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THE INTELLECTUAL LINEAGE

Meaning-Centred Coaching and Mentoring

Do you feel as if your life has little meaning, but wagon-loads of obligations?

Do you feel as if you have no choice but to keep running on the treadmill of existence?

On what tradition, or philosophy, do you base and manage your life?

Is the second half of your life going to be a slow dwindling into mind-numbing boredom, or will you forge a new path, a new, meaningful life?

  • Peter Drucker. He was the on-ramp for the revelation of The Practised Life. He diagnosed the need for a second part to one’s life. A new adventure. One built on contribution, rather than performance.

  • Charles Handy – the map. He provided the structural model, an identity that covers multiple areas, rather than a single defining role.

  • Clayton Christensen stood as a warning sign exposing the danger of measuring a life by the wrong metric. Your strategy is not what you say it is; it’s where you pour your time and energy.

  • Viktor Frankl and Marcus Aurelius became my road. Frankl provided the meaning behind why each day is worth getting through, and, when everything has been stripped away, where meaning still remains. Aurelius provided the daily operating system - how to get through today with discipline and presence.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PRACTISED LIFE DIDN’T EMERGE FROM A SINGLE SOURCE.

My personal journey through seventeen years of concurrent adversity led me to discover:

THE TWO PILLARS

Pillar One: Stoicism

Drawn principally from the ‘Big Three’ of Roman or Imperial Stoic philosophy - Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Seneca - Stoic philosophy answers the question, ‘How do I get through today?’ It also provides the daily discipline to do that:

  • Morning preparation

  • The dichotomy of control

  • The inner citadel

  • Amor fati -  ‘the love of fate’. The philosophical mindset of not merely tolerating everything that happens in life, including suffering, loss, and adversity, but actively embracing and loving it all. Gratitude in other words.

  • Evening reflection.

Pillar Two: Viktor Frankl's Logotherapy

This existential approach to psychotherapy defines the search for meaning as the primary motivational force in humans. Viktor Frankl, a neurologist, psychiatrist, and philosopher, says people can overcome psychological suffering by identifying and fulfilling personal purpose by finding their meaning in life. As a holocaust survivor, he should know. He provided the ‘meaning-making architecture’:

  • Creative Values - what we give to the world through work and deeds

  • Experiential Values - what we receive through love and encounter

  • Attitudinal Values - the stance we take toward unavoidable suffering. It answers the question: why continue?

Without the Stoic discipline, Frankl's meaning-architecture remains an insight, rather than a practice. Without Frankl, the Stoic discipline remains a method of endurance rather than a method of meaning-making. Together, they produce a daily practice of meaning-awareness under conditions of sustained adversity, sustained not for days or weeks but for years.

Are you needing a new approach to adversity?

The Practised Life may hold the answer and the road map you need.

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