Category: Article
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…
Stop! Look! Listen!
My six-year old twins learned these three words this past year in Kindergarten. Educators and parents often use them to remind kids to pay attention before crossing a street, or navigating the play yard. In true coach fashion, I have adopted these powerful words as part of a daily mantra/practice for my family and myself.…
The Shadow of Development
Resistance–gotta love it. It’s something we all have and know, and most often do not like or appreciate. It reminds me of one of those Chinese finger traps, where you put a finger in either end of this tube, and the harder you pull to get your fingers out, the tighter it gets. It’s the…
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…
Cultivating innocence
In recent months, I have been admiring my daughter, who is completing her first year as a high school teacher. She has embraced her new career with courage, passion and a great deal of innocence. I see innocence not as a detriment, but rather as a beautiful quality of her heart. Every day, every week…
Extreme empathy
In coaching, we speak a lot about empathy being a gateway to understanding our clients’ internal landscapes. The ability to be sensitive to what another is feeling in our work is, well, everything. Without some identification with the client’s experience, we are in a place of judging or advising from an outside perspective – nothing…
Nothing to do but “be with”
Each year in late November, around Thanksgiving, I begin a cycle of reflection. As the daylight hours become shorter and dark hours grow longer, it feels like time begins to slow down. Turning inward, I reflect on how life is turning out for me: What is the quality of life that I am experiencing? What…
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…
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…
Needing to be needed
The other day, a brilliant colleague likened self-care to the oxygen mask drill on airplanes – specifically, the part about always affixing our own mask before assisting others. In other words, if your own ability to take a breath is compromised, how in the world can you be of service to anyone else? “Basically, if…
Living in the Question
A potent question is a portal to infinite creativity. Socrates introduced us to a type of pedagogy in his method of questioning. Rilke implored his young poet to live in the question. Artistry lies in lingering with the curiosity that transforms our narrative. For years I lived in the question: What work is worth doing,…
Learning or practice: which is greater?
At the heart of Integral Coaching is the understanding that it’s in the nature of human beings to become who we are through our practices, the purposeful actions we repeat again and again. There are all kinds of grounds for this claim. The extraordinary plasticity of our nervous systems is one. The observations of the…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…