The Art Of Personal Transformation
Contents
Muddy Ground
We’re on muddy ground.
What I mean is, the thing about personal transformation that makes it so tricky is that we’re constantly on muddy ground.
From our perspective, we often feel our choices are well informed. But the truth is that “well informed” is a matter of awareness.
The greater our awareness, the better informed we are, and the more our choices can be based in truth and freedom. The less our awareness, the less our grasp on the full truth of each moment, and the more our choices are being made on muddy ground—potentially resulting in states of less peace, joy, love, and freedom.
For example, when we choose a partner from a place of seeking validation or trying to fill a void of loneliness, we may end up with a partner who isn’t actually a match for our true selves.
The challenge is that we often aren’t aware that this is what we’re doing.
That’s the muddy ground.
The power of raising our awareness
So how do we become more informed and more aware, so that we can attempt to make the ground a little less muddy?
Being informed is not only a matter of gathering more external information.
It includes awareness of our emotional state, our shadow material, physical health, pain, energy, nervous-system states, values, desires, relationships, the stories that run our lives, our narcissism, our inability to be vulnerable, our lack of responsibility, and more.
By raising our awareness of these different aspects of our holistic selves, we get closer to perceiving the full truth of our reality in each moment—and at a macro level as well.
In other words, we get closer to perceiving the truth of ourselves. Our true selves. And the truth of others. The more clearly we perceive ourselves, the more clearly we are able to perceive the people and world around us as well.
We will struggle to make choices that are in integrity with our true selves when we are not sufficiently aware of our true selves.
This is part of what makes transformation tricky.
On the one hand, making choices is critical to transformation. We learn through making mistakes. We learn by following choices to their end and discovering aspects of ourselves we couldn’t see before. And sometimes we simply choose who we want to be in this world and begin acting accordingly.
So we shouldn’t stop making choices because the ground is muddy.
Instead, we raise our awareness as much as we can, and then make the choice that seems most aligned with our true selves from where we stand.
We give ourselves the best chance of moving toward greater peace, freedom, love, and joy.
I believe deeply in the power of self-awareness to improve our lives.
Greater awareness allows us to act with greater clarity.
And true clarity is needed for effective transformation.
Seeing beneath the surface of goals
We may already have a destination in mind—what we’re trying to become, where we’re trying to get to, or what we’re trying to achieve.
And we can feel so sure of it.
But the destination itself could be out of alignment with who we really are and what we really want.
This is one of the responsibilities I have as a coach. I must honor where each person is in life, honor their existing awareness, their desires, and their journey.
But I also have to stay attentive to the possibility that raising their awareness may reveal something deeper about the very transformation they seek. It might help them distinguish whether their current desires and goals are coming from the intuition of their true selves or from a contorted self-image.
Sometimes I may perceive many possible areas of growth. Then another challenge appears:
Which direction would make the biggest difference for them and get them closer to the things they most desire?
Getting feedback from the world
This process of unfolding can’t happen only internally. We can’t think our way to transformation. We must interact with the external world.
We make choices. We take actions. We pursue relationships. We try new kinds of work. We leave things. We begin things. We move somewhere. We create something. We have the difficult conversation.
And then life gives us feedback.
That feedback helps inform whether a choice was actually aligned with us.
Over time, we may notice that some choices move us toward greater peace, love, joy, and freedom, while others move us away from them.
This is why I don’t see action and awareness as separate.
Action creates experience.
Experience gathers feedback.
Feedback expands awareness.
And expanded awareness gets us more in alignment with our true selves.
Like Teal Swan says, “The universe is trying to talk to you through everything that is here.”
Ignoring feedback… until one day we can’t
But the thing is—sometimes it’s hard to decipher the world’s feedback, especially when it’s coming to us filtered through our shadow, stories, and emotional and energy blocks. And sometimes we normalize or ignore signals.
There are periods in life when we enter what feels like a larger state of flow. Not merely the kind of flow we might experience for an hour while writing, surfing, making music, or working—but a flow that lasts for months or even years.
We’re building a community. Building a career. Building relationships and things around us. Life seems to be moving somewhere.
And then sometimes we wake up and realize that what we’ve created no longer feels aligned with who we are.
Maybe we changed.
Or maybe our awareness expanded enough for us to recognize that what we had been doing all along was partly hustling toward something in an attempt to fill a deeper void.
The external circumstances may not have changed.
Our awareness did.
And now we can see something we couldn’t see before.
Sometimes we ignore physical pain, feelings, and other signals until we can’t any longer. And then we awaken to greater awareness. And in doing so, we no longer feel a sense of alignment with our lives.
Taking action between sessions to grow awareness
This is why the approach I’ve chosen in my coaching practice combines two things:
raising awareness and taking action.
We raise awareness through the sessions.
Then we take actions between sessions so that we can interact with reality and receive information we couldn’t receive through reflection alone.
That feedback from the world then informs our awareness further.
It’s an ongoing loop:
Awareness → Choice → Action → Feedback → Greater Awareness
And then we choose again.
Constantly growing our awareness allows us to sharpen our ability to listen to feedback from the universe and to not ignore signals from the body like pain and feelings.
Growth for its own sake vs. the most effective path forward
This is where things become even more interesting. There are so many different ways we can grow and expand in life.
As a generalist and someone who is genuinely passionate about learning new things, my own curiosity has taken me in all kinds of directions—creatively through the arts, in business and the kind of work I enjoy doing, through hobbies and athletic pursuits, the types of communities I join, the friends I spend time with, the places I live, and countless other areas.
I genuinely have an interest in growth, seeking, and transformation for their own sake.
But it’s important to distinguish between growth because something is interesting, and transformation that is central to the life someone actually wants to create.
We can learn to draw.
We can learn to paint.
We can learn to dance.
We can get better at presentations.
We can improve our fitness.
All of these things can enrich our lives.
But when someone is suffering or deeply stuck, the more important question may be:
What transformation would make the biggest difference in this person’s life right now?
I see part of my responsibility as a coach as helping someone distinguish between the many possible directions of growth and the paths that appear most central to their deeper desires.
Otherwise, our attention can become scattered across endless projects of self-improvement.
Seeing deeper into communication and presence
A large aspect of growing our awareness is the ability to see and feel deeper into communication and our presence, as well as the presence of others. This allows us to get a better feel for how we’re showing up with others, how others are perceiving our communication, and how to perceive others more accurately.
When we look at reality, the truth is not always immediately clear.
There is what someone says. There is what they do. There is what we perceive through their facial expressions, behavior, posture, voice, and mannerisms. There is what we believe their actions mean.
Firstly, we might perceive these inaccurately. We commonly do. We think someone dislikes us because they look away from us, when in fact they may simply feel vulnerable maintaining eye contact with us.
Beneath the surface, there are feelings, motivations, fears, desires, defenses, and unconscious patterns they haven’t yet made fully conscious. And perhaps neither have we.
This is what makes communication so tricky. We’re often reading others inaccurately or incompletely and not perceiving with deeper awareness. The greater our awareness, the more we are able to perceive.
Through shadow work, studying interpersonal interactions, and spending an enormous amount of time analyzing video footage of myself and others, I became fascinated by the difference between what is being communicated explicitly and what else may be communicated through voice, facial expression, body language, movement, and energy.
Speech patterns are a simple example. We often don’t perceive the full reality of the motivations behind what we say to others, or the motivations behind what others say to us.
One pattern I became aware of in myself was: “I want to do XYZ, but…”
I began noticing how frequently everything after the “but” consisted of stories and explanations about why I couldn’t do something.
Sometimes those reasons were completely legitimate. But often they were just reasons I made up to protect myself from living more courageously, with more vulnerability.
And becoming conscious of the pattern allowed me to question something that had previously been automatic—a behavior I wasn’t even conscious of and that didn’t strike me as something I should change.
That’s one small example of what increased awareness can do. Subconscious patterns become more available for transformation when we make them conscious.
Seeing deeper into our physicality
My years working with somatic practitioners and exploring different forms of bodywork, nervous-system work, breathwork, posture, movement, and physical health taught me that many other aspects of our reality show up in the body.
And if we don’t become conscious of them, they can continue influencing our experience without us fully understanding how.
Holding patterns. Breathing patterns. Chronic tension. Pain. Fatigue. Posture. Nervous-system state. Our energy.
All of these can contribute to the reality we experience in each moment.
We might be unaware that patterns in our body are making every day more uncomfortable, thereby affecting our work, our relationships, our emotional state, and how much we enjoy our lives.
We may discover that physical pain is influencing the work we think we want to do.
Or that fatigue is influencing our motivation.
Or that our diet, sleep, movement, or breathing patterns are influencing our emotional life or our relationships more strongly than we realize.
I’ve seen this in my own life.
Through changing my posture and breath, releasing significant amounts of tension and holding patterns, rehabilitating old injuries, dramatically improving my allergies, changing my body composition, and transforming my energy from frequent lethargy to much more sustained, vibrant energy throughout the day, I’ve seen how deeply our physical condition can affect our overall quality of life and levels of day-to-day joy, peace, and freedom.
I feel that something that isn’t talked about enough is that there is so much liberation, joy, and peace to be found by liberating our bodies physically. When people speak about freedom, it’s rarely in the context of physical liberation.
Years of bodywork have given me the gift of the liberation that comes from vibrant health. I’m grateful to have the context of having gained and lost 50 pounds in my life, having grown up sick with asthma, migraines, and allergies, and having suffered from chronic pain, because it allows me to feel the difference between my current and past states.
This also helps me notice similar patterns in others and become curious about the ways those patterns may be affecting their lives. It gives me a strong desire to help others experience some of the liberation I experienced myself.
These transformations have helped lead me toward a life that feels increasingly aligned with who I am—including the relationships I choose, the work I do, the hobbies I prioritize, where I live, and the future I want to create.
The body is not separate from the rest of our transformation. It is part of the information.
The importance of dropping masks
A big part of my transformation has been becoming aware of and dropping the masks I wore. Especially my happy mask.
But there are so many masks that we wear in society.
The “let’s put on a brave face even though we’re unhappy” mask. The “let’s pretend everything is OK even though it isn’t” mask.
The good employee. The good host. The person who always has everything together.
And for some, it’s a mask that hides their true feelings.
There are countless versions of these masks that we learn to present to society.
As I’ve dropped more of my own masks, I’ve noticed that I’m able to receive other people more fully. I can listen with less attention on maintaining my own image. I notice individual words more clearly. I become more aware of what is happening in my own body and emotional state while simultaneously listening to someone else.
All of this helps us connect with others better, and at a deeper level. Showing up with more vulnerability. Authenticity. And in integrity with ourselves.
The limitations of specialization—and the value of a holistic view
Working with therapists across modalities including traditional talk therapy, relationship therapy, transpersonal therapy, and Internal Family Systems taught me the tremendous value of therapy and helped me enormously.
I’ve also spent years working with specialists across various bodywork modalities, physical health, breathwork, meditation, and other transformational modalities.
Each discipline has taught me something.
And each discipline inevitably has a lens.
That isn’t a criticism of specialists. It’s the nature of specialization.
A therapist may primarily view something psychologically.
A physical practitioner may see something through the body.
A physician may look through a medical lens.
Sometimes what we need is exactly that specialist lens.
But sometimes we need someone to step back with us and look across the whole landscape.
That is one of the things that fascinates me about coaching.
I love being able to bring everything I have learned across these different domains into a conversation and ask:
What are we not seeing yet?
And:
Where would directing our attention make the biggest difference?
I don’t see the role of a coach as replacing specialists.
I see enormous value in specialists.
But I do believe one of the particular contributions I can make as a coach is to help someone examine the totality of what is happening in their life, notice connections between areas that may initially appear unrelated, and determine what path forward seems most meaningful.
And it requires a holistic view—a cross-disciplinary awareness—to make these connections.
Our feelings, and feeling into others
Another important part of my coaching is emotional attunement.
Years of doing deep emotional healing work helped me connect with a large spectrum of my own feelings. This has given me the ability to perceive what other people may be feeling as well.
Sometimes I notice sadness beneath what someone is saying.
Sometimes tension.
Sometimes anger, fear, excitement, or something else that doesn’t seem to match the words being spoken.
That doesn’t mean I always know what another person is feeling. But I may notice something worth becoming curious about. And that curiosity can help guide a coaching conversation.
For example, if I sense sadness while someone is talking about something seemingly unrelated, I might bring attention to what I’m noticing and explore whether anything is there.
Simply bringing awareness toward feelings that were previously in the background can reveal important information.
I have also found that when we aren’t familiar with the full spectrum of our own emotions, we have a harder time identifying what we feel.
And when we can’t identify what we feel, it’s much easier to become confused about our thoughts or desires.
By becoming more familiar with our emotional world, we improve our grasp on the truth of our reality in each moment.
And that can make transformation much more effective.
Balancing truth and love
All of this emphasis on seeing reality clearly brings us closer to perceiving truth in its entirety in each moment. I believe seeing truth is critical for effective transformation.
But truth alone is not enough.
There are heart-centered forces we also need to remain in relationship with if transformation is going to create a life worth living.
Otherwise, we can become lost in the dogma of truth.
This is where love enters.
My friend Holly once said something that stayed with me:
Truth and love are like yin and yang.
We need both in balance.
Spend your time only seeking truth and it may affect the way you relate and communicate with others. It may make you overly analytical and blind to the love that is all around you, even though the whole truth of our reality encompasses love as well.
For example, sometimes it may genuinely be better not to point out our partner’s faults—even if we believe we see them clearly and think doing so could help them grow. Sometimes we simply love them as they are.
Spend your time pursuing love while ignoring truth, and reality may eventually tear that love apart.
For example, we might be blinded by love in a relationship, ignoring feedback that we’re getting about a partner, ignoring the things we’re seeing in them. Without a strong compass for truth, we can lose ourselves in love and awaken later to truths about ourselves, our partner, or the relationship that we were unwilling to see.
To live in alignment, we need a relationship with both.
It’s important to see the truth of our reality with as much precision as we can.
But it’s also important to balance that with love.
We need boundaries, and we need to learn how to enforce them. But we also need the experience of falling deeply in love, allowing another person into our lives, and sometimes letting the relationship stretch the boundaries.
Love is a powerful teacher.
Transformation requires both.
Our relationship with the spiritual realm
There is another dimension that informs my understanding of transformation.
In 2018, I had a powerful non-dual experience that changed the course of my life and set me firmly on much of the path I’ve been on since. I’ll write about that experience separately.
What I’d like to mention in the context of the art of personal transformation is that we need to recognize when our feeling of being stuck stems from a spiritual dilemma or one in the material realm.
I also began meditating regularly around that time.
Initially, it felt as if the spiritual realm were a separate world that I accessed during meditation—or occasionally in moments during everyday life.
There is the material realm: the empirical reality of what is happening in front of us.
There is what I think of as the shadow or psychological realm: the feelings, motivations, defenses, unconscious patterns, and deeper dynamics underneath what is happening.
And there is the spiritual realm: the subtle, the non-dual—that which is beyond words, thoughts, and material reality.
In the material realm, questions like making money, finding our purpose, building a career, finding a partner, or creating the life we want can feel enormously important.
And they are important.
But spiritual experience can also place these things within a much larger context.
From that perspective, what seemed ultimately important can begin to look relatively important. That shift in perspective can change the way we relate to transformation itself. If we are experiencing the spiritual realm, it’s important that we honor it and grow our awareness of its presence as part of our transformation.
Not everyone is interested in meditation or spirituality. And I don’t believe everyone needs to be. But if an awareness of it is growing in you, then avoiding it won’t help.
The art of personal transformation
This is why personal transformation coaching fascinates me. There is so much we can become more aware of.
What we’re feeling. Our physical state. Our mental state. Our nervous-system state. Our shadow. Our masks. Whether we are living in integrity. Our relationship with love. Our relationship with spirituality. Our posture and breathing. Our speech patterns.
The way we perceive events versus what may actually be happening. What we think we want versus what is really driving our choices. Whether those choices are truly ours—or are being driven by fears, wounds, unconscious needs, or patterns we haven’t yet made conscious.
There are also more modalities for transformation available to us than perhaps ever before.
Therapy. Bodywork. Somatic practices. Meditation. Health practices. Supplements. Tools. Courses. Books.
There has never been more information easily available to us about changing ourselves.
And yet there is still so much suffering.
People are still lost.
People still spend years working intensely on themselves without necessarily becoming clearer about the life they want to live.
I don’t think the answer is always another modality.
Sometimes the most important thing is expanding our awareness enough to see what actually deserves our attention. Because without a firm enough grasp on the truth of our reality, we make choices on muddy ground.
We slip and slide. We pursue destinations that may never have been ours.
And even when we develop a sharper grasp on truth, we need enough love to keep that pursuit of truth from becoming another form of rigidity.
This is what personal transformation means to me. It is learning how to dance with life—to bring the art of living alive in all its glory.
It is the ongoing process of becoming more aware of the totality of our reality—internal and external—so that we can make increasingly conscious choices about who we are and the life we create.
We raise our awareness. We make a choice. We act. We see what life reflects back to us. We become aware of something we couldn’t see before. And then we choose again.
The ground may never become completely solid. But it can become less muddy.
