Integral Coaching. Part 2: Communicating Across Worlds

Joanne Hunt, Laura Divine, and Ken Wilber
Written by Corey W. deVos

Have you ever had a conversation with someone, but left feeling frustrated and unheard, as if the other person was in a completely different world? Well, there is a good chance that they were—at least in the ways they perceive and interpret what's important to them.  In the second installment of this dialogue, Joanne Hunt and Laura Divine further explore the concept of "Native Perspectives," noting the four very different approaches to reality that influence our relationship with the world, with each other, and with ourselves. 

If you wish to understand how we can communicate more clearly and more effectively with the people around us, you won't want to miss this fascinating dialogue.

Topics Include:

Blindsided by Reality: Personal growth can be murky, mysterious, and often quite painful, especially when we become lost in our own minds.  It helps to have a map—and as it happens, we have the very best one currently available.  The Integral map describes all those aspects of reality that we need to take into account in order to have a comprehensive understanding of the human condition.  Failure to recognize any of these essential elements can create blind spots in our development—blind spots that can actually be made much worse by the sorts of piecemeal methodologies that dominate the coaching industry.

Orienting to the World: Joanne and Laura explore one of the most interesting applications of Integral Coaching, the "Native Perspectives" through which we experience and interpret our reality. To see how these Native Perspectives play themselves out in our daily lives, be sure to watch this video collection after listening to this talk.

A Psychoactive Map:  One of the most fascinating qualities of Integral theory is that it is psychoactive—that is, once you learn the integral model, you can never unlearn it, and you begin to see it manifesting everywhere.  Many people have described this feeling as a sense of constant churning in the back of our minds, organizing our thoughts and cleaning the dust and cobwebs from our lives. Once internalized, the Integral map begins to transform our perceptions, our relationships, our ideas, and our experiences, sending us on a life-long path toward becoming healthier, happier human beings.

A Light Touch: Integral Coaching is a powerful vehicle for personal transformation, inviting our somber respect and appreciation for its potential to dramatically alleviate human suffering.  At the same time, we must never forget to hold it with total humility, humor, and levity—or else we run the risk of taking ourselves way too seriously as virtue metastasizes into self-righteousness, clogging our compassion and diminishing our ability to spark authentic transformation in the world.

Trusting Ourselves - Most schools of coaching are primarily focused upon future results—What do I want?  How do I get there?—and most of the work represents a process of bridging the gap between the present moment and some conception of our desired future.  As Joanne and Laura explain, Integral coaching tries to fully acknowledge, honor, and empower a person's "current way of being" just as much as his or her "future way of being"—after all, if you can't fundamentally trust yourself, exactly as you are when you first walk through the door, it's going to be very difficult to trust any sort of process that is capable of taking us where we want to go.

The world is changing. We see it every day: economic crises, energy crises, climate change, geo-political meltdown, war, genocide, disease—it is hard not to be overwhelmed by the pressures of modern living. As you are reading this, take a moment to pause, close your eyes, take a deep breath, and let's feel into the anxieties of the present moment—what does the downside of the 21st century feel like?  Can you feel the undercurrent of fear and uncertainty that has so permeated our global culture?  Can you feel the collective anxiety, the silent dread, the smog of confusion that hangs over all of our lives?  Can you feel the weight of the world pressing on your skin, muffling your heart, and suffocating your breath?  And can you feel the yearning deep within to escape the claustrophobia of our chaotic lives?

There is a good chance that, wherever you are in your own growth, you can feel this collective anxiety right away.  In fact, you may even feel it all the time, if only as a sort of background radiation hidden behind all of your day-to-day experiences.  Even if we have the intellectual capacity to pierce through this veil of anxiety and see the rich abundance behind this and every moment, our hearts are not immune to the fears and anxieties of modern life.  The world has never been so heavy—and yet, as John F. Kennedy reminded us nearly fifty years ago:

“Don’t pray for easy lives.  Pray to be stronger men. [And women.]”

And we are already becoming stronger.  Even as the world is becoming more complex, it is also becoming more whole. We have opportunities for change—on both a personal and a global scale—that have never before been possible. We are being called to greatness, compelled by the very same invisible forces that pull mind out of life, life out of matter, and light out of darkness.

Habitual creatures that we are, we struggle to escape our somnolent routines. We lie awake at night, staring into the black, mulling over the opportunities for change that tomorrow will bring.  We are haunted by our thoughts—frustrated by our careers, our families, our relationships, our habits, etc.—promising to ourselves every night that, no matter what happens, tomorrow will be different.  But how often do we awaken the next morning to the very same patterns of comfort and avoidance we vowed to break the night before? How often do we spend the following night the exact same way: lamenting our failures, cursing our addictions, and wondering why it is so hard to live up to our own expectations?

You see, change is a murky affair. It is dark, mysterious, sticky—and more often than not, quite painful. Especially when you feel like you are left to your own devises, thrashing helplessly in the dark waters of human potential.

But you are not alone—and you are anything but helpless.

We can rebuild humanity. We have the knowledge, the wisdom, and the technology to build the world's first truly integral society—which begins, of course, with ourselves. We have the most comprehensive map of reality currently available, one that makes sense of virtually all of our accumulated knowledge and wisdom throughout history—and one that has the very best chance of helping us navigate the dense complexity of 21st-century living.

But of course, a map is just a map. As Ken Wilber often says, it is one thing to look at a map of Bermuda, and another thing to actually go there and see it for yourself. The map is not the territory—you are the territory. Your life is the territory; your friends and family are the territory; your whole world is the territory—and it can be easy to get lost every now and again.

At Integral Life, we don't just provide the maps we need to make sense of reality, we offer the vehicles required to support and deepen our growth. A map without a vehicle simply will not do—chances are, we will never even leave our front door.  At the same time, a vehicle without a map can be equally disastrous, as we might very well drive off a cliff. But when taken together, we begin to discern a road that brings us beyond ourselves, winding through the modern and postmodern wilderness of our hearts, leading directly to a better, stronger, and infinitely more-fulfilled you.

Integral Coaching is one of the most powerful vehicles of transformation we have seen, a highly effective means of personal growth, self-discovery, and behavior modification. Joanne Hunt and Laura Divine stand together at the intersection of self-improvement and Integral thought, and their work represents a powerful synthesis of map, territory, and vehicle that can help us all find our way to a greater tomorrow.