Welcome to bizcouples

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My first blog on bizcouples! I'm very excited to launch this new initiative of Calliope Learning www.calliopelearning.com. I have been running Calliope Learning for 20 years, the last 7 with my husband, Dave Whittington. I have been involved in many things over the years - instructional design, facilitation, e-learning, organizational development, leadership and team development and coaching. I'm delighted to be adding a specialty of coaching for couples in business together.

Coaching has become big business over the last 10 years and coaches of all sorts have popped up - career, fitness, retirement, money, life and executive coaches immediately come to mind. My coaching has evolved out of my own educational background in adult learning. I have been coaching learners through my teaching and facilitation in academic and corporate settings for many years. In the last 5 years, both my husband and I have added executive coaching to our leadership development programs.

This latest speciality, couples in business, evolved out of my participation in a wonderful coaching program, Organizational Relationship and Systems Coaching. This program allowed me to learn a plethora of powerful coaching techniques for couples, teams and systems. I have been applying these techniques in my existing leadership and team development work.

But what really fascinated me was the opportunity to apply these techniques in my own personal and business relationship with my husband. Thus the idea of bizcouples was born. We know several couples in business together and we often talk about the unique challenges we face. One of them is finding a trusted outside perspective to ask questions and challenge some of our assumptions. When it's just the two of us making every business decision, we can sometimes get into seeing things in a particular way.

We've also discovered many pluses to working together ... the excitement shared when you land that big contract, the opportunity to control your own time off, the flexibility of combining work and play, and the opportunity to continually recreate the types of work you want to do together.

If you're a couple in business, I would love to keep in touch with you. Hopefully we will discover our greatness together!