Touching What is Already Here

One of the gifts of having been a life and leadership coach for almost twenty years now has been to witness the amazing creativity and wholeness of human beings. Now that I think about it, I actually began coaching when two sisters were born when I was five and six years old. Suddenly I was a big brother. I was very proud of my two young friends. They taught me how to listen and how to let them learn at their own pace. How to be playful, but not too much. They taught me how to appreciate the joys and accomplishments of others. To this day, I am endlessly grateful to them both.

One of the basic tenants of coaching as I learned it formally in ‘co-active coaching’ aligns with the teachings of Zen: each human being already has everything they need. My job as coach is not to diagnose, solve people’s problems or give good advice. My job is to appreciate this person and to remember that they are already creative, resourceful and whole. They may or may not feel this way or even be behaving this way in their life. But my job is to help them connect to the wisdom and passion that is already within them.

It is the same in the practice of Zen. We are taught to turn our attention toward what is already here. Zen is not a self-improvement project. We’re not trying to be ‘Zen’ or to escape from our ordinary lives (though sometimes I must admit…..), but rather we are learning to be who we already are. This is a paradoxical enterprise since we are already fully who we are. It’s just that we suffer so much from the delusion that we are separate and that we should be something or someone else.

But repeating the platitudes of sufficiency is not enough. Both in coaching and in Zen, the encouragement is to find out for yourself. It’s all experiential learning. My job as a coach and Zen teacher is not to share my wisdom with the people I work with. My job is to help them touch what is always present. This begins, as the great Zen master Dogen wrote, by ‘turning the light of your awareness within’—beginning to listen to your deeper self.

To listen to our deeper selves, we have to somehow get through the thicket of gremlin voices that live in our head. These internal voices have endless opinions of how and who we should be. Often we are afraid to even acknowledge our own dreams and deep wishes for our lives. Who are we to want something more? We have so much, we should just be content and stop complaining.

The questions I often begin a coaching relationship with are simple and challenging. What is your dream? I often ask this question in various aspects of your life: career, finances, friends and family, personal growth, intimate relationship, recreation and location. Often we’re so busy coping with the challenges of the moment that we don’t give ourselves time or permission to dream.

Personal Practice: Take ten minutes today to dream. Sit down in your favorite chair or go for a short walk or lock yourself in the bathroom—whatever it takes to create some psychic space around you. Then think of a particular aspect of your life and imagine what it would be like if it were really great. Not just pretty good, but really amazing. You don’t have to be realistic, but be as specific as possible. Where would you be? Who and what would be around you? What would it feel like?

Allow yourself to dream. You don’t have to do anything else. Know that, for whatever reason, this is your dream. You don’t have to tell anyone, but sometimes just becoming conscious of the dream can bring an energy and aliveness to our lives that we had forgotten.