Integral Coaching

Joanne Hunt

Joanne is the Vice President of Integral Coaching and Development for Integral Life and the Co-Founder of Integral Coaching Canada.  She is a lead instructor for Integral Coaching Canada's advanced programs, and students describe her as an expert coach, a playful human being and a passionate, skilled teacher. Rooted in her own commitment to living with personal integrity and authenticity, Joanne brings this dedication to how she teaches, how she guides faculty and how she coaches clients. Joanne brings fifteen years of direct experience in corporate leadership positions to her work with clients, and she is is known for her clear, direct and skillful attention to what people truly need as they build the competencies necessary to more fully manifest their lives.
 

Laura Divine

Laura is the Co-Founder of Integral Coaching Canada and has been practicing in the field of coaching for over twenty years. She brings extensive leadership and business management experience to her ability to directly apply Integral Coaching® in complex settings. While living in her hometown of San Francisco, Laura spent fifteen years in the telecommunications industry accumulating comprehensive executive experience in leadership, business effectiveness, and change management systems while focusing all the while on developing the human beings working on large-scale initiatives.  She is a long-term tai chi practitioner and teacher and has brought tai chi principles to the development of Integral Coaching Canada’s training programs.
 

Written by Corey W. deVos
 

The world is changing. We see it every day: economic crises, energy crises, climate change, geo-political meltdown, war, genocide, disease—it is hard not to be overwhelmed by the pressures of modern living. As you are reading this, take a moment to pause, close your eyes, take a deep breath, and let's feel into the anxieties of the present moment—what does the downside of the 21st century feel like?  Can you feel the undercurrent of fear and uncertainty that has so permeated our global culture?  Can you feel the collective anxiety, the silent dread, the smog of confusion that hangs over all of our lives?  Can you feel the weight of the world pressing on your skin, muffling your heart, and suffocating your breath?  And can you feel the yearning deep within to escape the claustrophobia of our chaotic lives?

There is a good chance that, wherever you are in your own growth, you can feel this collective anxiety right away.  In fact, you may even feel it all the time, if only as a sort of background radiation hidden behind all of your day-to-day experiences.  Even if we have the intellectual capacity to pierce through this veil of anxiety and see the rich abundance behind this and every moment, our hearts are not immune to the fears and anxieties of modern life.  The world has never been so heavy—and yet, as John F. Kennedy reminded us nearly fifty years ago:

“Don’t pray for easy lives.  Pray to be stronger men. [And women.]”

And we are already becoming stronger.  Even as the world is becoming more complex, it is also becoming more whole. We have opportunities for change—on both a personal and a global scale—that have never before been possible. We are being called to greatness, compelled by the very same invisible forces that pull mind out of life, life out of matter, and light out of darkness.

Habitual creatures that we are, we struggle to escape our somnolent routines. We lie awake at night, staring into the black, mulling over the opportunities for change that tomorrow will bring.  We are haunted by our thoughts—frustrated by our careers, our families, our relationships, our habits, etc.—promising to ourselves every night that, no matter what happens, tomorrow will be different.  But how often do we awaken the next morning to the very same patterns of comfort and avoidance we vowed to break the night before? How often do we spend the following night the exact same way: lamenting our failures, cursing our addictions, and wondering why it is so hard to live up to our own expectations?

You see, change is a murky affair. It is dark, mysterious, sticky—and more often than not, quite painful. Especially when you feel like you are left to your own devises, thrashing helplessly in the dark waters of human potential.

But you are not alone—and you are anything but helpless.

We can rebuild humanity. We have the knowledge, the wisdom, and the technology to build the world's first truly integral society—which begins, of course, with ourselves. We have the most comprehensive map of reality currently available, one that makes sense of virtually all of our accumulated knowledge and wisdom throughout history—and one that has the very best chance of helping us navigate the dense complexity of 21st-century living.

But of course, a map is just a map. As Ken Wilber often says, it is one thing to look at a map of Bermuda, and another thing to actually go there and see it for yourself. The map is not the territory—you are the territory. Your life is the territory; your friends and family are the territory; your whole world is the territory—and it can be easy to get lost every now and again.

At Integral Life, we don't just provide the maps we need to make sense of reality, we offer the vehicles required to support and deepen our growth. A map without a vehicle simply will not do—chances are, we will never even leave our front door.  At the same time, a vehicle without a map can be equally disastrous, as we might very well drive off a cliff. But when taken together, we begin to discern a road that brings us beyond ourselves, winding through the modern and postmodern wilderness of our hearts, leading directly to a better, stronger, and infinitely more-fulfilled you.

Integral Coaching is one of the most powerful vehicles of transformation we have seen, a highly effective means of personal growth, self-discovery, and behavior modification. Joanne Hunt and Laura Divine stand together at the intersection of self-improvement and Integral thought, and their work represents a powerful synthesis of map, territory, and vehicle that can help us all find our way to a greater tomorrow.