Tag: Practice
The Being & Doing Dilemma
Originally Published on Feb 2, 2025 Explore the Being+Doing dilemma and discover how to balance your inner self with external expectations. Embrace a journey of self-awareness and authenticity. “We are human beings, not human doings.” “I need to stop doing and be more.” When have you said something like this? Heard someone else? I have.…
The Case For Discomfort
Any form of development work is an invitation to be with discomfort. Whether it is seeing a new distinction, taking up a new practice, or feeling that emotion and sensation you have been avoiding, some part of us—usually neglected or forgotten—is stretched. Development occurs through a series of stress and rest. Staying comfortable with what…
Midlife, COVID-19 and Climate Change Crises: What Are We Learning?
Jett Psaris, PhD has written the most beautiful book I know about midlife crisis: Hidden Blessings: Midlife Crisis as A Spiritual Awakening. It is a book I recommend often to clients needing guidance in that stage of life. In it she writes: “Some experience their entry points into midlife as maximally disturbing, with overwhelming levels…
The Importance of Self-Development in a Breaking World
I admit it: even as an Integral Coach and the person at NVW most responsible for spreading the word about our work, I’ve had moments in recent months when I’ve second guessed the point of it all. With so much of the world in dire emergency, it’s to the point that I’m literally forgetting to…
Working with Our Trauma Stories
There is much trauma in the world, and I mean Trauma with a capital “T”. After our NVW Book Study Group visited with Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, the author of The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma, I felt grateful that he shared his story of working to…
50,000 Life Coaches Could Be Wrong: The Importance of Development in Coaching
by James Flaherty 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…
The Neuroscience of Leadership
Breakthroughs in brain research explain how to make organizational transformation succeed. By David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz Re-posted from Strategy + Business, Summer 2006 / Issue 43. Mike is the CEO of a multinational pharmaceutical company, and he’s in trouble. With the patents on several key drugs due to expire soon, his business desperately needs…
How is Coaching Distinct From Therapy?
by James Flaherty 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…
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.…
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.…
Allowing The Mystery Back In
I recently spent a week meditating with 90 other people without talking. We ate, slept, walked and sat next to each other, the whole time in silence and avoiding eye contact, like peaceful zombies. I had no information about my fellow zombies. But by the week’s end, they each had a persona in my head,…
Playing with time
Okay, this may sound a little out there, but here goes. I’ve been playing with time. It all started one day a couple of years ago. I was getting worried about my coaching practice. Where would I find my next clients? Would I have to go back into the corporate world? If I did, would I…
Keeping New Year’s Resolutions by Allowing Time for Change
As we approach 2012, the tradition of New Year’s resolutions has sprung up on the horizon. The prospect of eating healthier, being kinder to ourselves, being a better this, a better that, a fully superior being: it’s all lying in wait for us. So why is it so hard to keep and follow resolutions? Isn’t it enough…
We can’t live like this anymore
During the 10-minute drive to work this week, I listened to a local NPR station’s daily call-in show. The topic was child abuse, and the story was based upon a recent BBC documentary and an article in The Guardian newspaper written by an American physician who works at a hospital in Houston. She has studied and thought…
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…
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…
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…
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…