When I shared my new project of facilitating Cutting the Ties that Bind with my mom starting on January 24, 2025, my friend and mentor Barbara Schaetti, one of the three founders of Personal Leadership and former members of the board of directors of the Family in Global Transitions Conference, asked me the following question:
“In what ways do PL and Cutting the Ties That Bind support and complement one another? What would an integration of the two look like, such that you might bring that integration to your clients as one coherent whole?”
And I have been thinking about the integration of tools and methods for some time! I’m so curious about how they complement and support each other! So here are ideas that came to me:
Mandy Staffa and I in Boston about 10 years ago – I love this photo!
My mother, Mandy Staffa, was my first teacher. She helped me develop internal stability to balance the external instability of growing up as a Third Culture Kid and moving so frequently throughout my childhood (I went to 19 different schools in 3 different countries by the time I was 21 years of age). She introduced me to Phyllis Krystal’s 'Cutting the Ties that Bind' method in my teens, showing me one of my first ways to connect to the spiritual leader and teacher inside of me.
I learned about Personal Leadership from my coach and friend Mick Vande Berg in 2014 when I became an IDI Qualified Administrator and when we started working together on my project to create my company, Intercultural Understanding. Personal Leadership gave me a framework with which to make better decisions around cultural differences and transitions. Using the two principles of mindfulness and creativity and the six practices that help to discern my highest and best approach by attending to judgement, emotions, physical sensations, as well as cultivating stillness, aligning with vision and engaging ambiguity, I was able to also make sense of how my cultural background and identity contributed to how I show up in the world.
Cutting the Ties that Bind (CTB) gives me a method for inner work and Personal Leadership gives me one for outer work. While both are technically “inner” work their focus is different. CTB frees me from programming that no longer serve me, and PL gives me a view into ways of being that do.
I’m grateful to Barbara for the questions she asked because it aligns with my coaching style. How can we push ourselves further and, in the process, become the person we want to be? For me coaching is a way to achieve coherence in our lives. The challenge is fun, the challenge is a way to test ourselves. Embarking on coaching is a challenge to get you to some new place where you want to be and where you can do this through fun discovery.
And again, with the help of my mom, I came up with one of the key pillars of my coaching approach. What I bring to my clients through the combination of methods is an invitation: I am going to ask you to try something new.
So having said that, I’m inviting you to come and learn more about Cutting the Ties that Bind by joining Mandy and I for some information webinars on December 10th and January 9th to learn more about the method and to see if this is something that you too can use to become the person you want to be.
