This last weekend was one of those amazing times when the right people are in the right place at the right time and for the right reason! Not far outside Christchurch, New Zealand, Living Springs is a retreat center overlooking Lyttleton Harbor on Teddington Bay – stunning views, hard to capture via camera. Thanks to Grant Hewett-Hawker, here is a pic of the view we had from our training room. If you click any picture, it will zoom bigger.
There were 14 Kiwi’s (popular sobriquet for New Zealanders), 1 South African, 1 Spaniard, 1 Kuwaiti, 2 trainers (North American and an honorary Kiwi) and 3 Kiwi team members … all present for the first phase of Coaching Essentials, incubating a new batch of More To Life Coaches.
Within one hour, a sense of destiny and gratitude was the order of the day; and as the weekend progressed, the sense of community deepened – immediate community and world-wide community.
To the right is Margaret Hewett-Hawker, who was the torch that brought the course to Christchurch – tiny, but powerful, like dyno-mite!
It was one of those trainings that had a lot of laughter sprinkled in large doses throughout. I am
grinning as I write this, remembering some of those moments that aren’t necessarily funny, unless you were there – and then they are remembered with great hilarity.
I don’t know what it is about this trip, but toilets seem to figure in a consistent way – the plane’s toilets stuffing up, Clare and Brian’s long drop, and then the discussion on how to equalize the bathrooms at the venue – just as many toilets/showers in the men’s, as there were in the women’s, 15 women using the facilities vs 7 men. Yes, as you can imagine, it was one of those highly entertaining discussions with lots of possibilities.
Here is the group –
Back row: Jo O’Sullivan, Sharon Roy, Felipe Gomez-Ferrandiz, Sarah Munro, Andrew Munro, Claire Jackson, Chaitanya Deva, Margaret Hewett-Hawker, Stephen Allan.
Middle row: John Newell, Nadia AlAttar, Moana Hodge, Ian Huddleston, Donna Southwick, Robyn Madden, Rosalind McClean-Stewart
Front row: Grant Hewett-Hawker, Mary Reynolds, Carol Allan, Clare Vivian-Neal, Ann McMaster, Felicity Campbell
