Coaching & Counseling

How the hell can a person
Go to work in the morning
Then come home in the evening
And have nothing to say?

Make me an angel
That flies from Montgomery
Make me a poster
Of an old rodeo
Just give me one thing
That I can hold on to
To believe in this livin'
Is just a hard way to go

- John Prine, “Angel from Montgomery”

After coaching hundreds of people, I’ve come to notice a lot of the work follows a similar pattern. It seems that everyone has a kind of inner blueprint, which includes, but goes deeper than, things like personality or preferences. There are kinds of work, life situations, and life questions we are just naturally drawn towards. Ideally, we learn the discipline of locating and following these inner compasses. But life can be challenging, and the need to survive those challenges can take us away from our inner voice, or compromise our ability to hear it. In the end, it isn’t the challenges of life that are the most debilitating, or the thing we are really trying to address. Rather, it’s the chronic disconnection from our path, from the things that bring us alive. We get exhausted by the struggle to maintain our voice and internal integrity. As the song says, it’s a hard way to go. When we are able to come home to ourselves again, or maybe for the first time, we gain a lot of resiliency. Life might still be challenging but we feel vital instead of drained, not just coping, but thriving, even if we face struggle. No matter what we work on in a coaching session, it always seems to come down to this.

Healing work seems much the same. An aspect of this inner voice we have, is that we all come with a healing intelligence built into our bodies. It knows why something hurts and what needs to be done to address it, and the work is to learn how to hear that and respond to it.

Consequently, my approach is to listen closely and help connect people with their own guidance, rather than to direct people or give advice. It’s about asking questions and listening closely, refining our ability to hear what is alive in us and has its own answers, rather than imposing ready answers from the outside (as comforting as that might sometimes be.)

Still, this is active, engaged work. Many of us have experienced life events that force us to set aside our own guidance for the sake of survival. Or perhaps we have never really been deeply seen and heard, and so we’ve never really learned how to tune into and listen to our own guidance. Our individualistic culture places belonging and autonomy at opposite ends of a polarity, and teaches us that we have to treat relating as a compromise of our internal integrity instead of an expression of it. There are many challenges to the simple act of discovering and being guided by our own integrity.

Even though I don’t give advice, I often point people towards useful resources, including books, trainings, and other supportive people and environments. (A list of some of work that has informed me and which I often find helpful to share can be found here.) We are not meant to figure it all out on our own. Attending to how we can construct life environments that support us and help us to thrive is also part of my focus.

Although it’s all one conversation, at one time or another the work will foreground processes of development, healing, and transformation.

  • Personal and Professional Development

    As a life coach I've worked with hundreds of clients, using trauma-informed, ontologically-oriented whole-life and whole-being approaches. This means we include, but work beyond, particular skill-building, capacity-development, or leadership-development approaches, to investigate the overall context and function of our lives and goals. We attend to the things that bring us alive and give our lives meaning.

    Purpose is not merely something we have , but something we are. When we engage our lives from this place, we also become resilient to the trials and setbacks of life, because success is not marked by what we have achieved or lost, but by being in alignment with ourselves and our expression in the world.

    Usually, as we move into deeper self-expression, we will encounter internal barriers, places where we learned to hold ourselves back. Or, as we move forward, we will outgrow our current way of being. These specific issues require specific kinds of work. Therefore, as needed, we might shift gears into work focused primarily on attending to healing, or to the transformative work that punctuates and underpins our evolution.

  • Healing and Relational Capacity

    To bring us into alignment with ourselves, and move forward in integrity, we have to find and attend to the parts of us that learned it was safer to hold still or hold back, than to grow. In other words, sometimes, before we can move forward, we must heal. I approach healing in a trauma-informed somatically-oriented way, incorporating elements of Somatic Experiencing, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, NARM, Internal Family Systems, Polyvagal Theory, and more.

    Most of what we now call developmental trauma is the result of adaption to the failure of our early relationships to provide us appropriate support and challenge. That which has been hurt due to the rupture or failure of relationship also heals in repaired relationship. I'm a senior student of Thomas Hübl, and have been using Transparent Communication as a model for structured approaches to relationship and working with personal and collective trauma for over a decade. Working with our relational needs and capacities is central to my approach.

    Whether or not trauma is something for us to consider, I always work in a trauma-informed and holistic capacity, not just focused on thoughts and ideas, but attending to and integrating, thought, sensation, and even transpersonal and spiritual aspects of being.

    Healing gets us unstuck and allows the processes of self-development and transformation to move again.

  • Transformation & Spiritual Development

    There is no final stage of adulthood. If we keep attending to our development and healing, we will find that we periodically outgrow the structures of our own lives. The pot we are growing in has become too small, and we need to re-plant ourselves in a larger context. We are faced with the challenge of reconstructing the way we are living, and our relationships, to support our new way of being. This is beyond skill-building, and not really healing work. It is learning to orient to a new way of being.

    I have a deep background in adult consciousness development, including training in the work of Robert Kegan, Susan Cook-Greuter, Terri O'Fallon, and others. I am deeply informed by Ken Wilber's Integral model, integrating consciousness development and spiritual development. I’ve continued to attend to my own spiritual development as a lifelong Buddhist practitioner and ongoing student of Thomas Hübl. I bring practical first-person experience and insight into the process of navigating even late stages of consciousness development.

    It’s important to meet this particular form of work well, because our way of being in the world is the engine driving our desire for developing skills and the source of our capacity for healing work.