Concepts and Themes

Below are some of the concepts, approaches, and themes that appear the most often in my work.

Embodied Creation

This is the art and practice of visualizing and mentally rehearsing your desired future state as a first step toward creating change externally. In addition to "seeing" the goal state, we fully embody it, allowing the physical and energetic body to rehearse and get used to being in the state.

Recommended books: 

Creative Visualization by Shakti Gawain

Internal Family Systems (IFS)

IFS is based on the idea that we contain multitudes of inner parts, like a large family, as well as a Self. 

• Some parts, like inner critics or task masters, are called Managers, on constant guard to prevent trouble. 

• Some parts, like binge-consumers and short tempers, are called Firefighters, calming us down in a (mini)crisis.  

• Some parts, like inner children, are called Exiles, often hidden away by Managers and Firefighters and seen as dangerous or too vulnerable to be let out and participate in our life.

Parts that give us trouble, like inner critics who beat down our self-esteem or binge-consumers that hurry us to eat it all before the inner critic makes us stop, are each carrying a burden. A burden is heavy, scary, tragic belief about the self or the world that drives the part to do their job to an extreme degree and without rest. Extremeness invites polarization, so our parts often work even harder to counterbalance other parts.

Our work involves building and healing the relationships between these parts and the Self so that your parts can work together and be a loving, tight-knit, high-performing team.

Recommended books: 

Internal Family Systems Therapy by Richard Schwartz - This is a detailed manual on IFS, which you can read and try for yourself if it feels safe to do so

Jungian Individuation

Jung said it best, "Our intellect has achieved the most tremendous things, but in the meantime our spiritual dwelling has fallen into disrepair." For Jung, the collective unconscious, the spiritual world, and our inner parts (which he called archetypes) are all the same. Jungian individuation involves opening the bridge between our conscious and unconscious, understanding our archetypes, and living as whole beings connected with the natural world.

Recommended books:

Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung

Career Transition

My software engineering career seemed quite set from the start. I interned at Cisco and Apple and worked at Google after college. On the surface, I mostly enjoyed my job, but looking back from a Jungian lens, I was entirely cut off from my inner world. My body and spirit suffered.

While working full-time, I tried almost all of my childhood dream jobs and hobbies, including middle school teaching, freelance writing, sketch comedy, musical theater, and running leadership trainings within Google. None of them stuck. I had the growing fear that I was a chronic quitter. I enjoyed running leadership trainings, but that was a volunteer (Google's 20% project) position, and there was no way they would allow me to do something like that full-time.

Leaving the tech world to reset and reflect was agonizingly scary because I was afraid I would just be a couch potato once I had no job to show up for (this is a common fear for clients and completely misguided!). 

During my coaching and therapy training programs, I felt so grateful to be there because I simply couldn't believe they were letting me do this. If I had known I was allowed, I would've done this sooner!

Transitioning careers can be a form of spiritual death and rebirth. Let me help you through this journey, please.

Recommended books:

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein - For all you polymaths

I haven't read any of the most popular career transition books (they came out after my own rocky transition in 2015), but a good place to start might be the classic and long-running book What Color Is Your Parachute? by Richard N. Bolles