Barb Kobe: confident healing artist, visionary designer, teacher, facilitator, creativity coach, and author. Barb and I started like most of my professional relationships. She needed a business mentor, and so did her husband, Bill (a chiropractor at the time). In the 1990s, each WeMentor peer group worked on business planning. I wrote curriculum integrating emotional intelligence into the business planning and leading process. Barb added her creative insights as a participant and evolved into being a facilitator. Barb and I have become treasured lifelong friends.

Barb’s book, The Healing Doll Way: A Guided Process Creating Art Dolls for Self-Discovery, Awareness and Transformation (Beavers Pond Press) just won a Next Generation Indie Book Award under the category of Body, Mind and Spirit.

Our idea of play is to do a creative healing project together. Barb created a loving kindness exercise you can incorporate into your day. The instructions are described in the podcast. You can also scroll down to find them in the Mentoring Tips below.

Barb makes healing dolls and teaches others to heal themselves through doll making. She spent 20 years honing the healing doll process and recently published The Healing Doll Way: A Guided Process Creating Art Dolls for Self-Discovery, Awareness, and Transformation. Her book has inspired women around the world, and a few men, to embark on healing the feminine within. It is beauty, spirituality, and healing combined, writes one of her fans. I ditto that comment.

Samba, Dance of Life doll by Barb Kobe

The healing doll process is based on archetypes: Guardian (defender, protector, keeper), Scapegoat (what’s in the way of what you want, going into the dark, or shadow), Talisman (going after what you want or stepping into the light), Inner Healer (naming your healing and wisdom ways) and Loving Kindness (nurture yourself and be grateful). These characters are images and themes with universal meaning in basic human experience and stay the same, regardless of the plot or time period.

We delve into an encouraging conversation of her upbringing with immigrant parents from Belgium. A modern, free enterprise economy tied to Europe. Belgium is known to have a well-diversified economy in transport, services, manufacturing and high tech, a brilliant infrastructure, and a solid education and health system.

In the 1950s, in Belgium, many families could not afford to educate their girls. Barb’s mom raised her and her three brothers with an 8^th grade education.

Barb describes traditions she grew up in. Her mother would get her dolls from all over the world representing different stages of her life, like getting one of the first Barbie dolls. As she speaks of this, she uncovers something new about herself. She then does what she teaches, follows a thread of thought to see where it will lead with great curiosity.

It is time for a Healing Artist’s voice. A time where poets are consulted to interpret the world around us. Barb lays out for us the content of her life and ways she developed her talents as a graphic designer and doll maker and emotional communicator. Her connections with her mother whom was raised in a home with 10 other siblings’ sets her foundation. Her learnings from her father who was raised in poverty, WWII vet, gifted wood-maker, an accountant, and world traveler. She describes what it took for her parents to raise three brothers and herself. Her admiration for both of them is clear. The lessons learned play out in her life. Healing practices she incorporates into daily life have shaped who she is today, an accomplished human being and artist skilled in emotional expression, creative healing, and personal dollmaking.

Barb has been on a lifelong journey to help others who have suffered from trauma and practices in homes of nonfeeling. How many of you have been told you are ‘too sensitive?’ Being taught to shutoff your emotions is a form of trauma that takes a lifetime to heal. Gain insights from our wise woman conversation and add loving kindness into your daily self-leadership practice.

Upcoming WeMentor Mini LAB: Strengthen Your Intrinsic Leadership and Mentoring VALUE!

Join John Patching and I as we create with you two MINI PLANs. We’ll show you the components so you can create a Self-Leadership Plan and components for you to create a plan to Lead and Mentor Others more effectually. Take charge of your leadership future. Join us on May 14^th (3:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.) for a fantastic evening tailor-fit for you!

Tune in more deeply into who you are.

• You will learn how to monitor and modify energy and information between your brain, mind, and relationships through mindfulness.
• You will understand and learn how to process the environments you are in more quickly. You will practice becoming an empathic listener and determine different levels of responsibility.
• You will learn ways to expand the level of trust with yourself and others you lead and mentor.
• You will increase your emotional intelligence in the workplace and learn what it takes to lead yourself and mentor others.

Mentoring Tips

After listening, do the following meditation exercises:

• Plug in your Loving Kindness battery today. Art Activity Instructions: draw a circle. In the circle would be a circle in the center that would hold an image of a heart. Add words around that heart of ways that you could love yourself this week. Take this a step further and notice how other people love and care for themselves. Use them as mirrors or mentors in giving you ideas to incorporate loving kindness in your day.
• Order The Healing Doll Way: A Guided Process Creating Art Dolls for Self-Discovery, Awareness, and Transformation, click here!

Mentoring Help

• Register for the WeMentor Mini LAB here!
• Check out a WeMentor Entrepreneurial Leadership and Mentoring LAB! Reinvent (evolve) who you are while you redesign your business.
• Subscribe to this podcast.

A Healing Artist of Our Time, Barb Kobe   Episode 172       Barb Kobe  

Heroine Journey Collage by Barb Kobe