all voices find their place in the conversation through the use of your dialogic meeting design methodology.
* Develop a deep respect for conflict and the power of opposition to ultimately create innovative solutions to our problems.
* Help difficult and “stuck” conversations to keep taking steps forward.
* Helping us understand that it is through deep and personal conversation that people change and move forward.
* And, ultimately, help participants to find meaningful connections even among our oppositions, discovering the potential for agreement on a course of action based upon very different, sometimes even opposing, reasons.
It is for these reasons that we honored you recently as our volunteer of the year. Nancy, the work that you have performed for us has made a lasting impact on our Commission and the City of Dallas. You have provided us with a set of tools that we continue to use with the result being that we are consistently receiving highly favorable feedback from our gatherings. Your work has fundamentally changed how we now bring people together to engage in substantive conversations.
Thank you for your efforts. We look forward to continuing this positive working relationship.
Sincerely,
Patty Bates-Ballard
Director of Valuing Diversity
Greater Dallas Community Relations Commission
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Dear Nancy,
I am writing to thank you for your extraordinary work with the faculty and administration at Hockaday this past year. We called on you because we felt fractured and overwhelmed by the tasks ahead of us this year: preparing a self-study, working on a strategic plan, participating in the search for a new head and a new principal. I think that as a result of your wisdom and expertise we will start the new year with a strong and shared commitment to our mission, and a genuine respect for and understanding of each other. Most importantly, though, we all have a new sense of how to communicate with each other in respectful and honest ways. Schools are bodies in which conversation is both blood and muscle, and I can truly say that you are the physician who healed us. You made us believe in ourselves and trust in each other. After each of your visits there has been an incredible sense of solidarity and joy throughout the school.
Your working style is always a source of wonder for me: you never tell; you always show. You use poetry, literature, readings and your own experience to color for us the points you wish to make, but you never preach and you are always open to the moment. You are incredibly thorough, but work with you is so interesting that no one has time to be bored or to get restless. I think that the tasks you set us before we began made us feel grounded, but you never let us feel confined or stuck on an issue. You have come to us in times when we were so tired that it seemed impossible to get the project underway. It would have been impossible, too, without you.
Your field, which is an amorphous one in some ways, is difficult to explain to the uninitiated, and I confess that I might not have hired you if I hadn’t known you as a parent and seen you model exactly what you teach... I always knew that schools depend on conversation to forge a common purpose and to express values, but I never knew that you could learn and teach a way to converse that would be transformative. I now know that conversation, “transformative dialogue,” as you call it, takes as much work as learning a new language. That work, though, with you as the coach, is as exciting and exhilarating as learning to read. You are right: you give your students the tools for “courageous change and growth” and help them to encourage change and growth in others.
In short, you have my deepest gratitude for everything you did to help us change and grow, and to make the journey a joyful one for all of us.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth M. Lee
Eugene McDermott Headmistress
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Nancy Wonders-Dearing is a highly gifted and truly extraordinary human being. Human, because her myriad gifts transcend the simply professional, taking life in the transformation of both the individual and the organization.
No single title ever seems to sum her up. She is a skilled facilitator, a coach, a consultant, a thinking partner, a sometimes mentor, a deep listener, a guide. She is positive, she is possibility, yet pragmatic. She is a breath of fresh air, a burst of fresh thought and invariably, a very pleasant surprise.
Nancy comes to the work with a wide and richly hued palette of experience and process. Process that she uses to enable her clients to explore even the most deeply seated issues. Tools that not only allow her to be in any conversation, but to bring everyone present along as well; empowering them to find their true voices. Inordinately important, since conversation is the natural way humans think together.
My firm, The Coaching Company, is the largest independent firm of broadcast performance coaches in the country. Working in over 50 television markets, we provide breakthrough performance coaching for television anchors, reporters and their supporting managers, as well as the station’s primary executives themselves. These are often conversations where huge things are at stake.
Know that Nancy has coached our coaches. She has coached me. In the course of that work, I found her to be highly intuitive, a powerful and deep listener and a strong voice for growth and for change.
She calls you out! Fully two years before it came to fruition, Nancy saw a line of personal and professional growth for me that I neither would have imagined nor realized without her insights.
Nancy has enriched the life of my company, and all those who we touch, in very much the same way. It’s funny, so often I hear her language coming out of our client’s mouths. Words that come at a time of epiphany, of breakthrough, of a new awareness, of meaningful growth. This is the work of Nancy Wonders-Dearing.
Sincerely,
Dennis Kendall
Managing Partner
The Coaching Company
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Nancy,
Words that come to mind off the top of my head about my experience of this process; powerful, fluid, expansive, discovery, focused, simple, nourishing, personal, engaging, helpful, spirited, spacious, restorative, sensory, valuable, symbolic, creative, meaning, revealing, clarity, opening, transformative, trust, fast, order, depth, intuitive, adventurous, sustainable, visual.
For me self-discovery is like watching a scary movie ~ you close your eyes at the scary part only to peak out from under. I want to know but can only handle so much at a time. That’s why this process has been so wonderful for me ~ it reveals itself more to me each time in doses that I can really process.
This process is a bit like the game Clue, you just needed to look at the information differently to solve the mystery. It also has an Alice in Wonderland feel, like when she falls through the rabbit hole and everything else becomes adventure. The process stayed fun and engaging, and didn’t feel like “one more thing to do”.
For me this has become a kind of interpersonal restorative transformation. I am so glad I said yes. Thank you so much!
Diana
Diana Pollak
Public Relations Consultant
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"Nancy's intuitive and spiritual wisdom is rooted in pragmatism and reality that creates transformative results smoothly and rapidly. In my first session I felt myself zooming and zeroing in of core levels of truth, self-knowledge, wisdom and strength that I have not experienced before. And unlike other growth or coaching experiences, felt energized, newly and completely alive, confident and joyful.
Although I have spent countless hours and many years in various therapeutic and personal growth pursuits, I had no idea that such immediate breakthroughs were possible.
It felt almost like being picked up by some invisible flying wire harness and gliding into new realms of peace and productivity into which I could then sink my feet and claim as my own."
General comments:
- Nancy's sense of commitment, her follow up notes and coaching create a continuously combusting climate calling me to my own truth, growth and healing.
- The power and presence of her energy make it impossible for me to ignore my own life forces and voices as I have for so long.
- This is a new and easier way to become a more vital and authentic person.
- The work is highly individualized and spontaneous around an individual’s unique needs in the moment.
Sally King
Fine Art Consultant and Appraiser
June, 2001
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January 10, 2003
Nancy,
At this point in my life, everything seems so scary. So much of my certainty and confidence have been eroded. The erosion left me feeling at times hopeless about what I could bring to this world in the way of gifts or inspiration.
You coaching and unique process have slowly opened closed windows of my soul. Your process has tapped deep resources and reservoirs that I did not know I had. Each session gave me a nugget of truth and light that enabled me to see that what lie ahead was a more fulfilling life. So many people focus on the negative aspects of growing in this world. Your process keeps me centered on the work yet to do in this life. There is no end to what I feel I can do. I had “a moment” the other night, as I mentioned to you. I looked out the window of our car as we drove to the Lake house. I could just feel my own desire for great illumination. I could burn with the power of a million candles if I chose to do so, I could also burn with small light of just one candle and still bring something to this life.
The greatest moments of my work with you thus far, have been the moments where I have been genuinely shocked at the truths in front of me. Where have I been hiding all these years? Your process is strengthening me each time I’m with you. The things I learn from you ~ I’ve never experienced before. I hope I’m never through with the process I hope that for the rest of my life ~ I remain a seeker.
You’re brilliant warm, funny, intuitive and encouraging. Working with you has restored my ailing faith in this old world and in people who refuse to “live”. I choose life. I choose hope. I choose to be here with all that I am ~ and all that I came to this world with. I may not “fit” the conventional culture that is so prevalent. I find it rapid and cold. You and your process are making me realize the importance of being me. Really being the real Neoma. I am safe here after all ~ my gifts have a place. I can live in my true skin without daily fear and anxiety. Your very presence has a calming effect on me. I know that I’m in the company of someone who not only understands me ~ but wholly embraces me. I wonder what would happen if everyone went through your process ~ the journey? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to see all of us being who we were really meant to be? I equate that desire to the day when were all in heaven and we’re all exposed and living our truths. Thank you for the open arms, thank you more for the “golden ticket” that has allowed my passage in my new being. I need to get there. I now have hope. What a gift.
Love,
Neoma Twining
Performance Coach
