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How Change REALLY Works

March 16, 2023

Leaders too often see major challenges as technical problems, when they are actually adaptive challenges, requiring personal adaptive change, sometimes followed by technical skills. In my view this is the biggest barrier to effective leadership. (adapted from Ron Heifetz, Leadership Without Easy Answers) The above adaptation of a Ron Heifetz statement is one of the […]

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The Trigger is Not the Cause

February 17, 2023

(Compassionate communication) I poured my heart out in that email I sent to him last week. No response. How freakin’ rude. He obviously doesn’t care about me. Screw him! How many of us have had this kind of internal self-talk when we are triggered by a behaviour that we don’t like and take personally? How […]

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How to Be with your Goals

January 13, 2023

I set personal and professional goals. Some explicit and some implicit. “Humans are a goal-directed species” (Elliot Jaques, Ph.D. in Human Capability). I encourage my clients to set goals. That is the starting point for development, keeping our attention, behaviour and resources aligned on essential life goals. However, during the first two years of Covid, […]

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Thank God We Disagree on This

October 19, 2022

We are losing our willingness and ability to disagree with each other. Development toward a better self, a better community, largely depends upon the outcome of conversations that value and express disagreement. When we cease to challenge and listen to each other, we have signalled that self-protection and personal promotion are more important than learning […]

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I Suck at Meditating

August 12, 2022

When I asked Joe if he had ever meditated, he reacted strongly. “I suck at it. I can’t sit still for 30 minutes. I can’t clear my mind for more than a few seconds, without random thoughts creeping in. I don’t have that kind of time every day. Every minute is already allotted.” Most of […]

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Living Life in Three Parts: from no power, to power, to meaning.

July 8, 2022

In the first third of our lives, we are relatively powerless and surrounded by power figures. We are little. They are big. They tell us what to do, and we are supposed to do what we are told, or we suffer. They are not only more powerful than us, but they are also flawed human […]

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The Road to Freedom

June 6, 2022

Some also call this a spiritual journey. In my opinion the spiritual journey is a road to freedom. Regardless of how you see this path through the levels of maturing ego development, it involves an ongoing investigation of our fear and safety-motivated mind games (internal stories, beliefs, assumptions) until we decide to call out their […]

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When Will I Live?

May 6, 2022

Two years ago, the height of Covid Lockdown, confined to my room (more or less), I had a eureka experience.  When I was fully engaged in the present moment, regardless of what I was doing, I was happy.  More or most experiences during lockdown were simple, very ordinary, and yet I wasn’t bored or unhappy. […]

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Do You Believe in Fairies?

March 26, 2022

Most of you taking the time to open this post are committed to live your life with a curiosity for discovering and/or uncovering a continuously emerging Better Self that engages with life’s circumstances with quiet and wise response, rather than with our habitual noisy reactivity. One of my earliest and fondest memories was the excitement […]

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Free to Choose

February 22, 2022

The ongoing practice of Mindfulness Meditation enables us to move along a spectrum, from a paradigm of separation to one of non-separation. By “separation” I mean we see ourselves as a subject in a world of objects. Non-separation is a world of impermanence, fluid interaction and life as process and relationships rather than a world […]

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