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Round Peak for teenagers- Balance: the secret to achievement and enjoyment

Teenagers want it all. And it’s normal. They should want it all.

At one point some them will start going after what they want. And they will realise that getting everything they want is not always possible and almost never easy.

Those that are grittier will keep going after what they want and invest their efforts in a dream- expecting to get a permanent sense of accomplishment when that dream comes true. More often than not they are disappointed by how fast this sense of accomplishment fades away.

The ones that are more tempted to go with the flow will jump from one dream to another, feeling accomplished whenever they have a new dream, but never actually bringing any dream into reality.

Balance

Eventually, as they mature they find out that the secret to enjoying life and achieving success is balancing these two attitudes.

Balance is something that is not taught in school and is rarely approched in extra-curricular activities. Balance between the amount of atttention we give to ourselves and others, to our inner life and our outer one, between intuition and judgement, between the aspects of our life situation that we need to accept and those we need to change. Essentially it’s balance between trusting ourselves and trusting life/the Universe/God.

Presence

The state of consciousness that allows us to develop this balance is called Presence. It is a state of consciousness where our mind becomes an instrument instead of the conductor. Where we are identified with something deeper than our ego/mind and use our mind in order to express that inner calling.

It is not an end goal in itself. It comes and goes throughout our lives and achieving it in different stages of our lives is a learning journey. We can think of it as a pair of glasses. It allows us to see clearly, but with time it gets dirty and needs to be taken off in order to be cleaned.

The earlier we start to train our Presence the easier it is, the more results it brings and the more motivation we will have to keep training.

This is why RoundPeak is a perfect match for teenagers looking to get a head start on life and become the best version of themselves while enjoying life in the fullest sense possible.

RoundPeak for teenagers

RoundPeak is a space that supports communities of people dedicated to accepting themselves as they are and using that state of consciousness to create measurable positive outcomes.

It enables teenagers to:

  1. Set ambitious but realistic goals
  2. Develop healthy autonomy
  3. Learn alongside others from practice rather than from theory
  4. Hold and be held accountable for their goals and ambitions

ultimately helping teenagers be present in their lives, enjoy the now and diligently work towards creating a better life for themselves and others.

Whether it’s achieving better academic results, being better in sports, having more fulfilling relationships, creating an entrepreneurial project, RoundPeak offers a space to constantly refine one’s method of… living.

To find out more about RoundPeak and checkout our website.

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Guest Post: Life Coaching, Life Transforming

I have been working with Chriszean, a remarkably determined teenager from Philippines for more than 3 months. I was impressed by the quality of his work and the level of determination he displayed, so I asked him to write a guest blog-post. Here it is:

“It’s been more than a hundred days since a new chapter of my life has emerged, and my life has been completely transformed. Deciding to open and read a very powerful inspirational and motivational book is one thing that marked the beginning of my life transformation, and I firmly believe that is an essential part of God’s great plan for my life, for it has helped me to a great extent in my personal development, self-improvement, and my overall well-being. During these moments, I’ve decided to navigate through my inner self on a deeper level through the help of life coaching where I discovered and explored some of my life goals such as becoming the best version of myself and living my life to the fullest as well as gaining clarity on my massive transformative life purpose which is living to glorify God and bringing hope to the world. Besides, I’ve also established some gigantic goals that helped me to avoid settling for good enough, but always aiming for the best.

This article includes a summary of the various essential key takeaways that every coaching session unfolds.

Effective and Efficient Time Management

Time management is a challenge to almost everyone. With too much to do and too little time to do everything you want to do, we usually experience stress levels soaring. We all need to fulfill our responsibilities, but there is a time for everything, and the use of effective and efficient time management strategies such as prioritizing, overcoming overthinking, and even allowing yourself to have enough time to rest, play a fundamental role in helping you perform better in daily activities and tasks, avoid burnout, and achieve more balance in life.

Fear Management

Many people encounter self-limiting beliefs and self-doubt as major obstacles or roadblocks that hinder them from pursuing their goals and desires and strive for the pinnacle of success. Feeling a sense of fear is perfectly natural, for our minds are programmed to have a fight or flight response. Fear is extremely powerful, and it can affect a person both positively and negatively, and can be used to our advantage for it can help us feel more motivated in achieving our goals in a way that we feel a sense of achievement, fulfillment, and satisfaction once we achieved this certain goal that we are constantly aiming for. Fear can make our journey towards our goals more exciting and thrilling, but not to the point that we’ll feel agitation and apprehension, similar to riding an extreme ride on an amusement park. It might be challenging to manage feelings of fear and self-doubt, but I firmly believe the famous quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson that the only person we are destined to become is the person we decide to be, thus we should control our emotions, and never let our emotions control us. We are the captain of our ship and the master of our fate. We can create a life that we want. We can’t choose our external circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond.

Profound Secrets in Living Life to the Fullest

What is life? We might not have similar answers to that question, but in my personal opinion, life is God’s greatest gift! We live not only for the sake of living, but we live for a purpose. I firmly believe that everyone has a strong desire to live the life they want and live their lives to the fullest. Throughout the coaching series, I tried to navigate through some of the profound secrets in living life to the fullest.

1. Always have faith in God and believe in yourself.

Having a strong and unbreakable faith in God together with believing in your abilities and capabilities creates an enormously powerful instrument in battling, facing, and overcoming life’s challenges.

2. Don’t take life too seriously.

Learn to enjoy, and go with the flow rather than go against the flow.

3. Have the desire and willingness to achieve desired outcomes, but learn to embrace and enjoy the process at the same time.

It’s exceedingly necessary to avoid having our entire focus on the product, but rather enjoy the process which is a great way in developing a growth mindset for there is a wide range and variety of life lessons that we can learn from the process per se.

4. Use life’s challenges as stepping stones instead of obstacles.

There is always a brighter side that we must figure out, and keep our focus on. There are numerous and various blessings in disguise.

Fortifying Our Faith in God

Grit and determination are exceptionally powerful in building a sturdy foundation towards achieving and accomplishing goals and desires. As a person who always wants to achieve, the value for achievement and recognition is something natural to me. I’m highly inspired by successful people-because they maximized their time, to the point where I forget to remember the true definition and meaning of success which is not all about getting what you want but also becoming the person that God has called you to be. Every time I see some of my goals falling apart, I sometimes feel like it’s the end of the world, and I sometimes forget to remember to trust and believe in God and His great plans, plans to prosper us, and not to harm us, plans to give us hope and a future.

Keeping the Right Balance

Nearly everything in life requires a balance, and it’s very significant to maintain a well-balanced life.

1. Taking Control and Going with the Flow

Your life is very similar to a ship, and you are the captain. If you just go to where the waves take you, you might not reach your desired destination.

2. Achievement and Enjoyment

Achievement and enjoyment are two interconnected things, and it’s highly similar to balancing discipline and relaxation and even finding the right balance between work and rest.

3. Positive and Negative

Life portrays a mixture of positive and negative things. Positive things remind us to be grateful and thank God for everything that we have while negative things help us acknowledge God’s power in our lives.

4. Contentment and Discontentment

Contentment is considered an extremely essential key in achieving happiness in life. However, being too contented might pave the way to mediocrity, thus it’s important for us to learn the art of contentment and discontentment at the same time to keep searching for better and greater things.”

One of Chriszean’s goals is to write for a living, so please be so kind as to give him some feedback on his writting in the comments.

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Why coaches shouldn’t have an expertise…

Spoiler: because otherwise they would be mentors, not coaches..

A while ago, I wrote an article about striving to be an expert in not being an expert.

I only marginally linked that idea to my coaching practice, so I decided to go deeper into it, this time touching on the benefits a non-expert coach posture could bring for the client.

There are two main outcomes clients look for when starting a coaching agreement: They either want to feel better, or to do better. Of course these basic objectives are formulated in divers ways: from “finding more balance” to “being more focused” and from “landing a job” to “increasing one’s impact” , but studying over 100 answers my clients gave to the question: “what do you want to achieve by the end of our coaching agreement” there isn’t one that does not fall into one of the above mentioned categories.

People shouldn’t look to coaches for expertise or information. There are other very qualitative sources for that which are -if not free- at least much cheaper than coaching.

Patrick Mouratoglou isn’t teaching Serena Williams how to hit the ball. There is hardly anybody who can teach her that. He is helping her identify her physical and psychological strengths and weaknesses and autonomously develop ways to manage them in order to achieve her desired outcome: which is to be the world’s best tennis player.

As a client, the main thing I would be looking for in a coach would be her capacity to create a space for me to grow. Like any relationship, the coaching relationship has an unspoken dimension that influences the outcome of the partnership sometimes even more than what is in the open.

A CEO looking to make the final decision on an M&A transaction does not need expertise. He’s already gone through a thorough process with his team of experts and has everybody’s opinion. He also probably already knows some of the vested interests his team members have. He’s not looking for the coach’s opinion or M&A expertise. He wants a clear, unintruded space where he can unwrap his thoughts on the matter without having to be weary of the other person’s biases or blind-spots.

No matter one’s level of competence in an area, there will always be unconscious patterns that are influencing one’s decisions. As mentioned in this article, the things we don’t accept in ourselves are usually the ones we project, so consequently the ones we perceive from reality. These projections are what create blind-spots. And these blind-spots are usually what hinder us from achieving whatever we want to achieve.

There’s a caveat: this hinderance is not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe what we are trying to achieve is not good for us, so our unconscious self is hindering us in order to help us find the right track. Or maybe it’s exactly the right thing for us, but the way we have been programmed determines a self-sabotage protocol in order to protect the programming itself. There is no level of expertise in the content the Client brings that can enable a Coach to accompany his Client through this type of process.

The more expertise a Coach has, the more he will be tempted to offer solutions. And most of the time, the Client will answer with one variation of the TA game “yes, but…”

There is however something that can help the Coach navigate these very slippery slopes. It’s called Coaching Presence. It is probably the most important “tool” in coaching and generally refers at the Coach’s capacity to let go of her unconscious patterns and focus all her energy in the now. This not only creates that safe space for the Client to grow, but models this state of consciousness for the Client so that he can use it to deepen his work.

I dare to say that Presence is THE ONLY EXPERTISE that is needed in coaching.

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Accepting yourself as you are might just be the best thing you can do to become better

Be kind to yourself… It’s the type of advice any therapist will at one point give her client. But what does this mean?

The Standard

We are constantly presented with an explicit and oftentimes implicit standard of “healthy” human behaviour. Based on a set of western if not Christian values of discipline, ethics, hard work and charity, it might indeed serve as a useful direction for our development journey, if properly put in context.

The Shadow

As C.G. Jung masterfully asserted, there are more than one psychic forces comprising what we might call our personality. The aspects that are not aligned with the above mentioned standards are collected under the concept of Shadow.

As we cannot speak about light without mentioning darkness, togetherness without separation, good without bad, we cannot speak about our standard for character without acknowledging those aspects that deviate from said standard.

Projection

Whether we talk about being lazy, selfish, dishonest or fearful, even the most spiritually advanced among us are “guilty” of these “sins”. They are an integral part of our humanity. While reading these lines, you can probably identify some of these tendencies in your own inner experience, but most of us are quick to brush them off by finding explanations, excuses or plainly ignoring them completely.

Most of us do not have the tools and context to bring these experiences into awareness without becoming judgmental or being overwhelmed by feelings of guilt so we prefer to brush them off using different psychic strategies. And it might work for a while – depending of your definition of both “work” and “while”.

There are many strategies we use to avoid accepting our own shadow, but a comprehensive inventory of these strategies is beyond the scope of this article.

One of the most common strategies however is projection. We do this with people- projecting traits that we refuse to accept in ourselves onto others, but most importantly we do these by projecting onto reality itself. Jung famously said that perception is projection recovered. This is why sometimes, reality seems to obnoxiously feed us back precisely the type of situations and interactions that we insist on avoiding.

Consequently we seem to create the type of reality we wish to avoid precisely because of the mechanism we use to avoid them.

Accepting

One alternative is Acceptance. It is as challenging a strategy as it is straight forward. It is theorised in many schools of therapy with ACT being the most representative of them.

Essentially it is a non-mental process that paradoxically involves mindfully acknowledging shadow traits, integrating them using techniques that can vary from breath work to behavioural training, creating a support system in order to maintain this new type of behaviour, and eventually relapsing and starting all over again.

This last part which is integral to almost any change process, as best described by Prochaska is a probably the most difficult part to accept when considering a development process. Relapsing, instead of being considered a failure should be accepted as an opportunity to refine one’s strategy.

Caveat

One of the potential pitfalls of this process of continuous acceptance is pure fatalism. It is easy to start accepting everything as it is, from your own inner experiences to life-situations, but it’s very challenging to do so without relinquishing responsibility of action.

That is why I mentioned this being a non-mental process. Because the mind alone cannot manage balancing the extremes of fatalism and perfectionism.

We need a more holistic process for managing our life. It involves working with our bodies, our emotions, using our own life-situations as training ground and it especially involves doing it with others instead of on your own.

It is not a fixed process with a clear finish line. It is a lifelong process and it can be as painful and frustrating as it can be blissful and liberating.

If you want to check out a community of people dedicated to accepting themselves as they are and using that state of consciousness in order to create a better life for themselves and others, RoundPeak might be a good option. Let me know in the comments bellow if you know about any other such communities.

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What I’ve learned from spending a decade and more than 50k euros on personal development

Most of the providers on the personal development market over-promise and under-deliver. The main reason for this is that if they where honest, it would be really hard for them to sell. Here’s why:

Personal development is a lifelong journey

When buying something we are used to being promised a measurable result at the end of a specified period of time with minimal effort on our part. This can certainly be achieved- maybe except the minimum effort part- with skill development.

When it comes to becoming better human beings, things are not that easy… We first need to define what better is. How we measure it. Then we need to craft ways to train in the direction we have set out for ourselves. We might at one point discover that the direction we initially set out for ourselves does not serve us anymore.

There is no finish line. And the only real measure of success is the level of satisfaction you have with your own life.

It’s not the method, it’s the relationship

While there are undoubtedly successful endeavours and we might be tempted to replicate a certain process with the hope of replicating its results, each individual is unique and accompanying someone in her development journey is more about creating an open and healthy relationship than it is about following a certain process.

The accompanying professional-let’s call him a coach- has his own biases, his own challenges and patterns. Being aware of those patterns and using them in the development work is essential for both client and coach growth.

The coach and client are recreating within their relationship the same patterns that they need to develop or manage in each of their own life situations.

It is similar to what Irwin Yalom calls “working with the here and now” or Alain Cardon’s “being present to client-coach resonance”.

This ultimately means that the coach/therapist must be vulnerable enough to admit when he is confused, overly-excited, blocked, doubtful, etc. This type of open, vulnerable relationship creates a safe space where the client is confident enough to deepen her work and take risks.

There is a catch: a safe space can very easily turn into a comfort zone if not kept in check by appropriate challenging strategies. This is where the idea of a method goes out the window. There is no way of balancing these two apparently conflicting strategies: creating a safe space and challenging the client to grow. It is only through a lot of practice in being present in the here and now, that you can start creating that balance on a regular basis. And I suspect not even the masters of the game get it right every time..

Autonomy is key

During our development process we have the tendency to delegate the responsibility of our progress to either the development process or the accompanying professional herself.

We can call it the paradox of accompanying: it is only when a client can do without a coach’s support that the work becomes valuable. Only when we as clients take full responsibility of our own development does the true development start.

However, autonomy is not something that we achieve at one point and never lose again. So paradoxically we will always benefit from having a partner that can hold us accountable to our own autonomy.

Having a purpose is great. Having clear goals- even better. But be flexible.

This is where I start mixing personal experience with my own philosophical ideas.

Clear goal setting is the basis of what we call the motivation stack. Having a life purpose and breaking that down into clear supporting goals helps us stay motivated and constantly move towards the direction we want in life.

But sometimes we set the wrong goals. Or we are too ambitious. Or not ambitious enough. Although changing your goal stack every day in order to minimise the effort needed to achieve those goals is an excellent self-sabotage strategy, so is clinging to a desired outcome without regard for what reality offers us as feedback.

The key here for me is constantly aligning on my purpose, goals, values and areas of focus and accountability. Creating a feedback loop between daily life and these rather conceptual guidelines and using discrepancies as input for my development work.

Groups are magic

Individual work is great for defining goals, overcoming basic postponement strategies, building an action plan, holding and being held accountable. If accompanied by a master, it can reveal deep patterns engrained in our psyche for generations, offer opportunities to transcend these patterns in the here and now and even help us develop the autonomy to take this work further into our daily lives.

But being in a group that has the purpose of offering a safe space for people to share their deepest fears and most challenging life-situations has an almost magical power.

A well supervised group can provide all the benefits a masterful coaching experience can, but in a more holistic way and for a fraction of the cost.

When you vulnerably share your deepest challenges with a group, especially with people you don’t know very well two things almost always happen:

  1. you get a sense of great relief when putting it out there. internal challenges-especially the most intimate ones seem less scary once shared. One of the main reasons is that we formulate them so they go from being a daunting mix of fears, projections and self-doubt it becomes a statement that can be fact checked, refined, or just listened to and received by others
  2. people in the group develop a sense of gratitude as if your sharing modelled what they needed to do. Also hearing someone vulnerably share their challenges makes it easier to live with our own. Because at a deep level, our basic challenges are the same. We all want to love and be loved. We have all experienced different challenges to this basic need, making us think that achievement, status, a certain relationship or a spiritual practice will help us fulfil this need.

To coclude…

With these conclusions and my own experience as an ICF accredited coach I enlisted the help of my wife Ramona (also a trained coach) and started building a platform that would allow us to practice these learnings with our clients and friends.

We call it RoundPeak and its purpose is creating a community of people determined to truly develop themselves and others.

This means using our own life-situations as training ground for our development, accepting ourselves the way we truly are, without making excuses or projecting over-inflated egos, and using the energy and clarity we get from accepting our life-situation to achieve specific outcomes that would improve our life-situation and hopefully other’s as well.

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Depression might actually be an ancient cleansing process

You feel so bad about yourself during a depressed period that when energy and inspiration come back, there is no more fear of making a fool out of yourself and you act with a different flavour of courage.

Depression has a bad name. And for anybody who is suffering from it there is a good reason for that.

But there’s another dimension to depression: underneath the painful experience of self-doubt and discouragement we might just find an ancient evolutionary process.

For efficiency’s sake, I will use some academically unacceptable shortcuts:

the Ego and the Self

The psychological identity we create for ourselves can be called an ego. It arrises from our need to identify as separate individuals. The way we build this ego is through our life experience. Based on a number of factors, we might be more or less inclined to over-inflate this ego.

Once over-inflated, it becomes part of a vicious circle that removes it even more from touch with reality which in turn gives it more reasons to artificially inflate.

At a more fundamental level of our being there is what C. G. Jung calls the Self which he defines as an all encompassing identity that unites the ego with the unconscious.

It is the integration of self and ego that can be identified at a psychological level with the evolutionary goal of life. It can be likened to the Middle Path in Buddhism.

But our outside world is not made for the self, it’s made for the ego. Society, its norms and standards, marketing, academia-they’re mainly directed towards the ego. So naturally, the ego sometimes takes over the ship with little regard for balance or moderation. So the only way the self can rebalance our psychological system is by sabotaging the ego’s foundations like self-esteem, memory, concentration, vital energy, etc. The only way our deeper self can depressurise our inflated ego is self-sabotage.

Letting go

Isn’t that what depression feels like? self-sabotage? The good news is that if we accept it as a guide instead of fighting it, depression will walk us through some of our most painful realisations, but it will eventually deliver us to a lighter, more open and more authentic psychological reality. It strips us of our masks, defence mechanisms, fake images about ourselves. Of course if we try to hold on to them, it will hurt. It will feel like you’re loosing something. But once you let go, it’s like being born again.

This is the desired outcome of any therapeutic process. LETTING GO…. of our image of ourselves so that we can fully engage with reality. It may take years of therapy and sometimes medication, but it can also happen in a second. Actually it does happen in a second, but some of us might feel they need to do years of practice before. Don’t get me wrong, I am a huge fan of practice, but I also know how over-preparation is the enemy of actually doing something.

Practicing letting go, of our patterns, our defence mechanisms, our personas is going to increase our ability to let go and be present to the moment. Preparing for said practice will increase our preparation skills. Not necessarily our ability to let go. Unless we practice letting go while we prepare for that practice… See where I’m going?

Letting go basically means seeing life from a different vantage point than that in which we are identified with a mental image of ourselves and compare that image to what we perceive to be the reality around us.

Flowing

We’ve all had those moments of just going with the flow. Where it seems like what you think is fully aligned with what you are doing, where there is almost no judgement and everything seems clear.

Different authors call it different names. In psychology it’s flow, in Christianity it’s kenosis, in Buddhism it’s sunyata new age spiritual teachers call it presence… And in my experience, it is not something you can replicate through a process- I’m still journaling and measuring my degree of let’s call it presence in correlation with other factores, but with little success in actually identifying a link.

Depression is the process that balances out our over-inflation of and over-identification with the ego. It allows us or better said forces us to systematically questions all our patterns and identifications and see which suit our purpose and which don’t.

It is an ancient process of integration involving both our individualised (masculine, rational) ego and our more collective (feminine, intuitive) self that allows us to experience life more fully, without constantly ruminating about the experience.

This is why I think that through integrating depression into our growth toolset, we gain a very powerful and very deep process for self-acceptance and self-improvement.

More about accepting and performance in this article.

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I strive to be an expert at not being an expert

Who doesn’t love a good paradox? Life and especially physics is full of them.

The paradoxical nature of our realities is precisely the reason I wouldn’t ever want to be identified with an expert role. Let me elaborate:

No matter how much you know on a subject, in order to present yourself as an expert in that field you need to ignore all that you don’t know on that subject.

Take any field, let’s say physics: it is humanly impossible to hold in understanding all the existing theories on any segment of physics. No matter how smart you are, no matter how much of your life you dedicate to the subject, the sheer amount of information out there surpasses any human being’s ability to grasp. Consequently, whenever one publishes a theory one needs to only present the facts that one initially took into account when working on that theory. One might say that peer reviews have the exact purpose of poking at the publisher’s own biases and one is most probably right. Also laboratory experiments confirm theories. But we all know that theories that have been considered to be true by the physics community have been later debunked, as is the example of aether.  or not…

More on the scientific method in this article.

So, in order to be an expert, you need to consider yourself to be right so that you can then exercise your expertise, even though deep down inside you know you’re probably wrong.

At the most fundamental level of our documented reality, there is no absolute truth: The Double-Slit Experiment

The above-mentioned experiment demonstrates that light (and also electrons, atoms, and molecules) behave in apparently opposite manners depending on how they are measured.

This is a very important “fact” to take into account when understanding the nature of reality.  There is no absolute truth… How about time? Isn’t time true? We grow old, days turn into nights, so time must be an absolute truth… According to Carlo Rovelli it’s not. And there are countless examples of well documented and/or proven facts that demonstrate that there is no absolute truth.

We need experts to build the outer world. 

From a doctor to a mechanic, going through marketing and consulting, nobody would pay for someone who says “Well, I’m not really sure about what I’m doing here…” so the whole society from education to entertainment, news, politics et al. is built around the idea of certainty. And that is why whenever I’m not present to this intuitive understanding and I’m just trying to “fit in” I feel like I’m very ill-prepared for this reality.

But to help maintain our inner world, we need a completely different type of professional.

I am in a rather lonely place where I am intelligent enough to understand how little I actually know about the world but not intelligent (or diligent) enough to deepen my expertise in any domain. I am what you might conventionally define as lazy, but after a deep scrutiny over almost 7 years I realize that it’s not because I am lazy that I don’t go deeper into the domains I spend time on. Nor is it because of my poor memory or difficulties I have focusing on one thing at a time (I’m sure that if tests would have been carried out while I was in school I would have been diagnosed with some form of ADD). Rather all of the above are consequences of my deep understanding of the fact that there is no absolute truth.

This is why I coach. When I am coaching, it is in my job description not to know things. My only responsibility is to make sure my training is done, my certifications are passed and I am PRESENT. Being present is for me the only absolute truth there can be. It’s creating a time-space for the client where your own biases, judgments, fears, and projections are checked at the entrance and the client is free to develop his own paradigm. Presence is what allows me to be an expert at not being an expert. To intervene minimally only when I feel it’s appropriate and to do it in a humble vulnerable way…

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Coaching is a peer relationship

There are many definitions of coaching, all saying the same basic thing but with different words. The one I resonate the most with is the one given by Alain Cardon.A profession focused on accompanying the client’s dialogue towards achieving his desired results.Let’s break down this definition:

Profession

Although the dynamics of a good coaching session resemble a casual conversation, it is important to make it clear for everybody that the Coach is there as a professional and not a friend or confidant for the Client.

Accompanying

This is probably the most important aspect of this definition. Although the Coach is trained to employ coaching skills, he has no expertise in the Client’s issue. So, the nature of the relationship is peer to peer with one partner being an expert on the content of the issue and another focused on accompanying him in a professional way. The two are co-creating the relationship, there is no top-down approach whatsoever and most importantly they learn together.

Client’s Dialogue

Communicating effectively through powerful questions and direct communication are expected competencies for a good coach. And that is why when people hear “dialogue” they interpret it as being a conversation between 2 people (dia-two?; logos-word) But the Greek “dia” is etymologically more akin to the Latin “via” which means “through”. So dialogue is a way of creating reality through language(words). Thoughts are transformed from quantic state- where they can be at the same time both true and false- into a “material” state as they take the “static” form of words. You can make a parallel with the thought-speech-action axis present in almost all spiritual teachings and psychological theories.

His desired results

I underlined the possessive pronoun to emphasize the importance of client’s ownership over the desired outcomes. Both beginning coaches and experienced ones, for different reasons, have a strong temptation to offer solutions or define the Client’s goal for him. It is essential to the coaching process that the Coach be aware of his own intentions, and subsequently let them go in order to make space for the Client to unravel his own frame of reference.

Using the word results instead of goals is a way of demonstrating the importance of linguistics in coaching: when we think of a goal, we automatically position it at a distance-it is in the future, there is time to be passed before we get there, there are resources to be employed and so on. When we think of results, we think of something we have already achieved. So less resource-related issues that can get in the way of us actually achieving those results.

Why coaching is a unique peer to peer experience?

One of the things people find it hard to accept is this idea that the coach is learning as much or maybe more than the client. I observed that if you listen carefully to your client’s dialogue you will realize that he has come to work on your issue, even though he is working on his. Of course, the actors might be different, the words used to describe the issue might be different, but the patterns are the same.

This is why I believe that the systemic approach to coaching that Alain Cardon proposes is an extremely efficient way of working.

If you’re interested in starting a coaching relationship with me, please fill in this form. No strings attached.

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Who is Paul Badea?

Short Intro

If I have learned anything from my experience so far it’s that life is constantly changing and unpredictable. Our attempts to make sense of it intellectually have a limit. And as long as we stick within that limit, we’re ok. But when we pass that limit and try to rationalize everything, we are entering an area that our rational mind is not yet prepared to navigate. The only absolute truth that I can accept is the NOW, perceived in a state I call presence…

This blog’s purpose is to describe from an authentic, vulnerable position my life as a father, partner, brother, son, entrepreneur and inner-explorer and my attempt to create a balanced life with purpose and enjoyment.

Why english? I am Romanian, and I love the sound and structure of my language. The ideas expressed on this blog are not Romanian, though. They are intended to be global. So it is only fair to give them a global audience, in order to get feedback and keep improving in that direction.

BIO

I was born in September of 1989 in Bucharest. I was 3 months old and 500m from the National Television Studios when the Revolution was going on. My mom prides herself by saying that I was listening to the last congress of the communist party when I was in my crib.  Apparently some bullets found their way into our house during the Revolution, but nobody was hurt. .

I was raised in a middle class family in Bucharest. I always had a powerful spiritual relationship with my mother and a strong reliance on paternal confirmation.

My dad was around less then I would have preferred but sufficiently so to provide a solid example of morality, achievement and generosity. He was also the one who introduced me to racing in general- especially Formula 1 , motorbiking, classic cars, British craftsmanship and Japanese culture – especially related to continuous improvement systems.

I would discuss life’s most complicated questions with my mom. I still do. Her unconditional and unequivocal love has been the fundamental pillar of my growth. The mini-trauma inducing remarks that she sometimes utters innocently have also have also been extremely useful in my development.

Silviana, my sister, is 9 years older then me. The age difference and the fact that she grew up in a completely different country than I did (Communist Romania vs Post-comunist Romania) made it challenging for us to communicate in our early years. It wasn’t really until a trip to Vietnam that we really connected and started a bond of mutual appreciation that held us together through a lot of difficult challenges ever since. Working alongside her is a pleasure as well as an honour. Her work ethic and capacity of getting shit done are world class.

I went through my first 20 years being of average intelligence, but having an ability to communicate that compensated wonderfully both in school and socially.

One notable event during these 20 years is the moment I crashed my car. It was a brand new Infiniti FX 35 and I totaled it. The next morning, after seeing the car, my dad swung by the house on his way to the airport. He handed me the keys for his car (an Infiniti G35-same engine, less body, RWD)- a car I was very rarely allowed to drive. I was all teared up, and all I could say was “Why?” and he answered “Because I know how I raised you and I am sure you have learned your lesson.” I hadn’t learned my lesson. I would have probably done the same stupid thing I did to crash the first one. But  truly feeling the honesty and trust in his voice changed me forever. I never drove recklessly ever since. And this moment has become the corner stone of my belief that some people, if treated with honesty and trust can change in the most astonishing ways.

Family

I feel like the person who understands me the most, especially in our most intricate philosophical inquiries is my partner and co-parent, Ramona. She truly is the Yin to my Yang and I feel most grateful to have met her.

We have been through a lot together trying to define our relationship and  knowing us, there are still many more lessons that we will be learning together.  My relationship to Ramona and the learning and healing it provides should be an article on it’s own- if not a book.

2013 was a special year for me. I met Sisi, my daughter, for the first time in February and saw  my dad for the last time in May. It was a challenging year, but it was the year that most evidently sparked my growth as a human being and brought me closer to my family, including Ramona’s mom and brother.

Sissi is a wonderful young lady. Although she looks exactly like her mother, she is a mini me in terms of behaviour. The only difference is that she is way more involved in school and lightyears more talented than I ever was in both sports and arts.

Our son Pacs was born in the summer of 2019- 6 and a half years after his sister. He has his mom’s stubbornness and purity of heart. He knows what he wants and you have little chance to convince him otherwise, unless you REALLY take the time to do it. But I have never seen someone react to authentic presence more powerfully than him.

We’re far from that perfect family where everything falls into place, and when things don’t we just accept it and make the most out of it.  My relationship with Ramona is the perfect mirror for my inner relationship with myself. Our relationship with the kids is a perfect mirror for our own relationship, and so on. Family life is our main training ground and I am grateful to have such a blessed journey.

BADSI

BADSI is the business my father founded more than 30 years ago. It started out as a Nissan Importer and Dealer. It is currently an Automotive Network providing services that range from fleet management to classic car trading.

BADSI was what you would call a distressed business when Siviana and I took over. We managed to turn the business around by legally and operationally restructuring it. We enlisted help from almost all family members in different moments of this turnaround.

It represents my link to my father and to the very solid world of car business. It is where I learn to trust, to measure, to align and to delegate and most importantly to be present. I am lucky to have a MEGA team who I love working with.

SERVE

SERVE is the first winery founded in post-comunist Romania by my mother Mihaela and her late husband Guy Tyrel de Poix.

It is a blessing to have the chance to stick my nose in winemaking and it is where I best learn humbleness. Our team in SERVE, lead by my sister Silviana is stelar, though!

Other Projects

During the past 15 years I have been involved in multiple projects around tech, sustainability and education. I learned a lot. But I also burned a lot of energy .  I decided to focus on the family businesses, because I felt that it was the only way to ground myself and restrain from jumping on every opportunity .

Depression… or Burnout (because depression sounds… depressing)

My father’s death was for me an opportunity to experience the most reality altering period of my life: depression. The details are unimportant for the scope of this article, but what I learned is that reality doesn’t exist as an objectively definable truth. That our mind plays a critical role in interpreting and ultimately creating our reality.  I also learned that we are responsible for our wellbeing in order to be in the best condition to help others and that although the decisions we need to make in order to be well are hard, the clarity and energy they   provide us with are more than enough to compensate. I overcame my depression by learning to accept myself as I am which provided me with a lot of energy to invest in improving . Meditation, Sports, proper Sleep and Nutrition, Therapy and Coaching helped a lot.

Coaching

In the midst of my depression, I was contacted by Alain Cardon MCC. I had already done a workshop with him and was inspired by his extremely different, very intuitive, profoundly authentic and of course systemic way of training. He asked me if I was ready to do the Fundamentals ( a 4 month, 2 days per month training with a 70 peer-practice sessions monthly target). Silviana, who did the training before me had told me that the program would turn my world upside down, so I told Alain that given my then-current state of mind I didn’t know if I was up for it. His answer: “From what I hear, your world is already upside down. The worst thing that can happen is to get it back to normal…” and that’s precisely what happened. I took time off work, started the training, gave it my all and I am still experiencing the effects 3 years later.

I understood through practice the nonlinearity of time, the importance of authentic presence during a conversation, the kind of space you create for a person when you take away all the judgment and just listen to what she has to say and so many other almost magical things. I learned the value of true modesty, or not taking myself too seriously as I mentioned before. I also learned that using modesty as a way of not assuming responsibility back fires violently.

I am currently accredited as a Coach by the International Coach Federation but I don’t coach anymore.

I still have regular talks with Alain whom I am honoured to call my dear friend and mentor.

Philosophy 

I am a Christian Orthodox by baptism and I often observe myself viewing philosophy from a Christian perspective (a paternal frame of reference), but I try to keep an open perspective while studying as many views on philosophy and religion as I can.

In short my view at this time is: There is a force uniting all things universal and that force manifests itself from the micro to the macro in an infinite web. There are different civilizations that have understood different aspects of this universal force. I don’t think humans are or have ever been able as a community to fully connect to that universal force. I also do not think that humanity is the most advanced form of life in the Universe.

For me, it is more important to act based on the understanding that you currently have and improve based on the feedback, than to constantly hide the lack of action behind acquiring more knowledge.

Wisdom is something to strive for. The moment you think you have it is the precise moment you should know you don’t.

I resonate more with Eastern religions(Buddhism, Hinduism) than Western ones, but I am not religious. I meditate. I try to do yoga.

You should know:

  • I don’t send my texts to anybody before publishing. I get my critique online. 
  • My opinions will change from time to time and I will try to present that in this blog
  • I feel comfortable with uncertainty and I will not be replying to comments that invite empty polemics. I will, however, clarify where it is necessary, answer pertinent challenges, and engage in casual conversation about interesting stuff 
  • I do not promote any company or service. My references to companies and projects I am involved in are intended usually  to emphasize a point rather than for advertisement. Bringing them into attention is a helpful side effect.

Trivia

  • I am passionate about enduro motor biking, Kendo, horse riding, classic cars, fine wines,  ice baths and nature.
  • I love spending time with kids, not only mine
  • I have 3 herniated disks and am constantly exercising to compensate
  • I sometimes could be described by the socially accepted term “lazy”, but I have a sense of priority that guides me through the important checkpoints of life and I strive to be a better worker everyday
  • I’m interested in sustainability but I’m challenged by where to draw the line…
Posted on

Another less than obvious reason for #brexit

Take away : Fact checking is fast becoming one of the most 
important skills in our arsenal.

2:40 min "take my word for it" read
36:00 min fact check read

I admit that this article has kind of a click-bait title, but i promise a short and well documented read.

We all know about pesticides and biotech in general and how they’re responsible for so many of our health problems. It’s like knowing that your spouse is poisoning you but not confronting him/her because you don’t want to ruin the relationship.

Apparently, MIT decided to confront through a “lawyer” by presenting the US Congress with a series of studies on the devastating health effects of using  glyphosate in agriculture.

The effect of this confrontation was an investigation held by the EPA which produced this report. It basically says that glyphosate cannot be characterized  as a human carcinogenic because there is near to no evidence of it directly causing cancer in mice -the nearest thing to humans we can test on.

The truth of the matter is that although the results of tests for interstitial cell tumors (cancer) in male Sprague-Dawley rats are debatable, almost all  primary DNA damage tests (results starting on pg 122) are positive. This means that we might not be directly affected by glyphosate, but our children will be.

Glyphosate was introduced  in ’74 by Monsanto under the Roundup brand, sales have multiplied more than 100 fold in the US between the late ’70’s and the time the patent expired (2015-about the same time as the MIT research was being conducted) . Along with the Roundup product sales,  proportional amounts of Roundup Ready crops (that would not be affected by it) where being sold in this period.

Here  an idea about the glyphosate phenomenon between 1974 and 2014 in the US:

In 2011 the US looked like this from a glyphosate usage point of view:

Comming back to Europe, here is a call for support from the British National Farmers Union.  see the infographic bellow:

YES, after all that i have just presented, they are trying to convince people to support glyphosate use in agriculture… ” propagandistically”, if i might add

And they’re not the only ones. #fakenews like this one  were using the subject to trash the EU 2 months before Brexit.

So as you would imagine, the Parliament of the EU decided to “only” approve glyphosate for 7 more years of use as opposed to the initial proposal of 15 years.

And if i have failed to convince you, search Probable Carcinogenic List for glyphosate. That will do the trick.

As a conclusion, it’s safe to say that we need to learn to fact check and we need to learn fast. I encourage you to start on this article.

I’ll link an article detailing this as soon as it’s done, but the combination between the failing standardized educational system, fake news, and a profit driven global democratic system isn’t good. At least we’re not challenged with something new. It’s been like this since ancient times. If you don’t believe me, ask Socrates and Plato.

 

Farewell.