Integral Coaching: An Interview with James Flaherty
by Russ Volckmann, PhD
Q: I want to start with your interest in Integral. When I reviewed your book, Coaching: Evoking Excellence in Others , I found the domains of competence that include the "I, it, we." You discuss intellect, emotion, will, context and soul. I was reminded of the holon and the notion of lines of development and wondered what were the sources of your thinking about coaching and in what way was it related to Wilber's work?
A: I don't think that Wilber was central to my thinking. I read some of his earlier work, but I hadn't read Sex, Ecology and, Spirituality or other more recent works. The "I, we, it" model, I got from Jurgen Habermas, the fellow that came up with it, and from reading Thomas McCarthy, the great English translator and colleague of Habermas. It offered such a rich way of working with the people.
Since high school, I have had this idea that there ought to be somebody that you could go to and bring them your life situation, your problem, your difficulty, your question and they would have so many different ways to teach you about it. They would say, "Oh, meditation, acupuncture, weightlifting or travel." They would just be part of a doorway to a whole universe that eventually, we could get to ourselves but they found it before us and are our link to it.
I think a coach is a person who is a link to many, many different traditions. I was interested in that idea. That's where the "I, we, it" seemed so powerful to me. I've used it many difference places. For example, with leaders I think it's a great way for someone displaying their leadership in the world. How much of the "I" world is involved in what they do? How much is the "we" world and how much is the "it" world?
I think there is a big difference between somebody who is a technology executive who may have much greater emphasis on the "it" world and somebody who is in marketing. The latter has much more emphasis on the "we" world.
The other model, I just made up one day. I don't know where it came from other than I was thinking about the question: What is it that someone really has to attend to, to be satisfied? And that's where that model came from.
Q: With components of satisfaction and effectiveness?
A: Yes, the two prongs in my way of working are will it be effective in the world, being able to sense that our life matters, that we have some way of correcting or helping to think about difficulties that we see in life, but also that we are fulfilled. I think one without the other is terrible.
Q: What was the developmental path for you that helped you bring all this together?
A: I went to an all boys Catholic high school taught by Jesuits who had a very strong involvement in Christian spirituality, a genuine spirituality as it is seen in following rules, following people in authority, but also an outreach to the community. I went on many retreats and had a pretty close relationship with a number of priests there. We would do outreach into the community, help people repair houses in some of the poor part of San Jose where the school was. We worked with mentally disabled people. I did a lot of that work.
From there, I went to seminary for a year to study to be a priest. I was an idealist then, probably somewhat still am. I was convinced at that moment that the most important thing that someone could bring to the world was God and that is what Catholic priests did. There is a belief that priests have this amazing ability to take ordinary substances and transform them into God and make them available to people. That seemed terrific to me.
When I got into the life, it was clear that it was not going to work for me to be that emotionally distant from people. When I went back to my home, I got reengaged in community activities, working children with strong emotionally difficulties, and so on. I did that for a year. I went to college at UC Santa Cruz and studied philosophy and psychology.
Q: I had an image of you coming from Boston.
A: Well, that's where I was born, but I've been out here since I was 14.
Q: You went to one of the more-we might say academically free-thinking campuses around.
A: Right. I think really the best education I got was there. I think another was when I eventually ran into Fernando Flores.
I did the EST training when I was really young. I was involved in that organization for a number of years. When Fernando and Werner became partners, I got a chance to take Fernando's class, which was his initial presentation of speech act theory in the world of work, jobs and careers. At the same time, I had gotten trained to be a Rolfer, so I was working with people's bodies. It was a big stream of my work.
Q: Did you work with Ida Rolf?
A: No, it was too bad, Russ. Just as I was getting trained, she was dying. I never got a chance to meet her.
I had a chance to Rolf Fernando and we started having a conversation. One thing led to another and he started giving me books to read, tutoring, coaching, and mentoring me. They were quite hard books like Maturana's Autopoesis and Cognition, very dense texts that one would be daunted by. I got to be very close with him and worked free for him, one day a week. He tutored me for ten years or so. I got a great philosophical education.
Q: So, that association lasted about three years?
A: Yes.
Q: And then what happened?
A: His partnership with Werner fell apart. Werner was starting to have all the difficulties that you might be aware of and he had a chance to give Fernando a warning that tough times were coming. Fernando stepped out of this business relationship and dissolved the company that they had together at the time. I was, by that juncture, a workshop leader. I did the original workshop. I was sent off on my own. Fernando used this as a chance to take his life in a different direction. so a lot of us who were close to him at that time didn't get to see him. I still hear from him from time to time.
Q: Where is he now?
A: He's a senator in Chile now. He still has a home here in the Bay Area. His children are still here and his grandchildren.
Q: You've developed your own coaching school, New Ventures West, in San Francisco. Other students of Fernando's also started the Newfield Program. Julio Olalla and his partner offered an ontological coaching approach, which was very publicly tied to the work of Fernando. But you chose not to go that route?
A: I did not go that route. Let me see if can answer this diplomatically. I had been in the EST world for a number of years; I had been in the Fernando world. Fernando is a very brilliant person and, at the same time, could be very forceful in the way he'd interact with people. EST trainers were the same way. When I started my company, I wanted to move away from that and have a different way of working with folks that wasn't so hammering and insistent on its own position.
Q: So, you were able to move towards recapturing your idealism?
A: It actually took a few years. What finally did it was, as I became a more and more serious Zen student, I started having individual meetings with the teachers. My teacher is Norman Fisher, who used to be an abbot at the San Francisco Zen Center and now his own organization called Everyday Zen. And some other teachers were there. When I met with them, they were so kind, radiant and present that I changed just by being with them. They had no particular agenda for where we should go and weren't measuring me against some place where I was supposed to be. Wherever I was, "Wasn't that amazing?" This was gigantically refreshing, new, and felt so correct, felt so deeply right.
Q: I can hear the light in your voice.
A: Yes, ooh-la-la. I met these folks and then I got to bring that work into what I did.
I know Julio a bit. We were around Fernando a bit together. I think his work is becoming more integral these days. My understanding was that he and his partner took what they had learned from Fernando and applied it in a kinder, gentler way. Julio is warm, genuine and charismatic.
I wanted to include more things in coaching people than what is in their repertoire. I thought that what Fernando was up to in a way was, helping people become more powerful. Clearly what he was doing was about how do you speak to be more powerful? How do you build up a social network to be more powerful? How do you get to be an expert so people rely on you? This is nice and helpful. We want people to be powerful who are up to good things.
I never thought that in that methodology they had a good answer to what's the power for? What is it in service of, what's the point of it? I think embedded in Fernando's work and probably not embedded in Julio's work was a lot the existential notions that existence is just what we make of it. It's the human enterprise and humans aren't part of something bigger. Humans are kind of the end of it and that never felt right to me.
Q: When did you start your own program in coach training?
A: 1986. The first version was a six-month class that I was writing on the plane as I flew to New York. I was using a lot of what I'd learned from Fernando and what I was bringing at the time. It just kept going and I keep it open ended. In other words, I don't feel like we have a final course now. We've changed according to our students, the changing times and what the course leaders are studying and developing.
Q: I first came across information that you were linking your work to the idea of integral a couple of years ago when I saw a workshop description for the Cape Cod Institute. I hadn't known that there was anybody who was explicitly moving in that direction. I contacted one of your students who said to me, "James is the most integral person I've ever met." Why do you think he might have said that?
A: Delusion, a limited circle of friends (laughter). That's nice to hear.
I'm sure that the things that we leave out of our life, that we're not willing, open or competent to attend to yet are the things that trip us up. That's what I like about Ken Wilber. I have met Ken and he's the kind of person that isn't vain and is putting forth gigantic efforts to make something very worthwhile happen in the world. I like all that and I like the idea of integral.
My basic notion of it is being in the now. That's part one and then part two is cooperating with the way life's going, the way the universe is going or the way God is going. I relate to it in those terms. What we humans, of course, keep trying to do is carve it down to some manageable, understandable, linear, progressive notion of what's going on in the world.
This happens to be exactly what I wanted to be doing as well. So, along my spiritual development it has become blindingly obvious that there is something that I am part of and that I'm not the initiator of. The integral pathway or the integral world is to be a way of opening to that more and more. What is it that is unfolding? What is it that we are subject to? What is consciousness doing? What is happening here?
I like that it's so big that any place that I or students land, there's always some place to sink into or open up to. What trips us up is any place that we can get attached to quickly becomes rotten. It's very much like putting the most wonderful food in our body. After a while, it becomes poison because we don't keep undoing ourselves.
Q: So, it's about being alive and being attuned to life in all of its aspects?
A: Which in a way is what is Zen is.
Q: I'm struck by your description of Fernando, an obviously brilliant, dynamic and personally powerful individual, who had aspects to his style and personality that he neglected or chose to ignore. An example would be the way he related to other people. I've heard Ken talk about the fact that because there are all these multiple lines of development as your early work even acknowledged, that it's very unusual, if not impossible, to find anybody who has evolved all those different lines of development to the same levels. We have a tendency to focus in on two or three and ignore one or two. I'm wondering how you would see that dynamic of development in terms of the different lines and the ability to balance or to integrate those?
A: In Integral Psychology , Ken has over a hundred lines which I think is a bit much. Maybe he can do it. In our work, we've come down to six streams: cognitive, relational, emotional, somatic, spiritual and integrating. I think you're totally right on when you say people tend to gravitate to some or others to their peril. Of course, in our culture some of them are held to be way more important than others: the cognitive and the emotional. Some people say our culture is cognitive. I think our culture is essentially misguided emotionally (laughs). We have really strong feelings about ideas, not that we're strongly cognitive and follow the ideas all the way to the bottom.
We neglect the body. We neglect the spiritual, even though the U.S. is the country that goes to church the most. But we stop way short of engaging in practices that can transform us so that we have our own spiritual experience instead of living off of what has been passed to us. I think that we have a hard time in relationships. In our work, in my individual coaching work and in training folks, we're working on the six streams.
- Cognitive:
- the ability to make observations in a particular field (e.g., business, philosophy, cooking) and then synthesize these observations into a coherent understanding
- Emotional:
- the ability to discern our own emotional states, our feelings in this moment, the background emotional tone of our lives, and our emotional responses to particular events (e.g., being challenged). Also, the ability to discern the emotional state of others, even when they themselves are obvious to it or denying it.
- Somatic:
- the ability to observe what is happening in our bodies (e.g., energized, tired, heavy, open, tight) and to tap into this somatic wisdom as we respond to the present moment.
- Relational:
- the ability to initiative and sustain mutually satisfying relationship. This includes the ability to listen deeply, communicate profoundly, and support others'; intentions while maintaining one's own dignity.
- Spiritual:
- the ability to create a life dedicated to the benefit of everyone––not only ourselves or our families, companies, or tribes. This includes active engagement in a community dedicated to serving others with wisdom and compassion.
- Integrating:
- the ability to undo all the ways we compartmentalize our lives so that our commitments and values show up in all of our words, actions, and relationships.
James Flaherty's Six Lines of Development
Q: You have put together a quadrant model. I assume you meant it to be a holon is that accurate?
A: Yes.
| III.
Culture and Relationships * Language * Ritual and Customs * Morals |
I.
Individual Experience and Consciousness * Thoughts and Feelings * Emotions and Mood * Body Sensations |
| IV. Environment * Natural * Human-made * Technology and Tools |
II. Body and
Behaviors * Body Chemistry * Neuromuscular System * Genetic Inheritance |
From: James Flaherty and Amiel Handelsman, "Integrating Rigor, Compassion, and Creative Design: The Promise of Integral Coaching SM and New Ventures West's Professional Coaching Course," a .pdf file available from New Ventures West, PO Box 591525 . San Francisco . CA . 94159 . 800.332.4618
Q: You shifted the positions of the quadrants. In your discussion of these, when you get into the system quadrant you call it environment. Instead of describing how those elements live and breath within us, which is one way of thinking about holons, you talk about things we can do. In Culture, you talk about speaking and listening, which sounds like behaviors to me. In environment, you talk about organize, simplify, beautify, things that sound like values to me. I can't tease apart the categories you are using. Could you help me?
A: Oh, it is very important, at least the way I think about it. Culture is analogous to what is inside the individual; it's just inside the group conscious that one only has access to really by being a member of the group. You can tell me what you're thinking, but I can't really be inside of you, feeling, experiencing what you do. We could go to Japan and maybe even learn to speak Japanese. We could eat Japanese food and wear Japanese clothes, but we never would have Japanese consciousness. There are all the ways of interpreting life passed along through language, practices, rituals, mores, everything in that culture. Everything in the way people live passes along the way of seeing life, from what we eat to all the deep structures of language.
The environment is if you took the people away, what would be left? So, you could go down to Hewlett Packard headquarters and the company exists. That business is essentially a quadrant of cultural phenomena, the creation of people. But you can take the people out of the building and things will still be there. There is the natural world of trees, birds, the oceans and the sky, and the things that are made by people and organizations.
Q: On what Fred Kofman has called the artifacts? They have no life of their own or do they?
A: Yes, they have a life of their own that exists without humans.
The way I distinguish between the two is to take the humans out and what's left? That world is something that coaches often leave out. But it's a mistake to leave it out, because where we live, the physical surroundings of our life keep informing us of who we are.
Prisoners who wake up everyday in their cells –– however big they are –– are reminded of how limited their possibilities are, who other people take them to be, on and on. The same thing happens to a person who wakes up in a mansion. It reminds them of the identity they've taken on and it reinforces it. One of the worst things that we can say, if we are having difficulty with addictions to drugs is to have the addict go to a rehab and then go back to the same neighborhood. Even if the same people aren't there. Somehow, the neighborhood stirs it up.
Q: You point out that integral coaching as you define it is developmental. Would you say a little bit about what you mean by developmental? Is there a particular model, perspective or framework you use?
A: No. I don't know if I have anything different than what other people say about it. First off, I agree with Wilber and other people that there is a universal movement towards development and unless we are in a trauma or some difficulty, we will keep unfolding, we will keep developing. I think that's the natural way and in fact, we have to work pretty hard to stop developing. So, that's the starting point.
What I mean by development is that I think it is pretty spiritual. The more developed we are, the less self-focused we are, the less self-ascending we are. To say it in a positive way, the more connected we are to others, the more we are connected to life, the more courageous we are, the more spiritual we are and the less we are seeing things only from our view. It means we have a looser and looser hold on our so-called self, our identity. As we get more and more developed that structure called the self, frees up more and more and more until the later stages, of course, there is no thing that is the self. Yet we could still function and still walk around. We would talk, but we wouldn't have the fixation, the obsession, the neurosis or neurotic behavior around protecting ourselves.
Q: In his work on organizations Ishaak Adizes describes the stages of development of businesses. Briefly, he sees these as a life cycle, as opposed to a continuous line of development. We go through the early stages of start up, the mid-stage levels of organizational maturity and decline, and then we ultimately have the death of the organization.
In our physical lives, we have a similar life cycle. How can we think about development in the way you talked about as being continuous, at least in the individual life when we have that "bringing to a close" our physical capacity to develop. How you make sense of all that?
A: My way of thinking about development is that we are less and less identified with this body, this personality, this history. We have an experience that we are something bigger. It gets expressed in this body, but we're not limited to this body and this personality or whatever has happened to us. Almost everyone has had some experience of that.
Often times, there is some strong emotional event. Sometimes it's happens when it looks like our death is approaching or we have an ecstatic emotional experiences. For instance, the birth of a child or being in nature or some type of sexual experience can just lift us out of what we are holding onto so tightly. It is an experience that we are not this. That doesn't mean, "Screw this, I don't have to take care of myself. This is all fake; this is all illusion."
It is totally real and we are totally here. But that is the partial story, not the whole story. That means that when we die, in a sense nothing happens. Yeah, the body stops, but consciousness keeps going, a different kind of consciousness and you have different content than the one you have right now.
This is a complicated question about does the physical change consciousness. It seems like it does. Give people a certain prerogative and their consciousness will change or, as you were saying, as you watch the nervous system deteriorate people's consciousness changes.
One way I think about that is the difference between consciousness and the content of consciousness or the expression of consciousness. I think about this in a way that, to make sense to this, there is consciousness that is unchanging, unmoving. It is just luminous and has all the different things that we are conscious of. Rarely do we have the experience of being that consciousness that is having the awareness of all these things.
We're mostly in the world of "what I am aware of" rather than the awareness itself. Awareness itself can be damaged by what happens to the body. So, that's one of the ways I think about it. But there is one thing of course to know that and then I say, "Oh yeah, that sounds right." But it's a matter of living that way.
Q: Of being that way.
A: Yes, of being that way and keep letting go and letting go and letting go.
Q: In relation to that, you talk about the ten waves and the range from addressing immediate concerns to death. There were a lot of things in between. That represents a kind of developmental model for you.
A: Yes.
Q: You also indicate that in terms of the population of the world, 90% are in the first four of those and 9.99% are in the next two which leaves a number of other levels where there is practically no one around.
A: I think that's right. Maybe I'm living on the wrong side of town or something, but that's how it seems to me. That's also true in David Hawkins' and other people's work. It is the case in Susann Cook-Greuter's work. She has done a lot of work in developmental theories and has similar statistics. Yeah, we are in a big mess here.
We're not going to run out of places to grow into. That's the good news. But for me, the most important part of that model is around levels 4 which is power to 5 which is vocation. The top 4 levels are all about, "Can I get my life to turn out the way I want it turn out. Can I get what I want in life? Can I protect myself; can I find security for me and my family or me and my clan?"
In vocation there is the turning question, "What is life asking of me? What is it that I am born for?" I think it's not the case we are born to start a company or sell software or stuff that we get so wrapped up in, hit more home runs or something. It is something else. Once we open to that, then there is the possibility of becoming fully ourselves, the possibility of our own individual suffering diminishing and our making a contribution to others.
Q: Does that mean that once you get past the vocation stage that really what you are doing is peeling away these other descriptions that you have of these stages, negative self assessment and all that?
A: Nasty title –– negative self-assessment, narcissism, suffering, all those things. It's freedom within those things. It's not freedom from it or peeling it away.
Q: Those are part of the realities of our existence and we are free within them.
A: Yes.
Q: With these distributions of populations across categories, what are the implications of your model in working with leaders in organizations? How do you think about that?
A: Most everyone at or near of the top of organizations, when they ask for coaching, they're asking for somebody who is in crisis. This is a gigantic percentage of the people that we end up coaching. 80% of the people are working on some topic around balance. People are neglecting big parts of their lives and having the consequences of this. Or they seek being able to be skillful at speaking or in building effective relationships. Or they want the emotional intelligence and so on that to go into conversations. And then power: being able to stay focused, concentrate their power in some particular direction, watch where power leads in terms of negative emotions; that's pretty much what people need.
I think when they say leader, they mean someone who's powerful, someone who can say as Eisenhower said before D-Day, "We are going to France with these thousands of ships, tens of thousands of people and we are going to make it happen." That is what most people look for in a leader. Of course, that notion is certainly inadequate these days, because not too many people are lining up to be soldiers and the world is much more complicated than that. It isn't so clear that the territory we're trying to take on Monday is the same territory we're trying to take on Wednesday.
In the organizations that we tend to work with people understand that being a leader means being a whole person. This means they can make connections with other people. They can be realistic and pragmatic. But at the same time, they can aspire to great things. They are not trying to position themselves as all knowing, all powerful and totally invulnerable.
Every now and then there is a leader with such genius that people will put up with all kinds of nonsense from them. But most leaders have to find a way of being a human being. That is someone who is learning and is appreciating other people. This requires competencies and qualities that can be developed brought forth, because they are there in some form already.
The backdrop of the developmental model is what we had in mind in our coaching work which is, "Can we move somebody a little bit further so they'd be more open to others and less fearful, because when people are more open and less fearful they are more communicative and more resilient." People who are further up in our developmental model are holding on tight and being self-protective, therefore they don't learn very much.
I think it's a big step to imagine that in coaching a person's going to make a big step from the conversational level to the power level, but within each level, there are steps a person can take.
Q: I was really struck by a comment that you made about stages are how someone currently responds. It's not the person, not his or her potential. What do you see as limits to developmental potential? I don't mean DNA limitations or genetic limitations, but how many of these stages can we go through in a lifetime?
A: There are certain books that just drive me crazy like "The Power of Now" where Eckhart Tolle is sitting on a park bench and all of this came to him.
Q: Right. He was homeless at the time.
A: Yes, drives me crazy. Then the rest of us are sweating it out on retreats, vision quests and years of psychotherapy or whatever we are doing.
This is what I really think, so I will tell you what I really think.
The limits are how much we can be loved. How much love we have around us and how much we let in, because the more of that we have around us, the more we can let in. It isn't enough to be loved. We have let it in or let it out. That's how it all happens. So, in a way, I think that what coaching is about is developing ourselves so we can love people more and more in all of the quirky, different, weird ways some people present themselves. From there people naturally open.
Q: In your work whether it's with business leaders or coaching students have you actually seen people be able to come from these first four levels and move up into the higher levels?
A: No, I haven't seen people there in business, yet. They may be there. I just haven't found them. Those individuals are really, really, rare.
Q: One of the things I think I first heard from Susann Cook-Greuter that really struck me was how there is no guarantee that as you move up to higher levels, you're doing to be any happier.
A: Right. I'm actually in the middle of studying what it is to be happy. I think that happiness is a matter of appreciation and gratitude for whatever is happening. Whether we like it or don't like it, we have the chance to be here, to be alive! Whoa! That is what happiness is.
Her explanation of development tends to be heavier on the cognitive side as in being able to do deeper and more complex operations cognitively with more complex factors and so on. This is different than being freer from our attachment to our ego. Happier? At some point, it isn't a sensible question. Am I happy or not? People at these higher levels, when I have asked them, they think it's an odd question. "Okay, I guess I can pay attention to that right now. Let's see."
Q: Well, the Dalai Lama says we have an obligation to be happy in the world.
A: I think that's right.
Q: Is that getting at the same thing you're talking about with the gratitude?
A: Yes, it's also that happy people are not violent people. We're not destructive.
Q: When we translate that to working with people in the world of business, this capacity to really appreciate what it is we have before us and not treat it like something we have to get away from, but something we've got to engage with, is that what you're about?
A: Yes, and the best leaders that I know are people that take the most difficult circumstances and they don't try and run away from, deny or exaggerate them. What is it? How can "me" and the team respond to this with optimism?
Q: I saw something in the Harvard Business Review in one of the last two issues, that optimism is one of the key variables for highly successful executives.
You also referenced the individual formal leader and the team and we've alluded to that a little bit in our conversation. One of the things that has been underlying my work in leadership and leadership development has to do with recognizing that there is both the leader, which I initially cast in terms of the upper left, upper right and the leadership system which I cast in terms of lower left and lower right. There is a leadership culture. There are leadership systems, et cetera and there are dynamics among these different quadrants of the holon. Have you thought about your work in terms of what is the relationship between the individual interior side and the exterior side and how you can talk about the dynamics of those relationships?
A: I have thought about that. I understand that each of the quadrants are important to attend to. Each one has, in my view, it's own kind of laws –– the way it works or operates, that they each have a different language and each has a different operating principle. But at the same time, especially the cultural piece is not fixed. The way that people can be in a meeting or which big decisions are being made may appear as if the way they are being in the group or the culture or history is pulling them into a particular role where they are supposed act that way. I keep finding that how an individual person shows up in a meeting and responds to what's going on shifts what's going on so that it isn't as fixed as it looks.
I'm, in a way, a radical in terms of the world is very much more fluid than we imagine it. How we interact with it brings it forth in a particular way. I guess in a more practical way for these relationships that we've had with people and the way we listen to them or the way we speak to them opens up and broadens the possibility and undoes our fixations. Am I responding to your question?
Q: The question was about the relationship among the quadrants and how you would describe that relationship. An example might be, if you want to talk about the upper left, upper right quadrants, how do you think about the relationship between consciousness awareness on the one hand and behavior on the other? What is the nature of the mutuality in that relationship? Self-management is a concept that might be used to describe that relationship. There is a mutual influence between the two quadrants and that is the self-management dynamic.
A: Self-management is about knowing yourself, knowing your history or how we tend to respond, how we tend to react, being able to discern the distinction between am I being triggered from something that's happening in the moment or something that is coming from my past? Being able to self-observe is a part of self-management. By self-observe I mean, being able to connect my internal experience, the action I am taking and the consequences of the action. That is what I mean by self-observation.
But it's also people tuning into their bodies, because the body has it's own momentum of habits. I think it's fair to say that we act according to how the world is showing up for us. A lot of that is fixed in our nervous system from our recurring patterns of behavior. We tend to pay attention to certain things, pick out things from the environment that we say counts. We act according to those and that's what counts and what shows up for us.
The nervous system phenomenon is based upon the practices that we have engaged in. We can will our selves to pay attention to something different. But when we are under pressure or lose our concentration, we fall back to another way of looking, other ways of seeing the situation. Soon, as we see the situation in the old way, our old behavior will return. So I think that the way to change consciousness is just engage in new practices that shift the body.
Q: So, that's where that mutuality occurs actually that you're talking about.
To return to the thing about leadership, since we do think often about an agentic aspect in a communal context, when you're working with leaders do you also work with the context, with the culture in the systems that they're a part of or do you do all the work directly through the individual?
A: I don't do so much system change. That's never interested me and I don't want to take, at this point, ten years to understand all of that.
My model of work would tend to be to work with a leader and her team. The leader gets coaching and all the team members get coaching from different members of our team, Then the whole group gets coached. We let all the synergy happen from what we're learning and what they learn.
Q: Is there anything from the experience of working in that way that you could share that has been an important learning for you?
A: This is going to be one of those obvious remarks, but most of the difficulty the teams have are not what the people are doing, but their perception of what people are doing. When I'm in the middle and I'm hearing from the leader of the team and the team members tell me what's going on and then I meet with our team of coaches and they tell me what's going on, I can see somebody thinks this is going on. Therefore, they're doing this. Therefore, that person's doing that and the other is not even happening at all. It's a gigantic percentage that 30 or 40% of the work that people are doing is anticipatory anxiety about something somebody picked up that they think is happening or going to happen.
Also, the startling part for me when I started working with high tech teams was how there is almost no listening going on. When you walk into these meetings, everybody has their screen on. Who knows what people are doing on their screen? Sending messages to people in the room with asides. When I was watching the meetings, some one would bob their head up and take some potshot at the presenter, having not paid attention the whole time to some idea that they don't particularly like. The meeting gets derailed from there.
People were getting so wound up in input of information that they're not paying attention to each other. We don't have enough stillness to listen. A lot of the work that I'm doing with leaders is simply around being present. This is challenging. They think it is a detriment to be present: "I should be thinking about what's going to happen next.".
Q: How would you go about working with the idea of presence with an individual? Is that tuning into your breathing and your body and notice what's going on as you're listening or.?
A: I get pretty bold. I ask a lot of people to do traditional sitting kinds of practice. I'm surprised by the number of people who are willing to take it on. I don't talk about it as a religious or a consciousness deal. I talk about it as practicing being present. The idea is to just relax and be present. And people, if they persist for a few weeks, notice a huge difference. Their system starts to ratchet down. They are more relaxed. There is less pressure. They hear what others have been trying to tell them six times. Or they notice, "Oh, the house next door is a different color." They get alive. We become happy in terms of being grateful and appreciative if we are in the present.
Q: When you're introducing this idea, how do you create the context where they're even willing to listen to that?
A: This is how the conversation goes. Meetings are inefficient because no one's listening to each other and the first step to listening is being present. It's very hard to argue your way out of that and say, "No, I don't have to be present to listen."
Then, how is it that we are living so that we are more present or less present? I keep hearing how we're living that keeps turning us into the kind of person we are that we only have insights. There are some people who have had insights and they are transformed by them. But all the people I know, even after they have had insights, need to keep practicing.
Q: One of the phenomena that I encounter, probably in myself as much as anybody else, is that we cognitively know a lot of the right action we should be taking, but for one reason or another ––distractions or comfort level or whatever–– we tend to not follow through on addressing those issues. How do you work with that phenomena?
A: That's where I love the quadrants. I would say that if someone wants to shift a behavior, they have to attend to all four quadrants. They have to attend to my mutual experience, my view of it, my beliefs around the end, why it's important to me, my historical difficulties that give rise to this, on and on. Then they have to pay attention to their body. What's the new neuromuscular responses that are going to be required to do this shift, how can I catch onto I have this other response in my body and then from there, introduce the new one.
Then in the social world, what kind of a social network of friendships, family and business am I embedded in? What sort of person in this social world am I going to encounter? What sort of support will I require?
For example, someone who is trying change their diet and their friends are eating horrible food, every time they go out, they say, "Oh, come on. What's the big deal? Just one, you'll be fine."
And then how do we have our physical environment set up? Somebody may be trying to calm down. In the meanwhile they are walking on their treadmill listening to the news on their headphones and reading the newspaper all at once? It's not going to happen. They have to pull themselves away from that kind of engagement with equipment.
I think we have to attend to all four. A person has to set up their environment so that it supports the new behavior. My wife had the strongest interest in exercising and it never happened until we got a treadmill in our house. Now she does it. A lot of people think, "Well, I shouldn't need to do that." But it's much more likely if we go to the gym in our building at lunch time that we'll exercise than if we joined the gym ten miles across town. So, it's attending to all four.
Q: When you're working with leaders and organizations, you're able to raise their awareness in all four of these areas and look at the relationships among them?
A: Yes. We are paying attention to people and supporting action for them to take.
Q: What about strategic direction? Do you find that contextualizing your work in the particular strategic direction the team or the business is trying to go relevant or do you attend to that at all?
A: Yes, I do attend to it. I don't get into strategies so much. That's not something I'm qualified to do. I do my coaching for a very complicated world. Strategies, I don't get into that. But in terms of what kind of competencies that people need to engage in a strategy, to carry it out or what kind of person do they have to be in order to build world-wide relationships, I get into that. A typical one would be, we want to open up the Asian market. Okay, so we have a person in Singapore who just went there from Palo Alto. This person needs a lot of coaching because it's not just about speaking the language.
Q: You are writing a book?
A: About integral coaching.
Q: When might we expect to see it?
A: I'm doing my best to get it within this year, maybe '05. It depends on how long the publishers take. I really want to go to Spain this year to write.
Q: And your coaching program, what's in the future for that?
A: One of the things I discovered was we have a year long certification program. But as my developments come along and developing the other course leaders goes along, we found that a year is not enough time. Instead of trying to cram more and more in, we're going to open up our curriculum, so that we have probably three more years of coach training after that. Also we have started a company; somehow we were able to register the name of Integral Leadership as the name of a company.
Q: You're kidding? I'm amazed.
A: Me too. So we're Integral Leadership, LLC. New Ventures West has been sitting, waiting for corporate business to come to us, to come from our graduates. Now we're going to do more of a pro-active marketing effort to reach out to organizations.
Q: Anything I haven't asked you about you wish I had?
A: Yes. For me, coaching is about supporting folks or building a partnership, a friendship or a relationship in which someone becomes freer so that their suffering is less. That's basically what we are doing. Then there's the matter of what are the skillful means for a particular person and we meet them where they are.