Author: James Flaherty
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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.…
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More than Anything Else, You Must Remember This
Something like 56 million sensory impressions come into our body at any given moment. We walk around or drive around listening to music, talking to people, reading billboards, thinking/planning/evaluating and, in midst of all that, someone or something interrupts us and takes our attention in a different direction. Our life could be seen easily as…
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How Deep Can You Go as a Coach?
How deep we go in as a coach may well come down to three factors: how open and capable of deep exploration our client is the depth of presence and skill of the coach the intention of the program. I guess as you read this there are a lot more than three factors in the…
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Cultivating Coaching Guidance
I don’t think anyone can learn how to deeply powerfully, lastingly coach someone solely by watching others do it. Here’s why: it’s like watching a skillful, experienced chess players or masterful jazz musicians and trying to determine why each is taking the action they are. In these examples, each observed person is freshly responding to…
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Newsletter Book Review: “The Best of the Best”
In the Spring 2015 issue of Distinctions, James Flaherty reviewed The Reality of Being: The Fourth Way of Gurdjieff by Jeanne De Salzmann. James says, “[De Salzmann] lays out our human condition—our being asleep and not knowing it, our self-indulgent self-importance, our ways of living that keep us confused with open eyed honesty—and yet never…
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Happiness
This article originally appeared in the Summer 2006 issue of the Distinctions newsletter. Old message, timeless wisdom. Happy reading! “All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in…
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Going For It — Really
Many people think, feel, or act as if “going for it” means putting lots of attention, time and energy into getting what they want. In this way of looking at things there are two options: getting what you want or putting up with what you get. Folks are encouraged to go for it, applauded when…
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Is Change Really Difficult?
I suppose that the whole discipline of coaching wouldn’t exist if the assumption didn’t persist that change for us humans is quite difficult. The notion seems such common sense that many of us have never challenged it or even given it much thought. But I wonder if it’s the case? Or to be more exact,…
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Limitation and Infinite Possibility
As Integral Coaches, we don’t have to leave out any parts of ourselves … just as we don’t leave out any part of life in our client work. This is, of course, easier said than done since we live in culture that has strong public standards about what it is to be a “good person.”…
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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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Studying the work of Sri Aurobindo
In the autumn issue of the Distinctions newsletter, James Flaherty takes up the topic of tuning into our inner guidance. To set the stage, he introduces the work of Sri Aurobindo. Here is an excerpt from the article, which includes a bit about this fascinating figure. Sri Aurobindo was a philosopher and spiritual teacher in…
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The Model Is Not the Person: Warnings About Assessments
The following is an excerpt from James Flaherty’s upcoming book, Coaching Now. Integral coaching employs three central models. Before I begin talking about them, I’ll give you the warnings that all model-givers provide but that are often ignored. The first warning is that the model is not the person. We know this more broadly as…
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Uncovering Integral Leadership: Leading With Our Whole Selves
An article written by James Flaherty is featured in the September issue of HR.com’s e-publication, Leadership Excellence Essentials.
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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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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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Our Experience is Endlessly Meaningful
When we are uncertain or unclear, many of us rely on our experience instead of trusting what someone else says or something we read in a book. All of us have heard people explain what they are doing or deciding by saying, “That’s my experience.” By “experience,” I mean what is showing up in our…
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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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Bringing your voice to the world
Too many of us are waiting. Waiting until all our concerns and worries are resolved, we have financial security, our stock options vest, our children are settled, we have a strong relationship. Are you waiting for something? Meanwhile, life speeds by, gaining momentum as we grow older. Let’s get over our waiting and start now.…
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Building Competence in the Integrating Stream of Development
One new concept with which we’re working now is how to build a client’s competence around integrating all aspects of her/his life as the primary way to catalyze development. Here is an example of how that might look with a client. Joan works for a high-tech company in a very competitive environment. She feels a…