The Developmental – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Through my work, I have been immensely lucky to meet some exceptional humans who have inspired me, taught me precious lessons of wisdom and even offered me the most precious gift of all: their friendship. This episode features one of these remarkable people: Samantha Kropff.

Sam shares with us her journey from being a forensic investigator to becoming a leader and later a leadership development expert and the accompanying transformation she experienced in her work and life. She vulnerably shares the ups and downs of her growth - revelations, setbacks, hard-won lessons and the courageous choice to push herself out of her comfort zone again and again.

Samantha is an inspiring example for every woman who has ever had to find her voice and step into her leadership power, especially when working in male-dominated environments. She is also an advocate for the value of vertical development as a life practice, showing us how incredibly beautiful and painfully messy the journey of human growth can actually be.

Episode Summary:

* [00:05:30] Sam’s Background: Sam’s career and personal journey towards vertical development.

* [00:15:45] Redefining vs. Transforming: Differences between the lived experience of Redefining and Transforming. See this previous episode of The Developmental for an overview of the stages of development.

* [00:25:00] Sam’s Career Change and Identity Shift

* [00:35:00] Relationship with Time: Evolving from a linear to a flexible perspective on time.

* [00:45:15] Integrating Shadow Aspects: Importance of integrating shadow aspects in personal growth.

* [00:55:00] Organizational Change Challenges: Challenges in pushing for change as the chair of a culture reform committee.

* [01:05:00] The Role of Discomfort in Growth: Discomfort as a catalyst for vertical development.

* [01:14:00] Closing Thoughts: Final reflections on vertical growth's impact on individuals and organizations.

Guest Bio: Samantha Kropff

Samantha Kropff is a Manager of Leadership Development in NSW Government and also a leadership coach. Samantha has spent her career working in government organisations both in Leadership Development and also as a technical specialist. Samantha is an experienced executive coach, having coached senior police leaders both across Australia as well as 8 international police agencies over the past 4 years.

Samantha started her career as a Forensic Investigator working both nationally and internationally on commonwealth police investigations. Working to dismantle global organised criminal syndicates and also helping Australian citizens or those overseas during times of crisis, such as Timor-Leste to help during civil unrest, deploying to Netherlands to assist with the investigation of the downing of MH17, or deploying interstate to help with fatal bushfires.

Samantha transitioned from investigating crime to using her investigative skills to explore what influences leadership behaviours, and how to support leaders to grow and development, not just as a leader but as a human being. She can see the exponential impact leaders can have on others and organisations, and it is her passion to find ways to support current and aspiring leaders to be the best versions of themselves.

Samantha works with vertical leadership development in her coaching practice and as a leader herself. She is a living example of applying the tool to herself for her own growth and works with leaders who want to do the same. She is especially passionate about supporting female leaders to let go of the conditioning that keeps them small and support them to feel safe to be seen and reach more of their leadership potential.

You can read more about Sam’s work on her website: https://www.skleadership.com.au

Dive deeper

I hope you’ve enjoyed this podcast. If you are curious to dive more deeply into learning about Vertical Development and how it might impact your work and life, check out our online library of webinars and courses accredited by the International Coaching Federation.

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In this emotional conversation, I sit down with my dear friend, Belinda Forman, who shares her profound journey with cancer, not just as a battle to be fought, but as a deeply personal developmental journey. Belinda opens up about the initial shock of diagnosis, the rollercoaster of choices around treatments, and the unexpected pathways to personal growth that emerged from her experience.

Through her story she invites us into a vulnerable exploration of the intersection of health crises and adult development, shedding light on the power of mindset, the importance of facing our mortality, and showing us how we might choose to lean into adversity as a gift of transformative growth. I hope you are as inspired as I was by Belinda’s insights into navigating one of life's toughest challenges with grace, ‘fire’, awareness, resilience, and an open heart, and that you find in this conversation some precious wisdom to bring into your own relationship with adversity.

Episode summary

* [00:00:00] Kicking off with a deep dive into growing through health challenges.

* [00:03:11] Belinda opens up about her cancer journey and finding growth amidst adversity.

* [00:09:58] She touches on the raw deal of facing mortality and the growth it spurred.

* [00:12:18] Talks about how her views on control and acceptance were turned upside down.

* [00:18:14] Highlights how a positive mindset and seeing cancer as part of her story helped her heal.

* [00:35:01] Belinda reflects on the continuous journey of self-discovery and supporting oneself post-crisis.

Useful Resources

* Belinda’s LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/belindaforman/

* The meditation Belinda mentions she has found hepful and healing:

* Insight timer - another great app for meditation Belinda recommends: https://insig.ht/j0c3vaJoNGb

* Bowel cancer AU - www.bowelcanceraustralia.org

* Learn more about colon cancer: Coloncancerfoundation.org

Guest Bio: Belinda Forman

Belinda Forman is a seasoned People and Culture professional with a diverse background in coaching, L&D, team experience, and culture development. Based on the Sunshine Coast in Australia, Belinda has a passion for helping individuals connect with their purpose and values, empowering them to lead more powerful and fulfilling lives.

Belinda and her husband Matt have spent the last 15 years building and growing business in the tech space. Creating environments where individuals thrive both personally and professionally.

Dive deeper

I hope you’ve enjoyed this podcast. If you are curious to dive more deeply into learning about Vertical Development and how it might impact your work and life, check out our online library of webinars and courses accredited by the International Coaching Federation.

Spread the word…

If you want to bring your bit to building a wiser, more conscious world, I hope you share this article with others who could benefit from the learning.

and, if you haven’t done it yet, Subscribe!

Join your nerdy community and let’s keep on staying curious and learning from each other.

Our guest for this episode is one of the leading researchers and practitioners in the space of vertical development. Nick Petrie has been a pioneer in bridging the science and application of adult development theories into organisational learning. His whitepapers on designing and implementing developmentally effective learning programs have inspired a whole new generation of researchers. Nick is currently breaking new ground in studying burnout and its developmental implications, as well as supporting leaders and learning designers to create their own developmental programs through his Vertical Incubator project.

Nick is a researcher and speaker on leadership, resilience and burnout prevention. A New Zealander, with significant international experience, Nick has lived and worked in the U.S., Europe, Asia, The Middle East and Scandinavia. His clients include Google, Walmart, NASA, Delta and Novartis. He has worked globally across industries including healthcare, tech, banking, education, energy, law and television. He holds a Master's degree from Harvard University and is the author of the book "Work Without Stress: Building a Resilient Mindset for Lasting Success". To learn more about Nick and his work you can visit his website here.

In this very special episode, we explore how raising children can be a catalyst for vertical development and how our kids end up, in a very real sense, raising us, just as we are raising them. My dialogue partner is a dear friend, senior leader and a mother who has walked the talk of personal transformation in the act of raising her (now adult) children and has then taken those lessons back into her leadership.

Genevieve Hawkins is General Manager Transformation and Supply Chain at Coles Liquor Group and the author of the book "Mentally at Work" - a powerful and practical guide for creating workplaces where humans can thrive.

From the start of her career as an occupational therapist, Genevieve has had a passion for understanding and influencing the psychology of how people not just cope but thrive under pressure. This passion led her to further study and exploration of how leaders, teams and cultures perform and has seen Genevieve move from the health system to insurance, to risk management consulting, to the corporate world. 

Genevieve is now a senior executive with extensive experience in leading major change programs in large organisations and is cognisant of seeing things from a different perspective given her mix of experiences and qualifications which includes parenting two, now adult children, of which one is transgender. It is this different perspective that led Genevieve to write Mentally at Work to help current and future leaders, lead in a way that makes a difference to individuals, teams and organisational performance. And it resulted in her becoming the sponsor for Pride at Coles.

She believes in the value of simplicity, pragmatism, finding the right way to talk about the elephants in the room, embracing clunky conversations and the importance of sticking to your ‘true north’ in order to get the right long-term outcome for a business and its people and herself.

Enjoy our vulnerable conversation about motherhood, dying and birthing identities, leadership and growing up the hard way.

In this episode, I am joined by a self-confessed fellow 'nerd' to explore a topic that has hardly ever been discussed in relation to vertical development: adult giftedness and neurodivergence.

Dr. Tracy Winter is is a leadership coach specializing in neurodiversity and the founder of Nerd Coach⁠. She enjoys coaching clients who are gifted, ADHDers, autistic, dyslexic, and more. Each client she meets has a unique brain that deserves its own unique approach, and she partners with her clients to use their strengths to reach the outcomes they desire. Tracy trains new ADHD coaches and is a mentor coach for students at the International ADHD Coach Training Center. She also facilitates leadership development training with organizations such as Tesla and has been an adjunct professor at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology. 

Tracy earned a Ph.D. in Human Development, an MA in Human and Organization Systems, and an Evidence-Based Coaching Certificate from Fielding Graduate University. Her dissertation focused on the social-emotional needs of highly gifted adults. Tracy also holds a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) credential from the International Coach Federation (ICF) and is the immediate Past President of the ICF Greater Austin Chapter.

Here are a few of the things Tracy has learnt in her work and which we explore in our dialogue together:

• Many neurodivergent adults (particularly gifted ones) don't self-identify as such


• Neurodivergent people often have different social-emotional needs that go unnoticed.


• Development in neurodivergent people is by excellence asynchronous - with some exceptionally developed capacities in some areas and limitations in others. That holds true of vertical development more broadly - where lines of development rarely, if ever, evolve at the same pace.


• People often have the solutions within them; they just need the right questions to find them - so that's why coaching can be an extremely powerful tool for neurodivergent people.


• Being and feeling truly seen can make an incredibly positive difference to someone's long-term development and yet is an experience neurodivergent people are most often deprived of.

This has been both an intellectually stimulating and enlightening conversation and a very personal one. Tracy and I dove into some of our lived experiences of neurodivergence and the gifts and challenges that come with that and explore why leaning in with curiosity towards the 'different other' might be the smallest most transformative thing we could do in families, teams and society to help harness the huge (and often untapped into) potential of the neurodivergent among us.

Useful Resources:

• Theory of Positive Disintegration

  
  



• Tracy’s dissertation on the self-concept of gifted adults

  
  



• Tracy’s coach (and neurodiversity expert): Kate Arms

  
  

In this episode, we explore the bridges between the new field of vertical development and the ancient practice of mindfulness with the help of Michael Bunting - author, researcher, and leadership expert. We discover how certain types of meditation - such as insight-mindfulness practice - can actually create an impact on vertical development by teaching us to recognise and lean into the most difficult feelings (the ones we usually try to avoid). This ancient practice is consistent with the newest research on adult development and the role of contrasting emotions in vertical growth. We also talk about love, addiction, what it takes to open up our hearts and how organisations might become places of healing, instead of suffering.

Michael is the author of the bestselling books The Mindful Leader and A Practical Guide to Mindful Meditation and co-authored Extraordinary Leadership in Australia & New Zealand with Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, some of the world’s premier researchers and authors in the field of leadership.

His latest book, published in October 2022, Vertical Growth, is a must-read book for anyone wanting to master self-awareness and lifelong growth.

He is the founder of Awakened Mind, a mindfulness IOS/Android App and The Mindful Leader leadership consultancy. Michael and his team have worked with some of the world’s most prestigious organisations in the area of executive leadership, mindfulness, mental health, adult development and scaled culture change. Several of his clients are award-winning best employers, and his app has been academically researched and proven to produce substantial improvement in key areas impacting mental health and team performance.

He lives with his wife and 4 children in Sydney, Australia.

Beyond his books and app, Michael recommends two well-known apps for beginning meditatiors - Calm and Insight Timer. 

This is a very special episode of The Developmental, featuring two adult development experts who are also best friends. They will open up the inner sanctum of their 12-year friendship to explore why and how it has transformed each of them, and what other people might learn from it all. This is an episode filled with personal life stories, but also one grounded in a research-based framework on transformative relationships. The story of one friendship will illuminate how this framework actually works and how you might bring it to life in your own friendships or other meaningful relationships. 

Veronica Brejan is Managing Partner at NeuroMindfulness® Institute and a former international HR Director. Veronica held top HR positions in London, Paris and Eastern Europe: Chief People Officer Europe (Pizza Hut, Yum! Brands), Global Head of Talent (Vodafone), and internal HR advisor roles in KPMG, Cargill and Alstom. Her areas of expertise are leadership development, executive coaching, talent strategy and organizational culture.

Veronica holds an EMBA from the Maastricht School of Management and Master in Business Communication. She is an ICF-certified executive coach (ACC), holding certifications from Barrett Values Center (Evolutionary Coaching) and the Institute of Human Excellence founded by Sir John Whitmore (Transpersonal Coaching). She is also a trained Yoga teacher and accredited Practitioner of NLP, Timeline Therapy and Hypnotherapy with the American Board of NLP.

Veronica and Alis have been best friends for 12 years. Their career paths have intersected, then diverged in complementary ways. Their life paths have been at times uncannily similar, and at other times radically different. They have lived in the same city, then in different countries and finally on different continents for years, and discovered how to keep friendship alive over long distances. They have been through ups and downs - separately and together - and have learnt how to be there for eachother not when it's easy, but most of all when it's hard. They almost lost their friendship, only to recover it stronger than ever before. 

Join them for the story of five seasons of friendship and an exploration of five ingredients of developmental relationships. Read more about the five ingredients framework in Alis’ PhD Dissertation. A dedicated article on this topic will follow soon here, on the VDI website.

In this episode, I am joined by Dr. Valerie Livesay, a passionate researcher who has devoted her work to illuminating the darker corners of our beings and the role our worst moments play in our long-term development. We talk about a core concept stemming from Valerie's research - Fallback - which describes those moments in life when we involuntarily revert to less mature ways of behaving and find ourselves simply unable to access our usual sense of perspective and wisdom. We discuss how vertical development is not at all a linear journey and is more of a 'two steps forward-one step backward' progression. We explore what triggers fallback, and how it manifests in our life both at work and at home. Valerie shares her insights into how we might turn moments of fallback into precious lessons for growth. 

Valerie introduces us to the metaphor of theatre as a description of our multi-faceted self and the idea of "Ghost Light" as an invitation to shed light on the 'inner characters' we usually avoid facing. While befriending those 'fallback characters' can be e lifetime's work - Valerie makes an excellent case as to why it can be deeply rewarding, worthwhile work. 

To dive more deeply into Dr. Livesay's work and gain a more thorough understanding of your own Fallback patterns and ways to change them, I invite you to read her book: "Leaving the Ghost Light Burning: Illuminating Fallback in Embrace of the Fullness of You" and explore the course by the same name, which Valerie will be facilitating in 2023. 

This has been a great conversation with a leader who actively integrates the practices of vertical development into both his own life and his work. Marti Hughes is currently the Principal of Organisational Leadership at Tennis Australia, and has been involved with leadership and capability development for the past 20 years. Adult development has become a passion subject in recent years and he has been introducing it into leaderships programs at Tennis. He has equally used the developmental lens to make sense of his own life's growth and continue to stretch himself into new octaves of development. 

We talk about the messiness of growth, the generational conflict in organisations and how adult development done right might transform the cultures we live and work in. 

For useful resources and extra reading, check out the podcast page: 

In this episode it is just me and you, trying to unpack some of the core theories of adult development and lay a foundation for the conversations to come. I invite you to reflect on your own journey of growth up to this point in your life and on what you feel might still be needed. Together we explore what vertical development is, how it is different from horizontal development and why we need both. We also look at some of the science around vertical development and what different researchers suggest it is that develops as we continue to evolve in our lives. 

Finally, we pause to reflect on why this whole topic is so important, perhaps even vital not just for you and your own life, but for all of us and our long-term thriving as a species.

Find the resources for this episode: www.verticaldevelopmentinstiute.com/podcast