If you missed my interview a couple weeks ago in June on the Sates and Stages piece and so much more, you can now download it here . [ 22MB]

This is not the entire interview, but the bulk of it–there is 10 minutes missing at the beginning.

One listener said:

“In listening to your recent radio interview [on states and stages] I enjoyed how you shared both intellectual knowledge and heart/spirit energy in your conversation. Smart, humble, good natured, and humorous. Soulful food for you and your listeners.”–Terri Horiuchi

Experience it now. Here .

Heh.

audio, radio

If you missed the April Interview of Suraya Keeting, Drama Therapist, on Reality Sandwich , with Julie Mathews, my co-host, you can now download the audio file [25mb] HERE.

Enjoy.

audio, intra-personal dynamics, radio

“Every human being is a philosopher. The question is: how good are they.” –paraphrasing Ken Wilber

There is a respectful way to intervene in someone’s experience. Unfortunately, few exercise it and many violate it; trespassing on the sacred space that is our internal subjective experience. People give advice all the time while violating these simple steps to respect and ecology, reducing intimacy and predictably causing the other person to close and contract rather than expand and grow. The net effect is to have the advice offered land on rocky soil.

How do we plant the seeds of contribution on fertile soil such that they can grow and thrive? There are two simple steps or principles that we can adhere to:

1. Get permission to offer the advice
2. Be in service of the other person’s outcomes

Defining Coaching

I use Mark Michael Lewis’ definition of “coaching”, which is: anytime a person is talking about their experience, they are sharing. Anytime they are talking about your experience, they are coaching and, if they are sharing for the purpose of changing another’s behavior, while more subtle, they are still coaching. As always, the proof is in the language. Any sentence that starts off with “you should, you ought to, what you need to do is, you might want to consider”, etc. is coaching, like it or not.

It is a beautiful thing to want to contribute to another human being, and we will be more effective if we ask their permission first before giving them advice.

Being in Service

What does it mean to be in service? It means that rather than give advice from our own desires for the person’s path or from what we think they should do or want, we ask them first what they want, what they hope to achieve, or what their outcome is. If we do not do this, we add an additional level of obvious disrespect to our intervention.

As always, this experience ranges from unconscious, to conscious, to super-conscious. From habit to chosen to chosen spontaneity. From instinct to intellect to intuition. From body to mind to spirit. From pre-rational to rational to trans-rational.

Jennifer had just completed a course where she learned to get out of her head and come more from a heart space. While talking to Jacob about something personal to him she told him “you need to get out of your head and drop down into your heart”. Jacob made it clear to her that she did not have permission to coach him. She replied with the slippery and emotionally dishonest response that she was not coaching. He stated again she did not have permission thereby drawing a boundary. Jennifer ignored this as well and in the process destroyed all safety and intimacy that may have been created between them. As a result, Jacob is no longer interested in sharing deep and intimate parts of himself with her.

Regardless of how well intended she was, Jennifer was behaving out of habit, unconsciousness, and from her own outcomes without permission.

Steven was a coach and he therefore had set contexts all day where he was offering his insights. People came in and paid him for his expertise in the domain of relationships. The permission was implicit and expected. Therefore, his clients were ready and willing to hear his advice. Steven conducted a detailed outcome elicitation so as not to impose his values on them. In other areas of his life—say when he was out with friends—Steven was sure to get permission to offer any advice with the simple phrase, “Can I offer something?”.

Steven was operating consciously and therefore actualized better results and was able to contribute to more people while doing so respectfully.

Kim had been evolving himself for two decades. He had been to many transformational workshops and sat amongst many evolutionary teachers. He saw many things in others that did not serve them and many mindsets they could take on to transform their lives and evolve their stage of development. However, when he noticed this, he always asked, “Where do I do what they are doing” and in doing so, he further evolved himself and always took responsibility for his own emotional and developmental life. He was always available to offer advice when others desired it, but did not impose his value-set on anyone else without explicit permission. He always asked the other person what they wanted and gave the advice in service of their outcomes.

Kim was operating trans-rationally, super-consciously, and with intentional spontaneity. Those who asked for his advice were always eager to hear it as they had sought it themselves. Therefore, the advice he gave always grew in fertile soil.

We can all give advice. Not all of us have the facility and the respect for the other being to actually ask permission and then give the advice. Still fewer wait for the other to request advice and use what we see as an opportunity to take responsibility for our own behaviors.

Setting all that aside, all it takes to operate with ultimate respect for the Other is to:

1. Get permission before giving advice
2. Always offer advice in service of the Other’s outcomes.

If only we would all conduct ourselves with such respect and consciousness.

Communication, inter-personal dynamics

Have you ever been to a workshop, had an amazing and inspiring time, knew that your life was forever changed for the better, and then within a few weeks of the experience, you were experiencing the same old habits patterns and felt dejected?

At some point we all have.

As people interested in personal development, we attend trainings and workshops, we read books, and we seek guidance. In this process, we gain access to tools, insights, and models of excellence in communication and in being. However, regardless of their promise, these do not always make the lasting and pervasive impact on our behavior that we expect them to.

Why not?

This is the result of confusing peak–and often profound–states with stages of development.

As we move through those stages [most often--unconsciously] we experience this differently. From unconscious to conscious to super-conscious. From pre-rational, to rational, to trans-rational. From shallow to deep to deeply reflective and inspiring. From instinct to intellect to intuition. From body to mind to soul with each level transcending and including the former. From ego-centric to ethno- or natio-centric to world-centric. From selfish to care to universal care with each successive stage giving us more emotional freedom and a greater sense and sensibility of responsibility in the world.

–

Jennifer went to a weekend workshop. While there, she was exposed to “what ‘the best’ do the achieve emotional mastery”. While there she experienced consistent access to peak positive emotional states, had more choice than she had ever experienced, and left certain that her life would never be the same.

And she was right—but not in the way she thought.

After about two weeks, she found her life settling back in to the same emotional rut as before the workshop. Daily events bothered her easily. She was testy and snapped at people. She found that all of the “mastery” she’d thought she had evaporated. She started to get upset about that and began to judge herself She decided the workshop “didn’t work”.

Michael went to a weekend experience. There he learned that he was making people wrong to make himself right and that he had little choice around who he was being in the moment. This led to him take responsibility for many of the challenges in his relating with others and patch many of them up. He transformed his relationship with his parents, a sibling, and his ex-wife. It was truly an amazing experience. It was mere weeks, though, before he was back to the same old blame-righteousness dynamic as before—isolating others and himself in the process. At first, Michael was confused, but then realizing that he needed to integrate the insights he had been exposed to, he hired a coach and began the challenging work of building the muscle of responsibility and giving others freedom to expand into the space created by this choice.

Samantha had long been up to the game of evolving how she related to the events in her life and how she related to herself—evolving her ego and her emotional responses. She enjoyed attending events where different speakers offered various insights and tools. At the same time, she knew there was no substitute for building the muscle of emotional choice and ultimately—freedom. This requires contemplation, meditation, and practice while exercising the facility of witnessing her self. No one can give her this. No single event can provide it. She knew that here very Self was an organic and emergent process. Just this knowledge alone gave her tremendous freedom emotionally.

–

And emotional freedom is really what it is all about, isn’t it? To be happy in the face of great challenges. To transcend guilt, fear, anger, jealousy…

That is not to say that peak states—be they from an event, an intentional medicinal rutual, a powerful meditation, or sitting with a spiritual teacher are not to be valued. In fact they are to be cherished. However, they are not to be yearned for or identified with. They are to be used to inform us as to what is possible. And as I have written before, the game of evolution is about integrating the insights we have been exposed to. So that states become permanent traits. It is important, however, that we not confuse the two, as it is our stage of development that will inform what responses we behaviorally demonstrate in the world. And this–our behavioral responses–is far more important than any insight or peak experience we have had.

Uncategorized