We are fortunate enough to live in an age where there is no shortage of help-oriented practitioners. Therapists, pastors, life coaches and mentors are providing immeasurably valuable services to people in need. These professionals ensure that, in an age or rapidly declining mental health, help is never far if one is willing to ask and do the work.
My approach to guided development is unique in comparison to the modalities listed above. Specifically, it is influenced by the following three controlling ideas, each of which is represented by concepts from both modern and ancient times.
If you are considering retaining my services, I would recommend investing the time required to read what’s below. It will help familiarize you with my “come from” and help you assess whether this approach is a fit for your needs.
Concept #1: “Soul Friendship”
“Soul friend” is the English translation of the Gaelic phrase, “anam cara.” The concept comes from ancient Celtic spirituality and refers to the deep friendship and commitment that existed between a guide and seeker.
When I came across this concept and its history in grad school, it stuck with me. I liked the idea of a mentor who was less of a “guru” or “know it all” and more of, well, a guide. I liked the emphasis on friendship and relationship. And I liked how the anam cara saw himself as the seeker’s peer rather than someone who was “above” him.
This concept made such an impression on me that I made the subject a continuing part of my graduate studies, even referring to it in my second doctoral dissertation. It continues to fit so well with what I do in the field of personal development that it remains a guiding image for my work.
In practice, soul friendship in unique. It is more personal than traditional approaches to therapy, more academic than modern approaches to coaching, and more discovery-based than conventional approaches to consulting.
It encourages a slow and sustainable growth process rather than a quick “ambulance syndrome” approach.
It is centered on intellectual development rather than emotional rabbit-chasing.
It is done in the context of a long-term committed friendship rather than in a sterile and impersonal doctor/patient environment.
Soul friendship presupposes the truth of three ideas:
First, all people are motivated by the same basic desire for what the ancient philosophers called, in Greek, “eudaimonia” (pronounced: you-die-moe-nee-uh) The closest equivalent we have in English to this concept is something like “happiness.” However, happiness doesn’t begin to capture what eudaimonia means because it has so many meanings and senses in modern times. Like “love,” the word has become imprecise and is used to refer to many often competing concepts. Some people use “happiness” to refer to a deep-seated joy while others use it when referring to something simple and inconsequential.
Eudaimonia, in contrast to happiness, refers to a soul-level contentment that is marked by a spirited enjoyment of one’s life. Eudaimonia is an internal state of being that informs and determines a person’s external state of affairs. It is not, as happiness is sometimes understood, a positive internal feeling determined primarily by an external state of affairs or circumstances.
In other words, eudaimonia is a state of being that affects all the rest of a person’s world. So as challenging as it was to learn ancient Greek in grad school, being exposed to this concept was worth the price of the ticket!
Happiness, by contrast, is based only on happenings. And with happiness, happenings are the primary determinant of a one’s internal state of contentment (or lack thereof). That’s why in personal development, I speak of eudaimonia, not happiness, as the goal.
The pursuit of eudaimonia is what makes life worth living. Eudaimonia is the desire that exists behind all external goals that human beings pursue. Any growth strategy that targets fruit issues (i.e. success, wealth, influence, etc.) rather than the root issue (eudaimonia) will ultimately fail because such a strategy won’t address what it is that all people actually, in the deepest parts of their souls, want. Such growth strategies, as popular as they sometimes are, merely target an external issue that has an easier and quicker fix.
Second, soul friendship assumes that the possibility of eudaimonia depends on the proper functioning of one’s mind. It assumes that the mind affects, and is the foundation of, emotions and relationships – not the other way around.
The possibility of eudaimonia depends on one’s ability to reason. This means critically examining and then evaluating the assumptions upon which one’s values and choices are based.
Many people’s decisions and values are based upon deeply held assumptions that have never even been identified, much less challenged. And since all people have blind spots, it’s essential to have someone else help with such identification and examination. That’s where soul friendship becomes immeasurably valuable. If you surround yourself only with people who think like you and never challenge the way you think, how will you escape atrophy of the mind? How will you ever grow?
Here’s another way to look at it: An undisciplined and unchallenged intellect creates an unhealthy mind. An unhealthy mind creates unreasonable, uncontrollable and unhealthy emotions. Such emotions inevitably produce a confused and unbalanced life incapable of experiencing eudaimonia.
In other words, a person cannot grow without being challenged to think about how they think. Instead of focusing primarily on the content of one’s thoughts, one must focus on the structure of those thoughts, assessing them and adjusting accordingly.
Practically speaking, this means making a commitment to expanding and enriching the intellect by engaging in disciplined study. This means reading, discussing, debating, engaging, writing, reflecting and creating. It means cutting back on the intake of media that promotes intellectual atrophy.
When such study is executed under the direction of a soul friend, the long-term results can be remarkable. This is especially true when one realizes that true eudaimonia can be realized as much in the journey as it is in reaching the destination.
Finally, soul friendship holds that the seeds of eudaimonia grow best in the soil of relationship with a guide who is personally committed to and invested in you.
This means that while a renewed focus on free and critical thinking is necessary, it is not sufficient. A person also needs a safe space to engage in such thinking, exercise it freely, and be challenged and encouraged by a mentor. She needs the space to explore and discover without the shame normally associated with making mistakes or changing one’s position.
In my experience, soul friendship provides this better than any model I’m familiar with.
Concept #2: Spiritual Direction
The second inspiration of my approach has its roots in another role and concept from the middle ages that is currently enjoying a revival in some helping professions. That is the role of the “spiritual director” and the concept of “spiritual direction.”
I want to say, up front, that “spiritual direction” is misleading because the practice actually has very little to do with “directing” much of anything. You may hear the phrase “spiritual director” and think of a guru who tells you what to do, how to think and live, and demands significant obedience. But that’s not what it is.
In reality, a spiritual director is like a soul friend. Someone who listens, understands, reflects and converses with and alongside of you as you learn things about yourself of which you’ve been previously unaware. They may be further down the road in their own journey than you are, but they’re still on the same road.
Hundreds of years ago and before the advent of modern psychotherapy, a spiritual director was someone who listened to your story, helped you clarify your purpose, and then walked with you – sometimes for very long periods of time – while you figured out how to implement this purpose. A director wasn’t there to tell you what to do, but to lovingly remind you to do it.
Here’s a quick analogy that might help you understand the role of a spiritual director:
Imagine for a moment that you were trying to get from Austin, Texas (the world’s greatest city, by the way) to Olympic National Park in Washington. A director wouldn’t give you a turn by turn set of directions like google maps would. Rather, he might encourage you with something a bit more generic, like “head northwest.”
That might not seem very helpful. But when you end up in Houston because you lost your way for whatever reason, and your spiritual director appears and says, “Hey – what are you doing in Houston? We agreed that you were head northwest to Olympic.” You’ve clearly lost your way, and the director is there not to berate you, but to remind you of Olympic and why you wanted to go there in the first place.
He shows your pictures of Ruby Beach, Shi Shi Trail and the Hoh Rain forest. He reads you reviews of Pacific Pizza, one of the best pizza places on the planet in downtown Forks, Washington. He doesn’t tell you how to get there, but why you need to go.
As the philosopher C.S. Lewis once remarked, “A friend is one who knows the song in your heart, and who sings it back to you when you have forgotten the words.”
Many of us entered adulthood with drive, ambition, hopes, dreams, and what we understood to be a purpose bigger than ourselves. We thought we knew who we were and where we were going. But after years of subtle but wrong turns, we wake up one morning in Houston. We have no idea who we are or how we got there. We question if we should leave, or if we should just… deal with Houston.
That’s where a spiritual director is helpful. And to be honest, many people have this type of person in their life. They don’t need to retain the services of one because that role is fulfilled by a parent, a mentor, or a friend. But not everyone has that. And everyone needs it.
So that might the best way to begin thinking about how I work with people. But here’s the kicker – and please don’t miss this. Being a soul friend or spiritual director isn’t about spirituality. Not at least in the way the term is used in modern times.
More often than not, it’s about intellectual development. It’s about how to build effective foundations for life, vocation and relationships by focusing on the mind. By focusing on rational and critical thinking. By achieving eudaimonia by being what a human was made to be: rational.
This emphasis on the cultivation of the mind is one of the most unique marks of my approach, which leads to us to the third and final historical inspiration.
Concept #3: Philosophy
When I tell people I teach college philosophy, there’s always a reaction. Here are a few of the most common:
“OMG. I remember taking philosophy in college. It was the worst class ever. I could never understand what the guy was talking about!”
“Philosophy – isn’t that, like, the most useless college major ever? What do you even do with a degree like that?”
“If you don’t want a job after you graduate, major in philosophy.”
“Ok, so you’re into philosophy. That means you think you’re smarter than most people and like to argue, right?”
It’s heartbreaking to hear that most people have such a poor and misinformed opinion of a discipline that has contributed more to humanity than any other. Philosophy, far from the modern stereotypes with which it is associated, was the precursor to most modern-day university subjects. For example, astronomy used to be called philosophy. So did biology. And physics. And pretty much everything else.
When each of this subjects matured to the point of having their own rationally justifiable knowledge base, they became their own disciplines. However, if you study any of these subjects to the highest level, the degree you’re awarded is still called, you guessed it, a “Doctor of Philosophy” (Ph.D.).
So why is philosophy special? Why would I suggest that it’s done more good in the world than any other discipline? Here are a few brief thoughts:
Philosophy instills within you a sense of profound freedom. Freedom to explore. Freedom to ask questions. Freedom to believe in your ability to make decisions that are right for you – even if they’re not right for others. And the freedom to do all this without shame. Basically, philosophy offers the freedom to be, and love, yourself.
At the end of the day, this philosophical foundation is what distinguishes my approach from others. I believe that personal growth is rooted in the intellect. And intellect is the domain of philosophy.
Some practitioners focus on emotions as a starting point for growth. Others may focus on methods associated with clinical psychotherapy, which often include medication. Others take the principles of their faith and its leaders as legitimate foundations.
Those who are more interested in vocational success may ruminate on the latest leadership and organizational management trends. Each of these are healthy ways to approach growth, depending on one’s goals and her season in life. The approach I utilize complements, rather than competes with, the approaches listed above.
Soul friendship fulfills a particular need because few other approaches advocate for a regimented approach to intellectual development. The mind takes a back seat. This is unfortunate because all growth, and all possibility of change, begins in the mind. Because a weak, undisciplined mind will not serve a person well in the long term, people should take its growth and development as seriously as they do other types of training (i.e. physical).
A strong mind, one that identifies, evaluates and reforms its own assumptions, can take a person as far as they want to go. That’s how ancient philosophy developed so many other game changing disciplines and innovations. Philosophers were not afraid to ask why. They were not afraid to challenge conventional thinking about subjects like the natural world. But more importantly, they weren’t afraid to challenge the way way they thought about themselves.
To make sure this important point lands, consider the following:
If you hired a personal trainer, you’d expect her to challenge you, right? She would tell you what exercises to do, how to do them, what to eat and not eat, and kick your butt when you slacked off. And you’d put up with all of it. Why? Because you want to be healthy. Or have a hot body. Or both. In short, physical training is valuable to you. And it is to most people – even if they don’t have the discipline to engage in it.
But what about mental training? If you don’t exercise your body, it becomes sick and lethargic, right? And if you really ignore it, it atrophies and may die prematurely. If a guy wanted to lose weight, gain muscle, feel better, and be noticed by others, wouldn’t it be reasonable to point him to dieting and physical training? Should we not encourage him to stop putting junk food into his body? Shouldn’t we spur him on in pushing his body to the limit in physical training. These things seem obvious to anyone who values the body and the lifestyle choices necessary to maintain the body’s health. But here’s the kicker: why do people not approach the mind this way?
If I encouraged you to read regularly and to craft your own thoughts about a subject, would you do it? If I said you should meet with someone who would discuss with you the ideas you had read, would you see the value? If I said that watching two hours of Netflix every night would have the same effect on your mind that eating fast food twice a day would have on your body, would you cut back?
The point is this: You’ll never grow long term without mental health. And to be mentally healthy, you have to 1) grow your mind and 2) monitor what comes into it. And how do you grow your mind? By engaging in the most ancient and time tested discipline of all: philosophy.
Some would counter that people don’t gain anything practical from reading French existentialists. Maybe. At least in the short term. But it’s also true that a squat or bench press is just as impractical. But people still engage in these exercises because they make the body strong and healthy. They help it better resist disease. But if you want the results, you have to do the work.
The same is true with using philosophy. The mind requires exercise. It must be trained. It won’t become strong by focusing primarily on garbage media any more than your body will become strong by eating candy and laying in bed all day.
Philosophical training works mental muscles that most people ignore. And when you take the time to study, study slowly, and study consistently, you’ll unlock the benefits of humanity’s most powerful tool: the mind.
You’ll become strong and confident because the conclusions you reach and the values you adopt will be yours, not someone else’s.
When you strengthen your mind in this way (philosophy), and when you train under the watchful eye of a competent guide (spiritual direction), and when you locate both in the context of a genuine and caring relationship (soul friendship), your chances of experiencing eudaimonia and its real-world benefits skyrocket.
Soul Friend Development & Consulting 