Category: Article
Staying with the Questions
I’m a little obsessed with getting to the very bottom of a question, and then filling up the hole with all the resources I can find. Tell me more. What’s it about? How does it feel? What is the problem you want to solve? Curious, always. But then I do have trouble staying with the…
Coyote Trickster: Embracing the Unexpected
While catching up recently with two of my wonderful colleagues, one of them asked the other what kinds of new connections she was making since having chosen her fetish. Wow, I thought, what a juicy conversation this was going to be! Yet quickly I was told that this wasn’t about the kind of fetish I was…
The Shadow Side of Advice
In Coaching Circles, we stay away from giving advice because it’s the antithesis of development. When a group first gets together, we do make some room for it because it serves as a useful point of departure for developing a coaching posture. The advice reflex is so strong and culturally ingrained that no useful interaction…
Schöpfung: Why Creativity is Key in Next-Level Leadership
A while back, I attended a workshop on process and transformation. At one point, I was struggling to explain why I believe creativity is so fundamental to leadership. And then I heard someone use the word “Schöpfung,” (the workshop was taught in German), which loosely translates to “creation” or “invention.” As soon as I heard…
Body-Centered Speaking and Listening
This article was original published on the Mindful Leader Blog in June 2021. In Integral Coaching we often talk about the three centers of intelligence: head, heart, and body. Useful across all areas of coaching, they are particularly interesting to explore in the realm of speaking and listening. Recently, I had the opportunity to spend…
Beauty and Kindness: Doorways to a Truer Place
This article first appeared in the Autumn 2007 issue of the Distinctions newsletter. Beauty is not decorative. It touches us deeply, dissolves our conscious control, and connects us to levels of our being well beyond our day-to-day concerns. Beauty pierces open a sharp clear space in which we directly encounter the immediacy of our experience.…
Innocence that Heals
What’s possible as we re-emerge, and my experience in a laudromat A day after a spiritual healing retreat I attended in Feb, 2020, I was at the laundromat. As the Buddhist teacher, Jack Kornfield, says in his book, “After the Ecstasy, The Laundry”. This was about three weeks before COVID, so a pretty appropriate title.…
Knowing When to Stop
There is an ancient tradition in Judaism called the shmita, or sabbath year. It’s the seventh and final year of the agricultural cycle, when any and all productive activity is forbidden in that field. The intent is to give the land an opportunity to rest. Shortly after the pandemic arrived, I decided to stop working,…
Aligning Thoughts and Actions: a 2-Part Exercise
This article was originally published on the Mindful Leader blog in October 2020. The “Integral” in Integral Coaching has a few different meanings. It points to the multiple traditions and disciplines that weave together to form the method itself. It indicates the ways that coaches synthesize all they know and are learning to support their…
Overcoming Imposter Syndrome by Normalizing Hardship
Michelle Obama was asked what hurt her most during her tenure as First Lady. She responded by saying, “The shards that cut me the deepest were the ones that intended to cut,” referring to the negative comments on social media. Among such comments include ‘she is an ape in heels,’ ‘her daughters don’t like her,’…
The People We Pick
How do they arrive? This year, in Brady-Bunch squares. Or, sometimes, 6 feet away on the porch. My world feels both bigger and smaller now. So few people are physically in my space. I can count the people I’ve hugged without using all the fingers on one hand. At the same time, next Friday I’ll…
The Shift from Control to Contribution
One of the most challenging lessons I have had to learn in my spiritual journey is my relationship to control. It was a tough pill to swallow, to confront how little control I have in and over life. As human beings, we tend to seek control because we think it provides us with a sense…
Fragments of Souls
It’s difficult for me to throw away pictures of people. People I love are the hardest, not really surprising at all. But a close second are the people pictured on packaging, especially if their faces are meant to evoke the workforce that brought the product to me. Of these, one of the most difficult is…
The Medicine of Walking
How Walking Makes Us Human In his incredible book, In Praise of Walking, author Shane O’Mara writes that walking separates humans from other animals. Walking upright “frees our hands for other tasks…makes our minds mobile…and changes our relationship to the world.” O’Mara even concludes that a baby who grows up in a non-human environment will…
Sensing Another’s True Nature
Often when we meet someone for the first time, we introduce ourselves by saying what we do, where we live, what we enjoy. Rarely do we speak about the most elusive yet most important aspect of our lives: who we are. This is very possibly because we don’t know, not really. This is because each…
Opening Windows
Othering lives within me. The parts of me that I love and the parts that I don’t. What gets neglected in me The corners of my soul that I don’t visit for fear of the unknown Or because I have forgotten. There are rooms in my soul that are filled with dust, Webs, and darkness.…
Renegotiating When Circumstances Shift
I recently got together with some friends for the first time since March. This event was a big deal for the whole group. To ensure everyone would feel comfortable, we agreed to get Covid tests and self-quarantine in the week leading up to our get-together. And yet, I still felt very wobbly about the whole…
The Tiger, The Strawberry, and the Role of Beauty
There is a well-known Zen story about a rather non-conventional response to impending doom. A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him…
I Am, Therefore I Celebrate
What does it mean to celebrate one’s self? How does one celebrate? Since debuting my book, the notion of celebration has been one I’m sitting with. I’ve been through many celebrations in my life, and fortunately, enjoyed a fair share of my own. Mostly, we head out for some nice food, a sumptuous meal outside…
How to Listen Mindfully
This post was originally published on the Mindful Leader blog in September 2020. Many of us spend the majority of our days in conversations of one kind or another. This is particularly true for coaches, therapists, and other practitioners who spend their time supporting others’ development. Bringing greater mindfulness to how we approach conversations with…