The Wisdom Way of Living and Leadership
(and How to Recognize the Counterfeits)
I recently embarked on an epic adventure backpacking down into the Grand Canyon. The journey was convened by my dear friend of forty years in celebration of her 60th birthday. Maria, an avid outdoorswoman and writer, summonsed five of us to accompany her on a 26-mile middle finger to the consensus reality around aging. While I knew the trip would be challenging and awakening on many levels, I did not expect the wisdom-download the canyon would reveal.
Curiously, the weeks leading up to our launch presented some major themes that were beginning to trouble me. I had just spent the winter honing EQUUS’ strategic plan, which provoked a lot of reflection––who are we, really? What do we stand for? What are our values, and how do we really live them as an organization? How do we walk our talk? And how are we different from all the other leadership and personal development organizations out there?
It's interesting what happens when one is confronted with powerful questions. When you really slow down and listen, you’ll notice life responds by presenting circumstances and scenarios that help you answer those questions. It’s almost as if life is listening and deliberately engaging in your inquiry. The process is often not comfortable because the scenarios seem designed to push you hard into new perspectives. This is how we stretch, grow, and develop beyond our current world view.
One such scenario was an emerging discourse in the coaching industry about Artificial Intelligence’s (AI) relevance to the field. In the wake of AI’s public debut through ChatGPT and others, many coaching organizations are beginning to court the new shiny toy. I was becoming increasingly distressed by the way some in the coaching domain were organizing themselves around it. It’s as if everyone suddenly forgot what coaching truly is and isn’t.
So lost are some that in one demo conversation with a “coachbot” pulled directly from ChatGPT while at a conference, PCC coach Dr. Woody Woodward Director at NYUs SPS Coaching Innovation Lab, directly addressed the bot as “Coach”. What ensued was a transactional conversation between the bot and Woodward. It was not coaching.
But the coaching debate following his demo was even more astonishing. Woodward posted the exchange on LinkedIn, inviting comments from other coaches. This is akin to a brain surgeon addressing Siri as “Dr.” and then asking the medical establishment to consider Siri’s relevance in the operating room as a physician. Were we, as coaches, really to take this inquiry seriously? Apparently so – the thread caught fire, not with clarity about the bot’s limitations or outright dismissal of the idea that AI could replace a coach, but with wonder and awe about its seemingly mortal abilities. Yet the bot only stacked leading questions, gave advice, and repeated back words. That is not coaching. AI collects information, compiles it, then it interpolates. Hence, AI is reductive. While humans are productive.
In another scenario, inside the walls of the International Coach Federation (ICF) an accrediting and credentialing body for both training programs and coaches, one of its senior level leaders (whom, it should be noted, has an ownership interest in an AI development company) was quoted as saying that coachbots were optimal to human coaches because they were ‘not emotional’. Wow.
And in an email exchange with the founder of a leading worldwide coach training organization, I was not only man-scolded for being “emotional” about the topic but told that “…most coaches are transactional anyway, so AI may as well support those transactions.” This is like saying, “Most playground accidents just require antibiotics and a Band-Aid so in lieu of doctors and school nurses, we should just employ sixth graders to administer them.”
Perhaps this is all happening because coaching, like many other industries, is unregulated. Any person off the street can call themselves a coach and, as such, can skew the discourse, lower the standards, and dilute the profession.
Data privacy and other risks aside (that’s another essay) AI is a shiny object that promises untold riches and benefits through efficiency. What we don’t realize is that the (AI generated) propaganda is designed to subvert humanity itself. It will displace livelihoods, replacing them with inferior apps while only benefiting those privileged few in tech’s rarified altitudes.
Bedazzled by its sway, instead of asserting our unique gifts as human practitioners (such as empathy, intimacy, and intuition) these dialogs would suggest that we as coaches have forgotten who we are and who we aspire to be. We have forgotten the miracle of human connection through our elegant circuitry of interoceptors and exteroceptors. We are willing to trade our humanity for the next big thing out there.
Let’s be very clear: no bot is going to hold space for you, look you into your soul, or assist you in feeling seen like masterful coaching does.
Another emerging scenario was equally disturbing. EQUUS is consistently approached by various coaching, consulting, and wellness organizations to partner with them in some way. We take very seriously who we partner with because they become a reflection of us and our values. One possible partnership with a wellness organization was particularly seductive. Like AI, it promised riches and benefits through a scaling of efficiencies. Like coaching, the wellness industry is unregulated. Any person can hang a shingle and say they are a shaman, healer, equine-assisted practitioner, or even spiritual teacher. And most wellness institutions operate on this premise. Absent any need for robust proof of authenticity, their marketing machine preys on clients’ ignorance of the difference and earns them millions. Scale is valued over legitimacy.
Was this possible partner in the real deal, or were they the synthetic alternative? I was beginning to suspect the latter. The opportunity presented meant more volume and visibility in an increasingly saturated market. Would I strangle EQUUS’ evolution if I turned away from this prospect? The choice weighed heavy on me.
Both of these scenarios were exposing a tension between ‘the fast, easy, efficient, but synthetic way’ versus ‘the authentic way’. Sadly, when industries are unregulated, authenticity and depth are compromised. Quantity prevails over quality. “Give them bread and circus!” wrote the Roman poet Juvenal (circa 55 – 127 A.D.). The phrase means to generate public approval, not by excellence, but by diversion, distraction or by satisfying the most immediate or base requirements of a people. What results is what is called an ‘exploitive model’ of doing business. The entire system thrives on manipulation––of all parties involved, but particularly the client and any party who is being ‘used’ such as a horse, an area of land, a community, or an indigenous person(s) or culture.
And so, as life would have it, I found myself standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon, my shoulders heavy with uncertainty––burdened with this pervasive theme of authenticity. Who is my business to be inside a culture that rewards exploitation and superficiality? How do I define my discipline of coaching inside a domain losing its grasp on reality? How is EQUUS to survive in a world that increasingly values the counterfeits, the superficial fly-overs, the empty calories?
I said a silent prayer to the Canyon, and then took my first step of what would be a 26-mile journey into her depths.
I thought the Canyon might be slow in answering. I thought it might take hours, if not days, to hear her response to my prayer. I thought she might mock me with impossible physical challenges and emotional ordeals. But I was wrong. She wrapped me in a warm visceral sense of maternal love, and almost immediately, the answers came as she disclosed her story as a cautionary tale to my own.
On first blush, the Grand Canyon is a breathtaking experience of natural beauty. Absent taking the time to learn more, this would have remained my understanding. But she told me another story––a story of something wild and ancient, exploited. So much was taken from her in the name of “modern progress”. About a hundred years ago, her original inhabitants––the Havasupai, Hualapai, Diné, Zuni, Apache, the Hopi and others were driven out of this ancestral land and forced to live on reservations outside the canyon. The carefully maintained and manicured trail system I was hiking was once hunting and migration routes of these peoples, now only available by shuttle and permits.
Upriver from the canyon, in 1963, Lake Powell was created by the Glen Canyon Dam, forcing the once-wild and free Colorado River into a bureaucratically managed version of herself to serve an unbridled thirst . The water appears as a Disney-like aqua-marine due to the necessary filtering of sediment for the dam to produce around five billion kilowatt-hours of hydroelectric power annually. The filtering also appeases the aesthetics of a $9 billion tourist industry (patrons lobby hard for pretty waters). The result is a strangling of vital ecosystems. Hence, the Canyon herself is moon-like silent. During the whole trip, I saw in total one butterfly, one caterpillar, a bunch of ticks, and one solitary raven.
The experience was a little like sitting in front of one of those elegant crystal-embellished gas fireplaces you see in high end resorts. No sound. No crackling of sap and bark. No sparks. No hassle. No variance of flame. No heat. I guess one could say no danger, unpredictability, or mess, but no life either.
In four days, the Canyon revealed what happens when something beautiful, deep, primordial, and immeasurable is traded for efficiencies, power, and metrics, through the artificial. As I climbed out of her depths on the fourth and final day, I was almost shellshocked to re-encounter her surface where most are understandably content to stand and peer over her edges, never to explore her depths to discover she is a shell of who she once was.
In a bread-and-circus world, who is EQUUS to be? The canyon appealed to my soul, “Be real, be authentic, no matter the cost, no matter how it slows you down, no matter if the world leaves you behind, be the real deal.”
But this essay is not merely to declare who we are, but to appeal to all of us inside the personal and professional development domains––as practitioners and as clients. I want us to know the difference between the real and the counterfeit. I want us to stand for that difference and live that difference. Because if we don’t, I fear we will be consumed by a nightmare of our own creation through our naivety, ignorance, and sometimes even our own greed. As the author Charles Eisenstein writes, “When we gear our society around efficiency, we produce more and more of the measurable, while the immeasurable, the qualitative, and the things we don’t think to measure drain away. “
As practitioners––coaches, equine-assisted facilitators, consultants, and mentors––I want us to perpetually hold a higher standard and to develop a keen sense to recognize exploitative, quantitative models of doing business. I want us to say ‘no’ to efficiencies if they exploit our clients, the land, anyone or anything around us. We are in the humanity business, let us not forget what is human and humane.
As clients––I want us to practice our due diligence before we put our dollar somewhere inside these unregulated self-help industries. Is the organization or practitioner in question in right relationship to the land, a good neighbor to their indigenous community, congruent with who they represent themselves to be? Are they highly trained, experienced, certified, or initiated, or do they just say they are? If they are engaging in equine-assisted work, are they putting the horse first? Are they using non-force, bribery-free methodologies or are they just using the horse as a device? Is the spiritual teacher deeply trustworthy, or in the guru business?
Due diligence takes time. It takes research and learning and is far from efficient. The answers aren’t always straightforward and require nuanced discernment. You may find your opinions are not popular. You may feel alone at times. This is how wisdom is forged.
As the world rushes to metrically dominated technologies, approaches, and economics we are called towards another way. The wisdom way. This way does not seek to repudiate technology or banish “spirituality lite”, but put it in its right place and not crown it with qualities it neither earns nor deserves. Just because AI can spit out 1,000 poems in 30 seconds, does not make it a poet. Just because someone can burn sage, does not make them a shaman. Just because it looks like a real river, doesn’t mean that it is. The wisdom way, knows the difference.
Kelly Wendorf is an executive coach, spiritual mentor, facilitator, horse-woman, writer, poet, mother of two astonishing people, and courageous life explorer.
To inquire about coaching, spiritual mentoring, or private retreats with Kelly, email her.
