As the COVID-19 lockdown continues, conflicts are erupting all over the world. Not just between Trump and China, or between household members who are riding the waves of cabin fever together. The most intense conflicts are often the ones inside our own head.  ...

Change happens from the inside out. That’s a popular piece of wisdom in the world of personal development and therapy.   It focuses our attention on the ‘inner work’ rather than the outer circumstances of our life. And it’s a sound, empowering principle. Up to a...

Last year, I heard a striking story about customer service from an unexpected source. It cut through all the ‘best practice’ that you might read about in management textbooks or glean from customer satisfaction data. It was a story that inspired me and, at the same...

“Our job is to excavate the unsaid,” Brené Brown tells us in her Netflix special, The Call to Courage. It’s a critical but underemployed lesson in management.       People often share with me their frustrations about a lack of progress at work – not being...

This June, it’s my 10-year anniversary of being a sannyasin, which means ‘seeker of truth’. More specifically, I’m an Osho sannyasin, a follower (in a sense) of the Indian mystic who became globally infamous in the 1980s.   When I tell people this – usually...

In Part One of this post, I talked about needing more integration in my life and my coaching work – and how Zen Coaching became part of the solution. To show how this approach works in practice, I’m going to describe the arc of a ‘typical’ session. Of course, there’s...

Integration has been a recurring theme in my life over the past several years. Previously, my attempts to find ‘balance’ involved lurching somewhat wildly between extremes: five years of hard labour in high-rise offices followed by a year or two getting my hippy fix...

In my previous incarnation as a business consultant, one of my biggest fears was to be caught on the hop without a good answer. My stock-in-trade was expertise, authority, knowhow. Confessing to a client or colleague, “I don’t know” seemed like a...

As we saw in Part One, businesses are duty-bound to set out specific goals and projected returns – but authentic mindfulness doesn’t respond well to this kind of marshalling. So where does that leave us? Is ‘corporate mindfulness’ a self-cancelling oxymoron, or can we...

Did you see the Buzzfeed article that everyone was talking about recently? It pointed to ‘burnout’ as an endemic psychological condition of the Millennial generation. In a long, world-weary dissection of her own and her peers’ life experience, Anne Helen Petersen...