The Courage to Lead® program offers an approach to leadership rooted in integrity and trust.  Through the Circle of Trust® approach, developed by Parker J. Palmer and the Center for Courage & Renewal, you can:

• Expand your inner capacity to lead a more authentic, meaningful and engaged life

• Develop your ability to listen openly and to be present to others

• Increase your skill in asking open, honest questions that help others uncover their inner wisdom

• Discover a process for discernment to reach clarity around key questions

• Learn principles and practices that can be applied to your daily life and work

Rodger’s PhD thesis included an exploration of the role of self-reflection and self-awareness in leadership. Rodger found the work of Parker. J. Palmer ‘exploring the inner landscape of a leader’s life’, particularly inspiring. This, in turn, prompted him to attend his first Courage to Lead® workshop and many workshops later to then become a facilitator of Palmer's approach. To this work as a Courage & Renewal facilitator, Rodger brings qualities of empathy, deep listening and humour; offering people the safe and welcoming space to tune into their own wisdom for living and leading well.

Read more in our blog 'Developing Your Courage as a Catalyst Leader'.

Learn more about The Center for Courage & Renewal.

What happens at the retreat?

Carefully prepared facilitators craft a “safe space” for self-reflection and shared exploration using insights from poets, storytellers and various wisdom traditions to guide you. A Clearness Committee, a deep process of discernment that lets you hear your inner wisdom, will be the capstone of the retreat.

'The Courage to Lead®: Living and Leading from Within – a retreat to reflect on and revitalise your leadership', was held August 28-30, 2015. Rodger Spiller co-facilitated this retreat with Rick Jackson, Co-Founder and Senior Fellow at the Center for Courage & Renewal. Rodger is now a certified facilitator with the Courage & Renewal.  Click here to download a PDF of the retreat brochure: Download File  Participants' comments included:

• The retreat provided me with powerful tools to use in my leadership and a safe and nurturing space to reflect. I wholeheartedly recommend it. 

• The Courage to Lead Retreat is a powerful and rare opportunity to reflect on one's journey as a leader is the company of a thoughtful and well facilitated group in a trustworthy process.

• The weekend retreat exploring 'Courage to Lead' provided me with valuable insight into my own leadership. The gentle, reflective approach was well rounded allowing me some excellent take away thoughts to apply to my path through life.

• An elegant, simple, clean way of bringing oneself to oneself and community. 

• Thanks Rodger for your generous gift of facilitation, of leading us in a humble, purposeful and elegant way.

• I have gained a greater clarity and real acknowledgement and appreciation for my inner resources and strength. 

• Words cannot really express how much it meant to me to be part of the Courage to Lead...being in that positive, inspirational environment with a leader who leads by example....an astonishing gifted and super-organised person (aka Rodger). It's like you have found a precious gift that you are excited to share, and I am so grateful for the opportunity to share it with you and experience it for myself. I really did find a new-found strength, courage, and renewal...A new stage of life that is now filled with hope and possibility.

• Come along to Courage to Lead and be profoundly changed. 

• I went in feeling drained and unsure, and have come out feeling hopeful and unburdened. 

• Loved the process. Thank you. 

• Loved everything.

Participants at Rodger's introductory events provided the following comments:

Leading Authentically – a one day workshop about leading with courage:

• An enlightening, enjoyable thought-provoking session expertly led by Rodger Spiller. He really ‘walked the talk’, being vulnerable and courageous, sharing his own stories and facilitating the session so everyone felt safe to open up and share. Great fun too.

• Provides the opportunity to reflect on what courageous steps need to be taken to align your outer life with your inner values – excellent.

• Excellent workshop – an opening of the doorway to explore myself in a reflective and deeper way. Highly recommended. The use of poetry contributed to the strength of this workshop.

• Rodger created a rich and safe holding space to explore living authentically. The day was very well-crafted, facilitating new depth of understanding and awareness.

• Amongst anyone I’ve ever met, Rodger Spiller is one of the most committed to his own personal evolution; and from this place, assisted by a vast pool of knowledge and wisdom gathered from the baskets of many paths and trainings, he is able to walk beside others with wisdom, with humour and with authenticity and with love. He connected us all and helped us to connect to self and other. 

 Being Mindful – a two hour workshop about leading with courage:

• Great structure. Super interesting. Fantastic facilitation. Very well done. Very impressed with the opportunity it gave me to connect to myself, share that and then go even deeper.

• I enjoyed the opportunity to be inspired and share insights with fellow leaders, with warmth, integrity and fun.

• Rodger, through this work in two hours, led me to a personal discovery that I will begin to apply in my life immediately. Thank you.

• I came here tonight knowing nothing about ‘Courage and Renewal’. I find the process gentle, focussed, intriguing, enjoyable, safe and quite powerful. Thank you. It has me interested!

• Particularly liked poetry as a way of finding more insights into our own lives.

• Flowed well. A lot covered in a short period of time. I came away with much to reflect on.

If you are interested in the Courage & Renewal approach for you or your organisation please contact us.

The Immunity-to-Change™ approach developed by Harvard’s Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey shows how our individual habits and mindsets— along with the collective norms and beliefs in our organizations—combine to create an overwhelming immunity to change. Their approach amounts to nothing less than a radical recasting, conceptually and practically, of the work of improving performance.

Those frustrated or disappointed with their current change efforts who want guidance in knowing what to do to turn things around will find The Immunity-to-Change™ approach very practical. With "how to" advice, hands-on diagnostics and compelling case studies, The Immunity-to-Change™ approach delivers the tools you need to overcome the forces of inertia and transform your life and your work.

A key question Rodger has researched is how can leadership development be truly effective? Rodger resonated with the view of Harvard Professor Robert Kegan who maintains that ‘existing leadership development places insufficient emphasis on development’. ‘The Immunity-to-Change™’ approach developed by Kegan and his Harvard colleague Lisa Lahey is a powerful tool for transformation. Rodger trained with Kegan and Lahey in Boston and undertook a comprehensive supervision process with them to become a Certified Immunity-to-Change™ Coach and Facilitator. Chellie has also studied and taught this approach.

Read more in our blog 'Overturning Immunity to Change'.

Learn more from Minds at Work about the Immunity to Change method of transformation.

The Enneagram is widely regarded as a more complete and in-depth approach to understanding personality and presence than any other system. It is comprehensive, yet easy to understand and dynamic rather than static. It is arguably the oldest human development system on the planet. It doesn’t put you in a box - it shows you the way out of the box you are in.

Rodger has been trained by Don Riso and Russ Hudson, two of the leading developers of the Enneagram system, and is a Riso Hudson Certified Teacher with the Enneagram Institute. Rodger has also been trained by Dr Ginger Lapid-Bogda, a pioneer of applying the Enneagram in Business, and authorized to offer training based on her book ‘What Type of Leader Are You?’ He has also been trained by the Nine Domains Group and is a 9D Facilitator able to apply this enneagram related approach in business. 

Read more in our blog 'Catalysing Success'.

Learn more about the Enneagram from The Enneagram Institute.

Based on Chellie’s latest book ‘The Catalyst’s Way’, we explore how to:

• Ignite your flame of Activated Hope

• Summons the Courage to Explore the Chamber of Dis-comfort

• Experience more Dis-Covery: Leading from Authenticity

As a 2022 Leader-in-Residence at the Atlantic Institute, Oxford University, Chellie authored ‘The Catalyst’s Way’ and her related leadership development services based on this to ignite, support and transform catalytic efforts worldwide - to empower catalyst changemakers like you to navigate your unique pathway. As a Professor of Leadership and a Fellow of the International Leadership Association, Chellie Spiller is a trusted authority in the art and science of leadership development. She can show catalyst leaders and businesses how to create more sustainable wealth and wellbeing.

A highly interactive and academically robust course that has been designed to give leaders tools to strengthen organisational transformation towards greater diversity, inclusion and belonging. As systems scientist Peter Senge has said, it is not organisations who change but individuals, and through a change challenge in the context of diversity, inclusion and belonging you’ll have first-hand experience of a personal change process which can also be applied in teams. The process also provides tools to help leaders coach others.

Participants who successfully complete the sessions should be able to:

Analyse, apply and reflect on a range of leadership skills that aid understanding and resolving of complex leadership issues in the context of diversity, inclusion and belonging

Discern between low and high context cultures

Reflect on personal responses to diversity, inclusion and belonging

Explore authentic leadership, relational and Māori leadership

Distinguish between adaptive and technical change, and acquire the tools to lead self and others through the “Immunity to Change” process

Chellie’s university research and teaching includes a specialisation in ‘diversity and inclusion’. She has also provided a range of leadership services on this subject for businesses.

Chellie draws upon her Ngāti Kahungunu and Pākehā lineage, experience at 17 of living for a year in Thailand as an AFS (America Field Service) Scholarship student living with a Thai family and attending Thai school, and a business career that included leading some of the first cultural tours to North Korea.

As a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the Harvard University, she worked closely with Harvard Professors and other scholars in the Harvard Native American Economic Development Project and at the University of Arizona. She continues to participate in and support this project. She has been a guest speaker for this initiative.
Chellie is a Fellow of the Dilin Duwa Centre for Indigenous Business Leadership – an initiative committed to the pursuit of equity for First Nations people in the economic life of Australia. ‘Dilin Duwa’ means everlasting flow.

Chellie is currently leading a transdisciplinary team of Māori economy researchers exploring Māori economies of wellbeing, with a strong whānau focus. This research is part of Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga, New Zealand's Māori Centre of Research Excellence (CoRE).

The book, 'Practical Wisdom, Leadership and Culture: Indigenous, Asian and Middle-Eastern Perspectives', that Chellie co-edited with Ali Intezari and Shih-Ying Yang features stories from contributors from the world’s wisdom traditions that are illuminating and inspiring.

An introductory session on how Māori culture and values can help organisations understand, and be motivated to create, a culture that is genuinely open and embracing of diversity and inclusion. In this session Chellie invites organisations to consider not just ‘adding Māori to the Multi-cultural Mix” as a kind of clip on or check box – but to look at integrating Māori values in a meaningful way. The wisdom contained in Māori values, developed over the aeons in relationship to the world around us help us create relational trust and wellbeing. This is a world of “I belong therefore I am” in which creating a culture of belonging is at the heart of ‘diversity and inclusion.’