You Are Connected. Now, Just Plug In!

“A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.” Albert Einstein

Einstein’s perspective recognizes the dynamic interconnectedness of all life on earth and points to a way of thinking and being that liberates us from the limiting constructs of our mind.

David Bohm, building on Einstein’s early work, in his Special Theory of Relativity, published in 1995, writes “Natural reality goes beyond any human idea but the extent to which we can bring it into our world depends on our ideas. Physical entities which seem to be separate and discrete in space and time are actually unified in an implicit or underlying fashion. Under an unfolded order of separate things and events is an enfolded order of undivided wholeness…. and this whole is simultaneously available to each unfolded part. The enfolded order harbors our reality…”

The Chernobyl disaster in 1986, the Fukushima nuclear disaster catalyzed by a tsunami in 2011 and the growing awareness of global warming and the subsequent climate change are expressions of these insights made manifest in our physical world.

“We are all in the same soup….What happens in one place effects the whole. The natural environment of our planet creates the conditions that give rise to and enable life.”

Technological and scientific research and development in the fields of tele-communications, information management, quantum physics, neuroscience and human consciousness, among others, further bridge what was once perceived as gaps in knowledge, communications and human interconnectedness to engender a sense of an emerging new paradigm where human beings are seen as agents of positive change, engaged in actively developing their potential as co-creative partners in an ever unfolding evolutionary process. This, empowering ecological perspective, is an emerging paradigm for the 21^st century and coaching is one of a number of effective modes enabling the human transformation and empowerment process.

 

Coaching Empowers

While a fear of failure, perceived lack of resources or misunderstanding about professional coaching may be the biggest single barriers people interested in improving their performance and fulfillment in life face, the technological enhancements made over the last 30 years provide us with increasing access to each other around the globe.  Knowing that there are professional coaches, actively engaged in empowering individuals in their communities, in a growing number of countries, is in itself empowering.

Living in a large urban centre I am inspired by the diverse culture that is Toronto every time I ride the subway and witness people here from around the globe. Each individual has personal and family connections to somewhere else – somewhere they are deeply connected with. The global-local connection is alive everywhere….The local-global connection is where you are – is you!

By changing yourself, you are changing the world. As Gandhi’s famous quote so eloquently expresses, you can choose to “Be the change you want to see in the world.’

Coaching helps! As a professional coach, I am change management expert and help my clients shift perspective, helping them recognize the assumptions and limiting beliefs that keep the stuck, to recognize new ways of thinking, seeing and doing that are aligned with their values and engage them in their lives from a position of strength. Each session ends with designing actions and practices that empower them to integrate and embody what they have learned to enable them to be the most awesome, authentic self they can be. In this evolutionary process of continuous improvement and becoming, we co-create the world anew, and while we know that we are primarily effecting our own reality, in our awareness of our global inter-connectivity, we also know that we are effecting the world.

 

This article was first published in the February 2014 edition of Worldwide Coaching Magazine