Show notes
In this episode, I interview Martha Beck, a Harvard-trained Sociologist and bestselling author who has become one of the “best known life coaches in America”. She has served as a trusted coach to clients including Oprah Winfrey and as a field-defining master teacher to life coaches from around the world.
Here, we discuss:
(1) How motherhood and mystery radically transformed her relationship to academic values
(2) How she leveraged these experiences to build an authentic body of work that has touched millions
(3) Key life design strategies you can implement to translate social breakdowns into breakthroughs
Key Quotations:
- “There are times when silence is a lie”
- “Life design is how you find out where your life wants to go and how you make that happen”
- “The true master shows up and says ‘I know nothing. I’m watching. I have no preconceptions. I have no categories. I am watching. But I’m watching with my whole self— body, mind, emotion, all of it'”.
- “If a big, big wave is coming, don’t go into a structure. The structure is gonna be crushed and you’ll be trapped in it. And you’re goin down. If a big, big wave is coming, grab a surf board and go straight into it . And learn to balance on the wave and you’ll be fine. The credo is I exist in continuous creative response to whatever is present” -Martha Beck, borrowing at the end from Gurudev Shri Amritji (Yogi Amrit Desai)
Key Themes:
- Martha’s entree into the limitations of western ways of knowing and prescribing ‘solutions’ through undergraduate study in East Asian Studies at Harvard
- How Martha’s doctoral research at Harvard laid the foundations for her bestselling book, Finding Your Own North Star
- How non-ordinary experiences during study at Harvard broadened her perspective
- How welcoming a child into her life with Down Syndrome led her to re-evaluate her relationship to the academy and its priorities
- How she changed her relationship to the Mormon faith of her upbringing and spoke out publicly amid great resistance
- How learning to engage with wild creatures and landscapes has deepened her awareness of self
Moving out of ‘fixed mind’ to ‘open mind’
