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how did I come to segue into coaching and training from a highly fruitful journalism career highlighted by my founding the LA Weekly newspaper, of which I was editor-in-chief and president for many years. During my tenure the Weekly grew to be the largest and most successful city weekly in the country and had a profound positive effect in Los Angeles, including forcing reforms that materially cleaned up LA’s once brutal smog and catalyzing substantial cultural and social change in the community.
Friends who know me also as a social activist and community leader who has started four non-profit organizations (my causes included poverty, human rights, community media, community development and campaign finance election reform) have particularly wondered about the path that lead me to become a successful teacher whose specialty is the conscious leadership, relationship and life skills that have helped hundreds of clients and students to reorient and elevate their lives or their careers/businesses, or to heal and grow their relationships without spending years in therapy or marriage counseling.
Part of the answer is that in youth I was fascinated by the question of: Why we do what we do? Why so much pain, conflict, disappointment, heartbreak and depression in life? How come society could often be so dysfunctional and unjust – and how could it be changed for the better?
As a young journalist I pursued these questions right into significant coverage of the post-Freudian human development movement. Over the years I attended scores of personal development trainings and workshops in order to write about them. I came to understand that we are like fish unaware that they are in water – that we are mostly blind to the power and effect of the beliefs and assumptions we hold and which we swim around in – and out of which we create culture and society as well as form our relationships to ourselves and others.
because I learned from my journalism inquiries that the intersection of consciousness and culture meant that if you want healthier society, it starts with psychologically healthier people whose lives are based on clearer and saner assumptions and principles. Thus, I see no split between being a social activist/community leader and simultaneously being a teacher and coach of the means by which we can alter our lives, relationships, careers AND the broader culture for the better.
Moreover, I seem to have been designed or gifted by a higher source with a talent to synthesize complex material and communicate it to others. This ability underpinned my natural journalism and editing skills, and I tapped into it again when I segued into the field of evolutionary personal development with the intent of assisting others into skills and a way of thinking that altered negative mindsets and situations in their lives, allowing them to live more fully realized and satisfying lives.
The rest of the answer is more ordinarily human. I came into this coaching and teaching practice the hard way, via my own pain and need for change, healing, inner development and self-knowledge.
In the mid-90s I experienced a serious burnout as a result of driving myself too hard to bring forth a new television network that would share the values and quality of the alternative journalism for which that I had become known. My emotional, psychological and physical damage was intense, magnified by the fact that both the TV business and the loving relationship I was in at the time failed, the latter almost solely due to my burnout.
In the course of seeking to regain my balance and strength, I participated in another assortment of human development trainings. These complemented what I had earlier absorbed in my journalistic career. The high points for me were a professional education in human development via the Master’s degree psychology program at the University of Santa Monica (USM) and the inner life program from Pathwork Institute.
People asked to work with me, and within a year after the program, out of nowhere I had a client base of 25 people a week, all referred by word of mouth. My coaching drew on my real life experience as a leader and on my range of experiences and knowledge of people and society acquired in years as a journalist – also, of course, on my extensive immersion in the many human development trainings. All this was wedded to strong intuitive and communication gifts and what I discovered to be my ability to create effective techniques and processes as needed by my clients.
Flash forward eight years and I had developed a method of working with people that was so effective, I decided to incorporate my methods in a trial run in a group course – not group therapy – called Life Mastery Basics. 250 or so happy students later I created this website with the course audios, these accompanied by recordings of spin-off workshops whose subjects are: what men and women need to know about each other, relationship basics, and stress relief.
My own sense of why my coaching and classes have been effective in terms of reorienting and elevating people’s lives from wherever the are and in advancing their careers, relationships and leadership abilities, is that they allow individuals to learn a system that, in effect, enables you to become your own coach and/or to become leaders, managers, creators or teachers yourself. As a leader and change agent myself, I understand how to help other leaders become happy change-makers, in their enterprises and families; and I understand how to help others onto a path of meaningful and fulfilling lives in which they are having a positive affect on everyone around them.
Moreover, during my journalism and business career, I dealt with a broad array of individuals and situations. Hallmarks of my coaching and classes are the pragmatic street smarts I bring to bear and my ability to relate to real world situations in most areas of human endeavor, including business.
– including mastery of inner emotional and mental demons. They dive right into the pain and challenges of life in every facet we live it, which , like my own life, embraces both success and heartbreak and the difficulties of navigating a variety of human relations and experiences.
They also accept as a basic reality the strange dynamic of our inner lives that contain an assortment of voices and inner critics (regret, for example, turns out to be a significant issue among successful CEOs), with these voices competing with our latent and often untapped wisdom, which seeks clarity and effectiveness in the labyrinth that is human affairs.
What I prize and focus on in my coaching and teaching, as in my life, is the quality experience of finding your way into that sweet and safe alignment of your authentic inner life with the outer relational and social order, where you are enthusiastically engaged in your life as life itself, able to handle the traumas, and where you are in service both to your best self and – in subtle if not obvious ways – to others, to the common good and to the evolution of human affairs from destructive to constructive.
Participants in my coaching and classes work privately on their own issues, gaining a sophisticated – and usually sorely needed – education in the realities of human inter-reaction and self-hood that the culture fails to provide to us en mass. My clients and students report learning skills, tools and a way of thinking which give them more confidence in nearly every situation, which also make them better able to cope when challenged, and which open their lives to being leaders in their field.
One way to sum up the gains possible from my work is: “Leadership Into Radical Sanity” in which you learn to become one of those individuals who lead themselves and others into an elevated (and saner) way of being, with all its rich possibilities in the world.
I’m inspired in this work by a strong desire to see people benefit, not by any desire to own a mansion, which is why I offer the satisfaction guarantee.
I hope you’ll choose to gift yourself the opportunity to experience my unique work, either with personal or relationship coaching or via my audios.
It would be my privilege to be of service to you.
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To sign up for a free 20-minute consultation or a session in-person or by phone or Skype, email Private@jaylevin.com or call 323-380-6242