Tag: Personal Development
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Freedom: Do You Really Want It?
Freedom and liberty are not the same thing (at least in this article). Liberty is the political/economic/legal structures that allow us to associate as we like, make a living as suits us, say what we want, etc. Freedom is when we act consistently with what is essential for us even in the face of uncertainty,…
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Forgiven
Forgiveness. Among the most healing of all human possibilities. Today, can you start by forgiving yourself? .. for your forgetfulness, your anger, your irritability, your desire to please, your frustration, your resentment, your boredom, your rushing, your waiting, your confusion? Can you forgive yourself, please, for everything you judge so harshly about yourself? And for…
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Marry Yourself
This post by NVW faculty member Marina Illich originally appeared in the Huffington Post. I don’t have enough. I can’t do enough. Indeed, I’m not good enough! Is this your mantra? I think it’s a mantra a whole lot of us intone daily, and with a frequency we barely notice. No surprise. Wherever we look,…
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How To Help
Of course you want to help. Of course you want to relieve other people of their suffering and difficulty where you can. But it’s easy to confuse what’s actually, genuinely of help with what makes you feel better. In other words, it’s easy to do what makes you at ease and then take your ease…
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How Mindfulness Makes You Powerful
This post by faculty member Marina Illich originally appeared in the Huffington Post in July of 2014. As an executive coach and leadership consultant, I think a lot about power in the work place and beyond. What is it? Where does it come from? How does it work? Conventional thinking has us believe that power…
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The difference between achieving goals and being fulfilled
Rather than helping clients solve problems, Integral Coaches work with them to develop a new way of being: one that has them live in ways that are more effective and useful across all areas of their life. We are interested in deepening our clients’ capacity to be self-generating and self-correcting. Another way of explaining this…
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The beauty of breakdown
Most of us spend our time doing everything we can to avoid breakdowns. In our culture the word itself carries an energy of panic and dread. We arm ourselves against anything or anyone that my thwart our plans or challenge our ideas of who we are. Entire lifetimes are spent busily keeping things in order…
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Story People
As well as living your life, you’re always in the midst of a story about it all, though perhaps it doesn’t often seem this way. Our stories quickly become transparent, invisible, in the living of them. But one evening, reading a book or watching a film, you find yourself deeply touched by the situation of…
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50,000 Life Coaches COULD Be Wrong: The Importance of Development in Coaching
Entering a six-month coach training program on the suspicion that life coaches are glorified confidantes who charge a lot of money and that coaching is “new-age nonsense,” the author of a recent Harper’s article finds lots of evidence to support her hypothesis. The irony of the piece’s title, “50,000 Life Coaches Can’t Be Wrong,” becomes…
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The Heart of Mindfulness
This article by faculty member Marina Illich first appeared in the Huffington Post. A Sioux saying has it that the longest journey we’ll ever make is the journey from our head to our heart. As an Ivy League-trained academic, some part of me still winces when I hear this kind of adage, thinking it sounds…
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In all seriousness
This morning I sat down. Immediately greeted by the Mystery we burst into laughter. It was a deep belly laugh. The kind that linger – that have an indelible affect. As soon as there was pause we erupted, again. We were struck by how silly I am. Oh the gut bursting hilarity of thinking richness…
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Nothing more whole
Right in the middle of your most profound difficulties, maybe the difficulties you’ve spent your whole life trying to avoid, there can be the birth of something new. Perhaps an illness, a loss, or a disappointment leads to a new kind of strength, intelligence, compassion, or kindness. Perhaps it leads to gratitude for your human…
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Beauty and Kindness: Doorways to a Truer Place
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. We know ourselves at that moment as beauty. Beauty can appear at any…
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Life as a mirror
A few weeks ago, chaos had been tracking me through my days. I felt it chugging through my veins alongside my blood cells: Urgency. Insanity. Nonsense. Annoyance. Rushing. When I get this way a particular part of me takes over: a manic, starving, prowling hyena. I am at her mercy, bending to her frightened, angry,…
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Affordances
What’s your understanding of the source of your actions and other people’s actions? Mostly we’ve been taught to think that it’s something within that produces what we do. We talk about motivation, or goals, or drive, or inspiration. We think of ourselves as separate from the world and that our actions and relationship to everything comes…
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The Power of Coming Back to Joy and How it Can Help You at Work
This article originally appeared on The Shriver Report. As an executive coach, I work with women across the professional spectrum from high tech and bio tech to finance, hospitality and start ups. Many of the women I coach report how joyless they feel. Their calendars brim with activities, juggling product launches, organizational audits and transatlantic…
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Beneath the Sky
Beneath the blanket of warm gray sky moisture falls The parched land forced to rest it can only produce so much for so long Shoots and fruits have withered the herds passed all that remains are ghosts of life passed it can only produce so much for so long it pines for lush green, flourishing…
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What are you steering your life by? (Part 2)
What makes a good day? Pretty much every moment we are asking some form of these questions: “how’s it going?”, “how am I doing?”, “am I getting what I want?”, “am I safe?”, “are people liking me?” … It doesn’t matter if we feel we are in a powerful position or an inferior position; these…
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What are you steering your life by? (Part 1)
Having goals, having intentions, having plans and preferences are all well and good but, for the most part, they do not affect how we live moment to moment, day to day. In order to bring life to our intentions and aspirations we must discover what is shaping our actions, our thoughts, our speaking right now.…
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Meeting the Shadow
In Ursula Le Guin‘s stunningly beautiful novel ‘A Wizard of Earthsea’, the young wizard Ged unleashes a terrifying shadow into the world by mistake. Stunned by his power, he stands paralysed in shock while the shadow’s claws cut deep lines into his face before disappearing. From then on, he lives a haunted life, forever running from…