Welcome! We’re glad you’re here. This blog is dedicated to having ongoing conversations with people who are bringing their best to their work and life, and want to learn even more.

Who blogs here?

Diane Craver and Karen Tax are the primary contributors to this space. Together we host this blog with lots of free information about transforming how we work and live so that everyone can be their best.

We also host a social network / online learning community: IAM Learning Community.  If you like what you see on this blog, our community provides lots and lots more resources.

You can learn more about us here.

What do we discuss?

Anything related to being our best. The key for us is being our unique best – not some version defined by others. Knowing how we create value for others is an important part of being our best. We focus on how to meet needs out in the world while anchored in our personal and brilliant IAM best,  as if we are the greatest gift possible to the world. Each and every one of us.

How do we approach being our best?

We have a lot of experience to offer. And we’ve challenged ourselves to come to the IAM Learning Community everyday with a beginners mind. A lot of what we’ve learned in the past has been thrown away – it hasn’t worked. A lot of what has worked in the past is irrelevant now.

The approaches we are sharing with you, and that we continue to evolve with you are the maps and concepts that have proven themselves worthy over time. They are also as simple as we’ve possibly been able to make them.

The maps we’ve developed are the:

• Essence Map – a map of consciousness that provides a way of talking about the real IAM. Not the IAM of our dysfunction or the IAM of our past, but the IAM of our best conscious, awake selves.
• Energy Map – a useful way to talk about the practicalities of who you are, especially in language most people and businesses can understand. More importantly, it helps us understand how to manage our energy – our most important resource.
• Navigational Compass – a map of the hero’s journey, the evolution of the soul – framed by universal and global indigenous archetypes, aligned with the four intelligences (mental, spiritual, emotional, physical), and mapped to the classic adult learning styles. This map provides a way to talk about and connect the most personal with the most practical. The sections of the Navigational Compass include:
  • Leadership
  • Vision
  • Community
  • Integration

In addition to the maps, the touchstones we offer provide a way to be at our best (centering, discovering more).

The topics we’ve identified as most important to both an individual and an organization to be at it’s best are:

• career development
• leadership development
• communication skills development
• coaching skills development

Thus, the categories you see on this blog… (Karen’s background is software engineering – the engineer is still alive and well!)

We’re excited to discuss our approach with you. Even more so, we’re excited to further develop our ideas with you because there is so much that we have no idea about! We figure we have a good 20 years worth of work, flushing out the details of how to use what we’ve framed up here.

That’s where you come in. See, every time we write something, or have a conversation with you – we’re filling in details of what’s possible – of the categories we’re playing with. We’ve structured this blog around the maps and concepts we created for IAM learning. With this fabulous internet technology, we can collaborate with you on what works. As we evolve with our changing environment, we’ll evolve the IAM knowledge base with the best of what brings out our best.

Our hope is that in the process, we’ll re-create how we think about and use the structures that we use – from rigid, confining, and defining – to evolving, simple, inspiring, and fluid.

How can you collaborate with us?

Participate in our blog!

You can read our blog:

• You can simply read through the posts in chronological order, starting at the first post and working backwards.

• You can search for a particular topic of interest. Go ahead and try it! We cover a lot of ground. Use the “Search” field on the upper right of each page.
• You can also browse the categories we’ve listed on the right column. They cover all of the topics we feel are the most important to being your best. (Or maybe you can find a category you think we’ve missed?!)

• Sometimes it’s hard to remember to return to a blog to read what’s new. That’s why they invented “RSS–Really Simple Syndication.” This lets you sign up to be notified when we write new posts. You can learn more about RSS and how to sign up by going here. If you’re confused or need some help, feel free to email us.

You can comment on our blog:

• The great thing about blogs is that they allow you to comment on what we have written. To comment on a particular post:
  • Scroll to the bottom of the post you want to comment on and click on the link to “comments.”
  • Scroll to the bottom where it says “Leave a Reply.”
  • Enter your name and email address. If you have a blog or website, you can share that, too.
  • Write your comment in the box and then click on “SUBMIT COMMENT”. You should see your comment immediately. If your comment does not appear right away, something happened in the commenting process. You can either re-enter your comment or send us an email to let us know what happened.
• Add a picture to our blog by creating a Gravatar (a globally recognized avatar) by going to the Gravatar site. The cool thing is that this image will appear in any blog you add a comment to.

Our goals is for this blog and all of our work to be a two-way conversation. We contribute to the blog regularly on topics and challenges that we think are really important. We post our thoughts on the blog. You read it. Then you can either write us a comment or send us an email. Really! We want to hear from you and we try to respond to everything we get. There is nothing we enjoy more than discussing these topics (ok, maybe there are a few things better! ).

We do expect people to behave as responsible adults when using our blog. Here are some details if you need more explanation.

Use the IAM maps and tools!

We’ve provided information about each of the core IAM maps and concepts above. Please feel free to use these freely, with attribution! Our only request is that you let us know how it goes. We really want to learn from your experience, as we’re sharing our experience. If you’d like, and we hope you do.

Use one of our IAM Learning Resources!

Our goal is to provide as much free information and content to you as we can. We believe that what we’re discussing here is basically stuff we all already know. So everything on our blog and lots of stuff in the IAM Learning Community is freely available.

We also happen to think our way of organizing and thinking about the IAM material is particularly useful. And where we know we really add value is in the conversations we have with people about this stuff. So we’ve packaged some of what we’ve learned as IAM Learning Resources: as e-courses, e-books, e-reports and the like. They are delivered via our social network / community – so unlike an e-book or powerpoint presentation, we’ll be able to continue our learning conversations and collaboration with you.

We’ve priced our IAM Learning Resources to pay for our time. That’s it. It’s more important to us for these ideas to get out there to be used (you’d be doing it already if you just remembered what you already know!) than to make a boatload of money. Our goal is for our offerings to be as affordable and accessible as possible. Let us know if you think they are, or if you’d like to see something different!

Our free e-course “How to be Successful in ANY Economy” is a great introduction to the IAM Maps and our approach. Check it out!

Become an IAM Coach!

Take a look at who we are, and you can let us know from there if you are interested in learning more.

Let us know what you think!

Really, really. We want to hear from you. We love this stuff, and we’d love to hear from you.