Author: James Flaherty
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A Manifesto – Beyond Coaching: What we Really Bring to the World
At our enormously exciting, inspiring and developmental UnConference last week in San Francisco, we came together as a worldwide community for the first time. Being in each other’s presence connected us to who we really are as a community and let us hear our true calling in a deep, resonant, unifying voice. I, for one,…
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Who are you – beyond the one constructed to survive?
Recently, this summer, I spoke to someone very close to me and pointed out something that was difficult to say and difficult for the other person to hear. Sounds like an everyday kind of event, doesn’t it? What was important for me, though, was that I was not speaking from my usual self. To speak up…
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Forever Jung
Just this week I read a quote from Carl Jung that shifted my way of understanding him—and brought fresh clarity to understanding people. First, a little context: Jung’s central commitment was to the development of people and not to their individual happiness. He thought each person was called to a particular destiny, and he did…
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We can’t live like this anymore
During the 10-minute drive to work this week, I listened to a local NPR station’s daily call-in show. The topic was child abuse, and the story was based upon a recent BBC documentary and an article in The Guardian newspaper written by an American physician who works at a hospital in Houston. She has studied and thought…
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Let’s end violence now
While listening recently to a recorded course called Philosophy, Religion and the Meaning of Life (yes, that’s a real title—you can check it out at The Teaching Company), I heard an amazing quote from Simone Weil: “To define force: it is that X that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.” I…
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Success is only a word
It might seem strange given my profession—being an executive and life coach and running a coaching school—that I don’t believe in success as a worthy or useful pursuit. To tell the truth, I don’t believe in it at all. Success always depends upon our surety about beginning places, and ending places and they both change…
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Is it too late?
Have the large problems facing us as humans gotten so large, complex and irreversible in their momentum that it is too late for us to reverse them or even really understand them? Has our culture in the States, so strongly shaped by marketing, evolved us into beings who cannot summon the will, fortitude, stamina and…
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Change in the world is more obvious just now
It started in Tunisia, moved to Egypt, then to Bahrain, Yemen and Libya. I’m not quite sure what the “it” is—maybe the use of social media and the wider world’s lack of tolerance for brutal suppression are providing a method, an opening and support for fundamental change that will bring greater humanity, justice and possibility…
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Friendship
In the last few weeks I have been moved on many occasions by the central importance of friendship. Perhaps it started in New Orleans, where I was taking a workshop on the Pointing Out Way of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Meditation, when two new acquaintances, Jerry and Barb, a married couple, took it upon themselves to show…
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How is coaching distinct from therapy?
Someone asks me this question every time I do a public talk about coaching. To continue the dialogue, I’m writing this piece. As will quickly be grasped, I cannot resolve the question once and for all. That’s partly because there’s not common ground as to what would constitute a satisfactory response and also because both…
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My new quest – dissolving busyness
I am going to spend the next two or three years working on what I take to be the central issue facing most of my family, friends and clients. Way too many people, when I ask them how they are, say “I’m busy.” You’ve noticed this no doubt and perhaps you say it. At first…
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Do you really want to know what’s true?
At a recent session 3 of the PCC in Boston, I came up with three essential skills for all human beings: being able to deal with the inner critic staying present with and learning from anxiety being able to tell what’s true (not in a mathematical or scientific sense but rather knowing when something I…
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Visiting China every day
My Qi Qong practice is taking over my consciousness. For a year I have been getting up every morning and doing about an hour of these extraordinary exercises. The tradition I‘m in is called Hua Shan and my teacher says that it’s over 2,500 years old. It does feel odd, ancient and simultaneously unfamiliar to…
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Integrating our life
Maybe like you, I take up different questions at different times in my life and begin to interpret what I experience, the people I meet, what I read or hear or encounter in terms of that theme. Lately I’ve been wondering about what it really means to integrate our life. Seems like an essential question…
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After Certification
Last weekend we conducted the certification process at the end of our year-long program and it left me deeply moved. Eighteen dedicated, talented and beautiful people presented their work, coached a stranger in a live situation and openly reflected on their own learnings. Every single person was vibrantly alive and present even when it didn’t…
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Why it works or doesn’t
These days I’m thinking that coaching has three parts. The first is the topic/issue/breakdown that the client brings us. These come in to us in varying degrees of size and clarity—from “my boss says I’m too pushy” to “I’m wondering what I should do with my life”—and inevitably shift, at least a bit, during the…
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Is the year ending or starting?
It’s a good thing that by cultural practice in the West this week marks the end of the year. Good because not many of us have a practice of stopping and reflecting and the year’s ending is a built-in opportunity to do that. If you are such a person please do slow down a bit…
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Knowing Yourself
It’s a funny thing that—even in a class that lasts for a full year—so much gets unsaid, so much depth is left unexplored, so many stories go unrelated. In this forum though there are no such limitations, so let’s see what there is to explore. What’s the best way to get to know yourself? The…