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.” It’s not that I am against being a good person, it’s just that being a good person is insufficient to being an integrated person or a whole person. And being a whole person is what I take to be the purpose of our life and certainly what gives us the experience of freedom and joy.
Integral Coaching practitioners, then, are always and only working on one thing, which is loosening our hindrances to wholeness. This “one thing” means everything. Such work provides us with unlimited challenge and profound experiences of connection and meaning, which we then can bring to our coaching work. Our coaching work in turn will continuously show us our limitations, so that we are always freshly meeting our developmental edge. Meeting our developmental edge keeps life new and reminds us that we are simultaneously and always a weird mixture of limitation and infinite possibility.
In sum, Integral Coaching is a vocation that requires us to be fully and completely ourselves, but not more than that. If we dedicate ourselves to it, we will find ourselves living harmoniously with all aspects of ourselves, with others, with the circumstances that life brings us. You can see then that I am making Integral Coaching a really big deal—big because it’s meant to include all of life, and big because it requires so much of us to do it. I’ve often felt that the deeds that our culture calls heroic—climbing tall mountains, going to the moon, rescuing people in danger—are all invitations to a journey that requires greater heroism.
Practitioners who are on this journey understand deeply that we are taking each step along the path on behalf of everyone who has lived before us or who will live after us. This path, it seems to me, is a noble one and worthy of us. Of course you will have to decide for yourself what you want your life to be about, and I trust that when you are in tune with yourself, the decision you come to will be right for you. The path of Integral Coaching is for people who find that they want to be of service and are looking for a practical way to do that.