Newsletter May 2011

The Transformer

Inspiration and News from the Center for Transformational Presence 

May 2011

Feature Article:  Alan Seale: Pioneering New Frontiers in Transformational Leadership and Coaching

Video of the Month:  Eric Whitacre: A Virtual Choir 2,000 Voices Strong

Alan Seale: Pioneering New Frontiers in Transformational Leadership and Coaching

by Johnathon Pape

Photo - Jos Rovers

This month marks the launch of Alan’s new book, Create a World That Works, so it seemed appropriate to profile Alan’s own journey and the path that has led him to this new milestone.  Alan is not only a master teacher/coach of transformation, he is also a master of transformation in his own life.  What started out over 25 years ago as a journey of self-discovery and personal awareness, has become an exciting new model of transformation for individuals, communities, organizations, and the world at large.  As Alan began his journey, the first stop was expanded intuitive awareness, and in opening up to that infinitely greater intelligence, everything changed.

“In those early years, I had no idea of what was to come,” he explains.  “I still thought of myself as a singer and voice teacher in New York who offered this personal development work as an extra bonus for those who were interested.”  In the early 1990s, Alan brought his new intuitive awareness to a 10-week class for performers called “Self Discovery as Artist and Performer.”  The course was all about knowing who you are as a performer, what you have to bring to the stage, recognizing the blocks that get in your way, and giving you tools to get past those blocks. Ultimately, it was about showing up on stage in your most authentic and dynamic presence. That 10-week class quickly evolved into a 3-level, 30-week class that he taught for several years.

By the mid-1990s, people began asking for classes in intuitive development and being able to see and feel energy.  They wanted more.  And so Alan began teaching intuitive development classes, and it was from those early classes that he wrote his first book, Intuitive Living: A Sacred Path. Over the next several years, Alan was drawn deeper into personal development work and heard about coaching. “I was ready for a change in my career at that point and in 2001 I enrolled in the training program at Coaches Training Institute. Coaching was definitely the right fit for me, and by 2003 I had shifted the bulk of my income from teaching singers to coaching.”

While the focus of Alan’s work continued to be personal development and living into your greatest potential, the work was getting much deeper, and invitations started coming in to speak and teach in spiritual conferences and learning centers. That energy continued to flow through his next books, Soul Mission * Life Vision, The Manifestation Wheel, and The Power of Your Presence. Yet even when he wrote The Manifestation Wheel in 2007, the energy of the work was shifting.  “I was being drawn out of personal development into a much deeper understanding of personal presence—how we ‘show up’ in the world. And from there into leadership and service—how are we going to make a difference in the world?  The personal development work is essential to strong leadership and service, yet in today’s world, we can’t stop with just personal development. We must now take it further  and do our part in creating a world that works. We are entering an era of personal responsibility.”

Johnathon Pape: Your work has had such a strong impact on so many people over the years.  From your early work with Intuition right through Transformational Presence Coach Training you have helped people get in touch with themselves at the soul level, integrate that with a new sense of ego in service to soul, and partner with the energy of what wants to happen to transform their lives.  Can you tell us some of the ways that your work has transformed your own life?

Alan Seale: The work has evolved as I have evolved, and I have evolved as the work has evolved. It has been an amazing journey. I feel like a very different person than the one who taught those classes in New York 20 years ago. Of course, at my essence, I am the same, yet my relationship to the world around me is so different—how I look at things, understand them, and engage them is very different. Fear no longer has any power in my life. I haven’t set a life goal for years. Instead, I keep paying attention to what wants to happen next and then follow that energy. I’ve learned that if I try to make something happen that isn’t happening easily, chances are it will not turn out well. I am working all the time, and I won’t say that everything that I do is easy, yet there is a sense of ease about it. There is a lot of grace and blessing in my life. And I think this is because I’ve learned to notice what potential is bubbling up next and follow it.

JP: Congratulations on the release of Create a World That Works.  This is your fifth book and in many ways is the culmination of your work up to this time.  Was the process of writing it different than your previous books?

AS: This book has had several incarnations. It began as a book called Future World Now, which I wanted to co-write with my friend Devin Wilson. In that incarnation, I created most of the material and Devin added some practical application to it. We led "Future World Now" retreats several times in 2006 and 2007. From the Future World Now idea, the book evolved to being about soul intelligence. When it still wasn't finding its way, I put the book away for about a year. Then in 2008 I realized this book was the core teaching for my Transformational Presence Coach Training program. Launching that program in January 2009, I came back to this material with renewed inspiration and clarity of the form the book was to take.

With all of the other books, there was more clarity about what the book was and the message it was to bring from the beginning of the writing process. But this book had to find its message and its audience. The book feels great now and the feedback has been incredible. It is written for leaders, coaches, visionaries, and anyone who wants to make a difference in their world. And they are receiving the book with open arms.

JP: Depending on the day, our world can seem like it is on the cusp of exciting transformative change or in a dangerously precarious place.  How do you keep your balance in these volatile times?  Do you ever despair?  And if so, how do you transform that into something that can make a positive impact, even in a small way?

AS: Today’s world is certainly a challenging place in which to live. Yet we must remember that the greater the challenge, the greater the opportunity. I’m on the whole a pretty positive person, yet I can also catch myself heading down that road of despair. There are several practices that I use to stay on track. The first is to look at everything through the eyes of “What wants to happen here?” That immediately gives me a different perspective. I also reinforce a vertical alignment within my being every day. I make sure that I can feel my feet on the ground and the clothes on my skin all the time—in other words, to stay present, right here, right now. It is only through being fully present in the moment that we can actually access the greater Consciousness. And I make sure that I am relating to all that is going on through the high heart energy center. All of these tools are things that I have written about here in this newsletter and are tools you can learn through reading Create a World That Works.

JP: Create a World That Works offers so many tools for transformation at the personal level, the global level, and everything in between.  If someone wants to start the process of transformation, what would you suggest is the first step they should take?

AS: The first tool in the book is the Four Levels of Engagement, which I first wrote about in the June 2008 issue of Full-Spectrum Living, the newsletter that preceded The Transformer. In this tool, we recognize that there are four basic ways of engaging with what is going on our lives: drama, situation, choice, or opportunity. We can choose to get caught up in the drama, or we can just see the facts and look for how to fix it. In both of these ways of engaging, we are giving our power away to something outside of ourselves. We are victims of life circumstances. However, if we choose to enter at the level of choice, we begin considering who we will choose to be within that situation. Now we start to take our power back, and from there, we can look for the opportunity that is present. Just learning to live from the perspective of choice and opportunity is already a huge shift from how most of the world lives. It’s a powerful first step in both personal and global transformation.

JP: What if they want transformation to occur at a higher level, say within their company, community, or even at the global level?

AS: It’s really the same thing. First we must choose who we will be in relationship to what is happening, whether as individuals, organizations, governments, or societies. Once we have made a clear choice of how we will “show up” to the situation, we have the possibility of actually having a significant impact in service of a greater good. When we first approach a problem or challenge by asking how do we fix it or what do we do, we are focusing only on the “doing”, which, of course, must ultimately come into play. However, if we are acting out of reaction or fear or stress, our actions will not be as effective and constructive as they would be if we are acting from a place of clarity, centeredness, choice, and opportunity. If we want transformation to occur, we must first press pause and get clear about who we are in the situation, who we choose to be in relationship to it going forward, and what opportunities are hidden within what is going on.

JP: One of the things I like best about Create a World That Works is that it has both a personal and a global focus.  The material is incredibly practical and useful at the personal level, but it also radiates out to affect the much bigger picture.  That seems like a mirror of the way your work has also blossomed over the years.

AS: Create a World That Works began as the textbook for Transformational Presence Coach Training. That training is continuing to manifest itself in amazing ways. There are now 93 graduates of that program from 14 countries. It is incredible to me that it has spread so far in just two years. The Center for Transformational Presence is also growing and expanding.  We now offer e-learning programs as well as a number of free resources and teleseminars. The whole idea of Transformational Presence is evolving and manifesting in new ways through new programs and collaborations.

I feel like my professional life increasingly takes on a life of its own. It was perhaps 7 or 8 years ago in meditation that I first began hearing the term “global coach” and I didn’t know what that was going to mean, but I just followed the energy. It wasn’t long after that I was invited to participate in the inaugural group of The Evolutionary Institute, a coach training program in Europe. Although that program was short-lived, the connections I made with a couple of other coaches in that program opened the doors for me to start working in Europe. That was in 2005, and now I teach twice a year both in The Netherlands and in Sweden, and have also taught workshops or been a keynote speaker in Scotland, Switzerland, and Romania.

JP: You have manifested amazing things in your professional life.  What are you currently manifesting in your personal life?

AS: Right now you and I are manifesting a new life in Boston. You have just accepted a new position as Director of Opera Studies at the Boston Conservatory, a major performing arts school in the U.S. That is incredibly exciting for you, and for us it offers the opportunity to live in the Boston area. I already have a wonderful community there and I look forward to what will happen both personally and professionally as we find our new home and settle into a new community and city.

Transcending both personal and professional, I feel like I am continuing to manifest me. I continue to grow and evolve and discover more of my own potential and live into that potential. “I liberate and empower” continues to evolve within me in subtle yet profound ways. Perhaps it is something about being 56 years old, but I feel like I am finally stepping into who I am called to be. Not that I wasn’t before, but something has shifted in the last year, and I feel like there is another level of maturing into who I was born to be. It feels good. It feels authentic. And it feels somehow humbling and sacred.

JP: Your soul mission is I liberate and empower.  Can you talk about how your understanding of that has evolved over the years?

AS: I think my basic understanding of it has remained the same, yet I am aware of that energy in much more subtle ways now—that liberation and empowerment can happen in such tiny ways that over time add up to a lot. I am more aware of little ways in which I and others get stuck and can more effectively shine a light on the liberation waiting to happen. And I keep discovering more ways to empower people, again, often in subtle but important ways. “Liberate and empower” continues to become more and more a way of life.  It often doesn’t even occur to me that I am “liberating and empowering.” It’s just how I live in relationship to myself and hopefully to others.

JP: You are such an amazing and inspiring writer, teacher, coach, and leader.  And though many of us think of you as superhuman, you are, after all as human as the rest of us.  What is your greatest challenge to living your full authentic Presence of Being?

AS: Remembering to trust. And keeping a balance. I love what I do. I live and breathe my work, because my work is all about creation and manifestation and that, to me, is the essence of life. So work and play become all the same. My intuitive mind is always drawing parallels, seeing connections, understanding something more deeply, and discovering the next creation. When I get tired, I sometimes don’t have the energy to stay expanded into the intuitive mind and I shrink back down to just intellect. When that happens, things don’t work so well. So my challenge is to keep balance in my life and stay rested so that I can continue to have the energy to live in a greatly expanded awareness.

JP: And how have you managed to transform that challenge?

AS: I have to have time outside, time in nature. I have to hear birds and see water and sky and green and breathe fresh air. I have to have solitude and stillness. And I make sure that I have time with the people who are most important to me in my life. That is sometimes a challenge because many of those people are spread across the globe, but I travel enough that I get to spend time with them or connect with them fairly often. I also love nature photography and would like to create more time for that in my schedule. That is very energizing to me. So these are ways that I find balance and recharge. And I can’t forget our two dachsunds, Toby and Matty, who are turning a year old just as this newsletter is published. Sometimes I just need to sit in my big chair in front of the fire with them in my lap for a while and everything comes into clear perspective again.

JP: “Life Happens,” as they say.  You’ve written several articles in the newsletter about the many things you’ve faced this past year.  What have you learned about the power of presence as you have walked through those difficult times?

AS: That presence is all we have. Our own presence; the presence of something larger than ourselves, whether you call that God or Spirit or Consciousness or Intelligence; the presence of those important to us or those with whom we are sharing an experience; the presence of the potential trying to emerge through whatever is happening. To me, standing in Transformational Presence means standing in oneness with something larger than me. The name that works for me these days is Consciousness. Sometimes I can also call it God or Spirit, but Consciousness is the word right now that is resonating. I believe that when we are standing in Transformational Presence, we are Consciousness in creation. We become Consciousness in action. And then what we might have once thought would be daunting becomes manageable, and perhaps even holy. My biggest challenges over the last year have indeed yielded many holy moments and certainly great personal transformation. I am incredibly grateful for the journey.

JP: What do you most want someone to get out of reading Create a World That Works?

AS: That there is another way from how the mass consciousness currently operates. That by making simple shifts in how we show up in the world and by understanding how life works as energy in motion, we can in fact create a world that works. We kid ourselves if we think it is grand schemes and balanced budgets and models for government or business that create a world that works. A world that works is created by who we are—who we are in relationship to ourselves, to each other, and to the circumstances we find ourselves in. We as a collective consciousness have created those circumstances, and the sooner we own that reality, the sooner we can make the necessary inner shifts in our being, beliefs, habits, and actions to create different circumstances. It all begins with how we show up—with our personal presence.  If we focus on who we are called to be—as individuals, as societies, as businesses, as nations—then we open the door for the greatest potential to unfold. The vision will show itself to us and our job will be to live into that vision of the next evolution of our global community.

That’s my work and my life—calling people into the fullness of who they are and into living their full potential now—not later, now. Ten years from now my potential will have evolved, and I’ll be focused on living into that potential. The same is true for all of us. Right now I need to focus on living into the potential that I can realize right now. To me, that is our charge—to live into our greatest potential as we understand it right now—to ask what is a world that works and then ask who must I be to create that, and be that person right now. That is Transformational Presence. That is what will create a world that works.

JP: Looking back at the last 20 years of doing this work, what are you most proud of?  What are you most surprised by?  What are you most excited about for where you have come and where you are going?

AS: I am the most proud of how this work has transformed so many people's lives—literally thousands of people. I regularly get emails and phone calls from people thanking me for the books and workshops. I am proud of all of the books. I never imagined writing books or doing the work that I do. I was a singer and a teacher of singers in New York. That was a wonderful career and I never imagined I would do something else—until I did. So I am surprised by the turn in the road and where that turn has taken me. I didn't set out to teach in Europe, but the opportunity came and I said yes. And I sit in awe and amazement at the network of people now in The Netherlands and in Sweden who are supporting this work and helping to spread this work in those parts of the world. I just focus on doing my work and doing it the best I possibly can, and others seem to be picking up the job of promoting the work and taking care of the details. I never would have imagined this happening. It is a beautiful and humbling experience.

What I am most excited about at this time is this book and Transformational Presence Coach Training, and the possibilities that are emerging for transformational leadership training based on these concepts. It is immensely rewarding to me to watch people's perspectives, insights, understanding, and personal presence shift, and to realize that they are each going out into their worlds and continuing the transformational work with the people they serve. I truly believe that by shifting our awareness and understanding of personal presence and making personal presence the place where we begin in terms of making changes in the world, we can, in fact, create a world that works for all.

Video of the Month:  Eric Whitacre: A Virtual Choir 2,000 Voices Strong

In September 2010, we featured an incredible video of a global virtual choir singing Eric Whitacre's "Lux Aurumque." This month we share this new video of Eric's TED talk where he tells the story of creating this amazing global singing community. Inspiring and uplifting.