Joel Monk: [00:00:23] All right, Steve, take two. We just had a technical issue. So here we go. Well, can we go get it there? Exactly. Welcome to the podcast. And yeah, it's a real delight to have you join us again because you are someone I've learned so much from the most actually to deepen my coaching. So I always love our conversations.

Joel Monk: How are you, first of all?

Steve March: [00:00:52] doing well. I'm doing well. I'm feeling a lot more rested in life, which is much needed.

Joel Monk: [00:01:00] Good. I'm glad to hear that. I should say for people who don't know you who are listening, you have created the Aletheia School of Transformational Work. You train a lot of coaches and I think you're questioning now whether coaching might be a good fit in terms of the the word. So we can get into that topic and you've been a coach yourself since 2000. So maybe a good place to start is to kind of tune in again. I think the last time we did one of these styles of conversations where we wax lyrical,

Joel Monk: I kind of called you the Einstein of coaching to some of my friends, because I'm always saying, like, you can ask Steve about anything. You know, it were coaching wise and any kind of esoteric theory or developmental theory and then he'll connect them all together.

Steve March: [00:01:53] So that's why I love these conversations. It's my favorite hyperbolic, but okay. [00:02:00] I have tried to be comprehensive in my understanding of transformation and coaching work. So I'll always make an attempt to answer a question.

Joel Monk: [00:02:12] Exactly. I think you do a great job with that. So maybe you're a good place to just tune in, like a state of the union kind of, thing, last time we spoke was about three years ago and it felt like, if I like, of course, back then things were changing, but I think three years feels like a really long time and now we're in the midst of something, you know, which is just feels unprecedented and hard to define and I'm just curious how you're making sense of things these days or not.

Steve March: [00:02:47] Well, yeah, I think that's kind of the that's kind of the challenge, right? Like if we had had this conversation a year ago, I probably would have had a lot of interpretations about what I think is happening in the world, you know, AI, you know, what's happening geopolitically, what's happening with, you know, responses are lack thereof to things like the metacrisis or the polycrisis, [00:03:14] You know, these days I just feel, you know, honestly, more uncertain and uncertain about where the world is heading, uncertain about my interpretation of the world. Of course, with no less of a need to feel oriented at the same time. Like everybody needs to feel oriented in the world to respond to the world. But I'm just noticing that there's something in the background, sort of mood that is shifting in our world. And I'm noticing the way it shows up for me as I just feel a little bit less certain about things. And there's a downside to that, there's an upside to that because some of the things I was certain about last year was that the world was headed in a bad direction and I'm actually quite delighted to feel a little less uncertain about that.

Steve March: [00:04:09] And yet I can't say it's headed hold my interpretations lightly, but still to make them, and to pay attention. to keep my senses open, to be present, to like this is not the time to kind of disappear from the world, to withdraw from the world. This is the time to open up and to pay attention to the news, to pay attention to, you know, the kinds of coaching topics and issues and challenges the students in the Aletheia School or or my coaching clients, right? [00:05:04] And to begin to kind of palpate into this kind of something that's in the midst of emerging and it's not just one story, it's it's a multitude of stories that are in the midst of emerging. And so That's how I'm sort of taking these times is kind of as a call to really focus on what's actually here, what's actually happening right now, which is maybe a little bit different from at least in our cultures tendency is to be very future-oriented.

Steve March: I think even in the coaching world, the tendency is to be very future-oriented, right? Like, where are we going? How do we get to where um, I'm not sure where I want to get to. I think my attention is occupied by understanding where I am, where we are, what is happening? What is possible to happen from here? [00:06:03] You know, what's the next most likely thing that's going to be emerging here? So that's kind of where I'm sitting right now.

Joel Monk: [00:06:15] I think there's a lot in that you just shared that we can unpack further and also it seems like a lot of people are coming round more to this idea that you've shared before of the unfoldment paradigm versus self-improvement and people seemingly seem to be exhausted and I felt tired of my own efforts to improve myself again, because they can creep back in very seriously. Could you share something about the unfoldment paradigm? So I think it's a key distinction you offer to coaches.

Steve March: [00:06:55] Yeah, yeah, this is really kind of the central distinction in [00:07:04] You know, there's a paradigm that's very dominant in our current culture, it's been dominant for, well, arguably hundreds of years maybe, maybe even more in Western culture, but, but as I've, as I've trained coaches globally and coached globally, I see it really as global culture these days for the most part. And that's this constant seeking of self-improvement, this kind of continuous improvement, this commitment to continuously improving. And I think a lot of the coaching industry has really been a response to that. It's like, sure, you want to improve. I'll help you. And of course, the intention to improve is a good one, and the intention to help people to improve is also a good one. And I would say this is for sure the way that I started coaching back in, 2000, when I started out as a new coach.

Steve March: I wasn't calling it self-improvement coaching, I was calling it developmental coaching, but it, you know, development, human development, adult development, which I was deeply engrossed in studying, understanding, learning, you know, wanting to understand how to develop myself. [00:08:16] If I viewed that as some kind of, you know, you know, an orientation to life, maybe even an ideal in some sense. And I see a lot of people wanting to do that, too. We have fields of leadership development and relationship development and performance development and all this kind of stuff. But development is really, really seeking self-improvement in some sense. And what I noticed being a developmentally oriented coach and trying to help is that, in a way, we only ever got mixed results at best.

Steve March: And the way I, it finally sort of the insight with sharpened for me as I realized that sometimes our efforts to seek self-improvement just outright fail. [00:09:06] And the result is that that reinforces the sense that something is missing in us, that something is deficient. And of course, when we feel deficient, what do we want to do? We want to improve ourselves, because we don't want to feel deficient. So the whole project that's seeking self-improvement is get rid of self-deficiency. except seeking and failing doesn't get rid of it, it reinforces it. But then I noticed that mostly what we generated were kind of mixed results. You know, we kind of got some improvements, but we failed to really, you know, fulfill our ambitions.

Steve March: And our ambition was to improve to such an extent that we didn't have self-deficiency anymore. partial results, but that leaves us with the feeling something is still missing. But oddly enough, even when our projects succeed and we actually do like lose the weight or cultivate more self-confidence or get a little bit of space from our inner critic, that success tends to also show all the other places in life that also need improvement. [00:10:21] And so it's like our successes draw this contrast. And now we see all the other deficiencies. So what I learned after a while of practicing in this seeking self-improvement paradigm, and this was my experience, and I saw this again and again with clients, is that it reinforced self-deficiency instead of delivering us from it. Then once I started to realize that, I started to wonder, could there be another way? And overlapping with my early career as a coach, I was also studying in different spiritual traditions.

Steve March: [00:11:00] Most importantly, for me was the Diamond Approach, created by Almaas and some of his friends. And Almaas talks about unfoldment. And that's really where I started to get curious about this concept of unfoldment. And of course, I discovered that, you know, it wasn't just he who talked about unfoldment. You know, unfoldment was also a part of Buddhism. Unfoldment was a part of many indigenous approaches and belief systems and spiritual practices. In fact, most of the world's wisdom traditions, In some way, whether they use the term unfoldment or not, are really talking about unfoldment, and unfoldment offers a totally different way to understand change in transformation.

Steve March: So the notion of unfoldment is that we already start out whole, who we are as beings is innately whole. And change and transformation unfolds as an expression of that wholeness. [00:12:06] So change and transformation is wholeness unfolding another expression of wholeness. And so if we look at it, You know, this is how organic things grow. This was something around the same time I was also looking at the work of Goethe, who was a contemporary of Newton. And of course, we all know Isaac Newton and he did all this great work. One of the founding fathers of the scientific method really looked at the world in an objective sense.

Steve March: We know Goethe mostly because he was a poet, a writer, but he was also a scientist. And he had a totally different view that was more holistic. You know, where we weren't studying something that was separate from us, we were actually studying something that was us in some sense. [00:13:01] And so his whole orientation was around wholeness. And in a sense, I started to really notice that when I oriented to myself as innately whole, that instead of instead of as something missing, that I started to pay more attention to what's already here. And so the way I sometimes frame this to my clients and my students is, in the seeking self improvement paradigm, we ask this question, what is missing? With the belief that if we can figure out what's missing, that we can develop it or build it or acquire it, and that when we have it, then we won't feel that deficiency. That's the improvement.

Steve March: But in the unfoldment paradigm, we ask a different question, what if nothing is missing? What if I'm already a whole human being? Now when I say that to people, especially people steeped in the seeking self-improvement paradigm, which is everybody in this culture, people will say, well, it feels like something's missing. [00:14:10] And then I say, what does that feel like? And now we begin to explore something that's palpably here as opposed to something that's not here. And so we shift into exploring the reactions to that, the different parts that get triggered, and we work in this immediacy. And as we follow what's palpably here, we tend to land into a view into an embodied experience of ourselves, as whole.

Steve March: We literally drop in and we feel that sense of wholeness. We feel that sense of a resourcefulness. That's what wholeness feels like. wholeness when we landed to our innate wholeness, we feel resourceful. We feel I sometimes like to say equal to the moment. [00:15:01] Like, we can feel unequal to the moment. Like, we can feel like the moment is so big and I'm overwhelmed by it, right? Sometimes we can feel the opposite.

Steve March: I'm so big in the moment to so little, but that's usually not as problematic as feeling overwhelmed. But when you feel equal to the moment, what that means is that, yeah, this could be challenging, but I'm up for this. Like, I may not know how to respond to this, but I have the capacity to even deal with that. Right. I can face into that. And what we find is we find that we do have enough compassion to face this moment. We do have enough courage to face this moment. We do have enough love to face this moment.

Steve March: And each moment calls upon us in different ways. And so when we land into that, it's like the great empowerment, and what we're really discovering is who we have always been, we're discovering something that is innate to our own nature as human beings. [00:16:04] And so that's not a self-improvement, that's not something that was actually missing, it was something that we didn't recognize about ourselves. So, in Aletheia, I use the distinction of depth. And one way to understand this is that we don't recognize these things about ourselves. We don't recognize our innate wholeness because we have a very shallow depth of contact with ourselves. We're kind of like a stone skipping along the surface of a lake touching into the moment very briefly because we're busy. We're hurried.

Steve March: We're rushing. We have a deadline. We have too much to do. Not enough time to really pay attention. Not enough time to connect. Not enough time to connect with others. Not enough time to connect with ourselves. So that's, in fact, what we practice in coaching conversations is let's slow this down.

Steve March: [00:17:01] Let's actually take the time to feel what's here, to connect to each other, to connect to ourselves. And as we do that, our contact deepens. And as we deepen what we discover is innate wholeness. And you can cheerlead somebody by saying like, I see you as capable But if they have surface contact with themselves, parts of them will just show up and say, yeah, but you don't know me. Parts of them will defend against that. So the only way to really wake up to innate wholeness is to actually experience it in the immediacy of now in the moment in contact. So that it kind of in a nutshell is this distinction.

Steve March: And I still feel like in so many ways bringing the unfoldment paradigm into the center of the cultural conversation is one of the big moves that's needed in our times. [00:18:03] And you kind of alluded to this earlier, but what I see different from three years ago when we last talked is that there's even more exhaustion at the relentlessness of the need to improve than there was three years ago. Right? So the seeking self-improvement paradigm, it's more apparent to people that that way of orienting to the world is failing. It's not working. It's leading to burnout. And I think AI is just kind of adding fuel to that.

Steve March: Because it's now we're not only having to compete with human beings, now we have to compete with AI, which is working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, It never, it doesn't have burnout. It never gets tired. It's read a million times more things than any of us have, right? [00:19:01] Yeah, it's interesting that even with all that power, we can still feel the artificialness of that intelligence. But literally month after month after month, that's becoming harder to discern. But it's just kind of taking the seeking self-improvement paradigm and just sort of push it, accelerate it even more. And so the limit of it is more apparent.

Steve March: And so I think in these times, we're ripe for bringing in an alternative view, especially an alternative view about what we are as human beings. We're not this kind of, you know, optimizing machine that the seeking self-improvement paradigm views us as, you know, we're not this kind of, you know, fundamentally flawed, deficient, broken, dysfunctional, in need of an upgrade, in need of self-too-pointal, that's the view of the seeking self-improvement paradigm. [00:20:07] We're in need of a view of being human that has more life That other view is kind of dead in a certain kind of way. And frankly, it's killing us. So we need something that's got more life in it, that's got more poetry in it, something that has more humanity in it. And so I think that the time is even more right for that distinction.

Joel Monk: [00:20:36] Beautiful. Yeah, I think many people listening will relate to what you're talking about here and I can just tie together this the unfoldment paradigm that you're speaking of with what you said at the beginning, you know, that in our times when we're in uncertainty, the uncertainty that we are, you're feeling cold to just be here where you are and and palpate experience. [00:21:07] I can feel how those two fit together, and it seems like the gift, even though things are very challenging right now for a lot of people. One of the gifts is that it's mirroring back to us very clearly. This paradigm you're speaking about, and it feels like if you just add AI to that, what are we going to do more and more faster, faster, faster, You know, I saw this advert today on my phone where there was a woman who was not real, but she looked completely real saying, you know, is this, is this, is this me the real me and then there was another one is, or is this the real me? Can you tell, and then, and then neither of them were real, but they look completely real.

Joel Monk: So now people have like multiple avatars of themselves on every social media channel, giving live You know, in inverted commas presentations, I'm using that example to highlight, I think the where it could go the kind of absurdity of the volume of what we put the pressure we put on ourselves.

Steve March: [00:22:13] So one of my experiences when I first started to use AI, which was now a couple years ago, along with everybody else. I was able to work with it and produce so much so quickly that I started to notice that I was feeling anxious. And I always like, well, I'm using this. I'm having fun with this. This is, you know, brilliant technology. Now, I'm a former technologist that come out of a tech background. So I'm always, you know, trying to keep up to speed with this stuff, although that's a, that's a, that's a hopeless cause as well. But, you know, trying to explore this kind of stuff.

Steve March: I love technology. it's fun. I felt like I was doing good work except I was feeling more anxious and I started to realize that it's almost like it was getting ahead of me and I was I was feeling like something is being produced here and I don't feel oriented anymore. [00:23:16] I don't feel oriented in this. So where And I started to realize, oh, like, you know, what I was doing as I was giving AI the work to do. And I was kind of sitting back and just waiting for it to happen. And I started to realize it was my way of using AI that was actually the culprit here in some sense.

Steve March: And in some ways, I've started to use AI more to support me to do the work. And then I started to realize, oh, this is a great support, this is helpful, and I feel oriented. And as I feel oriented in the work that I'm producing, I don't feel anxious, right? [00:24:04] And so that whole thing was an interesting shift for sure. But to be honest with you, I haven't used AI now for the probably about two months. And I felt like I needed to put it down. and to come back into what's actually here. Now, I'm not saying I'll never use it.

Steve March: I'll probably will just like everyone else will. But yeah, it's fascinating to just see the thing that the thing that is really important to understand is that all technological innovations, all design and fact functions ontologically. And, you know, ontology is the study of being. When I say design, design functions ontologically, what I mean is that what we design design us, it designs being, we are being. [00:25:05] So it designs us back. We're often there with the way that mobile devices have created this kind of body posture where we're hunched over these tiny little screens that we hold close to our face and we're typing on it and we're in this kind of hunched over position or the hunched over the keyboard position. So this, the shape of this technology in the way that it is, it changes us, it designs us, it designs the shape of our body, but it also designs how we know ourselves, right? And I think what was happening is that as I was using this technology of AI, it was beginning to shift and maybe even to pull the rug out from under how I know myself a little bit.

Steve March: And you know, It's also becoming more apparent, the ontological nature of design is becoming more apparent. [00:26:01] Today, to talk about the ways that social media has a negative impact on the mental health of teenagers. That's not news anymore. That's not a surprise anymore. I think most people get that. That's another example of this kind of the way that designs ontologically design us. They design who we are.

Steve March: The big question is how is AI designing us? And it's not a question of is it designing us? it's how is it designing us? It is absolutely designing us as we use it. And I think that question hasn't been, we haven't sat with that question enough. As this has been, you know, one of the most quickest and most widely adopted technologies in the history of human kind, right? [00:27:01] this thing is just sort of swept into the world almost overnight and we haven't sat with that question. And it swept into the coaching world, right?

Steve March: Our world of, you know, makes a lot of sense companies can, you know, they can hire coaches for their executive team or they can hire makes a lot of sense. Makes a lot of sense to try to provide some help. But the thing is, is that all the AI's are also, because they've studied the material that's written, they've studied the material on the internet, they're all designed to help us seek self-improvement in a more optimized way. And so they're pulling us into that paradigm because that's the paradigm [00:28:02] So it's an interesting thing that's happening in our world where it's like this seeking self-improvement is, it's accelerating in some way. And I think the silver lining of that is maybe that we can see the good intention of it, but we can also see the distortion of it more clearly. That's one of my hopes is that we can start to see the failure of it, the limit of it.

Steve March: the way it doesn't succeed in its own terms. It isn't that it fails in the terms of the unfoldment paradigm. It actually fails on its own grounding, right? It's whole purpose is to alleviate self-deficiency, to eliminate self-deficiency. And if we improve enough, we won't feel deficient. Nothing will be missing. except that as fast as we do it, as hard as we do it, as much as we do it, it never delivers us into that state. [00:29:02] So I see more and more people questioning that.

Steve March: I see more clients questioning that. And I think that's a good thing that's beginning to happen here.

Joel Monk: [00:29:18] Before I ask you about how we can practice and, you know, if AI is accelerating this move into the improvement paradigm, and it's designing us, you know, what can we do? Where are we being invited to go? So I want to go to that practical practice or into question. But I wonder if you could just say something first about, because we're in this topic, self-improvement, in a sense, has emerged out of the modern mindset of scientific revolution, breaking things, down into parts, optimization. [00:30:01] Could you say more about how you feel the coaching industry or how the traps we fall into, how we view what the self is and how transformation occurs what really you think is a better wider or more wholesome view of holding who we are and how things change and fault.

Steve March: [00:30:28] In terms of how our culture views change and transformation, which I think has been sort of, has informed the most of the coaching industry as well is that we look at what changes and transforms us as being the individual. And this is also true in developmental coaching, in developmental coaching, at least as I was familiar with it back in the early 2000s, 2010, we would do some kind of developmental assessment of the individual. [00:31:02] We viewed the individual as working as moving through these stages of development. And yet, I love what Nora Bateson insists here. She says, we've looked thoroughly, and we can't find any individuals. all we ever find our ecosystems. And this is also essentially what's echoed in Buddhist philosophy, that when we go to look for the separate self, we actually can't find the self as separate.

Steve March: All we ever find is a kind of co-emergent, interdependent beingness. And so, in Aletheia Unfolding, I like to talk about this, you know, what is the locus of transformation? Is it the individual that's transforming is that the location of transformation? And I offer inside the unfoldment paradigm that actually it's the complex ecosystem that's transforming. [00:32:03] And so the way this shows up practically is we have a coaching conversation. But what transforms to that coaching conversation is are the relationships that the client has with themselves, with the people in their lives, with their colleagues and coworkers, with world events. It's those relationships that are actually there in the conversation and that are transforming. And so we'll work in a coaching conversation and often make a move that I like to call circling back.

Steve March: After we work in a conversation to deepen contact with what's here, we circle back into the situation to feel inside of it. Like how does that whole situation at work feel to you now? And the client will say, it feels completely different to me now, right? And what do you understand about that situation? What do you see as possible response to that situation? [00:33:03] And new understandings are there, different possibilities for responding, or not responding are available to the client that just weren't there before. So it wasn't really them as something separate from the situation that changed and transformed. It was their very situation itself that changed and transformed.

Steve March: That's what I mean by the complex ecosystem. So if we do an assessment of the individual separated from the world, you know, really in ignorance of what's happening in their complex ecosystem. And I think it's unskillful, and at best we'll see kind of mixed results. But instead, if we focus a coaching conversation on exploring that complex ecosystem. So you have this relationship with your boss or you, you're struggling with your life partner. [00:34:01] Like, what's that like? How do you feel that? What are you sensing in your body?

Steve March: What is it like to be in this relationship in this situation? A part of me may get scared. Okay, maybe we can give some space to that fear. is it okay to feel that, like we're actually continuing to sink into to be present with the complexity of this situation as it is and to begin to explore it, that's what's changing and transforming. And standing apart from it, which is the modernist move, the scientific move, standing apart as a separate observer in trying to diagnose what's happening, and then to treat what's happening. I mean, this is medical model, sort of stuff, right? That's the move that we tend to make in the seeking self-improvement paradigm. We stand apart from the situation, we try to analyze it, we try to understand what's missing, we try to figure out where it could be, how do we acquire it, or if it's not somewhere else, how do we develop it, how do we build it, how do we manufacture it, how do we fabricate it.

Steve March: [00:35:12] what is it made of? Is it made of parts of things? Do we pull parts together? It's like building a machine. That's the metaphor, right? But I don't think change and transformation of living beings functions like that. It doesn't, it doesn't occur like that. So there is a fundamental, you know, different understanding of change and transformation that's needed.

Joel Monk: [00:35:39] What do you see the connection with parts, you know, I know you use parts work in Aletheia coaching and, you know, the example you gave there, what are you feeling in your body, what are you sensing? So, you know, there's a kind of an inverted commas like appointing towards the inner world of the client and again maybe that's a problematic distinction actually. [00:36:06] But I'm trying to just get a more, so, you know, coaching the relationships rather than the nodes or the things themselves. And do you, which led me to think about how, how can we access a kind of systemic being being this? You know, because in a sense, the system is showing up in our embodied experience, that's right, in our perception. So I'm trying to weave together how,

Joel Monk: One might hold, like, you know, doing the inner work and invite that to come as with that kind of ecosystemic view, where we're seeing the whole ecosystem as the thing where including in the coaching conversation, how we can bring that in and in a more in a wider sense.

Steve March: [00:37:01] When we feel our emotions, what we're really feeling is our current sense of relationship. There's a sense of relationship with the world. And we tune into our emotions as a way of understanding what that relationship is. The same is true when we sense our bodies. But we sense our bodily felt sense. And I'm borrowing the term from Gendlin here of felt sense. And we When we sense our bodily felt sense, what we are actually sensing is not ourselves separate from the world.

Steve March: What we're sensing is our relatedness with the world. And so it is interesting, and you've kind of alluded to this that this term like inner work. You know, it's almost as if, you know, we tune inwardly, but we don't tune inwardly to get away from the outer world. It's almost like we tune inwardly to have contact, to feel into the relatedness that we are with everything. [00:38:09] And so this inner outer distinction, this notion of inner work, I think is, is maybe helpful at a certain stage where, you know, as a tendency our ego is often externally oriented. And so we don't have this kind of, you know, the sort of self-introspection, where we're looking outwardly at the world at others, You know, goal fulfillment, you know, the problem is out there, this kind of thing. At some point, this happens earlier in life for some people and later in life for other people, but there starts to become an inward turn, an introspection, maybe a reflection on how one is thinking, how one is feeling, what one is feeling, what one is sensing.

Steve March: And this can bring kind of like the other half that's been ignored in some sense. [00:39:04] So they're the distinction of turning inward makes sense. But if we turn inward and we actually pay attention, it's act and we actually deepen inwardly. What we notice is that we're not actually moving away from the world. It's not a withdrawal from the world. It's actually a deeper entry into all of it. Right? It's a deeper entry into the felt texture of relatedness.

Steve March: So the relatedness that we are in the world is something that can be felt and felt intimately. And that allows us to be able to navigate this complex ecosystem. I love complexity theory and I think bringing in the lessons of complexity theory is a really important part of this and talking about the complex ecosystem is an aspect there of that. And one of the views I have is that human beings by nature are native in the habitat of complexity. [00:40:06] Like it's not something that we should try to simplify away because it's too much for us. It's too overwhelming for us, it's too threatening for us. We need to fix it, we need to eliminate it. Now, that doesn't mean on the flip side that we should, you know, do everything we can to make things more and more complex, you know, that that's not what I'm saying, I'm saying is that that this ecosystem that we live in that we're integrated in is complex by nature.

Steve March: There's nothing we can really do about that, but that's exactly where we've grown to live. and so we're natives in this habitat and we can survive and thrive in this habitat of complexity. Many of us don't actually recognize that in ourselves. We feel the complexity is too much and we feel overwhelmed by it and we feel threatened by it. [00:41:01] And this is often leading us to feel like some kind of deficiency or something missing in us. We try to self-improve our way out of that, instead of actually opening up into this relatedness, complex as it is, and finding ourselves more deeply in contact with the whole thing, and then finding ourselves more deeply at home in this, which means that we land into it as something we can navigate. So that I think is my understanding of a lot of how we want to help clients in a coaching context is to help them to navigate this, this complex ecosystem, their relationships, and to keep connecting to and embodying their innate capacity to do so.

Joel Monk: [00:41:56] This is why I think people are also coming round to this because of the complexity of the world, where I think people are seeing that the usual scramble for like, what's the, how can I solve this as a problem, a simplification of using tools, certain tools to find a way through, and instead, which, you know, is kind of more of that self-improvement approach to things, [00:42:23] And so, I find what you're saying here fascinating because again, it feels like the mirror, the mirror is back to our innate, as you're saying, you know, there's an innate capacity to meet life and be part of the complex and foldment of life, and wonder if you could say something here about depth in the necessity for this because, you know, on the one hand, people like Iain McGilchrist have made great arguments about how, you know, we've privileged to certain hemisphere of the brain, which tends to again, like reify experience and break it into, you know, disconnected parts. [00:43:03] And, you know, you talk about the depth of parts. And it seems like the more we can inhabit, the more we can open to this rich, the richness of our financial and the complexity of life.

Steve March: [00:43:26] Yeah. Yeah, in Aletheia, we have depth as a core distinction for us. And I've talked about it, I think, before with you on podcasts. And at the surface of it, we have the depth of parts. And we do practice parts work there. And really, we're working with parts as reflections of our innate wholeness in some sense, that they're the very affordance that as we work with the parts that are triggered, and meet them exactly as they are. [00:44:05] they release, they melt, they soften, they sometimes shine in ways that actually spontaneously deepens us into another depth of contact with ourselves. So working with the apparent fragmentation of ourselves,

Steve March: rather than sort of demonizing that fragmentation, actually working with it as something that's present, becomes the pathway of returning to an embodied sense of our own innate wholeness. And so as parts sort of begin to relax and soften, we naturally drop into a deeper depth of contact, not just with ourselves but with everything. with other people, with the world around us, and that depth, I call it the depth of process. This is the depth where of a kind of fluid flow of felt experience. [00:45:00] And what we're experiencing, bodily, what we're experiencing, imaginally, even, is relatedness, is what I was just talking about that sense of the complex ecosystem. And that it's that complex ecosystem that's actually what's unfolding, it's actually what's transforming. And so we tap into that in a direct immediate way, not as an observer, but as a full participant in that. And so we drop into this participatory relationship with that unfoldment at that depth.

Steve March: And as we follow what's unfolding, it naturally carries us even deeper, even deeper into the next step down, which I call the depth of presence in absence. This is the first depth that we actually land into a recognition of our innate wholeness. and we can drop into that depth either into an absence or into a presence. [00:46:01] And from the seeking self-improvement paradigm, we kind of demonize absence and valorize presence. We don't want something to be missing. We want something to be here. Yet in the unfoldment paradigm, we realize that this is like Yin and Yang, you know, if you go deeply into Yin, Yang is born, if you go deeply into Yang, Yin is born, we realize this kind of polarity that is life-giving, this kind of pulsation of life, this inhalation and exhalation, this heart beat. And so we embrace absence and explore absence and want to get to know absence because that's the precondition for the realization of presence and so on.

Steve March: And so this is our first kind of taste of wholeness. It's kind of like not feeling these things are really separate from each other, which will be fragmentation, but feeling that they're sort of like mutual. [00:47:00] they're mutually co-emergent, and so we want to embrace all of that. And as we embrace all of that, there is a deepening still further into the deepest depth, which I call the depth of non-dual presence. And this is kind of the ultimate returning home to our true nature. And by contrast, this is the depth of non-separation, by contrast to the depth of parts And so here, this is the depth that you find most spiritual traditions, really speaking of, but the thing to notice here is that this is not somehow a part from life. This is very much exactly this moment, right?

Steve March: These four depths exist here in this moment, always. And even the depth of non-dual presence is displayed in the separation of all these things, in the kind of the going from the one to the many. [00:48:05] The many is not separate from the one, when viewed from the perspective of the one. And so here we have this sort of display of life. And as we deepen our contact with who we are with life, there is a deep sense of resourcefulness. You know, because it's, you know, what we find in these two deeper depths are human virtues. We find love. We find compassion.

Steve March: We find strength. We find courage. We find perseverance. We find joy. We find passion. We find pleasure. We find bliss. We find peacefulness, equanimity, and on and on and on.

Steve March: And when I look at the challenges that we face in the world, what I see is not for the most part is not a call for yet another self-improvement. [00:49:00] What I see is a call for us to bring what is deeply human in us forward, to bring our love, to bring our compassion, to bring our perseverance, to bring our courage, You know, these times are uncertain, and it will take love to get through it, it will take compassion to get through it, it will take courage to get through it, it will take some perseverance to get through it, and it will also take joy to get through it, right, it will also take equanimity to get through it, different qualities of being human in different instances, different moments. But that's, I think, uh, something that deepening contact with ourselves and unfolding our innate wholeness can bring, you can't self-improve yourself into that. It doesn't matter how hard you try. because self-improvement, it's starting off on a wrong foot. [00:50:00] The assumption of self-improvement is it's not here. It's missing fundamentally.

Steve March: And instead needs to be constructed. It needs to be, or the absence needs to be compensated for in some way. Like we really don't have, we don't have fundamental confidence in ourselves. So we have to fake it. Like that's a compensation, right?

Joel Monk: [00:50:28] And just an example, I remember when I first started to work in this way with clients, I had a client like literally say like, oh my god, this is what I was looking for, right, when we dropped into this depth of presence. Yeah, they were like, they were like, sometimes with clients, they can miss it a little bit as well. They're like, you know, they're easy to miss. Like it's like just check is there anything missing right now and they're like no and then it's like then they then the recognition comes forth more fully and For some people it can be deeply moving. [00:51:03] I mean, I for me too, you know, it's a I think in a sense it's like we're chasing the self improvement paradigm, you know, it's been. very convenient with, you know, capitalism in the sense of chasing, constantly chasing something to fulfill oneself. And this depth you're talking about here is where that fulfillment for me personally has come in more, where it's like, oh, I don't need to fill, I'm full already. I don't need to fill it with something.

Steve March: [00:51:36] Yeah, that's exactly right. I've had those conversations in those moments with, with many, many hundreds of people where we've dropped in, they've dropped in to this moment. And I just say, you know, what's it feel like? Was anything missing here? And it's a shock to them. It's like what? Because it's a palpable feeling.

Steve March: [00:52:02] This feeling of dropping into an embodied sense of your own wholeness. It's not a thought, it's not an idea, it's an immediate experience, it's an unmediated experience, right? It's even a non-conceptual experience to some extent. And it is legitimately could be called a kind of awakening experience. It's an awakening to our own nature, to what we've always been. And in fact, that's one of the things that you start to see, as you integrate this more, is you start to recognize that it can never not be true, in fact, right? And it's not the creation of the coaching conversation, like the coach didn't create this and give it to you.

Steve March: It's always been here. It's your own nature. It's always been your nature. What we did was to kind of have a different kind of conversation where, instead of talking about how do we get there, how do we fix the problem, how do we fulfill the goal? [00:53:07] We were talking about what's already here and simply kind of following the breadcrumbs deeper in some sense. into a deeper appreciation, recognition, understanding and embodiment of what is true already. Let's true already here.

Joel Monk: [00:53:30] Yeah, maybe it's worth to say something about that whilst we're here because it's, you know, a deeper recognition of what's already here, I'm thinking of here letting be letting unfold in this process of kind of attuning and including more of what's here and how that can allow for this spontaneous deepening into depths and so could you say something about that, that practice of what a coach is actually doing with the client around a topic?

Steve March: [00:54:05] Yeah, the first thing, you know, one of the questions here is like how do we shift into this kind of conversation, right, shifting out of the seeking self improvement kind of conversation and into the unfoldment kind of conversation and the first step, which is the most important step is to shift how we attune to what's here. So the way I've talked about this in my school is shifting from a technological way of attuning to a poetic way of attuning. That's the most important shift. In a technological way of attuning, we tend to look at the world in terms of functionality or dysfunction, in terms of possibilities for becoming more efficient or more optimized. And of course, we live in a technological world. There's no doubt about that. and yet the, you know, to view a machine as broken in need of repair is entirely appropriate. [00:55:07] If your car breaks down on the side of the road, it needs to be fixed, right?

Steve March: That's appropriate. The problem becomes we, we tend to attune even to human beings other people in ourselves technologically. And that is dehumanizing. And when we do that, that we see a broken person. When we look in the mirror, we see a dysfunctional person when we look in the mirror or when we look at someone else. And in need of upgrades and fixing and improvements. So that way of attuning from the very beginning, inclines us into the seeking self-improvement way of engaging with what's here. So in order to shift, we need to change how we attune.

Steve March: So I like to talk about a poetic way of attuning. And a poetic way of attuning is something that discloses what it is to be human, that a poetic way of attuning is an attunement to wholeness. [00:56:04] So instead of attuning to partness, to fragmentation, to mechanism, we attune in a more organic way, we attune to wholeness, to innate wholeness. And the easy way to enact that is through engaging your love of truth, your love of truth, beauty and goodness, and so the conversation in coaching is typically, well, what's true What are you sensing? What are you feeling? What's happening in your life? What's happening in that relationship?

Steve March: What's happening at work? What's happening with your health? And to begin to notice what's true, and sometimes what's true is there's something happening and we're reacting to that. There's a part in us that's reacting to that, a part that's scared. Well, now that's true. And we can begin to really work with those truths exactly as they are. [00:57:02] So one of the core notions that we work with in Aletheia Unfolding is that we all have we have experience, but we react to that experience and very often we react to our reactions. So there's this kind of chain of reactivity that is actually our experience.

Steve March: And whenever there's an experience and you react to it, you freeze that experience in that act of reacting. And so what we do in our coaching is we work with the current reaction in a way that it begins to relax and soften. And when that happens, the primary experience it's reacting to, uh, unfreezes and begins to move begins to unfold. And we simply walk that chain of reactions to more and more primary elements of our experience. [00:58:01] And this is actually how we deepen and depth. So we deepen into what is even more primary, and all the way along, we're just liberating what's stuck in us, we're liberating what's fixated in us, we're liberating what's frozen in us. And that's that right there is, you know, taking it's like there's an aspect of the complex ecosystem that's been locked in place. And when it's locked in place, it can even seem separate from the complex ecosystem.

Steve March: But as it becomes, as it thaws from being frozen or relaxes from being tense or releases in some kind of way from being stuck, it becomes more obviously integrated into that entire complex ecosystem, which it always was. And so that recognition is that recognition of being in this world of relatedness. [00:59:02] So that's one way to understand what we're doing. And so the conversations unfolding by following this thread of what's true and when we discover something it's true, we'll almost always find that it's also simultaneously beautiful. yet there's also something that's fundamentally good about that truth. And we kind of follow that vein of truth, beauty and goodness, deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. And of course, we have sort of pragmatic ways of doing this. We have parts work as one way of doing this.

Steve March: We have process work. We have presence work. We have non-dual work. And this gives a lot more detail about how do we navigate these different, how do we navigate the moment with the client? How do we create really all these things are our ways of creating the conditions? in which unfoldment occurs spontaneously, because it's not really the coach's job to unfold the client, the coach can't unfold the client. [01:00:07] The client can't unfold themselves. The way I like to think of it is its life's job.

Steve March: So all we can do is look at how do we create the conditions for life to do its job in an unencumbered way. And mostly what that entails is learning how we're unknowingly getting in the way and beginning to relax that. And that's a lot of what we work with. We do with parts work is our parts are well intended. They're trying to be helpful. They're trying to compensate for deficiencies and keep us safe and prevent us from feeling hurt and wounded, which is good intention. But it doesn't really work. We still wind up feeling hurt.

Steve March: The ways of compensating don't really work out that well. They do fail. And so what we do with parts work is, you know, we appreciate those parts for their good intention, we explore their emotional truth, we want them to feel seen for their emotional truth, we explore their beauty parts are beautiful, you know, they were created when we were children and they got us through our childhood and we're here. [01:01:22] parts are good. They have good intentions. They're trying to be helpful and loving and positive. So we let them feel seen for all that truth, beauty and goodness. And when that happens very predictably, parts just soften and melt.

Steve March: Or they shine. Shining is like, you know, if you've ever given a little kid or a little kid has ever given you a gift like they drew you a drawing or something maybe your daughter's done this for you right and if she gives it to you and you pick it up and you say wow, this is the most amazing thing anybody has ever given me you will see her shine right she she beams right it's like [01:02:07] And so that's another way that parts sort of move into release is, is they shine. Then in some instances they melt, they just soften. And so, that's really all we're doing with parts work is creating that condition. And it's the melting shining bits that move from frozenness, from fixation, right into unfoldment. And so we move right into unfoldment. And then we have another way of creating the conditions at the depth of process and another way to create the conditions of the depth of presence and absence and so on and so forth.

Joel Monk: [01:02:54] One quick question just before we end is, what's the difference between absence the depth of presence and absence and deficiency at the depth of parts?

Steve March: [01:03:05] Yeah, deficiency at the depth of parts is an identity. It's we feel self-deficient, that's who I am. I am a deficient individual, right? I'm broken. I'm not optimized, I'm a need of improvement, I'm a need of an upgrade. We wear it as a self-image. And so it's a kind of, you know, what an identity is is that we have in our ego structure a self-image, think of it like a photograph of yourself. And then we basically say, that's me.

Steve March: When we actually deepen in contact down through the depths, and we recognize our own nature, that is unmediated. [01:04:01] There is no representation that we say that's me. The representation would be the medium. we have an unmediated, immediate self-recognition of our own nature, and that self-recognition is a little bit like the sense, you know, this is metaphoric, but I think it's pretty accurate Before I said, notice the space in the room, the space in the room was absent in your awareness. But as soon as I said, notice the space and you turn to it, the space is present. But notice nothing about the space really changed. It was just a notion that the space can manifest in your experience sometimes more like an absence, something that you could easily overlook

Steve March: [01:05:08] But the second, someone points out or the second, you recognize it. It's very palpably here. And so our self-recognition functions in this way, and this is one of the reasons why when we have all these different self-images and we keep saying, this is me, this is me, the concreteness of those self-images. You know, the objects in the room, so to speak, they tend to grab our attention faster than the space itself, right? And so we tend to not recognize the thing that's most immediate, right? It's right here, and it's always right here. So that's the difference.

Joel Monk: [01:05:55] That's really helpful. Yeah, thank you. Um, yeah, I think this was a beautiful tour de force around the, you're, you're a paradigm for the kind of work we can do. [01:06:07] And I'm kind of deliberately holding back from using the word coaching. I mean, I think that's the vehicle that many people know, but my sense is that many people feel, and I know you've talked about this constricted by the way that words being defined. And Yeah, just want to say thank you Steve for the conversation today and working people find out more about your work as well.

Steve March: [01:06:31] Well, you can certainly go to our website, integralunfoldment.com. And it's filled with information about the different courses that we offer, and you can see the course schedule. I also have links to a lot of other podcasts, interviews there, articles, and other things like that. So that's kind of the central place.

Joel Monk: [01:06:55] Beautiful. Thanks, Steve.

Steve March: [01:06:57] Thanks, Joel.

Joel Monk: [01:06:58] Here we are. We're at the end of the podcast. [01:07:00] Just a heads up again. If you're not on our mailing list and you want to stay in the loop about other things we create, then head to coachesrising.com, put your name in the sign-up box there. You'll also find some of our other offerings, our online trainings for coaches there. And just want to end by wishing you well and I'll see you again next time.