I'M LEARNING to listen. To really listen. Of course, coaching is all about listening and so I could say I’m a trained professional listener and that’s the end of it, but then I wouldn’t be listening anymore – listening for what there is to still listen for. The movie Tornado is a story about a guy who learns to sit through the night, listening to a horse, and through his listening, he becomes healed, and heals the horse. I’ve been practising this, with my son, with myself – sitting [...]

  ONE OF the greatest realisations that people get from attending workshops is the realisation that they’re not alone. For most of our lives we keep our cards to ourselves like poker players; the energy compounds, and we feel worse about our ‘situation’. Just sitting in a room with other people, hearing the presenter say something that applies to you and that you realise applies to everyone else in the room already halves your worries. The guardedness you arrived with starts to fall away. If the process has rules that [...]

  THERE'S A great reality show on TV called Chasing Nature. Four engineering students are split into two teams and each team has to build gadgetry that will literally enable them to emulate a creature in nature. I’ve seen them try to emulate the sonar detectors of bats while flying in a harness, the tongue of a chameleon while crawling on a pole 10m above the ground, the suspension of a sloth from a bridge between two skyscrapers and, best of all, the 25km/h head-butting power of the ram. Sometimes [...]

  COME ON men, tell me this isn’t true: you avoid getting help because you’re ashamed of what you’re going through and you don’t want to tell anyone. You see it as some failure on your part. And God forbid you should have to attend a seminar and reveal your failings in front of others! Have you heard that old saying: A problem shared is a problem halved? (Those old sayings still work best, and this one is the best of the best.) The fact is, when someone else shares [...]

  HENRY DAVID Thoreau wrote that ‘most men lead lives of quiet desperation’. I am at war with ‘quiet desperation’. What does quiet desperation look like? It looks like someone shutting up for the sake of peace. It looks like someone not doing what he wants in order to meet expectations, or fit in, or maintain the status quo. It looks like someone falling in line. What’s the opposite of ‘quiet desperation’? It’s a man who starts each day knowing that he’s surfing the wave of being, that he could [...]

  LOOK INTO the fabric of life and you’ll see that we don’t have all the information we need before we start a task, which is when we need it most; instead we have to learn it. Similarly, we have all the knowledge and wisdom about life at the end, when we can no longer use it. Seems crazy, but if life has any order or meaning, then there must be a reason for it having been constructed that way. Perhaps the learning is more important than the knowledge or [...]

  I BOUGHT a book many years ago because of its title: How Shall We Then Live? It was a Christian social manifesto, with plenty of validity, but it didn’t answer the question for me. Instead, the title, which had resonated in the beginning, stayed with me: I knew that it was the central question of my life. I wasn’t fulfilled, and I wanted to be. I didn’t feel free; I could see that people weren’t free, and I was determined that we should be. I’ve since learned that if [...]