Since I started offering The Coaching Intensive a few years ago, I have bumped into the challenge of talking about it. You see, it's so different from traditional, goal-oriented coaching...and yet, it supercharges your ability to take action. How can that be?
So I recorded a conversation with my client Henry Olaisen about his experience with the 6-day Coaching Intensive he participated in over a year ago. Watch the video below to get a glimpse of its power. You will also find a transcript at the bottom of this post.
R. Henry Olaisen, Ph.D., MPH is a first-generation college graduate, an immigrant, and an openly transman who left Oakland, CA for Cleveland, OH, and in pursuit of PhD training at age 40. Professionally, Henry serves as a federal data scientist, agile executive coach, and consultant. At the Uniformed Services University, in his role as adjunct assistant professor, he applies and champions virtual collaboration and agile team science. Earlier in his career, as a social entrepreneur, he led community health innovation in Silicon Valley. He is a former CDC disease detective (EIS, class of 2018) and a Public Voices fellow. He holds professional certifications in public health (CPH), project management (PMP®), and strategic foresight.
In this conversation, Henry and I talked about:
- The importance of diving into coaching for 6 days in a row
- The experience of "coming home" to yourSelf
- What happens when we start speaking and living from Source
- Not being afraid of being afraid
- Why working together is one of the best investments he made mid-career
- What it feels like to do less and accomplish more
Please note: you don't have to hike 9 miles a day every day during the intensive. It's not a requirement 😀
However, I do now start all my coaching engagements with the Coaching Intensive. I do not offer coaching anymore without this deep dive.
You might wonder why, so here it is: it makes a huge difference.
Over the years I realized that I only have one job: opening up space for your inner Wisdom to show up.
Then, if I can, I am happy to also help with strategy and action. But if a client is not tuned into their own Wisdom, things take a LOT more effort and might not work at all.
When you understand how you work from the inside out, it's like finding your superpower, a superpower you always had, but never fully tapped into. And you are set free.
Transcript
Aurora Meneghello:
I'm so excited because I get to talk to Henry here and to hear what it's been like for him to coach with me. So also for the first time my cat here is sitting with me on my lap during the testimonial. So that's what you're seeing right there at the bottom of the screen. That might be a little strange. Alright, so first of all, Henry, thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for agreeing to share your story today.
Henry Olaisen:
But of course, thank you for having me, Aurora.
Aurora Meneghello:
So I would love to start from the beginning, which is what made you want to get in touch about working together?
Henry Olaisen:
Well, I have spent the majority of my life in therapy. Like many of us come a little bit to these things through trauma one way or another, and I think I just kind of had run the course with all different kinds of therapy. I also knew you from another world and I was fascinated that you had taken on this profession of being a coach and having left a very successful career. And I was honestly quite curious about how coaching could help me in contrast to psychotherapy. And I had also really wanted a more spiritual path for myself. It was during a time of a little bit of a professional identity crisis I had and I wanted to pave a new path for myself.
Aurora Meneghello:
Yeah, wow. Here's one thing that people watching this might not really realize, which is I am a transformational coach, and so it's not quite like traditional coaching as we used to see like answer these questions, do the assessment, all that kind of stuff. And one thing that I do now, I start everybody with a six-day coaching intensive, which sounds really scary, but actually it's quite relaxing. But we do six calls over six days back to back. And I honestly, Henry, I was just even telling you before we started recording, I don't even know how to talk about this because it's so deep and it's so, it doesn't have a framework. The whole point of it is that we flow together. And so I wonder how you would describe that experience of that deep dive for six days with me?
Henry Olaisen:
Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for bringing that back to me and my memory of it. It was both a difficult time for me and also a transformative time for me. And you had given me an option to either do this or every other or every month. I chose to do this every day for six days because I felt like I needed that, my system needed that I felt that I needed to jumpstart my spiritual journey. And it was almost like an old car. Now I don't own a car, but an old car that needed to just get to work again. And it was just to set context, a time where I had chosen to leave my previous leadership role and take six months sabbatical. So that's kind of in the U.S. very unorthodox and many people had many opinions about what I was doing and I really needed the scaffolding around me to feel good about this.
So you are a central ingredient for me to leave that work environment and enter into that next phase of my life and was really a bridge for me to return to a deeper spiritual practice. And so what happened in those six sessions together, I think we spent 90 minutes together each time, and if I remember correctly now that it's been more than a year, but I remember it being September and it was also at the time where I was hiking every day. I was doing nine miles a day for nine days in a row and I would hike and then spend time with you and then meditate. That was my whole day for those six days together. And basically what happened in the six sessions for me was that I was expecting one thing and I received something completely different.
You see, I am very organized strategic thinker, so I had this top down approach of how things should be, but I also realized that what I really needed was somebody with your expertise. So I was open enough to be like, I don't really know what this is going to be like, and obviously I'm engaging you for a reason, so I just, in one word, what happened during those six 90 minute sessions back to back was a gift. And if I were to say more, it would be, it was the beginning for me of a journey returning home. And what I mean by that is that I moved from a point of a lack in limitation, darkness, and being quite hard as an individual, to a softer, easier me, to return to who I want to be and what I embody and coming to accept exactly where I was and that it wasn't going to happen in six days, but it set me on the course for where I wanted to go.
Aurora Meneghello:
I think you have this really amazing capacity to be open and to be there with the conversation, and I think that really helped the unfolding happen in a beautiful way.
Henry Olaisen:
Thanks. I think that's also something you've helped me with a lot. I remember shortly after that intensive, I was doing a lecture, a virtual lecture to these university students and it was a rather big crowd of 60 people or so, but I applied the very things that we had practiced on and what I heard coming back from the student feedback, it was so fundamentally different than what that had been in the past. People would give accolades for, it was informative, they learned a lot, intellectual growth, this type of thing, but what came out of that presentation where I was really channeling that kind of grounded energy was they felt inspired and they felt the receipt of insights. Do you remember that?
Aurora Meneghello:
I actually really remember that. I remember that because it's so amazing that we don't know we have a deeper intelligence. We don't know that there's something that can guide us in the moment, and so we over realize on an intellect, and especially if you're super smart, if you're doing with data and information all that, that makes sense, right? And that's so good, but you can supercharge that once you learn how to come from your essence, your Wisdom, what I call Source, and I just really remember you coming back to a call and telling me that, and it was so mind blowing.
Henry Olaisen:
Yeah. I think it was the beginning for me returning home to very basic principles that I was introduced in my childhood among wise, insightful elders, but this notion that we are all in this together, the notion that I as a teacher have as much to learn as my students or that we are all equally intelligent, it's so humbling and it's such a stark contrast to how we live our lives in this kind of a capitalistic culture, and so that has been really, really powerful to embracing being small in a good way.
Aurora Meneghello:
Wow. Yeah. I'm curious. One of the things actually I like about this is that I invite people to share the stories and I actually invite them, share your story when you have some to say not right after, take some time. And so I'm curious if there's anything else that for you was really a big contrast before and after working together or that really opened up like an insight or something that opened up beyond what you just shared.
Henry Olaisen:
Yeah, there's a lot. For me I remember early on you explained to me that I am not my thoughts, and while I know that intellectually and I can read about it, I can meditate over it, I can talk to others about it, I am a data scientist, and so I live with numbers. I live for numbers. I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about numbers, and this is all to say I'm in my head a lot, and what you have helped me see is that it's actually quite liberating to not be in my head, and it's quite beautiful to fully embrace that kind of white space that exists when I am completely serene, connected to source, no monkey mind, but more importantly, the monkey mind is quiet, it won. One is calm, restful. Then some weird thought comes over me, some fear, and I can today travel with that fear into the basement wherever.
It's an analogy that you've shared with me and I'll just try and explain it. It's like I can be so many people afraid and when that fear takes over, am I good enough? Will I have a job? Will my marriage last? Whatever the story is, I can be completely wrapped up in it and then it becomes this perpetual accelerated thing that just brings me really dark into a dark space and in that dark space, I think the analogy that I sit with from our time together in those first sessions that still is very central to me is that I'm actually just going down the elevator. And instead of acknowledging that I'm in an elevator and the elevator is just a temporary state, and maybe I didn't mean to go into the basement and now it's this dark, very scary basement that I had no idea I was going into, I was going upstairs.
I can either breathe into it or I can let my fears, my thoughts take over, and then of course it just continues to get worse. Instead, I can allow those thoughts to enter my being, and I can either let them pass completely, or if I find myself acknowledging that I'm in the basement, this is actually not a place I want to be. I can actually tell myself that, well, the elevator's going up rather soon. There's no need for me to get worried here. I just actually need to breathe. Maybe I need to meditate. Maybe I need to go for a walk. Maybe I talk with somebody about my own fears. This is another thing you have very much inspired me to do, so talk about another time, but this thing about when fear takes over, how to move myself out of that fear and to be compassionate with myself that every one of us have weird, dark thoughts and I'm just like everybody else, but I am today resourced and centered in that I can distinguish that from my entity, from my Source.
Aurora Meneghello:
Well, you are. Yeah. That's so beautiful. Yeah, so the elevator metaphor is from George Pransky. I didn't make it up, but it's one of the things I most often share with people because if you know it's an elevator, you understand the nature of the elevator is going up and down and you don't have to be afraid of your fear. It's bad enough when we are afraid that we get afraid of being afraid, right. That's a level of suffering that why? We don't need that.
Henry Olaisen:
Yeah. Very powerful analogy.
Aurora Meneghello:
Yeah. All right. Well, so I have one last question for you. If somebody is in a situation where they feel stuck, they are in the middle of change or they want to change, but they don't know what to do, all that kind of stuff, and they're sort of on the fence about working with me doing a six day intensive, what is that? What would you say to them?
Henry Olaisen:
Yeah. Well, I would like to say a few things. One is don't be afraid. I spend so much money on things that I really don't need, and investing in my own spiritual journey has to be first and foremost, and I hope you make that too. It's easy to say I can't afford it, but the alternative is can you not afford it? The other thing is if it feels strange or unknown, I agree with what you're saying. You're not the traditional coach. I was a professional coach in my life, and I know I'm an executive coach. It's fundamentally different. Unlike you, I am basically telling people what to do. I'm giving them advice. I'm recommending this and that senior advisor kind of thing. Your way of coaching is fundamentally different from that, and I encourage people to embrace this kind of spiritual soft coming along with you for the journey instead of being prescriptive. I think this is the strength of your approach is that it's very much, I think you often say to me, it wasn't your insight. It was my insight, and if you are looking to grow as a person to return to your essence, to build a deeper connection to your innate source of goodness and wellbeing, and you want to grow spiritually and find work-life balance,
I mean, it's endless. Right now you're helping me with my own business and just, there's so many different things, but I think rather than getting into the minutia of all the things you help with, it's an immense presence of engaging in a conversation that's not set by an agenda or a framework or an outcome, so it's very much about the moment itself, which is so rare. I find that if this is something you're looking to do, if you're looking to grow, you owe it to yourself. I did the six-day intensive, like I said, coupled with hikes to really ground myself, and I have continued working one-on-one with you once a month now for more than a year, and it's to me, one of the best investments I made to myself in mid-career. Thank you.
Aurora Meneghello:
Oh, thank you. I just have to say that just with every client and with you, it's been so special to be along for the journey, and I think no matter what somebody's working on, I really feel my number one job is to open up that space for you to be with your own Wisdom. That's where you have all the answers, and that's where you have the insights that are meant for you, and that's where you find your own answers and your way and yeah, it's been really a pleasure and I can't wait for all the things you build and you're going to do and everything.
Henry Olaisen:
Well, I appreciate that. I think just to say a couple more things is that there is the element of doing, and you're very much helping me with evergreen principles and thriving and following the energy of the path of least resistance. I think one of the most beautiful things that have happened by working with you is doing less: this notion of not pushing anything, of just being in the flow of things and less is more.
Aurora Meneghello:
And yet you accomplished a lot, right?
Henry Olaisen:
With very little effort. I think that's the thing: with very little effort, and it's just the difference between pushing versus just being there and tapping into universal wisdom from others.
Aurora Meneghello:
Universal wisdom. Yeah. Wow. Well, I could talk to you forever here, but how about we wrap it up right now? I want to thank you again for sharing about your experience and your insights and what you've been seeing throughout our work together, and anything else you want to share or say before I stop the recording?
Henry Olaisen:
Just if you're listening to this, you owe it to yourself. And just start and take one foot in front of the next. It's a beautiful journey and there's a lot of light and brightness in this world, despite how dark it might seem.
Aurora Meneghello:
Thank you so much, Henry.
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