In life, it’s not who you are or what you are that matters. It is who you are being that makes the difference in every situation. We are called human beings for a good reason.
Being is the coherence of what we experience as sensing, feeling, and thinking in our body. This is not an abstract philosophy. We observe what happens using these capacities. If we are a conscious human being, we can also watch ourselves actually observing them.
We can all be Heros
Any boy or girl; or man or woman, of any age, can be a hero. The hero is one on the journey toward their highest potential. It has always been so.
The hero is on a journey through life experiences, but also one through the meaning that they make from those experiences. The journey is full of challenges. Every hero’s journey starts in diapers, and passes through childhood, youth, adulthood, and ultimately to maturity if each stage is passed cleanly. Unfortunately for some, the journey is abandoned should the hero fail to pass a stage. Sometimes a stage is passed, but not resolved and becomes the lesson that needs to be re-learned (until we finally get it). Every myth tells the tale of the hero’s past, but our lives are the tale of our own hero’s journey into the future. The task of the hero is always to navigate the facts of life, and its risks and possibilities. When these are faced, with acceptance, courage, and trust, one passes. However, when they are denied, with resentment, resignation, or fear, the journey often pauses or even ends.
Coaching the Hero
Ontological Coaching addresses the way we observe experience. It focuses on the meaning that we make, in 3 different domains of life. These are Facts, Possibilities, and Risks. Our understanding of our circumstances in life is always about these three domains, and how we make assessments about them, and what we take for being true, either with or without evidence. Much of the work is breaking this down by looking at our language to determine what is true from what is merely believed.
However, we extend this beyond just words, because we can also observe our sensations and emotions. Together this gives our human intelligence. In coaching we bring the three domains of sensing, feeling, and thinking together, and see what happens when we either accept or deny the truth about Facts, Possibilities, and Risks based on our past experience. We distinguish if our assessments about them are true or merely ungrounded assertions that give us illusions and false judgments.
My job, as a coach and mentor, is to help the hero untangle for themselves the web created by their choices and to free the body of the hero from any protective armor that blocks their sensory and emotive abilities. This involves both coaching and bodywork to produce lasting results. This is because who we are is our embodiment, and we need to discover for ourselves the body of the hero, or heroine in our life. If we do not do so, we may be doomed to live the life of a victim, created by our own assessments and false assertions, when we could instead embody the heroic as the lead actor in our empowered life story.
Photo by Manyu Varma on Unsplash
© Copyright 2020 Robert Fertman, All Rights Reserved
Comments