Alana Peters, Leadership Coaching and Facilitation

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Alana Peters, Leadership Coaching and Facilitation What do you want for the next chapter of your life or career? What do you want to create, accomplish or explore? Contact me at [email protected]

Discover conversations and workshops that will inspire you and your organization. I offer a full range of professional development services including keynote addresses, workshop facilitation and coaching. These can all be customized to suit your organizational needs. Dare to Lead™, a program and skillset based on the research of Dr. Brené Brown is one of the programs I offer and customize to fit the needs of each organization. As a member and Professional Certified Coach, PCC, associated with the International I am committed to bringing you coaching that is designed with your success in mind. Royal Roads University, based in Victoria, BC, is where I took my training. It was truly life changing. I am also qualified to offer my clients EQi assessments and 360 assessments to both inform and inspire their next steps. With thirty years of working in leadership, education and ministry, I have lived and worked in six communities where I have loved and served people. In our conversations, you will experience an authentic, challenging voice that speaks truth with compassion. You'll discover new things about yourself; greater courage, grounded confidence and a signature presence that will take you to new places. Who do you have to support your growth? Who is there to ask you the hard questions? What have you yet to discover?

When I ask senior leaders what they are running on, the first answer is almost always about what they have produced. The...
10/23/2026

When I ask senior leaders what they are running on, the first answer is almost always about what they have produced. They tell me what got delivered, what is still outstanding and how far behind the list has slipped. That is an honest account of output, but it says very little about what the output was drawn from.

The aspen leaves in this photograph show the difference. Before an aspen drops its leaves in the fall, it breaks down the green and draws much of the nitrogen back out of them into its branches and roots. That store carries through the winter and feeds the first growth in spring, before there are leaves to make anything new. The gold is what shows once the green has been taken back, and the green flecks still on these leaves are the last of it.

Our own reserve can be named just as specifically. A leader runs on relationships with credit in them, decisions already made that do not need reopening under pressure, judgment tested enough that a pattern shows in three weeks instead of three months, structures that run without us in the room, and the physical state we actually arrive in on a Monday morning.

That is what we push from when the work asks for more than the week can supply, and it is what the fifth permaculture principle is about: use and value what renews. Most of us could not say how much of it we have, because we gauge it by output, and output is one of the last places a shortfall shows.

This month is about that reserve: what it is made of, what rebuilds it, and what draws it down without anyone noticing. It starts with being able to name it.

This cottontail is sitting in a thicket of shrubs and wild rose that keeps the wind and the predators off it. Nobody pla...
10/21/2026

This cottontail is sitting in a thicket of shrubs and wild rose that keeps the wind and the predators off it. Nobody planted that thicket for the rabbit, and nobody tends it. It provides shelter every day all the same, and its value usually becomes obvious only when one is cleared. Permaculture has a principle for this: use and value renewable resources and services. Using what renews is easy. Valuing it means noticing it while it is still there.

Our workplaces run on services too. A colleague brings the bad news early, while it can still be handled. Someone makes a new hire feel expected. Someone else keeps a meeting honest when it would be easier not to. None of it shows up in a report, and all of it holds something up.

These services last only while the person offering them still has a reason to. When they are taken for granted long enough they stop, quietly, and we tend to find out what someone was holding up the way we learn what a thicket was doing: after it has been cleared.

There is research behind this. Adam Grant and Francesca Gino ran a study in which people helped a stranger with a cover letter and were then asked for help a second time. Of those who had received a neutral reply, 32 percent helped again. Of those who had been thanked, 66 percent did. Being thanked did not work by lifting their mood. It worked by telling them their help was valued and wanted.

So gratitude is not only a feeling. It is how we notice what keeps arriving, and part of what keeps it arriving. Thanking someone specifically, for the actual thing they do, answers a question most helpers carry quietly: whether what they offer is wanted at all. Before the week starts again, it is worth naming one person whose work holds up something no one measures, and telling them what it is.

This month I am spending time on this principle: what we run on, what renews, and what quietly does not.

Fireweed has gone to seed along a prairie roadside, and the silk is lifting off the stalks and carrying in the wind. Not...
10/13/2026

Fireweed has gone to seed along a prairie roadside, and the silk is lifting off the stalks and carrying in the wind. Nothing the plant built this year stays with the plant. All of it moves outward, into ground the plant will never see.

The work of regulating ourselves and seeing ourselves clearly can sound like private, internal work, something a leader does for their own steadiness. It is that. But it never stays there. A leader who has learned to notice the pull to react, and to choose instead, changes the temperature of every room they are in. A leader who has looked honestly at how they land stops making the people around them absorb the pattern they could not see.

Self-regulation is not self-management for its own sake. It is the most direct thing any of us can do for the people we are responsible for. The steadier and clearer we are, the less our teams have to spend managing us, and the more they have for the work that is actually theirs. Awareness makes choice possible. Choice makes change possible. And change, held long enough and shared widely enough, is what transformation actually is. It does not stay in the leader. It moves outward, the way the seed does.

In the weeks ahead I follow this thread outward, into what a senior leader actually runs on. What renews and what does not. It is the territory of the next principle in the series, and the next essay.
Thank you for the depth of attention you have brought to this month.

If this is the kind of work your organization needs this fall, connect with me here or email [email protected]. I am booking coaching and team training now.

If you have been considering the public Dare to Lead™ workshop in Red Deer October 23rd, 24th and 26th, registration is still open and I would be pleased for you to join me.

Nothing in the growing year looks less dramatic than seed ready to spill over the ground below, and nothing in it is mor...
10/13/2026

Nothing in the growing year looks less dramatic than seed ready to spill over the ground below, and nothing in it is more decisive. What goes in now, deliberately, is what there is to work with later.

A note for the leaders who have been reading along this month, now that the year has turned. Awareness makes choice possible. Choice only becomes change when you act on it, and this is the month to act.

My practice is built around the questions this month has circled. How do we stay steady through the season that asks the most of us? How do we see ourselves clearly enough to lead ourselves well rather than manage ourselves harder? What becomes possible when a senior leader stops running on assumption and starts working from an honest read of how they actually land?

The concrete way this work usually starts is the Leadership Circle Profile™, a research-based 360 developed by The Leadership Circle that shows a leader how they are experienced by the people around them and the gap between what they intend and how they land. We debrief it together, and then we work with what it surfaces.

From there some leaders continue in one-to-one coaching through the fall. I also facilitate Dare to Lead™, with a public workshop in Red Deer this October (23rd, 24th and 26th) for leaders who would rather do this work alongside others than one to one. Much of this happens with HR and People leaders, often the first to see that how their senior leaders regulate themselves and take feedback is a culture question, not only an individual one, and often the ones who open that conversation with their president, CEO, or executive director. That is the heart of the regenerative work: culture is not a program we run, it is the accumulated conditions our leaders create. The work runs with leaders and their people across purpose-driven organizations, in Canada and internationally.

This is the season the year turns, which makes it the natural moment to start something like this. If some part of this month has been describing your own situation more accurately than you expected, the next step is a conversation. Message me here or email [email protected] and tell me what your fall looks like. And if the October workshop is the better fit, registration is still open. https://www.alanapeters.com/https/wwweventbriteca/e/1098142717429affoddtdtcreator/https/wwweventbriteca/e/dare-to-leadtm-leadership-organizational-culture-october-23-24-26-tickets-1994873136251affoddtdtcreator

Picture a Mountain Ash tree in the fall. The fruit has been on the tree all summer, but now colour has come in, tipping ...
10/06/2026

Picture a Mountain Ash tree in the fall. The fruit has been on the tree all summer, but now colour has come in, tipping from white to red. The calendar has its own turns like this, and for most organizations the sharpest one is happening right now.

Fall is the real new year.

Not January. January is a date. Fall is when the organizational year actually restarts. People come back, budgets reopen, hiring resumes, the strategic calendar fills in, and the pace changes almost overnight. Everyone feels it. Almost no one uses it.

That turn is not only pressure. It is also an opening. The same reset that fills our calendars gives us a natural moment to enter the year differently instead of simply faster. The question worth asking is whether the way we led last fall is the way we want to lead this one, and if not, this is the cleanest moment all year to change it. Change does not begin with effort. It begins with a choice, and a turn like this is what makes the choice available.

For a lot of the leaders I work with, entering the year differently has meant not doing it alone. Bringing in a thinking partner, someone outside the system whose only job is to help them see clearly and choose well. Often we start with feedback, with a structured read of how they are actually experienced in the role, because you cannot decide what to change until you can see what is there.
If you can feel the year turning, you have a choice about how you meet it, and this is the window to make it deliberately. Two concrete ways to start. Message me here or email [email protected] and we will talk about what your fall is going to ask of you, and whether an honest read of how you are landing would help.

Or join the public Dare to Lead™ workshop I am running in Red Deer October 23, 24, 26. Registration is open. Will you join me? https://www.alanapeters.com/https/wwweventbriteca/e/1098142717429affoddtdtcreator/https/wwweventbriteca/e/dare-to-leadtm-leadership-organizational-culture-october-23-24-26-tickets-1994873136251affoddtdtcreator

Earlier this year I worked with a senior leader who was, by every external measure, doing well. Respected. Delivering. T...
10/02/2026

Earlier this year I worked with a senior leader who was, by every external measure, doing well. Respected. Delivering. The kind of leader an organization leans on. And privately worn down in a way that did not match how well things appeared to be going.

Instead of time management, we started with feedback. Structured, honest feedback about how they were actually landing on the people around them, gathered through their Leadership Circle Profile™. What came back was not that they were failing anyone. It was that they were carrying almost everything themselves: reading every room, absorbing every tension, quietly making sure everyone else was okay. And the people around them had learned to let them.

We did not fix that in a session. What changed is that they could see it, named in front of them, in a form they could not argue with because it had come from the people they trusted. Awareness did not fix anything on its own. It made choice possible, which is the only place change has ever started. The photo is from a session like that one, where the flip chart holds what a leader came to once the pattern had a name and a shape.

That is most of what the work is. Not fixing the leader. Helping the leader see clearly enough to regulate from choice instead of habit. If you want to look at your own pattern this fall,
message me here or email [email protected]
and we will set up a conversation.

I'm in Victoria this week, and spent a morning at The Butchart Gardens. These Totem poles were carved in Coast Salish st...
09/30/2026

I'm in Victoria this week, and spent a morning at The Butchart Gardens. These Totem poles were carved in Coast Salish style by master carvers Charles Elliott of the Tsartlip First Nation and Doug LaFortune of the Tsawout First Nation, and dedicated in 2004. Both Nations are WSÁNEĆ, and the Gardens sit on WSÁNEĆ land.

Before the work I do now, I spent twenty years as an educator, in classrooms in five Alberta communities. On this day I think about what I was taught, and what I wasn't, about the schools that came before mine. I think about the children who went to these schools and didn't come home, and the families still carrying that weight.

Reconciliation depends on truth first, and the truth is still ours to learn. Today I'm rereading the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's 94 Calls to Action. Have you read these calls to action? Where can you focus your attention to support reconciliation?

Thank you to the carvers, and to the survivors whose testimony made this day possible.

🧡

A line I keep coming back to in the work I do with senior leaders: we cannot regulate what we cannot see.We spend a lot ...
09/29/2026

A line I keep coming back to in the work I do with senior leaders: we cannot regulate what we cannot see.

We spend a lot of leadership development on managing behaviour: communicate better, delegate more, hold the difficult conversation. Useful, all of it. But it treats the visible behaviour as the thing to fix, when the behaviour is almost always the downstream expression of something we cannot see from the inside: a set of assumptions about what we have to do to be safe, valued, and in control. We can coach the behaviour all year. If the assumption underneath it stays invisible, the behaviour comes back the moment the pressure returns. And the pressure returns every September.

This is why I use the Leadership Circle Profile™ in my work, and why I am naming it directly this month. It is a research-based, standardized 360 assessment developed by The Leadership Circle. It gathers how the people around a leader actually experience them in the role: their manager, their peers, and their direct reports. It shows the gap between what they intend and how they actually land, and it connects what people see on the surface to the habits of mind underneath, the difference between leading from a reactive place and a more creative one. It shows a leader not just what they do, but the pattern beneath what they do.

What I watch happen when a senior leader reads their own profile for the first time is not usually surprise at the content. Most of us already half-know. It is the relief of finally seeing the whole pattern laid out clearly, in language that is precise rather than accusing, with a way forward attached. We cannot regulate a pattern we cannot see. Once we can see it, we have a choice where before we only had a habit.

If this is the question you have been sitting with, how do I lead myself better rather than manage myself harder, you are not alone in it. It is the question my practice is built around. If you want to look at your own profile this fall, message me here or email [email protected] and we will set up a conversation. I am also running a public Dare to Lead™ workshop in Red Deer this October. Early bird pricing is open until September 30.
https://www.alanapeters.com/https/wwweventbriteca/e/1098142717429affoddtdtcreator/https/wwweventbriteca/e/dare-to-leadtm-leadership-organizational-culture-october-23-24-26-tickets-1994873136251affoddtdtcreator

Feedback is given and received. That is what it is as a leadership skill, and both halves are harder than they look. Wha...
09/22/2026

Feedback is given and received. That is what it is as a leadership skill, and both halves are harder than they look. What makes them possible is not technique. In Dare to Lead™, which I facilitate, it comes down to four capacities being available: vulnerability, trust, clarity about what we value, and the fortitude to stay in it when it gets uncomfortable. Given without those, feedback lands as judgment. Received without them, it lands as threat.

There is a second kind of feedback, and it is the one most of us miss. Not what anyone gives us. What the system returns.

We cannot see the wind. We can only see what it moves: the corn stalks bending, the leaves swishing away. A system answers us the same way. Nothing is delivered, nothing is addressed to anyone, and the information is there regardless, in what moves around us.

It is in how quickly people bring us bad news, or how long they wait. In whether the room gets more honest when we walk in, or more careful. In what our direct reports have stopped raising and started working around. In the meetings that used to have friction and now reach agreement too fast. None of that was given to anyone. All of it is accurate, because no one edited it first.

And here is where it stops. We can observe the whole system except the part of it that is us. We cannot see our own face in the hard moment, or hear our own tone the way our newest direct report hears it.

That is not a character flaw. It is a structural fact of standing inside the role, and it is why self-regulation on its own is not enough. We can only regulate what we can see. Awareness is where all of this starts, and this is the piece of it none of us reach alone.

A few leaves are beginning to change color. Have you noticed? The tree has read something in the light and the length of...
09/16/2026

A few leaves are beginning to change color. Have you noticed? The tree has read something in the light and the length of the days, and it has begun to respond. The first signal always arrives before the season does. Now that the year has restarted, the most strategic thing any of us can do is read our own first signals.

Last month I wrote about three patterns I see in senior leaders under prolonged pressure: Fading, Frustrated, and Fawning. Fawning is the one most often mistaken for good leadership, because from the outside it looks like steadiness. Each of the three has an early signal, and the signal almost always shows up in the body and the calendar before it shows up in behaviour.

The thing that comes off the calendar first when the week gets tight. The meeting we start dreading a day ahead. The email we reread four times before sending because something in us has gone careful. The no we softened into a maybe, and then into a yes. These are not failures. They are the first yellow leaf.

The demand is ramping up again now. But the conditions that determine how we meet it were set over the summer, in how depleted or resourced we actually are underneath. Most of us do not check. We come into the fall running on last year's reserves and wonder why the same season that energized us once now flattens us.

Self-regulation starts here, with an honest read of our own state. Not the performance of being fine. The actual reading of what is full and what is thin. What we are quietly already dreading. Noticing is not the work itself. It is what makes choice possible. Take that reading while there is still room to act on it, and decide what needs handling before the year gets heavy.

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