I’ve traveled the world – I’ve spent time at a Buddhist monastery in remote Thailand, in the Amazon jungle with shamans, in the African bush, and all over the US learning from the best scientists, business and civic leaders, sociologists, human potential leaders, healers and spiritual leaders. Spending 6 years earning a Doctorate in the Reinvention of Work enabled me to not only clarify, unify and focus such disparate teachings but also to dignify the fact that I’d walked such a winding road. In the middle of those 6 years, I also graduated from Coach U, a 3 year program.
I often feel like an Olympic coach because my clients are usually either already doing very well and hire me to maintain the leaderful edge or, they’re between successes. Either way, we coach to their definition of gold. Through a combination of training, traveling, working and being blessed with what seems like an extra dose of wisdom, I deliver results because of my ability to:
- cultivate vision and bring it to fruition
- generate creative yet pragmatic solutions
- cut to essential, core issues for sustainable results
- help close gaps between where people are and where they want to be
- develop strategies that are rooted in the heart and produce meaningful results on the ground
- present, write and advocate for values-driven cultures.
I offer clients a unique depth and breadth of experience mostly because I’m never happy doing just one thing. I’ve been blessed with a wide variety of amazing clients through the years who use me the way Olympians use their coaches – they’re already strong and they hire me to capitalize further on their own strengths.
But I started to get a nagging – a calling really – that I wanted to use the same skills to also make a bigger difference. Intention is a powerful thing! I now do roundtables, workshops, think tanks and other activities at the United Nations on creating a values-driven culture. I do most of the work from my home office and have been traveling from Phila to New York about once a month for the last 2 years – which works out really well with my coaching hours. My UN work is through an NGO called Global Vision Institute, where I serve as Vice President of the organization and also deliver programming. I’m able to apply my expertise in organizational development and cultural transformation. Global Vision Institute is dedicated to creating a values-driven international culture. I love working there – it’s truly a dream come true.
Over the last 15 years, I’ve served on lots of other boards and, while I was building my practice, I served as Executive Director of a small philanthropic foundation where I interacted with many, many organizations. And, I had the privilege and responsibility to grant over $1 million for social services and social development. I also served on the boards of directors of two regional grantmaking associations – Delaware Valley Grantmakers and Council of NJ Grantmakers, affinity groups for philanthropists. My job ranged from site visits with struggling grantees who were serving the rural poor to sitting at boardroom tables where the collective grantmaking power was worth well over $20 billion. I learned a lot about what money buys and what it doesn’t buy – about the power of money and about the power games that weaken the dollar faster and harder than inflation, depression or deflation.
As the part-time director of a small foundation, I had the very rewarding job of giving money away to worthy social programs. My philanthropic activities as co-director of our foundation and my service on the boards of two Regional Associations of Grantmakers (one for the 5 county Philadelphia area and one for the state of New Jersey), have afforded me an insider’s view on just how arbitrarily our economy regards essential human needs. So I co-founded Community Foundation of South Jersey.
Given my own propensity toward seeking variety, I especially appreciate that my clients come from all sectors. Through the years, I’ve had the privilege of coaching corporate executives, entrepreneurs, professionals, solopreneurs, and civic leaders, not only at the United Nations, but also at the Wharton School, and, of course, in my international private practice. Coaching non-profit leaders is especially rewarding, though, because not only am I able to draw from so much field experience, I get to combine business best practices with service best practices.
What I love best about it all, is that I do most of it from my home office by phone so I’ve had the privilege of being able to spend lots of time with my 2 amazing sons, Ian, now 18, and Ari, now 15. Being independent and home-based has not only allowed me to get to games and concerts and provide care on sick days, it’s also given us the flexibility to travel. As I write this, we just got back from being tourists in Egypt, building a school in a very, very, very remote and primitive village in Malawi, Africa, and then taking a 3 day safari in S. Africa.
I’m personally a member of the LOHAS sector (Lifestyles of the Healthy and Sustainable). Some call us “cultural creatives,” and my path of many paths would define me as a core cultural creative in LOHAS jargon. What that means is that I’ve been making values-driven decisions my whole adult life and have literally gone to the ends of the earth to uncover how values fuel success and they point the way toward a world that’s not just sustainable, but vital. I have lived, worked and breathed transformation for 30 years.
I think that’s why audiences say that my talks and seminars change their lives. Before moving on from academia to concentrate on public speaking, I taught Applied Ethics at Drexel U, and Religion and Culture at Chestnut Hill College, and guest lectured at colleges including George Washington U. I absolutely love teaching. So I continue to design and deliver workshops and international teleclasses on professional development, social transformation, right action, values-driven decision making and leadership.
One of the most profound teachings for me personally happened in Ecuador about 12 years ago. We wove from shaman to shaman from high in the Andes to deep in the muddy Amazon jungle. Day by day, my vision emerged, my authentic voice broke through, and a new era sparked in my life. Presence mattered: we were staying with headhunters, managing scorpions in our bags, fire ants up our legs, and muscular warriors going at a good clip as they bushwhacked ahead of us for many hours through the lush, pristine jungle. The high demand for presence was significant enough – then there were the spiritual teachers who upped the ante on calling forward personal realization.
As we journeyed, I saw myself speaking to large numbers of people and working one on one with people who make a difference. I saw my own work ripple out through touching others. I came home and began building the credentials, strengthening my personal foundation, and living the experiences necessary to be right here, right now – ready to touch hearts and minds in a big way with stories and teachings from my path of many paths.
Eventually I came to understand “wisdom” the way Native Americans did: a healthy combination of heart, mind and insight. In my doctoral research I discovered that developing confidence in inner leadings needs to happen in balance with doing due diligence for information gathering. So, I named my coaching method “Wisdom at Work” because my experience with hundreds of clients has taught me that the most successful people use hearts at work as well as their smarts at work.
I think everybody has their own inner wisdom voice – an inner GPS. My job as a coach/consultant is to help cients become their own best coaches by synthesizing their expertise and gut instincts with the ability to consistently make their wisest choices.
Eventually I came to understand “wisdom” as a path that includes development of confidence in inner leadings in balance with knowledge and understanding. I think everybody has their own inner wisdom voice – an inner GPS.
It’s not that I have any drive to proselatize – spirituality doesn’t usually come up in coaching sessions. It’s just that I know that the spiritual anchors in my life make me a sharper professional and a better partner with my clients. My words always fall short in describing my relationship with Divinity but I’m called to keep working at it.
I do truly love religions but I am most drawn to the essence that unites them. I stand for that essential place that is beyond religious constructs. I was lead to ordain as an interfaith minister to further sanctify my stand for a civil and compassionate world in an originally blessed universe of good will, abundance, and extraordinary evolutionary potential – a universe filled with possibility, and with ancestral, latter day and every day saints.
Here are my ordination vows: I am an instrument of Divinity. I commit my gifts to the highest good. I speak truth with power. Here’s a photo – every major religious text was on the alter and there was a shell and feather to represent oral and ancient traditions.
I never intended to have a congregation but I can now legally perform weddings! Taking vows somehow secured another layer to the foundation of my work.
gift was somehow enhanced by making a public commitment (in front of 1400 people in a gorgeous Upper West Side Manhattan cathedral). My expertise is combining the micro and macro
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story about well-equipped mountain climbers who carefully planned their expedition for years. When they finally reached the top the yogi already sitting there calmly asked, “What took you so long?”
the Shuar who live their yoga in balance with their families, nature and Spirit.
The fine art of personal spiritual inner expression is where I am most gifted.
If we look to the ways in which we have been blessed, and follow those blessings into their depths and breadths, we will be led to find our unique meaning and purpose in this life. If we follow our blessings we will discover our historical integrity.” Matthew Fox
Following our blessings by telling our truths. Discovering the ever-deepening spiral of faith which intertwines with the spiral of blessing.
My perspective is radically holistic despite my Christian, baby boomer, capitalist acculturations. For thirty years, I’ve done meditation, yoga, study, music, and a largely vegan diet highly influenced by macrobiotic philosophy. I heal my children and myself almost exclusively by natural means. My experience with the natural healing process has given me perspective on just how inflated the health care industry is. I believe it’s a crash waiting to happen.
Having been so long a card-carrying, Birkenstock heeled, member of the new wave, I know an undeniable, holistic cultural current. My perspective is that of what Ray and Anderson (2000) call the “core cultural creatives,” the 24 million people who actively articulate and are fully committed to the emerging paradigmatic shift toward a more just and compassionate earth population.
self-development. Getting skills in grounding, centeredness, so secure in their own truth that they could not be thrown off by another person or by the culture itself. To embody compassion. To be truly free. (Ray & Anderson, 2000, p. 173)
The seed of God is in us. If the seed had a good, wise, and industrious cultivator, it would thrive all the more and grow up to God whose seed it is, and the fruit would be equal to the nature of god. (Fox, 2000, p. 512)
My doctoral dissertation is called: Noble Seed/Royal Soil. It’s got 5 sections divide up over 200 pages: Spirituality, Cosmology, Nature and Natural Sciences, Cultural Development, and Dollars & Sustenance.
My dissertation question is, how can we best nurture noble seed and develop royal soil in twenty-first century America? How can we treat every sentient being as a noble being by creating royal cultural soil? Noble Seed/Royal Soil: The Care and Feeding of the Royal Person in 21st Century America is an attempt to weave individuals’ considerations with cultural concerns, every day choices with our spiritual nature, and the creative spark with All there is. I refer to that creative spark as arutam, spirit, soul, essential realization, and chi. Coming from a broad range of experience, I am using a wide-angled ((lens)) to offer snapshots to the reader and viewer. I offer gestalts within a gestalt of infinite gestalts shot from within an emerging creation-centered culture.
~Speaking and teaching including seminars for United Nations departmental leaders; adjunct professor at Drexel U. and Chestnut Hill College; guest lecturer at George Washington U.; workshops, seminars, keynotes
have a sense of what Martin Luther King called “beloved community.”
On a personal level, it also helped me dignify the fact that I’d walked such a winding road.
Skilled presenter and writer advocating for values-based cultures
My own life experience confirms Fox’s (1980, 2000) declaration about how we will know when we have reached a creation-centered culture:
What will be its sign? It will be a time of compassion. When all people– all royal people – learn to coexist responsibly with all the creatures of the earth with whom they are in fact interdependent. The time of compassion will be marked by a betrothal to justice. (p. 530)
