Category: freedom

Coaching in the Age of Coronavirus

Amid the cacophony of advice on how to survive the pandemic or what to do during lockdown I’ve been reluctant to add to it, but since so many of us are stuck at home with time on our hands and a jumble in our heads, I’ll highlight a few things I’ve found helpful.

The first has been to set some goals: not big lofty goals or enormous challenges that will feel burdensome, but simple choices to focus on things I care about that will occupy my mind and keep me moving forward in a time when I might otherwise feel stuck – at home, in the limits of my life, and in the obsessive tendencies of my mind.

Have something you’re working toward:  learning a simple skill or craft or about a subject that interests you; a moderate physical challenge like a series of pushups or a weekly yoga practice; a book you’ve been curious about but never given yourself the time to read before. Do something simple and achievable that you can feel good about, and that’s different than just what you need to do to get by.

Various combinations of these have gotten me through these last few months, and though I still sometimes feel stir-crazy, my online painting class (thank you Art Students League) or Yoga with Adriene or Insight meditation Zoom sessions have been a huge help.

So has learning new coaching skills, like Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems model, or IFS. For use both in psychotherapy and in coaching, IFS is a way of understanding our own minds that I’ve found particularly helpful at a time when so many of us are spending more time isolated with our own minds than ever before. Living in lockdown can be a bit like being on your own home meditation retreat (or mandatory home confinement) without the guidance of a teacher or connection to a community, which makes it far more difficult to learn from the experience.

Schwartz’s IFS model is ultimately a way of making friends with our own minds – the good, the bad and the ugly. In his view, we all have different parts of ourselves that emerge and take over and lead us at various times — and often lead us astray. Like a family where different members play different roles in the system (Schwartz started out as a family therapist) we’ve each developed these internal voices or “parts” in response to various experiences in our lives. Each serves a different function, so has different goals and interests and means of conveying them. We may have an inner critic that tells us we’re stupid whenever we make a mistake, for example, or a part of us that’s afraid to try new things. Those parts might have developed because as children we got in trouble for making mistakes, or were shamed if we tried and failed at something. We’ve internalized those responses, and now those parts are battling other parts of ourselves that long for learning, growth or adventure. The critical or fearful voices aren’t bad: they developed for a good reason, to try to keep us from getting hurt. But by now, if they’ve become too dominant, they may be more destructive than helpful, keeping us stuck in internal turmoil.

The IFS model isn’t about banishing those internal voices, but about getting to know them, developing understanding and compassion for them, and ultimately, helping them channel their energies or interests more constructively. In Schwartz’s theory, while we all have these inner parts that often work against one another, we also all have a “true self” or core wisdom that we can access, which allows us to hear and accept the various voices, and learn from but not be ruled by them. Acting from our core wisdom or true self – in others words, self-leadership – is the goal of IFS therapy or coaching.

You can learn more about Schwartz’s model here or through his audiobook, Greater than the Sum of Our Parts. The model can be applied in various settings, including, when used carefully by a well-trained therapist, to situations of serious mental disturbance. But as a coaching method, IFS can help us all sort through some of the noise in our minds that keeps us feeling stuck and dissatisfied. Whether you’re trying to endure the isolation of a lockdown or having conflict in a relationship or feeling stuck in your career, it’s really helpful to identify and come to know the various parts of yourself that are rushing in and trying to tell you what to do. They’re often arguing with each other, so it can be hard to discern what each is saying above the cacophony. Schwartz’s model is all about doing just that:  disentangling the parts so we can hear, listen to and learn from each of them, and ultimately re-direct their energies and interests to guide us in more constructive ways.

If you’re feeling stuck, anxious, or just exhausted by the monotony of pandemic life, consider taking this opportunity to slow down and really listen: what are the different parts within you, and what are they saying? What might you ask them, and what could you learn? What do they want for you, and what do they need? And what can they teach you about how old patterns of thinking may be getting in your own way?

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

Separating the Normal from the Natural

I’m getting ready to head out on a 7-day silent meditation retreat, and I’ve been feeling a little weird about it.

So I really appreciated coming across Paul Graham’s essay, The Acceleration of Addictiveness, which in large part explains why I’m doing this. A computer programmer and founder of the startup funder Y Combinator, Graham — who’s also a wonderful essayist — explains that while technology has brought us many great things, it’s also made our world much more addictive.

For example: “Food has been transformed by a combination of factory farming and innovations in food processing into something with way more immediate bang for the buck, and you can see the results in any town in America. Checkers and solitaire have been replaced by World of Warcraft and FarmVille. TV has become much more engaging, and even so it can’t compete with Facebook.”

The result is that we’re constantly being drawn toward things that technology has allowed some big company to profit from by capturing our attention. The consequences range from obesity to ADHD to home-grown terrorism.

As individuals, it means we each have to pay that much more attention to where we’re putting our attention, and to whether it’s what we really want to be focusing on. This is what meditation is all about.

Graham calls it the difference between what’s “normal” and what’s “natural”. It may be “normal” to binge-watch your favorite series on Netflix, but sitting on a couch for hours on end (and likely adding some junk food and alcohol to the mix) is hardly what our bodies were made for. After a while, it doesn’t feel very good.

On the other hand, refraining from “normal” things like television and processed food and electronics, even briefly, can make you seem pretty weird. Already, “someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US,” Graham writes, predicting technology will only accelerate the trend. “You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don’t think you’re weird, you’re living badly.”

I take some comfort from that. Living the life you choose requires turning away from lots of things the modern world is trying to convince you you should do, mostly because someone’s making a huge profit off it. Thinking and living independently is hardly “normal” these days, but it does tend to feel a whole lot better and more “natural”.

I’ll have to remind myself of that when I’m sitting in silent meditation next week and inevitably start wondering what the hell I’m doing there.

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

What Would You Do If Nobody Knew?

UnknownWhen thinking about what to do with our lives, it’s easy to get sidetracked by the idea of doing something, rather than how we’d enjoy the experience of doing the thing itself. I loved the idea of being a public interest litigator when I got out of law school, for example, but it turned out I really didn’t enjoy the process of writing briefs arguing over endless procedural details and reviewing thousands of pages of documents to build my case. I was bored.

The esteemed management professor and consultant Warren Bennis was once asked how he liked being a university president after he’d left teaching at MIT to run the University of Cincinnati for seven years. He was stumped. He couldn’t say. Later, after some reflection, writes psychologist Tal Ben Shahar in his book, Choose the Life You Want, Bennis acknowledged that he liked the idea of being a university president, but not actually the job of doing it. At the end of that academic year, he quit and returned to teaching and writing.

In thinking about what sort of work we want to do, it’s easy to get caught up in how it sounds, what we’d tell people at cocktail parties, how our profiles might look on LinkedIn. Of course, at some level we know that doesn’t really matter, but it’s still easy, when we’re feeling insecure, to get hooked by it.

As Paul Graham writes in “How to Do What You Love,” that’s a big mistake:

What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn’t worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world. . .

Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like. . .

Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you’ll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. Jazz comes to mind—though almost any established art form would do. So just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself. . .

Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That’s the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn’t suck, they wouldn’t have had to make it prestigious.

The philosopher Alain de Botton similarly cautions that rather than get caught up in ideas of “success” that we’ve sucked up from other people: “We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.”

Of course, this is easier said than done.  It can be difficult at times to separate out what you think you want from what others have told you that you should want. To separate out our often subconscious worries about what our parents would say or what our ex-boyfriend might think of us, I think the following exercise, proposed by Tal Ben Shahar, can be very useful.

Consider:  What would you do if you had complete anonymity? In other words, if no one else would know your actions and their consequences, what would you choose to do? It may be hard to imagine, since we live in a world where it’s so easy to be constantly publicizing our actions, and there’s so much pressure to do that. But what if you were somehow invisible to the world, there were no Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn, no parties to boast at or family visits or reunions where you had to account for yourself?  What if only you knew how you were spending your time? Now what would you do?

Give yourself time to sit with that and see where it takes you. If you’re like one of the many people struggling with this question, it could help clear the messy mental landscape a bit. Kind of like pulling weeds.

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

If Dogs Run Free . . .

7aceb4bd3e15499190a8b4762050e1b8If there isn’t a name for it, there should be:  that feeling when you come back from vacation in a beautiful place and wonder why you don’t just live there.

I know, this is a privileged person’s problem. Still, travel often leads people to question their daily lives and purpose, and I was having a severe case of that as I packed to return to Brooklyn after 5 days in the Dominican Republic in early March.

Of course, I was very lucky to be able to go there at all, and to stumble upon the terrific Hotel Todo Blanco:  a picture-perfect colonial style building perched on a hill above the ocean.

Waking up there, I felt like a different person:  fully relaxed, in both body and mind. In New York, I face winter mornings in the fog of a sinus headache and have to drag myself to the gym just to attain a modicum of sanity. In the D.R., I felt great from the moment I woke up and felt the cool ocean breeze wafting through our open patio door.  Though I took long walks on the beach, swam in the ocean and hiked up to a terrific restaurant, El Cabito, perched on the edge of a cliff with a breathtaking view of the sunset, I never once “worked out” – there was nothing like work involved.

It helped, of course, that I never turned on my cell phone or checked my e-mail. Nor did I read or hear any news for the 5 days I was there. (Turns out it doesn’t really change that much when you’re gone.) So why, I wondered, as I reluctantly packed my suitcase, do I choose to live in the harsh climate and dirty, noisy, costly city of New York, and keep a job that requires me to follow the news obsessively? Is this really a good idea?

It’s not just the people in the D.R. who are relaxed: dogs roam freely, on the beaches, in town, even in restaurants. No leashes (or neutering) required. And I never saw even one act aggressively.  The D.R. seemed like heaven for all of us; I envied the European expats that live in the fishing village-turned-tourist town we stayed in. I even fantasized about buying the Hotel Todo Blanco and offering beach yoga and life coaching to my guests.

Then we got in the taxi to the airport.

As usual, upon arrival in New York, we had to go through customs. I always kind of like this ritual, because the customs officials always offer a warm “welcome home.” This time, though, the man asked me what I do for a living. I don’t know why that’s relevant – maybe it’s how they guess whether you’re sneaking things into the country. In any event, I said I’m a lawyer for a human rights organization. The customs official stamped my documents, looked me in the eye and responded: “Keep making a difference.”

I was surprised and a little flustered. “Thank you!” I said with a smile. As I headed for the taxi stand, though, I wondered: “making a difference? Do I really make any difference?” I’m not sure. In fact, I thought, if I owned a hotel in the D.R. and provided decent jobs and a living wage to people there, wouldn’t that be making more of a difference? Maybe I would even do volunteer work there, teaching English to children or something. Wouldn’t that help people more than I do now?

I don’t really know the answer to those questions. But what I do know, and I felt as I headed to my office the next morning, is that, like many of us who put up with the discomforts and stresses of big cities, I have an opportunity now to do work that’s useful. Now that I’m back home, it’s where I need to focus. Advocating for better human rights policies may not provide anyone a living, but as I’ve written before, I do think advocates, working together, ultimately do an important service – even if it’s only to keep things from getting worse.

Christof Heyns, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Arbitrary or Summary Executions (a cheery title), made a similar point recently at a lecture at Columbia University law school that really struck me. He said that while the world seems pretty brutal today, it’s a whole lot better than before the Geneva Conventions, the cornerstone of international human rights law. In World Wars I and II, for example, the brutality of organized governments and their armies was unimaginable: some 60 million people were killed in the Second World War alone. Today, bombing the civilian centers of major cities would be unthinkable. Yes, there are brutal dictators who sometimes slaughter their own people, but it’s not on the same scale. Major world powers do not commit the level of atrocities seen in the past. New weapons have actually improved governments’ abilities to fight wars while killing fewer people. And the establishment of human rights laws and norms has made it impossible for those trends to reverse, even if we know that a superpower like the United States will never be held accountable for its own wrongdoings. The development of the law, pushed along slowly by its advocates, is gradual and often painfully slow, Heyns acknowledged, but it does shift norms and public understandings that eventually lead to lasting change.

Of course, today’s challenges are still huge. As Rebecca Solnit recently wrote in a powerful essay in Harper’s, nation-states are less vicious today in attacks the built environment, but we’re steadily destroying what’s left of the natural one. That’s perhaps the fight where tangible gains seem most elusive: defending the planet’s climate and air and water requires long-term commitment to concerted and coordinated action despite huge political hurdles; it’s undoubtedly incredibly frustrating to everyone involved.

So what does this have to do with why we don’t all just move to the D.R.? Maybe just that part of how many of us feel in any place will be directly connected to what we think we can contribute there.  Maybe one day I’ll find a way to make what feels like a real contribution while living along a tropical beach lined with palm trees and cooled by ocean breezes. But for now, I live in Brooklyn, which has a lot of very different things to offer. And I think there’s plenty for me to at least try to contribute right here.

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting