Self-Transformation: The intersection of my teaching, writing, and consulting work

If you’ve been following my recent endeavors, you may be aware that I’ve been very pleasantly surprised to find such significant personal and professional successes with my work that translates my interests (creativity, performance, and self-transformation) into corporate settings through teaching and consulting. I’ve also decided to extend that into actual one-on-one coaching, which I think is really powerfully rewarding. I started in education, of course, but I’ve been as surprised as anyone that my “tools, techniques, and templates” have found powerful resonance in a diverse range of fields including healthcare, human services, the helping professions, leadership/administration, and even finance, engineering, and technology. I’m interested in how we think, feel, and act “in the moment” when it matters. 

I don’t claim to have brilliant answers; I just happen to ask brilliant questions.

I don’t claim to have brilliant answers; I just happen to ask brilliant questions.

I’ve noticed how often the phrase “achieve your goals” comes up in coaching and consulting work. My approach is a bit different. Accomplishing goals is not the hard part. The more difficult part is DISCOVERING the trajectories of growth and the open-ended teleology of vision that are available to us as we negotiate both our own internal resources with external opportunities afforded by our environment. What lies beyond the obvious? What powerful uniquenesses are at our disposal? How do we know we are moving in the “right” direction? How do we get started working with the internal and external resources available to us? 

With an open-ended teleology, traditional “goals” are not something we aspire to achieve, but rather mileposts we notice once they are in the rear-view mirror. 

With an open-ended teleology, traditional “goals” are not something we aspire to achieve, but rather mileposts we notice once they are in the rear-view mirror. 

What holds most people back is not an unwillingness to work or insufficient talent or lack of resources. Rather, what impedes our progress toward anything is unquestioned narratives of limitation that are “leftover” from situations no longer relevant or misguided goals that aren’t really what maximize the possibility of our own development or are even based on what the world needs. It doesn’t matter how far or how fast you move if you are propelling yourself toward a futile and fleeting destination. 

Underneath it all, what REALLY do you want to be doing and feeling? If we start there, the goals, objectives, and targets land naturally, organically, incidentally. 

Self-transformation is my thing. It’s at the center of all my interests, pursuits, and what I have achieved thus far. You may say it’s something of an obsession for me. I wake up and begin my morning pages wondering how I want to change that day. Or, perhaps more accurately, I put pen to paper and ask “the universe” how I should begin to change. Actually, no, that’s not quite right either. I begin to explore the ways in which I have ALREADY begun to change, to transform. Aware then, of the subtle, almost imperceptible growth that has already begun, I try to expand my awareness of it—to envision what prompted it, what fuels it, and where it might end up taking me. 

You see, we are not really in control of our own self-transformations. We are at the mercy of the immutable natures within ourselves (the aspects that we cannot change, whatever they are) as well as the external circumstances in the world outside ourselves, over which, of course, we also have no control. And then there are the aspects within our unconscious control and, of course, our conscious wills, which can also, quite honestly, get in our way. The conscious will can be hindered by faulty beliefs, distracted by “shiny things” that hijack our awareness, or unduly influenced by internalized values and ideas we hear from others. 

That’s why I’ll warn you right now, not to take anyone’s advice too seriously, even my own. But if it rings true for you, if you listen to me and you realize “Oh my, I actually think I knew that all along and you just said it out loud,” then that’s a clear sign that you can choose to adopt that insight for as long as it serves you. Use the ideas, narratives, and shifts in awareness that propel you to better things. How do you know that they are better? They have a general but incontestable “rightness” in how they “seem” (feel, appear, or make sense). Some may even describe it as a sense of recollection: “Oh yes, this is how it goes . . .” even if it’s the first time you’ve trod down that path. 

The best advice never feels like a foreign concept—something from the exclusively exotic, from far away, or from way “out there.” Really good advice feels like something that you had known once and then forgotten. 

I think that’s the test of any path worth pursuing: 

Does it feel inexplicably familiar? 

Does it remind me of who I am?

Does it seem to lead in that direction to which I had been drawn but talked myself out of? 

Does it seem as though the world had been asking this of me for quite some time and I didn’t listen? 

That’s the test, which is one of the “tools, techniques, and templates” that I love to teach because I developed it to help my very first, and perhaps most difficult client—myself!