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Sandra Ford Walston, The Courage Expert, is the innovator of StuckThinking™ and principal of a 20-year-old human potential consulting firm based in Denver, Colorado. With over twenty years of original research in integrating courage behaviors, courage leadership, women’s courage and non-gender integral levels of courage consciousness, Sandra focuses on the traps and tricks of the human condition. She believes that integrating courage actions at work leads to a more naturally propelled and happy employee, resulting in reduced attrition and improved bottom-line performance. She has found that there is a direct correlation between the organization’s success quotient and its courage quotient.
Ms. Walston has trained over 4,000 individuals and customized skill-based training programs including webinars and teleclasses for major associations and Fortune 500 companies, including Caterpillar, Inc., Procter & Gamble, Hitachi Consulting, Qwest, Hensel Phelps, IBM, Wide Open West, Nolte Engineers, and Farmers Insurance. With over eleven years of experience with finance professionals, she also instructs for the University of Denver Graduate Tax Program programs including “Courage Leadership: Do You Demonstrate It or Are You Stuck?”
She is the internationally published author of bestseller COURAGE: The Heart and Spirit of Every Woman (Greece and Brazil), endorsed by Marianne Williamson, Jack Canfield, Harriet Rubin and Neale Donald Walsch, to name a few. Her second book and follow-up to COURAGE, The Courage Difference at Work: A Unique Success Guide for Women, is about courage consciousness actions at work that become stalled in obstacles, and her third book, FACE IT! 12 Courageous Actions that Bring Success at Work and Beyond, is not about how to get a job, but about learning to use courageous techniques to overcome work-related obstacles—things like uncertainty, intimidation, denial, apathy and self-doubt. The premise of this book is that we can change our behaviors when given the necessary tools to take the steps to grow and progress toward a courageous life.
Ms. Walston’s articles have been featured in Chief Learning Officer, Training & Development, Accelerate (Malaysia), Zig Ziglar’s Newsletter, Personal Excellence: The Magazine of Life Leadership and Strategic Finance.
She is certified in the Enneagram, a system of understanding nine different personality types and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator®. She is a certified Newfield Network Coach.
Highlighted Achievements:
- Denver Health and Hospitals – Designed and delivered over a year intellectual capital programs on self-directed teams and adult self-directed learners to enhance collaboration and support cross-functional teams to provide the best care possible. This yielded accelerated synergistic production and increased team effectiveness.
- Qwest – Designed and delivered a series of intellectual capital programs for migrating teams across with cross-functional representation across the country. Per their request, I applied the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® as a baseline to flow in and out of team assignments. The teams applied this self-awareness to collaborate which diminished breakdowns and misunderstandings, retained/increased quality standards and improved revenue.
- Wide Open West – Designed and delivered a series of Enneagram leadership programs that merged the national leadership team members’ courage leadership behavior patterns. Assessed and defined the courageous intentions to achieve revenue projections. Outcome: integrating courageous leadership and the Enneagram, team effectiveness increased and yielded greater efficiency.
- All Care – Designed and delivered intellectual capital to bridge the communication and time management preferences between clinical and non-clinical departments to achieve increased revenue, improve retention and morale. Coached the President/CEO to improve morale and applied the five linguistic speech acts as a cross-department communication tool.
- Nolte Engineering Associates – Designed and delivered an Enneagram program for principals and spouses. that highlighted the diverse worldviews and increased principal awareness.
- IBM – Presented intellectual courage research to the top executive women “Courage Leadership: Making It Work for You!” at their annual conference. This presentation yielded an understanding of the feminine behaviors of courage that could be applied immediately.
- Career Service Authority (City and County of Denver) – Designed and delivered a series of training programs including designing and presenting four programs (out of thirteen) to the managers’ training series. This generated increased team effectiveness and unity.
Areas of expertise include:
Courage Leadership and StuckThinking™ Facilitator * Executive Coaching * Team and Organizational Effectiveness * Assessing Organizations’ Level of Courage Consciousness * Building an Organization Spirited in Courage Leadership * Implementing the “Language of Courage” * Adult Self-Directed Learning * Certified in the Enneagram and Myers Briggs Type Indicator®