This Pre-Session lays the foundation for my Summit session on Pragmatic Enlightenment: Why the World Needs Elders and What it Takes to Become One. It offers an introduction to coaching as a rite of passage and why vertical development is both hard and more essential than ever for our clients.

We will focus on the concept of thresholds and their critical role in development as an act of intention not just a process of acquisition. We will explore how thresholds are essential crucibles through which our clients mature and why this is so important.

Using the narrative coaching framework, we will explore how to help clients mature through shifting their narratives about themselves and others and about their past and their future.

You will be able to trace your own development using this model as well, and identify openings for your own growth as a human and as a coach. This is essential work if we are to remain relevant to our clients because they are asking us to join them in bigger questions, more complex dilemmas and more unknown territories. In so doing, we discover that coaching becomes a way of life, a way of being. It is asking ourselves, “In this moment, what is needed most?”

You will learn about the power of radical presence to enable you and your clients to stand at the threshold that is before them at this stage in their journey. While many of you have cultivated aspects of it through somatic and mindfulness practices, radical presence takes it to the next level because it is tied into clients’ vertical development and maturity.

Participants will find themselves part of a fully-immersive, interactive learning experience, by seizing the opportunity to put their questions to formidable coaching expert, Dr. David Drake, World-Renowned expert on Narrative Coaching. During this engaging, deep-dive session, participants will explore Pragmatic Enlightenment: Why the World Needs Elders and What it Takes to Become One - empowering them to immediately apply the knowledge and skills they have gained with their clients.

This session complements my 2018 WBECS Summit session on Enlightened Pragmatism: Bringing Wisdom and Design Thinking to Coaching. It focused on how coaches can evolve their practice; this session focuses on how coaches can evolve themselves.

We will look at what it means to be an elder in these times and four areas of development for those who want to be on that path. Each area is connected to one of the four phases in narrative coaching as a framework for preparing elders in ways that is both ancient and visionary.

The session draws on indigenous traditions in Australia and North/South America where there is a long history of honoring and developing elders to see what we can learn from them. It also looks at contemporary challenges and opportunities to understand what is called for now. We will look at both becoming an elder yourself and/or coaching elders-in-the-making.

To become an elder in and for these times requires a profound shift in how we see time and space such that we can stand for a bigger vision in any moment. The narrative elder framework offers a blueprint for those who want to bring greater wisdom into the world. The session will offer you a series of questions you can use to gauge where you and/or a client are on that path and to determine what is needed most right now.

The focus is on putting mindfulness in motion to do more than just cope. The session will offer you pragmatic actions you can take to awaken yourself such that you can connect, create and contribute at much deeper levels. It is part of a larger vision to develop more elders within coaching and to bring coaching into the process of developing elders.

So much of coaching has historically focused on horizontal development and helping clients to achieve their aspirations. This is important in narrative coaching as well, though we do so by dropping into key moments rather than taking a linear path. In so doing, we engage clients in vertical development so they can make wiser choices and are more able to meaningfully enact them.

We also use integrative development principles to invite them to think ecologically in terms of space (how to create healthier environments that make it easier for them and others to flourish) and time (how to plant trees under whose shade they may never sit).

In this demonstration, you will gain insights on how to address patterns, not symptoms, how to look beyond the goal to see the client’s soul—and what they want at a deeper level—and how to think in terms of wisdom, not just progress. These distinctions are essential in a time when there is so much at stake and such a need to ask bigger questions about how we live and how we lead.