A Question I Frequently Get

Is how did I come to segue into coaching and training from a former successful and highly fruitful journalism career?

Friends who  know me also as an activist community leader who has started several non-profit organizations have wondered about the path that lead me to become a successful coach/teacher who specializes in skills for life, relationship and conscious leadership that have helped many hundreds of clients and students elevate their lives or their careers/businesses, or improve their relationships, without spending years in therapy marriage counseling.

Part of the answer is that in youth I was fascinated by the question of: Why we do what we do? Why so much pain, conflict, disappointment, heartbreak and depression in life? How come society could often be so dysfunctional and unjust – and how could it be changed for the better?

As a young journalist I pursued these questions right into significant  reportage on the post-Freudian human development movement. I attended scores of personal development trainings and workshops. I came to understand that you need two kinds of skills to make our lives and relationship fully successful and positive. (1) skills to transform your own and other’s emotional and mental reactiveness (low self esteem being just one of innumerable subsets of that), and (2) skills that create a much healthier and more loving way of relating to self and others – and life itself – in all circumstances.

I also got it that we’re like fish unaware they are in water – that we are mostly blind to the power and effect of the beliefs and assumptions we hold and which we swim around in – and out of which we create culture and society as well as form our relationships to ourselves and others.

Then, 20 years ago, as a break from media, with no intention of become a coach or therapist,  for the fun of it I signed up for a master’s degree program in spiritual psychology. During its two-year course I discovered I had a surprising-to-me natural gift for coaching, so much so that other students asked to come to my home to work with me. I said yes as an adventure…and within a year, with no promotion by me, I was seeing 25 clients a week, all via word of mouth.

And another career was born.

The Life Issues We All Encounter

All coaching ultimately is about mastery – including  mastery of inner emotional and mental demons as well as of career and financial matters and relationships. Done well, you get to dive right into and transform the pain and challenges of life in every facet you may live it.

Coaching also accepts as a basic reality the strange dynamic of our inner lives that contain an assortment of voices and inner critics (an inner sense of not good enough, for example, turns out to be a significant issue among successful CEOs). These voices compete with our latent and often untapped wisdom, which seeks clarity and effectiveness in the labyrinth that is human affairs.

What I prize (and focus on in my coaching and teaching, as in my life) is the experience of finding your way into that sweet safe alignment of your authentic inner life with the outer relational and social order. That’s where you are enthusiastically engaged in your life as life itself, able to handle any traumas, and where you are in service both to your best self and – in subtle if not obvious ways – to others, to the common good and to the evolution of human affairs from destructive to constructive.

My clients and students report learning skills, tools and a way of thinking which give them more confidence in nearly every situation, making them better able to cope when challenged, and which open their lives to the potential of being leaders in their field.

In sum, as a client you up your life game while gaining a sophisticated education in the realities of human inter-reaction and self-hood that the culture fails to provide to us en mass. With that, you may find yourself being one of those individuals who show the way into an elevated (and saner) way of being, with all its rich possibilities in the world.

If you choose to gift yourself the opportunity to experience my unique work directly,  it would be my privilege to be of service to you.