Newsletter November 2011

The Transformer

Inspiration and News from the Center for Transformational Presence 

November 2011

Feature Article: Gratitude for an Unexpected Life

Certified Transformational Presence Coach Profile: Chris Monk—Authenticity and Perception

Video of the Month: Gratitude Dance

Gratitude for an Unexpected Life

Photo - Jos Rovers

November has always been one of my favorite times of the year, especially because here in the U.S. we celebrate the holiday of Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of the month. It is a time of giving thanks for the blessings and gifts of our lives.

In the past few weeks, I have been somewhat awestruck and humbled by all that I have to be thankful for. And many things for which I am now so grateful, I would never have imagined would be a part of my life even just 20 years ago.

When I look back over my childhood and adolescence, university study and early adulthood, and then the unfolding of both my personal and professional life, it has been quite an amazing journey. Yet it has unfolded step by step in what seemed like the most natural and organic way. I feel like I have been on the same road all along, yet that road has taken many forms over the years. From young budding pianist, to church musician, to professional singer, to voice teacher, to spiritual teacher, to author, to personal development coach, to leadership coach and trainer, to whatever comes next, I look back over my life with wonder and gratitude for a journey that has overflowed with gifts. If you had said to me 30 years ago that in my future I would write books, lead workshops and trainings in North America and Europe to people from all over the world, and be recognized as a pioneer in creating a new paradigm for coaching, I would have said you were crazy. I would have said, “I’m a singer and voice teacher. That’s what I do.” Yet here I am.

So at this season of thanksgiving, I reflect on my unexpected life and some of the things I am most grateful for.

First, I am grateful for my childhood among wise elders. I was lucky to have a few key people in my early life who recognized me for who I was at my essence. Perhaps most important among them was an elderly woman who was our next-door neighbor from the time I was six years old until I was 15. She and my grandmother discovered that we had some relatives in common several generations back, so the neighbor became “Cousin Lucy” to me. I spent every afternoon after school with Cousin Lucy. She taught me to play chess and to make clay pots on a potter’s wheel. Even from when I was six and seven years old, she conversed with me as an adult—as an equal. We talked about ideas and feelings. She taught me about life just by how she lived, who she was, and the way she respected and valued everything about life. It was also clear to me how many people respected and valued her. She understood life as a gift and she passed that attitude on to me.

My maternal grandfather was a man of few words but huge heart. I am grateful for the many hours I spent sitting with him under the trees behind the house on his small farm in central Kentucky or riding in the back of his pick-up truck as we made the rounds to all of his friends that he “checked in on” several times a week. He taught me about the importance of diversity, honoring the human spirit, and non-judgment in similar yet different ways than Cousin Lucy had. How lucky I was to have them both.

Only recently have I realized that my first piano teacher, Marjorie Murphy, helped lay a foundation not only for my professional musical life, but for the work that I do now as well. From the very beginning of my piano studies at age 7, she emphasized the importance of music theory, building a strong piano technique, and studying classical piano literature. Yet she also taught me to listen to melodies and create spontaneous arrangements of those melodies on the piano. Improvisation was just as important to her as learning “the rules” and the building blocks of music. While that certainly helped me become an excellent musician and be at home both in classical music and in improvisational genres, it has also helped me recognizing the importance of understanding the science and ancient wisdom teachings behind my coaching work today. Mrs. Murphy helped me understand that the stronger your foundation of knowledge, the more you can then free yourself to play within the concepts to create new forms and discover deeper understanding. Technique, skill, and craft are all part of the art of life.

I am grateful for many rich experiences in college and graduate school, and for teachers who saw something special in me and encouraged me. I am grateful for an extremely painful year immediately after graduate school as I accepted who I was at much deeper levels and began to live openly as a gay man. It was a year of great loss as others couldn’t accept who I was, yet that year also helped to make the path that was ahead of me possible. Exploring and living from deep within and accepting “what is” in the moment and working with it instead of against it became a way of life that will serve me as long as I live.

When I left graduate school with a masters degree in voice, my long-term professional goals were to have an enjoyable singing career, and more importantly to teach singers who sang on the biggest stages of the world. I thought that if I could realize those two dreams, I would have a great life. I couldn’t imagine myself doing anything else.

By the time I was 40 I was living that life. I was singing professionally as much as I wanted and my students were singing leading roles at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, in most of the major opera houses of the world, and on Broadway. Yet at the same time, I was also beginning to feel restless. I didn’t want to live in New York City forever, and, while I was very good at what I was doing, I wasn’t feeling challenged to learn and grow. I was doing my job and doing it well, yet something else was stirring inside.

During that time I discovered a quote from choreographer Martha Graham in which she talked about a “divine dissatisfaction” within artists, “a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.” (as quoted in Agnes DeMille’s book, Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham, p. 264)

Divine dissatisfaction—how I have come to respect that term! I am so grateful for the divine dissatisfaction inside of me because that is what has made it impossible to accept a life that is anything less than extraordinary. When we are in touch with the divine dissatisfaction within us, a mediocre life is not an option. I admit that there are fleeting moments when I wish it was—when I wish that I wasn’t so driven to do what I do and live the life that I live. But those moments pass quickly and I come back to great gratitude for the life that is mine to live.

In the early 1990s when I began teaching a class called “Self-Discovery as Artist and Performer,” I never imagined that I was opening a door to an entirely new life and career. I thought I was just adding another dimension to my voice teaching. Yet by the late ‘90s it was clear that something else was happening. I started hearing about this emerging profession called coaching and I was intrigued. In 2001 I enrolled in The Coach Training Institute (CTI) and began my education as a coach.

Entering the CTI program, I still thought of myself as a singer and voice teacher with some extras thrown in. I had written and published my first book, On Becoming A 21^st-Century Mystic (which would later be published as Intuitive Living) and was still thinking of this “other work” as an interesting sideline. However, a year later as I completed the CTI program and my second book, Soul Mission * Life Vision, was on its way to publication, I realized that my life was changing fast. By 2003 my personal coaching practice had become my primary source of income, and I was only teaching singers two days a week. In 2001 my partner and I had bought a house in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, and in the summer of 2003, I sold my apartment in Manhattan and left the city.

I am extremely grateful to myself for the courage and commitment it took to make this choice for my new life. And I am grateful to “Hust Pond,” our property in the Catskills for the inspiration and nurture it provided during our six years there. My coaching and writing work continued to grow and develop during that time and begin taking the shape that continues to evolve today.

My work expanded to Europe in 2005 and I now have the great privilege of teaching several times a year in The Netherlands and Sweden, as well as other short teaching stints in other countries. I am so grateful for Birgitta Granström, Anna-Lena Smith, Gabriella van Rooij, and Marie Josee Smulders, who first invited me to Sweden and Holland and supported my work there. Since then others have also become actively involved in supporting and promoting this work, but these four women were the first. They took a chance on an unknown guy from the U.S. Now we all look back in gratitude at what has unfolded.

In some ways, I look at my life as before and after Egypt. I am grateful to Rita van der Heijden for inviting me to join her in leading trips to this incredible land. And I’m even more grateful to Egypt itself. I wrote about my experiences there in the March 2009 issue of Full-Spectrum Living. I am grateful for the insights and understandings about time, values, culture, and inner intelligences that my time in Egypt gave me.

My father, James Seale, walked with cancer for 16 years. While I could not begin to name all that I learned from him throughout my life, the courage, strength, and faith that he embodied during those last 16 years were nothing less than astounding. I am forever grateful for his many gifts to me and for the wisdom that he lived so purely in his later years. The tenderness and beauty of sitting with him through his last night until he took his last breath was an experience that will always be with me. (See The Transformer, September 2010)

From my mother, I am grateful for gifts of grace, beauty, and hospitality. Since my father’s death, I have also stood in awe of her courage and strength, and of her intentional approach to the grieving process. From both of my parents, I received the love of learning, travel, and growth. Even in my father’s last months, he still wanted to talk about and explore ideas, and at 81, my mother remains committed to learning and experiencing new things.

I have huge gratitude to that “divine dissatisfaction” for the inspiration, clarity, drive, and discipline to write five successful books, for the vision to create the Center for Transformational Presence, and the focus and energy to create and lead the Transformational Presence Coach Training and leadership program. I am grateful that more than 140 people from 18 countries have felt called to join us in Transformational Presence Coaching in the last 2½ years, and that this work is making an impact through them on five continents.

I am grateful for my partner, Johnathon Pape—for his creative spirit, his beautiful soul, and the important gifts he gives to the world as a stage director, teacher, writer, and recharger of hearts. We have created a wonderful life together, each of us supporting the other to live into his greatest potential. I truly believe that an enlightened relationship is one in which each partner is constantly setting the other free, and I am grateful for the ways in which we do that for one another. I am also grateful for the home that we have established together—a home that is truly built of love.

There is so much more to be grateful for—music making over the years with pianists Bill Lewis, Arlene Shrut, and Gordon Porth; 17 years of Winter Solstice concerts with Bill Lewis and Able Rae; 5 years of part-time living in the extraordinary energy and space of the ChurcHouse on Gould’s Mountain in the Catskills; many lessons of loss and re-alignment from a not-always-easy four years in Rochester, NY; travel; so many close friendships and experiences over the years that have touched me deeply—the list goes on and on. Too many to name here, yet each person, place, and experience holds an important place in my heart.

As we enter the Thanksgiving season this year, I am incredibly grateful for this unexpected life. Forty years ago, I certainly didn’t imagine this life, yet I am clear that it has manifested because I continue to live from that divine dissatisfaction. The life that I live is not a miracle or a coincidence. It comes from listening to my soul and to “what wants to happen,” and then following the emerging potential. I am grateful to have discovered this way of living and to be able to celebrate the joy, grace, happiness, and blessing that is my life.

Many blessings to you, and Happy Thanksgiving,
Alan

Copyright © 2011 Alan Seale

Certified Transformational Presence Coach Profile: Chris Monk—Authenticity and Perception

by Johnathon Pape

There is a commando dagger hanging on the door of Chris Monk’s office. It’s a relic from his years serving with the Royal Marines, but what is more important, it has become a symbol of his own transformation and his work as a Transformational Presence Coach. “It is sharp, piercing, and gets to the point of things,” Chris explains. “It’s definitely more of a tool now than a weapon of war—more like a surgical instrument that can cut deeply, but also cleanly and with precision. Sometimes you have to cut deeply to cut away the fears and the parts of you that are no longer authentic. I made a once-and-for-all commitment around two years ago that I would live my authentic truth no matter what—in my marriage, in my closest friendships, and in my work.”

In addition to his years as a commissioned officer in the Royal Navy and Royal Marines, Chris’ fascinatingly diverse background includes growing up by the coast in Cornwall, attending Aberystwyth University in Wales for a degree in agricultural biochemistry, playing semi-professional rugby, working on a commercial ferry, and training as a helicopter navigator. In 2003 he became accredited as an executive coach at the Ashridge Business School in the UK and continued to build a lot of experience in both one-to-one and group coaching. He also augmented his coach development with Solutions Focused coach training and becoming a Master Practitioner of NLP. But as Chris says, “while all these things added extra dimensions to my coaching practice, the Transformational Presence Coach Training has accelerated it to a new level altogether. Connection to potential, to energy, and to the soul is a whole new ballgame!”

Chris took the 7-month TPC training teleclasses from September 2009 to May 2010. He followed that up with the TPC Mentor Coaching program this past spring and recently became the newest Certified Transformational Presence Coach. The concepts of Transformational Presence came into Chris’ life at an important and pivotal time and helped him with his once-and-for-all commitment to living authentically. Six months before starting the TPC training, his 24-year old son, Paul, died. “Losing my son was a monumental event in my life, and it also opened the way for a whole lot of new things. I was in a pretty difficult and painful space at the time. The TPC teachings helped me to take different perspectives on what happened. It helped me move from perceiving myself as a bereaved father to perceiving myself as a father who had shared his life with a wonderful son for 24 years.”

Johnathon Pape: Thanks for sharing your story with us, Chris. I can only imagine the experience of losing your son and the profound effect it must have had on every aspect of your life.

Chris Monk: It was a real turning point in my life. More recently I’ve been able to share my deepest personal learning and, importantly, how this learning has impacted me in my work as a coach. The experiences I had when I was in a great deal of pain really helped me understand what it feels like to be deeply listened to and what it feels like to not be deeply listened to. There was a specific experience where I sat down and asked a member of my family how they were doing after Paul’s death. I listened to them for about 45 minutes. I didn’t say a word, just really listened to them. After they were finished, they said “how are you?” I was so looking forward to having 45 minutes to be able to talk, but I actually had about 15 seconds before they started to try to solve my problems. It was devastating, but also a very deep learning about how our presence and our listening are so important to us as coaches and as people. In Alan’s program I subsequently learned a process that he calls deep dialogue, where the underlying concept is that by just listening deeply we provide a space for something to happen. I recently wrote an article about my experiences as a father who has lost an adult son. It’s called “A Father’s Story” and can be downloaded at http://tinyurl.com/64lpl95.

JP: It’s a very moving article and it includes some apt and helpful guidelines for how to listen to someone deeply, especially someone experiencing profound loss. I’m sure the process of transforming your perspective called on every tool available to you, as well as judicious metaphorical use of the surgical instrument properties of your commando dagger.

CM: Indeed. I also found the D[i]SCO model—Drama Situation Choice Opportunity—particularly helpful in my process of finding different perspectives on Paul’s death. And in TPC training Alan also encouraged us to establish a daily meditation practice. That is something that I’d been doing sporadically for several years, but my commitment to it during the training really contributed greatly to my growth as a human being.

JP: Having gone through the Transformational Presence Coach Training at a time of intense personal transformation, what are your thoughts about the difference between transformation and change and how they affect our lives?

CM: Transformation involves a raised energy frequency; a different level of consciousness; often accompanied by a newly discovered sense of purpose that inspires people to get involved.

Change involves doing things differently; not necessarily for a different purpose though. Often people commit to change and then the momentum drops off because the purpose hasn’t changed or perhaps isn’t clear.

JP: Regarding that sense of purpose, can you speak a little bit about your own purpose—your soul mission?

CM: I describe my soul mission as “I am a life adventure guide.” Essentially this describes my role as a leadership coach where I aim to walk along my own life journey with the spirit of adventure required to guide leaders into a new paradigm.

JP: That’s wonderful, particularly since you have had such strong and varied experiences of leadership throughout your life. Can you tell us a little about that?

CM: There have two really big, influential factors on my understanding of leadership in my life—my time with the Royal Marines and playing semi-professional rugby. In both of those activities or experiences, what I learned the most about leadership was that it is really about understanding people. And before you can understand anyone else, you have to understand yourself and how you tick. I would say that I started my spiritual journey only about 12 years ago, and I’d been in the military for 10 years by that point. What I’d developed in that first 10 years was a deeper understanding of who I was, and therefore an ability to understand other people. My leadership in both the marines and rugby involved bringing people into very close proximity physically and emotionally, developing a sense of empathy. The team-based structures in both the military and rugby helped me learn very quickly about working in teams. That definitely applies in coaching, both in working with organizational teams and one-to-one coaching. One of the core values of the Royal Marines is unselfishness, so if you’re a selfish person you just wouldn’t get very far in that team. Unselfishness and a sense of empathy are integral to leadership, trying to connect with each person, their values, their needs, their motivations. When I went on to train as a coach, the specific values developed in the military really helped me. And I definitely believe that coaches are leaders. They may sit back and ask questions, but they still lead the process—not the content, but the process.

JP: Alan often does an exercise in workshops where you have to wear a particular name tag that defines you in a certain way. Imagine yourself wearing the name tag Chris Monk, Leader. Who is that person?

CM: One of my beliefs is that everyone is their own leader. It’s the most important choice we can make: to be our own leader, take responsibility for ourselves, recognize our leadership role. Chris Monk, Leader is someone who recognizes that he has various leadership responsibilities and is now stepping into those responsibilities more than ever. Whereas before I would have maybe avoided leadership of self, I focus on that much more now than I ever did before. I recognize that I’m my own leader. I’m a leader in my family. When I’m coaching I’m co-leading, but I’m still a leader. And I recognize that I’m a leader in my wider collaborative work with responsibilities for certain areas. For years I had been looking for the right leadership development company to join, and while I had tentatively looked at several opportunities, none seemed right. But in June this year I was invited to join Extraordinary Leadership (www.xleadership.com) as a Partner. It felt absolutely right to do this, and I am now really enjoying working with my 4 new partners (Jefferson, Nigel, Helen, and Anne) as we seek to “transform leadership consciousness.”

JP: You have such a unique palette of experiences that inform your leadership, not least of which is your understanding of Transformational Presence work.

CM: One of my “co-conspirators” in Alan’s TPC Mentor Coaching this summer was Anna-Lena Smith from Sweden.

JP: Yes, I know Anna-Lena well. She was our Soul Mission Profile in November 2007.

CM: She’s a wonderful coach, mentor, and also a shaman. In one of our conversations this summer she asked me if she could share an image of me that kept coming to her. That image was of me as a shield maker. The shield maker is the guy who makes the shield so that others can go out and fight. That makes a lot of sense to me: I train a lot of people, a lot of coaches. But I also think that a shield maker needs to go out and fight occasionally just to test the shields. I’m a Gemini astrologically—a twin—and one of my twins is the shield maker and the other is the warrior. That’s how it was in my military experience and how it is in my coaching.

JP: So how do you make shields for yourself now for your walk in the world?

CM: I make my shield by taking time, usually about 45 minutes in the morning, for reading and reflection. I do this pretty regularly, at least 4-5 times a week, and I continually ask myself the question, “Am I living my authentic self?” This is important to who I am. It becomes like a coat of arms on my shield to let those you meet know who you are. Shields are also used for protection, and in my walk in the world I’m a bit like St. Christopher—carrying people across the river to the other side. That means I have to be able to survive and thrive on both sides. I spend time in both the physical world and the spiritual world. In the physical world I’m exposed to energies that might otherwise be perceived as negative. So my shield is often a shield of perception—being able to look at things in a different way.   The shield provides you with a different filter that allows you to see the potential in the situation without judgement. Once again, it’s the D[i]SCO model, rising above “drama” or “situation” into “choice” and “opportunity.” I’d like to be able to do that all the time, but I haven’t quite reached that elevated state of enlightenment yet!

JP: You mentioned that you train a lot of people. Can you tell us more about that?

CM: One of my major roles now is as a coach trainer.   In the UK and across Europe I train coaches to use the Cultural Transformation Tools – a set of individual, team, and organizational diagnostic tools based on measuring and mapping values and consciousness levels. These are very powerful diagnostic tools, and I’m one of 24 licensed trainers around the world who run this training on behalf of the Barrett Values Center (www.valuescentre.com) based in Asheville, North Carolina in the U.S.

JP: You’ve talked a lot about how powerful the D[i]SCO model has been in your work and personal life. Are there other tools from your Transformational Presence Coach Training that have been particularly useful to you?

CM: The Point of Stillness meditation is probably the one exercise that I use most often—for myself and my clients. This exercise puts us straight into communicating with our souls and accessing our inner wisdom.

JP: What is the most important thing you’ve learned about yourself since becoming a Transformational Presence Coach?

CM: That I have a “magnificent ego” to partner with my soul.

JP: What has been your greatest challenge to living your full authentic Presence of Being?

CM: Coming out—in the sense of living my authentic truth 24/7.

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

CM: I met my wonderful wife, Lynn, and many of my closest friends back in the early 90s when I was serving with the Royal Marines. I was a different person back then; so my fear was that my wife and friends wouldn’t accept me if I started to live my authentic truth instead. What actually happened after I made my once-and-for-all commitment to do so was that they said, “we knew all along you had some weird beliefs, and we’re glad that you’ve stop pretending that you don’t!”

JP: What would you say to someone who is considering working with or becoming a Transformational Presence Coach?

CM: I’ve really enjoyed Alan’s teaching style; I often describe him as my “coach trainer and spiritual teacher.” He combines the best of both—he’s a great coach trainer and a wise spiritual teacher. If you’re looking to take your coaching to the next level then I’d thoroughly recommend it. Transformational Presence Coaching enables you to work at an incredibly deep level with your clients, so if you want to go there then this is for you.

Chris and his wife, Lynn, kayaking

Video of the Month:  Gratitude Dance

Matt Harding had an idea that he could get people all over the world to dance. He had made two previous videos of him doing his funny dance in exotic places, but then he realized there was more. Watch this four-minute video and let your heart fill with joy. Perhaps you'll even start dancing!