#80 From Self-Improvement To Unfoldment | Steve March

Have you been trying and failing to make improvements in yourself? Perhaps the problem isn’t with you, but with the entire approach of self-development as a way to ‘fix’ ourselves vs letting our best selves shine through. Join us as we discover with Steve March, founder of Aletheia, how shifting focus from a deficiency-oriented goal of self-improvement to a fulfillment approach using Unfoldment can put us on the liberating path of self-discovery and personal growth.

Discussion Topics: From Self-Improvement to Unfoldment

• Self-development pre-supposes some deficiency to be rectified whereas Unfolding strives to uncover what’s already there
• Today’s crises are intertwined and therefore resistant to traditional problem-solving approaches that try to identify and treat problems in isolation
• The Unfolding paradigm might help resolve these intertwined crises as it helps reveal interconnected truths that are already there
• Unfolding allows us to meet our personal suffering from a place of wholeness vs deficiency
• Our economy is fueled by our sense of deficiency and Unfolding could help us live more sustainably
• Unfolding happens in the context of relationships, so it shifts the locus away from individual self-development to relationship development and the community
• To experience Unfolding, we need to shift away from viewing the world in mechanistic terms
• As start to attune to ourselves more poetically, we uncover and materialise the innate goodness that’s there
• How Aletheia is helping bring the Unfolding paradigm as a response to the challenges in the world today

Transcripts: From Self-Improvement to Unfoldment

Yana Fry: Welcome to Timeless Teachings. Today our guest is Steve March, who is the founder of Aletheia, and Steve is a champion for the power and wonder of the human spirit. And Aletheia is famous for many things, including the next-generation coaching methodology that shifts focus from self-improvement to unfoldment, and we are gonna talk about that today more, so Steve, thank you very much for joining us. It’s such a pleasure to have you here.

Steve March: Yeah. It’s a pleasure to be here and I so enjoyed our first conversation, just getting to know each other and seeing all that you’re up to. So I feel honoured to be here and to have our conversation.

Yana Fry: Yes. And as you said, our first call was really inspirational and I’m so looking forward to seeing what’s going to unfold during our conversation today.

Self-development pre-supposes some deficiency to be rectified whereas Unfolding strives to uncover what’s already there

Yana Fry: So let’s maybe talk a little bit about that so that people understand what we are referring to, right? So what is the major difference between constant self-improvement and unfoldment? And those who are in personal development, wellness, consciousness, and human development would know what we are talking about.

Steve March: Yeah, mostly what I’m engaged in is coaching and coach training and I’ve been doing that since, I guess probably about 23 years or so since 2000. And in the early part of my coaching career, I would say that I was very much offering coaching in a self-improvement paradigm. The way that you’re in a self-improvement paradigm is that you feel some sense of deficiency, some sense that your life is deficient, your relationships are deficient, and your health is deficient. You are deficient. And of course, when we feel that way, which mostly we don’t want to feel that way, but when we do feel that way, it’s very natural to instigate some kind of self-improvement project.

We want to improve ourselves. And there’s a really positive and wholesome intention behind the desire to want to improve oneself, or to improve one’s life, to improve one’s relationships, et cetera. And that’s really what I was doing in my early days as a coach. And except that what I noticed was that very often the results were mixed. I noticed that sometimes people would set off on a self-improvement project and really struggle with it, and at some point in the middle of it, they would just give up and they would say I guess I don’t have what it takes to really do this. And oftentimes the project started with a deficiency but only seemed to reinforce a sense that something was missing. And I really began to be concerned about that. 

And I began to wonder if there was an alternative to that. And that’s really what got me started into thinking and working in an entirely different paradigm and in the unfolding paradigm as I call it, which I think of as the antidote.

In some sense, the problems of the self-improvement paradigm start with a provocative question. And the question is, what if nothing is missing?

Yana Fry: I love the question.

Steve March: Yeah. So it’s of course, like skills can be missing. There are a lot of skills I don’t have, but the question isn’t asking about our skillfulness. The question is asking about who we are as human beings.

And so the premise is what if everybody already starts as a whole human being? And then the question reframes the sense of deficiency. So we can still feel a sense of deficiency, but what if that sense and experience of deficiency is really a calling into a deeper self-contact and self-discovery process? The deficiency seems to be because we actually haven’t explored ourselves deeply enough. And what I found when I started to work with clients in this paradigm inside of this question and take that sense of deficiency as an opening to explore and get into deeper contact with yourself, deeper contact with other people, deeper contact with the world, with nature.

In fact, what we discover is wholeness. We discover innate wholeness that there is within us a deep well of resourcefulness, of creativity, of capacity. And you know we, all of us know these things. These are things like love, compassion, courage, strength, perseverance, and joy, and so when I say that I like to think of myself as a champion for the human spirit, it’s these things that happen in life that, that we feel somehow deficient is really a call to get reconnected to our own depths. And at depth what we discover is the human spirit.

We discover that we not only have love, but we are love, we are compassionate, and we are courageous. And when I look at the things that are happening in the world, the struggles that we have in the world today, I just see a call for the human spirit. I see that’s really what’s being called force.

And so I talk about this as a paradigm shift between self-improvement, which is about, trying to get to be somebody that you think you’re not right now into unfoldment, which is getting connected to who you are and unfolding yourself, unfolding your relationships, unfolding your career, unfolding your health,

Yana Fry: That’s beautiful. And also it’s actually very true with a lot of ancient teachings. That often says that human beings are complete by nature, right? And we are just discovering that completion within ourselves. And it’s also interesting if we just look at what has been happening in the field of, especially personal development for the last, 50 years.

I think it came to the West in the seventies, approximately right from the East. So for the last 50 years then it’s been turned entirely into this never-ending process of self-improvement. It’s another retreat. It’s another workshop. It’s another program. It’s and especially for women actually, it’s interesting.

Men are also part of this, but statistically, if we look at that, you would see more women who are constantly thinking something is wrong with them as if we didn’t have enough pressure in this society already. And it’s so I love you. Look at it from a different way at your academy where people come and they can relax and you tell them you are fine.

So we just gonna unfold what you already have, like you are not broken. So that’s I guess, the main message here. And for people who are just listening to us right now, or watching it. Just an interesting point. Maybe you can just ponder for yourself and reflect on where you are on this journey.

And there’s absolutely no judgment either way. It is just important to have an awareness of where you are at the moment and where you would like to go since there are options.

Today’s crises are intertwined and therefore resistant to traditional problem-solving approaches that try to identify and treat problems in isolation

Yana Fry: Okay, and you started talking about what is happening in the world. So let’s go a little bit in that direction. What is happening in the world from your point of view?

Steve March: So many things are happening. The interpretation that I find really compelling these days is that we are facing what some people are calling a poly crisis or a meta crisis. It’s a kind of crisis, and we all know these are environmental crises, climate crises, and political crises.

We have many different things that are going on. And they all seem to be intertwined and tangled. Inside of each other in such a way that none of them can really be solved without, to some extent, addressing the other ones. And that’s creating a kind of almost intractable, complex situation.

And it seems to be becoming more intensified over the years. We can see the economic swings and climate change. I’m living in California, we just came off of one of our coldest winters and one of our wettest winters in history. And now we’re experiencing this beautiful super bloom of all of the spring flowers and everything, but that’s also producing one of the worst allergy seasons in our history.

And these extremes, we’re now living in a world of extreme weather and extreme politics. The political situation is getting more and more polarised as people entrench their deeply rooted beliefs. And so it’s a challenge and it’s a complex challenge.

And when we try to address this complex challenge, like a problem to solve, how do we do problem-solving? What we do is we first define the problem, which means that we have to put blinders on and we have to narrowly look at something in isolation to even call it a problem. And then of course we come up with a solution to that problem.

The challenge with that is oftentimes solution is undermined by the rest of reality that we’ve had to somehow pretend isn’t there. And oftentimes the solution winds up creating yet more problems. Elsewhere. Tackling this kind of poly crisis or this kind of meris in a problem-solving kind of way doesn’t seem to be workable. And so the question for me is, what is, what is a workable alternative to this?

The Unfolding paradigm might help resolve these intertwined crises as it helps reveal interconnected truths that are already there

Steve March: I think that actually, the unfolding paradigm is a workable alternative to this. Because of the unfolding paradigm, sometimes I call it a new paradigm. It’s only a new paradigm really in the field of coaching and self-development.

But really it’s the primordial paradigm. It’s the original way that complex systems have evolved and changed throughout history. And so there’s, I find in that something deeply trustable about unfoldment because in some way it got us here without the intervention of a well-intended, human being trying to problem solve.

And there’s something trustable in this source of change in the transformation that emerges out of complex systems or that unfolds out of organic living systems. And the trick, however, is that you have to learn to stop messing with things, right? And the place to learn that first is with yourself.

So when we find some deficiency, some self-deficiency, what do we do? We mess with ourselves. We’re constantly fiddling, changing this, changing that, changing our schedules, changing our diet, changing our exercise routine, etc. We go through all this and of course, it’s well intended, but what I often notice is that mostly it doesn’t work. Yet when we actually stop and just begin to inquire into who is here right now, what is here right now? It’s interesting that in the self-improvement problem-solving paradigm, our attention tends to not be on what’s here now. It tends to be based on some ideal or goal that we have in the future that we want to fulfill in the future.

So our attention is on the goal. We have our attention on the prize, so to speak. In the unfolding paradigm, we really take our attention off something that’s not here and bring it into the present moment and begin to explore what is here, what is concretely here in the moment. And what we find is that what’s here by nature begins to unfold.

It begins to be unconcealed or revealed or disclosed. So something as simple as just noticing how you feel emotionally and just allowing yourself to think that really embodying that emotion fully and just feeling it. And what you notice is that emotion has a life cycle that doesn’t always stay the same.

This sort of wave of emotion comes and it passes, and oftentimes it leaves something in its wake afterward where we feel more connected to ourselves, we feel touched. We feel open in a way, we feel connected to others in a way we feel more present. So something is unfolding right there. If we stop messing with our emotions, right?

Most of us mess with our emotions. Like we start to feel something and we move into avoidance cuz we don’t wanna feel that or we start to feel something and we move into attachment to some other emotions. So we dismiss this one and try to figure out what we can do. How do we create the circumstances so that we can feel the emotion we want to feel?

Want to feel happy, want to feel loved, want to feel whatever. And this as well has been understood by many of the world’s wisdom traditions. In Yogic philosophy and in Buddhist philosophy, they call these the three poisons, avoidance, attachment, and delusion. And so we’re constantly embroiled in avoidance, attachment, and delusion.

Unfolding allows us to meet our personal suffering from a place of wholeness vs deficiency

Yana Fry: Steve, when I’m listening to your sharing about the unfolding, I do feel like it’s literally, our conversation here is unfolding, right? So it also then brings me to the question, what effect? Is it fundamentally having on the human being? So the more we allow ourselves to feel, the more we allow ourselves to unfold into our greatness, then would it be correct to say that we are creating a new kind of man with this kind of approach?

Steve March: Yeah, I think that what unfolding does is in a progressive way, it actually allows us to embody our innate wholeness. It allows us to embody. Who we are. It’s just a funny way of saying it, but it allows us to become more of who we are, more of who we already are.

The thing is that all of us are more than what we currently know. And when we actually tune into what’s here now and feel and experience ourselves with depth and in fact dropping deeper into contact with ourselves and into contact with each other and reality, this is exactly what we discover.

We discover that we are more. And we learn how to embody that, how to enact that, how to bring that forward. And so oftentimes when I’m working with clients, they can let’s say, drop into a state of compassion and recognize that they have a resource already that enables them to face the suffering that exists in their life. And to face it in a way where they feel. Already whole and complete. Like the suffering doesn’t tear them apart. The suffering doesn’t fragment them. The suffering is true. The suffering hurts. So it doesn’t take anything away from the suffering, but we meet the suffering from a place of innate wholeness, from a place of being a complete human being.

And that is such a difference. It’s a dramatic and profound difference in navigating life’s complexity. Sometimes a client might recognize as they deepen in contact with themselves, that they actually have a kind of inner strength, a capacity to take a stand for something that they care about in the world, a capacity to set a healthy boundary.

And it’s interesting because sometimes the clients that I work with who make that discovery, where we start, is with their struggle to create healthy boundaries. They feel like they lack what it takes to create healthy boundaries. But simply by working with what’s here now and unfolding into depth, there’s a way in which they drop into their innate capacity to create healthy boundaries, this capacity of inner strengths and make a discovery about themselves, which is something that they have actually never known about themselves.

So that’s what I mean when I say that we are all more than what we know.

Our economy is fueled by our sense of deficiency and Unfolding could help us live more sustainably

Steve March: And I think that if we zoom out to the larger picture of responding to the meta-crisis, much of which by the way is fueled by our economy, which is fueled by a sense of deficiency,

That the best way to market anything to anyone is to convince them they don’t have it and they need it. And it’s like our entire engine is built on this sense of deficiency, in responding to deficiency. And so in some ways, this unfolding paradigm begins to reorganise the world, begins to reorganise our economies, our lives in a way that I think actually can become more easily sustainable in the future.

Right now we’re living in this kind of scarcity economy, and we’re consuming the planet as a result, with all of these issues that are stemming from that. And so I view the unfolding paradigm as one, probably not the only one that’s needed, but as one really important response to what’s happening in the world, and one that I think will start to unfold in our direct experience.

The realisation that we can be a kind of human being that is sustainable and the kind of human being that we’ve been for the last several hundred years at least, is I think demonstrably not sustainable. And that is becoming more and more clear, particularly in the last decade. And I think it will only become clearer in the coming decade.

It’s a funny way to say it, but I think the true response to the meta-crisis is not technological. It’s not political, it’s not social. Although those will all have their place and their role. Fundamentally, the true response is ontological. And by that what I mean is the true response is to literally be a different kind of human being. It turns out that this being a different kind of human being has happened many times in our history before, and so this isn’t the first opportunity to evolve or unfold a different way of being for humans. That’s actually been happening all throughout our history and we have evolved in different ways of being human as we’ve confronted different existential challenges.

So this is yet one, another one except this challenge is different from all the other existential challenges we face because this challenge is global. This challenge affects everybody.

Yana Fry: which is like a blessing in disguise. Because it’s almost like in a way we can wait no longer that something has to change now. And perhaps the first step would be to recognize that we are moving into this unfoldment paradigm. And I love how you say that it’s not something that people have to learn or acquire from outside.

It’s something they already have deep within themselves. And also humanity in history went several times. Massive crisis and not just survived, but thrived and devolved into better humans. If we just look at everything that is happening right now in the world, yes. We can still complain and say, we don’t like this.

There’s too much violence there. People are not fair here. There is not enough inclusion in this place. But if we look back on history, what has been happening even last century, on a societal level, we definitely took a quantum leap. So humans are becoming better. We are becoming kinder, we are becoming more compassionate.

We are becoming better with our own self-awareness, even though the moment might not always seem like this in the real world. So I love, I love the way the conversation is heading with that.

Unfolding happens in the context of relationships, so it shifts the locus away from individual self-development to relationship development and the community

Yana Fry: And when we talk about people, we could talk about an individual.

Because that’s what society is made of a group, of a massive, large group of individuals. Or we can talk about ecosystems when that people create. So let’s talk a little bit about what we are focusing on right now. Is it good for us? Is it not? Or what could, maybe a better way to go?

Steve March: Yeah. When we look at self-development inside the self-improvement paradigm, we tend to focus on improving an individual. We tend to look in an atomistic kind of way with individuals. A very common coaching approach that works in this way, we’ll use some kind of an assessment tool to assess the individual, the coaching client.

They will create some kind of a development plan that is customised to that individual, that is based upon their assessment and the person’s individual learning styles or development styles, all of these kinds of things. And this is the kind of coaching I did for a long time. Except that I recognized that, oftentimes the results weren’t what I had hoped they would be.

And instead, we just wound up reinforcing a sense of self-deficiency often. And so when you shift the unfolding paradigm. you also have to. Shift your view of the location of transformation. So transformation instead of happening inside of an individual, actually happens in a relational context or it happens in an ecosystem.

So the focus has to actually be on cultivating relationships that form a kind of developmental context. And that fundamentally what’s developing are the relationships themselves first, and then what develops out of that area, is noticeable by the individuals in those relationships. And so that shift in the locus of transformation from an individual into a network of relationships or a community or even a partnership, even two people can form a relationship that develops in a way that both people develop out of it. 

And that’s oftentimes what happens inside a one-to-one coaching relationship. But that shift into seeing transformation in this collective sense, I think is an important and necessary ingredient in this paradigm change.

To experience Unfolding, we need to first shift away from viewing the world in mechanistic terms

Yana Fry: I’m just wondering for people who are listening to us right now or watching right at the moment, Could we give them maybe a practical, tangible 1, 2, 3 steps or see what they could do right now if they feel that they’re resonating, they have been listening now for us for this time, and they feel, yeah, that resonates with me and I would like to have an experience perhaps of that.

So what is possible for them?

Steve March: One of the easiest ways that I think is available and accessible is to shift from the. The improvement paradigm into the unfoldment paradigm is to shift how you attune to the world. And so in the improvement paradigm, the prevailing attunement is a technological attunement. This is where we see everything in technological terms, and this is where we can see ourselves as in need of an upgrade.

We see ourselves as broken. We see ourselves as. Needing to be more efficient, needing to be optimised, this kind of language efficiency, optimization, brokenness. We need to be fixed and repaired. We need these kinds of improvements. This is mechanistic thinking. These are mechanistic metaphors.

And this was pointed out by one of the philosophers that inspires a lot of what I do. A man named Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher in the last century. And he was writing about this in the 1930s and living in rural Germany and seeing the mechanisation of farm equipment and how farmers were moving from working with their hands towards working and doing the farm work with machines.

And he was beginning to see a kind of technologizing of everything. And I think if he were alive today, he would say the trend that he was concerned about back, almost a century ago, has really just gotten out of control. It’s really that everything has been technologized and the big concern that he had wasn’t that he was against technology.

And I’m certainly not against technology. I actually am a former technologist myself. We’re having this great conversation via technology. So let’s not demonise technology, but the concern is that we start to think of ourselves as human beings and each other as human beings in technological terms, and that hides what it is to be human. What I was saying earlier in our conversation is that the meta crisis that we face is a call for the human spirit. It’s a call for us to bring forth what is fundamentally human and if we view ourselves in these technological ways just as a capacity. Heidegger talked about technology as a capacity standing in reserve.

Think of, I don’t know, my cell phone sitting here on the desk, right? It’s just sitting here. It’s clearly a piece of technology. It’s a capacity. It’s just standing around waiting to be used, or my bicycle in the garage, or my car in the driveway, right? Or my mechanical pencil here, right? These are all just technologies standing around waiting to be used.

And then think about how we view the cashier at the grocery store. Do we view that person as just a capacity standing in reserve, waiting for us there very patiently for us to bring our cart of groceries to them so that they can scan the items and make some financial transactions?

And if we do view them in that way, then there’s a certain way that they’re just technology to us, and their humanity is lost. And truthfully, there are lots of people we interact with daily with whom we do have that kind of relationship. And let’s not beat ourselves up too much because they have that relationship with us. That cashier views us as a kind of technology for them to make a living as well. So it goes both directions. So the thing that we can do to shift immediately into the unfolding paradigm is to change our attunement, to change how we look at the world, how we look at ourselves.

How we look at each other. And I love Heidegger’s proposal. He proposed that instead of attuning technologically, we attune poetically.

Yana Fry: So beautiful.

Start to attune to yourself poetically and discover the innate goodness that’s there vs just things to resolve and fix

Steve March: And so what we wanna do is we wanna look in the mirror when we wake up in the morning and we wanna see poetry. That’s poetry right there, right? And the way that we can attune to ourselves. And to the world in a poetic way is through connecting with and feeling our love of truth, beauty, and goodness for its own sake. And so in a lot of coaching conversations that I have, we are practicing attuning in a poetic way. And the question is what’s true? What are you sensing? What are you feeling? What’s happening in your life? And as we explore what’s true, uncovering more and more of what’s true, what we find is that implicit and inherent inside that truth is beauty

It’s the beauty of truth, but it’s the beauty of being truth, right? It’s the beauty of human beings. What we also uncover is that there’s innate goodness. That there’s goodness that we all are. Now, I know people can do bad things, and let’s not pretend that they can’t, but to then view that people are just bad is taking it too far.

That there is. As we, especially as we drop into deeper contact with ourselves we discover more and more of the innate truth, beauty, and goodness of being human, the innate truth, beauty, and goodness of being in human relationships. The way that human relationships can be nourishing and fulfilling.

All of these kinds of things are so close, they’re so immediate, and yet our gaze, we gaze right past them when we attune technologically. So something that any of you who are listening to this can do just to play with this is. Notice how you might be attuning technologically, and we all do it.

I still do it even to this day. I know all about this. There are times when it’s appropriate to do it and it’s fine, but there are other times when we really wanna see who we are as a human beings when we really wanna connect with somebody as a human being, when we really wanna connect with nature, not just as a resource to be consumed.

But to connect with nature as a living organism to connect with the nature that actually nourishes us. So we have to shift into this poetic attunement and practice actually seeing the poetry of life to see the poetry of being human. No, and you know what? That can happen that fast. It’s much easier than losing 10 pounds.

Yana Fry: Yeah, since actually many people these days are concerned about their health and weight and go to the gym, and that becomes the focus. Why not this, right? Why not just add some poetry into your life for this great peace and beauty and love and happiness fundamentally? Steve, I love it so much. I like, yes, poetry. So thank you for bringing this up

How Aletheia is helping bring the Unfolding paradigm as a response to the challenges in the world today

Yana Fry: And I can see that we already have been having. A great interview today and we are slowly coming towards the end of the conversation. So I just would like you to share a little bit more about Aletheia. So what is it, what are you guys doing?

And perhaps what is your biggest dream and, what is your poetry in that?

Steve March: Well, Aletheia is unfolding as poetry. Aletheia started out as a self-development school about 10 years ago, and within the first year, I really started to work coaching people in a very different way. And I realised very quickly I needed to train other coaches in how to work in this paradigm.

And so we launched a coach training school. that still to this day is our dominant business. We have an extensive and deep program that runs through four levels. It takes several years to get through.

So we’re training people in how to go out into the world as a professional coach. And really bring the unfolding paradigm into places that, frankly, I can’t bring it into. All of our programs are offered online. We have coaches on six continents. We just launched our latest cohort with over 50 participants. and that’s the centerpiece of it. But then off of that, we have developed training in working with leaders. We have training for parents taking an unfolding approach to parenting and actually using some of the practices with children. This wasn’t what I had originally had in mind. This was a surprise and unfolded as participants in the training classes. we’re starting to use what I was teaching them with their children. And they returned to me and said, you need to teach this to parents.

This is really great, this really works. And I am not a parent. And so I said, no, I have no business saying anything to parents about parenting. I know I know my own ignorance here, but I’m glad you’re finding it useful and you should train parents. And two of our faculty members who were doing some of that early work with their own children are now the ones that are leading that.

And I’m really happy that we have that. And it’s delightful to see it flourishing and continuing to grow. And we’re continually adding new elements to our work. So our program, our level two program is a deep dive into somatics, into the body, into breath work and utilising unfolding through the body, not just conversationally, but through the body.

We have an approach to dreamwork. So we have a way of actually working with dream content, embodying it, and unfolding that as another modality. Next year we’re gonna be adding creative work as a modality. How can we actually use the creative process as unfolding itself? And learn how to create things in life, not just necessarily art, but it could be anything creative.

Aletheia is a company that I created, right? So creativity spans the gamut of all kinds of different things. And my commitment at Aletheia is to cultivate a sensitivity to what’s happening in the world. Standing in our capacity as human beings to face what’s happening.

I think it’s challenging to face what’s happening, but fundamentally we have what it takes to navigate this. And I’m working along with the faculty that we have and the coaches now on six continents that we have as a global community. Where we’re supporting each other in bringing this unfolding paradigm into as many different places as we can.

And I think it’s a strong response to what’s happening in the world today. That’s opening a new possibility.

Yana Fry: Thank you so much, Steve.

That was Steve March on Time Teachings podcast and all the information guys in the description. And of course, also remember to subscribe to the YouTube channel and the podcast itself. And if you wanna connect with Steve. Then we will provide the link so you can learn more. And I definitely enjoyed this conversation so much.

I love poetry, so it really touched me deeply. So I’m gonna go through my day now looking into the world and seeing poetry everywhere, which would be a beautiful experience. So thank you very much, Steve.

Steve March: You’re welcome. Thank you so much.

Our Guest: Steve March

Steve March is the founder of Aletheia and a champion for the power and wonder of the human spirit. He’s the creator of Aletheia Coaching, a next-generation methodology that shifts the focus of transformation from self-improvement to unfoldment. Unfoldment is an antidote to seemingly endless self-improvement projects and offers a way to navigate the complex crises we face today. Previously, he worked in the field of software development for 15 years. A professional coach since 2000 and a coach trainer since 2003, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Donna Chang.