contemplative learning

Rethinking Freedom in Coaching: From Agency to Awareness

A client, Kathy, arrives at a coaching session exhausted.

“I know exactly what I need to do,” she says. “I just can’t seem to do it.”

The coaching conversation quickly turns toward goals, accountability, habits, and confidence. Together, coach and client begin strengthening her capacity to act. She leaves feeling clearer, more empowered, and ready to make different choices.

This is coaching at its best. It cultivates agency—the capacity to intentionally direct our actions toward desired outcomes.

But beneath this success lies a deeper question.

Does becoming more effective necessarily mean becoming more free?

The Agency Puzzle

Few ideas have become as central DOWNLOAD PDF

By |2026-07-20T10:09:32-04:00July 20th, 2026|Blog, Learning/Coaching|2 Comments

Beyond Coaching: Apollo, Dionysus, and the Art of Being of Service

Life unfolds through creative tension.

The ancient Greeks captured this tension through two mythic figures: Apollo and Dionysus, both sons of Zeus (though born of different mothers: Leto and Semele, respectively).

Popularized by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, the Apollonian–Dionysian duality captures the enduring tension between order and emergence, reason and instinct, structure and vitality.

Through Apollo, we seek harmony, clarity, understanding, and distinct form. He helps us distinguish, discern, organize, and make sense of experiences.

Through Dionysus, we encounter the spontaneity, immediacy, and emergence of life. DOWNLOAD PDF

By |2026-06-16T00:19:37-04:00June 15th, 2026|Blog, Learning/Coaching|0 Comments

Keeping Care Alive, part 2: Practices for Working with Being

In everyday language, care is often treated as an emotion. We speak of caring as a feeling we have toward people, causes, or outcomes. Sometimes it is framed morally—as kindness or concern—and other times therapeutically, as empathy or emotional availability.

In Part 1 of this series, I argued that something essential is lost when care is reduced to sentiment. I also distinguished between two different ways of understanding care: psychology and ontology. Psychology interprets experience—explaining feelings, motivations, and patterns of behavior. Ontology, by contrast, discloses the structures that shape how experience is possible in the first place.

From DOWNLOAD PDF

By |2026-06-03T14:31:16-04:00February 17th, 2026|Blog, Mental Models|0 Comments
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