Coaching, Life Alchemy & 100% Living
your answers about coaching | how I coach | my coaching philosophy
The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.
— Albert Einstein
The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking
Albert Einstein
Coaching is a powerful collaborative process for accessing greater clarity, wisdom, creativity & engineering your potential into reality.
Who do I coach?
If you’re motivated, committed, courageous, willing and ready to do what it takes to go from average to awesome, then you’re who I coach. The key themes with my clients are change, transformation, personal and professional life optimization and transition.
How do I coach?
We kick off by figuring out exactly what our true destination is and how things will be different when we get there. Let’s be honest, clarity is key when you set off on any journey. No point turning up in Austria when you actually meant to head to Australia! Equally, some of us hold life goals or dreams without ever exploring their true origins or what they might be in service of. If, say, they’ve been inherited from implicit social messaging, even if that goal is achieved, the hoped for sense of fulfillment and satisfaction simply won’t be. We’ll work on that! Great coaching should always be about good clear directions and measurable outcomes.
How the rest unfolds varies from session to session, while I ensure we keep our eyes on the big prize. My coaching is what I call a developmental style, meaning I help you clarify what needs to be built, learned and developed, and then we craft strategies and actions to make sure that all becomes real and concrete in your life and your way of being. This way you build mastery rather than simply going for a one off win and supports you in literally becoming an upgraded you instead of just resembling a newer version from the outside. There’s a huge difference there. It also means that when the coaching is finished you are able to do it for yourself going forward. This is called ‘self-actualizing’. Great coaching should make you self-sufficient and not dependent!
A keystone of my process is a quality called presence. Like its close cousin mindfulness, a key marker of presence is the capacity to be fully present in the moment, but there is a little more to it than just that. Way more in fact.
What is it?
A quality of experience which comes online when we intentionally shift awareness from our typical ‘head-orientation’ into a way of being which is embodied, connected, centered and grounded in the moment. When we do so, so much more becomes available to us: More intelligence, more insight, more choice, far greater wisdom.
I think of it as a kind of superpower. A meta-competency for living a fully engaged and intelligently responsive life. MIT’s Otto Scharmer, founder of the Presencing Institute tells us,
“When I started realizing that the most impressive leaders and innovators seem to operate from a different core process, one that pulls them into future possibilities, I asked myself: How can we learn to better sense and connect with a future possibility that is seeking to emerge? I began to call this operating from the future as it emerges “presencing.” Presencing is a blending of the words “presence” and “sensing.” It means to sense, tune in, and act from one’s highest future potential …”
It is a quality which sits at the heart of the coach training methodologies I’ve been developing and heading and is a game-changer for revealing and unlocking our greatest creativity, wisdom and potential. Truly great leaders and innovators embody this quality. I’ll support you in developing it and integrating it into your personal toolkit. There’s plenty more unique tools which I’ve integrated into my process as an innovator in the field of coaching and change myself. In my role as creator and head of the Human Potential Institute’s coaching programs, I’ve been integrating several cutting-edge tools and strategies many drawn from the fascinating new domain of Cognitive Science. This nascent multi-disciplinary subset of science is keenly exploring areas such such as Embodied Cognition and Embodied Mind—the discovery that mind is not simply the six pounds of jello between your ears, but is an integrated whole-body system which clearly needs to be addressed to exact real lasting change. This radical new direction appears to have left many of the dominant 20th century change models (such as the once ubiquitous NLP) looking rather dated and redundant these days.
All this said, who I coach is you—meaning the unique, fascinating, possibility-filled individual that only you are. I don’t agree with formulas in coaching and so there’s no one way in which we coach. Instead I hold the monumental range of possibilities that exists for you—for all of us really—and moment by moment bring my whole self to the change process. That way, together we might potentiate possibility into gold.
That is what I mean by alchemy!
If you’d like to know more then please click these boxes below or reach out to me directly.
I feel the need to clarify as there’s definitely some confusion around what coaching (as I practice it) is and isn’t. This is largely due to the fact that, unlike other helping professional descriptors (such as a therapist), there’s no statutory control on the use of the term ‘coach’, so it has ended up being employed to describe a whole bunch of different activities.
The world’s premier body for credentialing professional coaches (and my credentialing body), the International Coaching Federation defines coaching it as,
‘… partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.’
First thing to note here is that it’s a partnership. A professional coach isn’t a mentor, consultant, therapist or advisor. We don’t have your answers, but what we do have is some really good questions that help you discover your answers. Let’s be honest how can anyone else possibly have them? I’m not the expert in you — you are!
This isn’t to say that I don’t have a ton of knowledge, insights, observations, hacks and skills which might be of enormous value. That I do have and in time (and if they’re appropriate!) we’ll get to them. But I still don’t have your answers!
Professional coaches view their role as a partner in service of your change, growth, development and towards maximizing your potential. We also differ from sport coaches who will come as an expert, give you strategies and push you towards greater success. While this is appropriate for what they do, professional coaches are more interested in helping you to craft your own strategies for learning, growth and change and then supporting you to make those happen. There’s good reason for this difference, the primary one being that this approach supports you in being able to do it for yourself. To switch on your capacity to self-generate solutions, motivation, creativity and so forth. I call this: self-actualizing. This means we’re helping you to be able coach yourself going forward.
Professional coaching is also all about forward momentum via action—going from a current stuck or unfulfilled place in life to realizing your potential—your most ideal self and way of being. This forward-orientation is also a simplistic way to highlight the differences between coaches and psychotherapists. The latter are generally preoccupied with healing the past in order to have an easier present and future, whereas we coaches are more interested in discovering how you’d like you and your life to be, then creating practical strategies to get there and getting the job done.
It also has to be said that there are a ton of people out there calling themselves a coach. Some have completed many hours of professional training and others … well, it’s hard to say. As a professional coaching educator and long-term professional coach the only guarantee you have is to check whether they are credentialed with (or their certifying/training organization is accredited with) one of the key professional bodies such as the International Coaching Federation (ICF), the Association for Coaching (AC) or the European Mentoring & Coaching Council (EMCC). Otherwise it’s a pot luck!
While this is a fairly simplistic rendering, it’s a good enough overview of the main points.
Yeah I used to talk about this 100% life a lot and I still do mention it on the home page. So what does it mean? Why not the 110% or 200% life? Firstly we’re all adults here and we all know there isn’t any such thing as more than 100%. But getting all the juice you can out of your life seems pretty appealing wouldn’t you say?
In my experience there’s very few of us who can hand on heart say their life is exactly the one they would choose in every single area. Maybe it’s the very reason why you’re even here reading this now and contemplating working with a coach. All too often while some of the pieces might be great (or at least look great from the outside!) there can be a gnawing sense that your potential, your heart’s great dream, may end up yet another unwritten book in the great library of time. In her poem The Summer Day, the late Mary Oliver wrote,
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
So this is what I’m pointing to when I speak of living a 100% life. It’s one where you live out your greatest potential. Those things you always wanted to do. The job you always thought was amazing. The book to write. The trip to take. The next-level way of being you sense is possible. That is the stuff of the 100% life. And if not now, then when?
My whole professional skillset has been built around awakening human potential. I’ve had a lifetime of research and experimentation in so many areas of optimal human functioning. From my early years spent in the elite athletic and artistic field of dance, through my engagement with leading researchers and experts in the area of longevity and aging via the Grow Young Project, to my current work in the fascinating community of biohackers and at-the-coal-face-of-research-in-application as Head of Coaching Faculty and creator of the groundbreaking Human Potential & Emergent Coach Trainings I’ve been consistently learning, evaluating and applying what helps make us function at the top of our game for over three decades now.
What even brought me into the field of coaching was a sense of mission, a calling around supporting others to live more fulfilled, happy and complete lives. A 100% life. Coco Chanel apparently once said,
‘Don’t spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door.’
Indeed please do not. Doing the same thing and expecting a different result is undeniably the former. Working with a great coach can be that door into a new way of being.
Alchemy was an early forerunner of what we now know as the field of science, primarily concerned with transforming simple and rather everyday items or objects into something of great value and importance. The classic of these was turning base lead into gold. Paulo Coelho, in his book The Alchemist wrote,
‘Lead will play its role until the world has no further need for lead; and then lead will have to turn itself into gold. That’s what alchemists do. They show that, when we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better, too.’
Why I started calling what I do alchemy was not some overblown claim that I’m able to turn you into an instant billionaire or that I have some kind of magic touch to instantly transform your life. What I had noticed is that, while I do have a pretty good level of professional skill and I show up fully to my coaching, when clients and I both committed ourselves fully to the process I was holding, that something mysterious, something magical, something I couldn’t quite nail down yet was nonetheless amazing, seemed to occur. Transformation and growth happened, radical insights emerged seemingly out of the ether, yet it wasn’t so easy to say exactly what had caused it. What was the precise mechanism.
From my perspective, the whole (the outcome) was so often greater than the sum of the parts (what we did).
In my coach training programs I am and have been attempting to break some new ground in the way coaching happens. Many coaches learn simply to sit and have nice conversations employing some really cool questions and running a few nice coachey hacks and practices up the flagpole from time to time. While I’m a big fan of the conversational skills and certainly employ them, I also know there’s a number of other ways to get under the hood, to the place where real change happens. Most of these are built on some red hot areas of cognitive science and are part of the ground-breaking methodology I’ve been building into coach training programs for some time. Somatics, Focusing, Presence, narrative and many, many more. I’ve been working with some incredible world-class researchers, thinkers, practitioners and teachers to develop my process and I (and they) know it works.
So when I talk about alchemy and the mystery in there I am also talking about science and results. I might not be able to say precisely how we might have got from there to here, or how this outcome happened exactly but I do know all the ingredients that go into the crucible.
A good question.
Mostly we connect on the Zoom platform which offers voice and visuals in the same way as Skype, but with a lot more stability and functionality. It’s very common for coaches to work in this way these days and obviously means we can both coach while in any environment providing we each have a connection and privacy. Most importantly this means you don’t lose time traveling to sessions and back.
Oh, and as such, obviously you can be anywhere on the globe to coach with me. I regularly work with clients from all over the world. The only catch for us is to suitably synch timezones. I’m generally on US eastern apart from my business travel.
With Zoom you can also connect via smartphone app as well as computer. If necessary you may simply call in as a normal voice-only phone call.
I do offer face-to-face coaching in the Chattanooga, Tennessee area and for business clients we will typically combine a mix of Zoom and face-to-face.
I also offer coaching hikes. I’m located on the stunningly beautiful Signal Mountain TN with a huge range of wilderness trails virtually on my doorstep. We take 2 hours from trailhead where we’ll meet, and coach along the hike, stopping whenever a pause seems appropriate. Often insights and new views which are not so easily accessible when in the office or in our regular everyday environment, are far more easily revealed when we’re out in nature.
How the rest unfolds varies from session to session, while I make sure we keep our eyes on the big prize. My coaching is what I call a developmental style, meaning I help you clarify what needs to be built, learned and developed, and then we craft strategies and actions to make those happen in order that you become this new upgraded you. This approach means you develop mastery rather than simply going for individual wins and helps you to literally be an upgraded you instead of simply looking like a new version. There’s a huge difference there.
A keystone of my process is a quality called presence. Like its close cousin mindfulness, presence is on one hand about being fully in this moment but it’s also way more. It also sits at the heart of the coach training methodologies I’ve been developing and heading and is a game-changer for revealing and unlocking your greatest creativity, wisdom and potential.
What is it?
A quality of experience which comes online when we intentionally shift awareness from our typical ‘head-orientation’ into a way of being which is embodied, connected, centered and grounded in the moment. When we do so, so much more becomes available to us: More choices, more insight, more options, far greater wisdom.
I think of it as a kind of superpower. A meta-competency for living a fully engaged and intelligently responsive life. MIT’s Otto Scharmer, founder of the Presencing Institute tells us,
“When I started realizing that the most impressive leaders and innovators seem to operate from a different core process, one that pulls them into future possibilities, I asked myself: How can we learn to better sense and connect with a future possibility that is seeking to emerge? I began to call this operating from the future as it emerges “presencing.” Presencing is a blending of the words “presence” and “sensing.” It means to sense, tune in, and act from one’s highest future potential …”
Truly great leaders and innovators embody this quality. I’ll support you in developing it. There’s plenty more unique tools which I’ve integrated into my process as an innovator in the field of coaching and change myself. In my role as creator and head of the Human Potential Institute’s coaching programs, I’ve been integrating several cutting-edge tools and strategies many drawn from the fascinating new domain of Cognitive Science. This nascent multi-disciplinary subset of science is keenly exploring areas such such as Embodied Cognition and Embodied Mind—the discovery that mind is not simply the six pounds of jello between your ears, but is an integrated whole-body system which clearly needs to be addressed to exact real lasting change. This radical new direction appears to have left many of the dominant 20th century change models (such as the once ubiquitous NLP) looking rather dated and redundant these days.
All this said, who I coach is you—meaning the unique, fascinating, possibility-filled individual that only you are. I don’t agree with formulas in coaching and so there’s no one way in which we coach. Instead I hold the monumental range of possibilities that exists for you—for all of us really—and moment by moment bring my whole self to the change process. That way, together we might potentiate possibility into gold.
And that is alchemy!
I feel the need to clarify as there’s definitely some confusion around what coaching (as I practice it) is and isn’t. This is largely due to the fact that, unlike other helping professional names (such as a therapist), there’s no statutory control on the use of the term, so it gets bandied about to describe a whole bunch of different activities.
The world’s premier body for credentialing professional coaches (and my credentialing body), the International Coaching Federation defines coaching it as,
‘… partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.’
First thing to note here is that it’s a partnership. A coach isn’t a mentor, consultant, therapist or advisor. We don’t have your answers, but what we do have is some really good questions that help you discover your answers. Let’s be honest how can anyone else possibly have them? I’m not the expert in you — you are!
This isn’t to say that I don’t have a ton of knowledge, insights, observations, hacks and skills which might be of enormous value. That I do have and in time (and if they’re appropriate!) we’ll get to them. But I still don’t have your answers!
Professional coaches view their work as a partnership in service of change, growth, development and maximizing potential. We also differ from sport coaches who do come as an expert, give you strategies and push you to success. While this is appropriate for what they do, good professional coaches are more interested in helping you create your strategies for learning, growth and change and supporting you to make that happen. There’s good reason for this difference, the primary on being that this approach supports you in being able to do it for yourself. To switch on your capacity to self-generate solutions, motivation, creativity and so on. I call this self-actualizing. In some ways this means we’re helping you to coach yourself going forward.
Professional coaching is also about forward momentum via action—going from a current ‘stuck’ way of being to a way better one. To realizing your ideal life and self. This forward-orientation is also a simplistic way to highlight the differences between coaches and psychotherapists. The latter are generally preoccupied with healing the past in order to have an easier present and future, whereas we coaches are more interested in discovering how you’d like you and your life to be, then creating practical strategies to get there and getting the job done.
It also has to be said that there are a ton of people out there calling themselves a coach. Some have completed many hours of professional training and others … well, it’s hard to say. As a professional coaching educator and long-term professional coach the only guarantee you have is to check whether they are credentialed with (or their certifying organization is accredited with) one of the key professional bodies such as the International Coaching Federation (ICF), the Association for Coaching (AC) or the European Mentoring & Coaching Council (EMCC). Otherwise it’s a pot luck!
While this is a fairly simplistic rendering, it’s a good enough overview of the main points. As I keep saying, if you want to know more, then book a call. Hand on heart I do not bite.
Yeah I used to talk about this 100% life a lot and I still do mention it on the home page. So what does it mean? Why not the 110% or 200% life? Firstly we’re all adults here and we all know there isn’t any such thing as more than 100%. But getting all the juice you can out of your life seems pretty appealing wouldn’t you say?
In my experience there’s very few of us who can hand on heart say their life is exactly the one they would choose in every single area. Maybe it’s the very reason why you’re even here reading this now and contemplating working with a coach. All too often while some of the pieces might be great (or at least look great from the outside!) there can be a gnawing sense that your potential, your heart’s great dream, may end up yet another unwritten book in the great library of time. In her poem The Summer Day, the late Mary Oliver wrote,
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
So this is what I’m pointing to when I speak of living a 100% life. It’s one where you live out your greatest potential. Those things you always wanted to do. The job you always thought was amazing. The book to write. The trip to take. The next-level way of being you sense is possible. That is the stuff of the 100% life. And if not now, then when?
My whole professional skillset has been built around awakening human potential. I’ve had a lifetime of research and experimentation in so many areas of optimal human functioning. From my early years spent in the elite athletic and artistic field of dance, through my engagement with leading researchers and experts in the area of longevity and aging via the Grow Young Project, to my current work in the fascinating community of biohackers and at-the-coal-face-of-research-in-application as Head of Coaching Faculty and creator of the groundbreaking Human Potential & Emergent Coach Trainings I’ve been consistently learning, evaluating and applying what helps make us function at the top of our game for over three decades now.
What even brought me into the field of coaching was a sense of mission, a calling around supporting others to live more fulfilled, happy and complete lives. A 100% life. Coco Chanel apparently once said,
“Don’t spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door. ”
Indeed please do not. Doing the same thing and expecting a different result is undeniably the former. Working with a great coach can be that door into a new way of being.
Alchemy was an early forerunner of what we now know as the field of science, primarily concerned with transforming simple and rather everyday items or objects into something of great value and importance. The classic of these was turning base lead into gold. Paulo Coelho, in his book The Alchemist wrote,
‘Lead will play its role until the world has no further need for lead; and then lead will have to turn itself into gold. That’s what alchemists do. They show that, when we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better, too.’
Why I started calling what I do alchemy was not some overblown claim that I’m able to turn you into an instant billionaire or that I have some kind of magic touch to instantly transform your life. What I had noticed is that, while I do have a pretty good level of professional skill and I show up fully to my coaching, when clients and I both committed ourselves fully to the process I was holding, that something mysterious, something magical, something I couldn’t quite nail down yet was nonetheless amazing, seemed to occur. Transformation and growth happened, radical insights emerged seemingly out of the ether, yet it wasn’t so easy to say exactly what had caused it. What was the precise mechanism.
From my perspective, the whole (the outcome) was so often greater than the sum of the parts (what we did).
In my coach training programs I am and have been attempting to break some new ground in the way coaching happens. Many coaches learn simply to sit and have nice conversations employing some really cool questions and running a few nice coachey hacks and practices up the flagpole from time to time. While I’m a big fan of the conversational skills and certainly employ them, I also know there’s a number of other ways to get under the hood, to the place where real change happens. Most of these are built on some red hot areas of cognitive science and are part of the ground-breaking methodology I’ve been building into coach training programs for some time. Somatics, Focusing, Presence, narrative and many, many more. I’ve been working with some incredible world-class researchers, thinkers, practitioners and teachers to develop my process and I (and they) know it works.
So when I talk about alchemy and the mystery in there I am also talking about science and results. I might not be able to say precisely how we might have got from there to here, or how this outcome happened exactly but I do know all the ingredients that go into the crucible.
A great and clearly important question.
Mostly we connect on the Zoom platform which offers voice and visuals in the same way as Skype, but with a lot more stability and functionality. It’s very common for coaches to work in this way these days and obviously means we can both coach while in any environment providing we each have a connection and privacy. Most importantly this means you don’t lose time traveling to sessions and back.
Oh and as such, obviously you can be anywhere on the globe to coach with me. I regularly work with clients from all over the world. The only catch for us is to suitably sync timezones. I’m generally on US eastern apart from my business travel.
With Zoom you can also connect via smartphone app as well as computer. If necessary you may simply call in as a normal voice-only phone call.
I do offer face-to-face coaching in the Chattanooga Tennessee area and for business clients we will typically combine a mix of Zoom and face-to-face.
I also offer coaching hikes. I’m located on the stunningly beautiful Signal Mountain TN with a huge range of wilderness trails virtually on my doorstep. We take 2 hours from trailhead where we’ll meet, and coach along the hike, stopping whenever a pause seems appropriate. Often insights and new views which are not so easily accessible when in the office or in our regular everyday environment, are far more easily revealed when we’re out in nature.
Get in Touch
If this above has fired your imagination as much as your motivation. If you are ready for the life you deserve. To roll up your sleeves and do the work of dropping deep into your possibility, then contact me and book a call. Your life can change.
Get in Touch
If this above has fired your imagination as much as your motivation. If you are ready for the life you deserve. To roll up your sleeves and do the work of dropping deep into your possibility, then contact me and book a call. Your life can change.