Top Executive Coaching with Tony Mayo

One of my favorite radio programs and podcasts is the non-denominational, non-doctrinaire Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett. Krista interviews deep thinkers with important ideas about the essential human experiences of awe, eternity, and community. Every show leads me to reflect deeply and, very often, to live a happier, more involved life. I consider it one of the most nurturing practices of my continual development as an executive coach.

A recent guest was Esther Sternberg, Ph.D., an expert on immunology and stress. She relates the remarkable history of stress’s role in heath and healing. It seem that every culture has always known that emotional and physical stressors contribute to

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The Essential Gandhi:
An Anthology of his Writings on

his Life, Work, and Ideas

---

by Mahatma Gandhi

or Mohandas K. Gandhi
Louis Fisher, Editor

[Items in square brackets are by Tony Mayo.]

{Items in fancy brackets are by the editor, Louis Fisher.}

p. 15 [As a boy, Gandhi confessed a petty theft to his father and was forgiven.] This was for me an object lesson in Ahimsa [Love and Non-Violence]. Then I could read in it nothing more than a father’s love but today I know that it was pure Ahimsa. When such Ahimsa becomes all-embracing it transforms everything it touches. There is no limit to its power.

This sort of sublime forgiveness was not natural to my father. I had thought he would be angry, say hard things and strike his forehead. But he was so wonderfully peaceful and I believe this was due to

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The Relaxation Response
by Herbert Benson, M.D.
with Miriam Z. Klipper

Reading and using The Relaxation Response may have saved my life in 1989. It may also have destroyed my life, for it turned out to be the first paving stone on a spiritual path which lead away from much of what was accepted and familiar. I left behind the person I had known myself to be and became a person I could not have predicted. The path brought me to most of what I treasure today.

I was a thoroughly Western, rational, mechanist, Ayn Rand Objectivist, John-Wayne-style “I’ll do it myself” individualist whose life was thoroughly unsatisfying. Each day I came home from a thankless, stressful job to a cold and chaotic home. I would sit on the couch and feel as though worries and disappointments were

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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
by Robert M. Pirsig

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a deep and impressive work that has sold millions of copies and stayed in print in many languages for over twenty years. I read it for the first time when I was about forty years old. It was good to wait until I was ready for it. I am not sure I can recommend the book, but I am glad I experienced it.

Mr. Pirsig presents the story of his search for the roots of deep

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Lessons for managers from how the Army re-made itself between Vietnam and Desert Storm.

I was moderating a conference of business owners in the late 1990s as they lamented the poor work habits and other failings of “Gen-Xers.” Finally, I’d had enough so I said, “Say what you will about body piercing and Starbucks, I don’t think that’s the key issue. It looks to me that our generation’s contributions were the drug culture and Vietnam while the present generation has given us the Internet and Desert Storm.” The question becomes, how did this happen? Into the Storm provides part of the answer.

I am a baby-boomer who came of age in the Vietnam era, so my interest in things military was slight and my general opinion of military organization, I’m ashamed to say, came more from Catch-22 and MASH than reality. Yet, the U.S. Army has done some huge and useful things, so I was willing to take a fresh look with this book.

In the aftermath of Vietnam, “the Army began a revolution in

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The renowned author of The Tao of Physics weaves a yet broader tapestry of reality in The Web of Life. Capra’s readable survey goes beyond quantum physics and eastern mystics to encompass biology, consciousness, and the ecology of the entire earth. From chaos and complexity science, through Heidegger and the Systems Thinkers, right up to the Gaia Theory, Capra explains in fascinating detail the key ideas of twentieth century philosophers and scientists whose insights may be propelling all of us into the post-modern era.

The Web of Life:

A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems

by Fritoj Capra

 

Selected excerpts from the book. [My comments in brackets.]

p. 6 A social paradigm, which I define as “a constellation of concepts, values, perceptions, and practices shared by a community, which forms a particular vision of reality that is the basis of the way the community organizes itself.”

The paradigm that is now receding has

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Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

widely attributed to Nathaniel Hawthorne

Don’t aim at success–the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run–in the long run, I say–success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.

Viktor Frankl (1905 - 1997) in
Man’s Search for Meaning

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The Last Word on Power:
Re-Invention for Leaders and Anyone
Who Must Make the Impossible Happen
by Tracy Goss (Betty Sue Flowers, Editor)

Capsule Review

Tracy Goss has long been closely associated with Werner Erhard, the originator of EST and Landmark Education Corporation’s Forum. I expect happy graduates of those programs to be very happy with this book (I am and I am). The book presents the central concepts of those programs very clearly and in a format designed to help business people put the “distinctions” to work immediately. I doubt, however, that a person not trained in ontological coaching could get much sense from these pages. It can seem to be merely jargon and wild promises unless you have actually put the techniques to work for yourself with the assistance of a coach (as I have and I do).

For people experienced with the methods, this book is an effective refresher and spur to action. A friend and I

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You Can’t Teach a Kid to Ride a Bike at a Seminar: The Sandlr Sales Institute’s 7-Step System for Successful Selling
by David H. Sandlr, John Hayes

I put off reading this book for months. Reading another how-to, self-help autobiography was like a trip to the gym: I knew I should, but it could always wait. Most sales trainers left me with a simple pair of thoughts: that stuff would really work–if I could force myself to do it! The Sandlr System leaves me with: this stuff works–and it feels natural!

The book is very professionally written: not literature just clear, concise and readable. A lively mix of

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