30,000 feet – er excuse me, 10,000 meters – over Germany at the moment, flying home from the European International Coaching Federation Conference in Geneva, Switzerland. Connecting Worlds was the theme of the conference, and I had the honor of being one of its keynote speakers. It came about as one of those simple acts of grace: a timely email from Marijo to Virginia on the very day this intuition-trusting Virginia, organizing a conference for which she was determined to find a female keynoter, had taken the search into her own hands. I think we both sensed the rightness of our connecting.
Grace did not end there. Concentrated in this conference were hundreds of remarkable explorers – including the quite literal explorer Remy Lecluse who has dragged his skis up and made death-defying descents down more mountains than anyone on earth. “How far have you ever fallen,” one questioner asked. Remy didn’t understand the question, even after it was repeated in his native French. Oh yes, he grasped the words, but “fall” puzzled him. “I’ve never fallen,” he said, going on to explain what was only now obvious to his audience, “If I had fallen I wouldn’t be here.” What made Remy “flawless in his execution?” – the operational objective of so many a business leader. “I spend more than 250 days a year in the mountains,” he said. “I become the mountains.” Moreover, this “becoming” plays at the razor’s edge of life and death – not some kind of hazy, lazy one-with-everything bliss, but rather an intense oneness reminiscent of the Zen Master Shosan who would sleep with a sword dangling above his head. To what practice do we commit with such perilous passion to reveal our essential nature?
Another great explorer, George Kohlrieser, spoke the day before me. A former hostage negotiator and now a leadership professor at IMD, George spoke of bonding. “Where there is bonding, a difference of opinion is not a conflict,” he reminded us, even as he cast an invisible bond among the hundreds of us listening. “You’re a genius,” he had us saying to one another – on one hand an easy emotional lift, on the other hand such a profoundly deep truth of the enlightened, infinite nature in every one of us.
I spoke of the energy patterns of personality, and how they connect us mind-in-body, and also interconnect us in the world. I had people moving in each of the patterns, checking their reactions, comparing experiences. Having done this countless times in smaller groups, I was still astounded at how, in a matter of seconds, hundreds of people could synchronize their movements in the Organizer pattern! We explored how the patterns show up personally, on teams and in organizations, and how to cultivate a needed pattern at any level. For the rest of the conference, people came up to me to share their experiences of the patterns. “I could suddenly see better,” one man said of entering the big-picture Visionary pattern. One woman just cried and hugged me. "I get it!" said another, “It’s so simple and clear.” So many of these coaches had been through other somatic learning as part of their coach training, but the patterns pulled something together for them, as they had for me 10 years ago, when the wonderful Betsy Wetzig showed them to me.
Whether it is our mountain, genius, or – my term – “greatness,” I was reminded at this conference how we are all mapping similar territory. Along our particular trajectories to be sure, but we are all describing the journey to an ever-more-capable, ever-more expansive self, to the point where “self” itself disappears. We’re at different places in the journey, carrying different tools and different challenges. And yet, I leave this conference with a sense of the lovely perfection of it all. And a deep appreciation to have joined with hundreds of explorers who are also carving a path for others.