Sylvia Lafair, Ph.D., and Herb Kaufman initially founded Creative Energy Options, Inc. (CEO) in 1985 as a wellness center to help individuals, couples, and families learn new and more effective ways to communicate with each other and move toward optimum health. Throughout the years, they created many innovative programs in health care, education, and business by bringing leading-edge teachers to share their wisdom at The Country Place, their retreat and conference center in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. "Studies in the New Therapies," "The Future of Education," and the "Business of Business" series brought together an array of highly respected leaders including Deepak Chopra, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Bernie Siegel, David Whyte, Harrison Owen, Robert Bly, Marion Woodman and Willis Harman.
By the early 1990s, Sylvia and Herb were asked to work with Fortune 100 companies and family firms to teach their highly effective methods for conflict resolution and creative collaboration. They were intrigued to discover that the same methods that worked for families also worked at work!
As the couple continued to engage with business teams, a particularly fascinating and unexpected insight became clear: that patterns of behavior are passed from one generation to the next, and that individuals unaware of these patterns tend to repeat them over and over in spite of often-negative consequences. Sylvia and Herb began to help individuals and teams to observe, understand, and transform the hidden family patterns activated in their work settings, allowing them to untie the “knots” of “cannot, am not, and not good enough” that limit their success. This was the inspiration for the PatternAware™ Leadership Model, the foundation of CEO’s work today.
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