How many people in your life really get why you are here? What you are about?In initial interviews with prospective clients, I often find myself probing the question of mission. Some people have been trained to give a glib reply. Others answer with, “I don’t know.” Either way, most report how rarely they have been met or understood in this sense of inner mission.I like to approach deepening clarity of mission from three very different angles.The first is to create assignments and conversations that explore the evidence of the life so far lived. What successes are you most proud of? When do you feel you are doing your best stuff? How do people appreciate you? You can see for yourself as you investigate such questions for yourself. You may be a builder of trust, a manifester or a visionary.A pattern emerges from the evidence of the life so far lived that points to your innate gift. However, this only points to a part of our true being.The second angle is to bring forward the experiences of the little child inside; the part of us that feels vulnerable and has needs. What is the little child deepest need? We might visualize sitting with that child or find some way to engage with the most tender part of our inner nature.As we touch again that little child’s deepest need, we find understanding. Because we know that need so well, we understand how to give what is needed. Safety, for example, or freedom. Here is the gift that is uniquely ours to bring as an adult now. More often than not, we find that we have remarkable capacity in the very area that was once our own deepest need.The third angle is the spiritual or mystical dimension of experience. Often such things are held private or hidden behind aversion or attraction to religious concepts and so on. As we peel that back, people report experiences in all kinds of different forms. Moments when they could see through the outer skin to the inner workings of those around them. Inspiring encounters with hawks, leopards or other powerful animals. Soul connection with a teacher. A vision of the future. Recurring dreams. Experiences of prayer, meditation or community.Our sense of mission is shaped by what we touch in this regard. We feel called in some way. For example, to create community or abundance; or to release people from limiting beliefs.I am sure many of you reading this piece love to meet your friends and colleagues in a shared understanding of what we are most deeply about. What has allowed you to go there with people? I would be interested to hear what you are finding.

In the initial interviews we do with clients, people will speak of limitations and mistakes that are holding them stuck. Unpeel the layers, however, and often it turns out to be the love experienced at some high point that holds the key. Moving though a crucial transition involves freeing our attachment to past success.

For example, a truly talented executive thought his last three ventures were failures. Sure, the businesses made money and the people felt engaged in a positive vision. But the outcomes in each case were less than a home run hit out of the park.

Not like it was at the high point.

He talks of what that was like. The appreciation of a respected mentor. Car, house, glamorous parties… all the accepted trophies of success. The love of an incredible woman.

Then, for the sake of his own integrity, he had to make a hard decision. There was a rocky year for the business, a break with his mentor and the romantic relationship ended.

What do we do at such a painful time? We still have all this energy, all this love to give but the way we gave and the way we loved are just gone. We have to go on somehow. We may tell ourselves, “What is done is done” and try to embark on our next adventure as if it doesn’t matter.

The human heart, however, is more loyal than our good intentions. A lost love will not be denied. It may be set aside but it is still remembered, and often as inner battle. On the one hand, there is the hankering to recreate the experience. Yet, when we come close, it is never good enough. We just don’t have the same zest for our new endeavors. I have even seen people, unaware they are doing it, sabotage their current activities or relationships because to succeed would betray the love of that past high point.

In the case of my talented executive friend, he was able to experience a profound healing. He let himself feel the depth of the love he had lost. He faced the self-defeating inner conflict that had lived in him ever since, and took on a new, more positive way to remember what that time means to him. He had the guts to tell the truth. He can lead with that integrity now in ways he could never have done as a younger man. He has a deep care, sensitivity and clarity of mission.

Most of us are aware enough to see our inner conflicts. Is there one for you that is ripe to release right now?

Often it helps when we make the connection with what we have loved and lost. You might want to take a moment and revisit the high points of your life, ways you have known great love or feeling of success.

Could it be that some self-limiting inner conflict living in you came from that time? Some thought that it could never be that good again?

The loss of a high point has something to teach us. Look into what occurred with new eyes. The very way those events happened points to a quality of character that was emerging in you at that time. This quality that is in your life now is a wonderful tribute to what you were part of then. While love and success may be experienced and measured differently in the days ahead, there is no limit on what is yet to come.

Are your goals poisoning you?

Like many senior executives who have been through the good-to-great type trainings that are popular today, you may have been encouraged to create a BHAG—a big hairy ass goal—for your life and work. Most of us impose self-limiting beliefs on what is possible. So reaching beyond such limits by creating big stretch goals can help people open to their full potential.

Likely you are not actually achieving the goal but at least you are pushing yourself further than you might otherwise do. Or so you think.

I sometimes ask people to model what their lives would be like with their big hairy ass goals fulfilled. As the glittery portrayal of fame and fortune comes forward, more often than not it becomes clear that the person does not in fact want that life at all.

It is as if there is a perverse element inside each of us that takes pleasure in failure. “See. I knew you didn’t have it in you.” This dynamic of reaching for the impossible and tolerating noble failure is actually more comfortable for many people than the experience of success. It feels deserved, feels like home or something like that.

We may think we are pushing ourselves further than we might otherwise do but in fact we are sapping energy.

Once the glittery portrayal of fame and fortune—or whatever it is for you—is exposed as a false ideal, something remarkable happens. It becomes possible for the person to admit to his or her true nature. Authentic self has its own authentic sense of mission.

Time and again I find this: the innate destiny inherent in a person’s true nature is many times more remarkable, a much more meaningful contribution in the world, than their original BHAG. But to the person, it does not feel like such a huge deal because it is who and what they already are.

I suggest this meditation. Create a stretch goal for your life and work. Flesh it out and adorn it as fully as you can. Imagine yourself becoming that person. Envision fulfilling all the steps it would take to be that successful. Feel how you would be in the world, how you would relate to your current friends and to yourself as you are now.

You might find that you really don’t like that person much.

In the wake of that realization, the space opens up for you to discover your NHAD—your natural hairy ass destiny!

Is there a taboo on talking about feelings at your place of work? Is there a tacit collusion to pretend that none of us are as sentient as in fact we are? What kind of depth happens in the conversations you initiate or the teams you lead?

Shallow work environments are getting left behind in the race to attract the best talent. Dead from the neck down doesn’t cut it anymore.

I was talking with a group of CEOs and senior executives last week about releasing the blocked energy in their most challenging people. I was outlining mentoring tools with which they can help their colleagues develop self-confidence, handle conflict, navigate fears and connect with the feelings of others.

As I went into the last segment—connecting with what another feels—the room went quiet. “We can’t talk like this at our workplace” was the refrain.

In our culture, we act as if business is divorced from feeling. Yet, when you ask a group of people to name the most successful leaders they know, every example is someone who knows how to connect with the feelings of the people around them.

Some leading companies are deliberately creating work to be a place where a greater depth of feeling is welcome.

Here are five practices for developing your capacity to create an atmosphere in which it is safe for people to bring forward their inner depth:

1. Nothing Else Matters. For at least a few moments each day, deliberately focus all your attention on what is right in front of you. It could be the person you are engaging in a conversation or simply staring at a group of ants or a tree. Send everything else, including thought and concern about yourself, to the background.

2. Level with a Kid. Find some time to talk straight with a pre-teen. Set aside parental mode or trying to be as nice as Mary Poppins. Listen for what is on his or her mind and heart and, in a way that connects with where they are, share what is important to you.

3. Interpret All Behavior as a Way of Loving. We usually interpret the behavior of others for its impact on us and the projects or people we care about. Re-frame what you see the people around you doing. Limit yourself to only two possible explanations for everything you see: it is either an expression of love or a cry for love.

4. Notice Your Own Body. When someone walks into the room or a meeting closes in on a core issue, what happens inside your own body? Notice the subtle changes: tension in your hands, openness or gathering of energy in your belly, a flutter in the chest or eyelid. As we become more aware of the feelings moving in our own bodies, we instantly connect more readily with what is moving in others.

5. Acknowledge Personal Events. Things happen for people that have no direct relationship to our work with them. They have birthdays, a new tattoo or haircut, a spouse gets sick, their sports team wins a big game. Some are obvious, some not so. For those you work with most closely, write down 10 personal events that have happened for each of them in the last week. Noticing more of more of these will lead you to that timely acknowledgment that just wins a person’s heart.

Even in the most traditional environments, there are so many ways to connect with what others are feeling. Depth breeds talent. I continue to benefit from simple practices like the five outlined here. You might be surprised what paying attention in this way will do for you.

If you knew the source of much of the most unbearable pain in your life, would you let it go? The more I examine myself and work with other people, the more I see how tenaciously we hold onto what is causing us pain.

For example, I was mediating a dispute between two men who really care about each other and are both passionately dedicated to the same important mission. They had locked horns over what? An accounting entry!

We all know what it is like to get trapped into defending ourselves over something, which with the passage of time is seen as petty. How could we possibly back down because, damn it, we know we are right.

In working with people, one of the most powerful questions is: What are you defending?

You might want to ask yourself that now. Go to some moment, some area of your life where there is even just a little pain. What are you defending? What are you protecting?

Peel back the layers. It might have something to do with needing to be right.

From an early age, in western culture at least, we are molded into this. Gold stars for being right. To the principal’s office in shame for being wrong.

Then we try to apply the same technique to relationship. Much pain in marriages, for example, comes from one partner desperately trying to do the right thing by the other and feeling hurt because they are not getting the gold stars.

It’s a prison.

Each of us has a choice. Would you rather be right or free?

All of us coach or mentor others in some way, encouraging people toward an ever more authentic life. Here is one of the keys of coaching. Look for where and how the person is getting his or her sense of being right.

Invite them to see that, with or without this, they are already “all-right.”

People don’t usually let go of self-sabotaging behaviors just because you point them out. There has to be some direct experience of the benefits of change.

In our presence these people no longer need to defend their actions or their points of view. This is the beginning of their freedom. Here is a person in their life who appreciates them for who they are, someone for whom they can’t do it right and they can’t do it wrong.

What a difference people like that have made in my life!

Sometimes what needs to be done is a really tough thing to do. Leaders have to terminate employees, unpopular things have to be said and so on. In such situations, people usually see what is needed long before they are willing to admit it to themselves.

The most successful executives are those who have closed this gap between seeing what needs to be done and admitting it. They read people and situations quickly, and act with remarkable effectiveness.

I am sure you have had experience of how you missed something which later seemed so obvious. You probably noticed that your mind got caught in what you hoped was there. The truth was too inconvenient to admit.

It takes an aggressive kind of honesty to see what is really there and act on it. This is the “grit” in integrity.

In working this with people, the most common reasons I find for missing what is there to be seen are: (1) concern for appearances and (2) fear of action. The way through such concerns and fears is not so much by effort or will power. I have seen people try to prod others with comments like, “You must be more bold” or some such. And of course nothing much changes.

The way through is a gritty desire for truth.

For example, I was working with an executive who was creating a new management structure. He synthesized differing points of view in the boardroom to propose a solution that seemed to make everybody happy. Only trouble was the new plan was too convoluted to actually work in practice. Obviously, to re-work this whole thing with his board was going to be immensely inconvenient. He struggled three days trying to convince himself that maybe it could work. But it had to be changed. As soon as he admitted the truth and accepted what needed to be done, the whole process—intense and challenging as it was—become fun to deal with.

A good coach can awaken the pleasure that is to be found in seeing and acting on what is true. Trying to make things look right and people feel good, avoiding sticking one’s neck out, is such a hell in comparison with the pure joy of seeing and acting on what is there to be done. The simplicity of living all out.

When we get a taste for that, we lose our appetite for seeing only what we hope is there or what is convenient to see. We come to trust that, while what is actually present may at times be challenging, it will always be a whole lot more fulfilling.

As you have probably found out the hard way, you cannot take people where they do not want to go. So, what happens when a client or friend says, “I don’t know what I want”?

People who have created companies worth millions tell me that. Or people who have been on a spiritual path for decades. Yet here they are at the first session of a transformational intensive. Two coaches, one participant, two days.

They must want something.

“I don’t know what I want” is a cover up. Sometimes, the true desire is covered beneath statements of apparent altruism, as in “I want to make this or that difference in the world.” Where you can tell it is still just a concept. Usually, when you poke around a bit, you find what is really being said is: “I dare not ask for what really matters most to me.”

The person does know what they want but they believe it cannot happen. They don’t think they deserve it. If they open to happiness, or new levels of success, pain will surely follow.

In all of us there is something for which we dare not ask.

When people are moving through crucial transitions, the key is a change in what they are going for in life. A deeper admission of what they really want. Typically, a person has spent most of their life going after a certain type of success; maybe developing an organization, money, being liked, even a spiritual concept. Then suddenly what seemed so important all these years starts to lose its luster.

As people graduate from their previously limited ideals of success, we can help by inquiring deeper and deeper with them into what they really want. We make it safe for them to speak what up till now they dared not ask. Recent examples of what people have dared to ask include: pure happiness, peace, freedom and truth. Not as concepts but as intense personal desire deeply, and often painfully felt. There is a quality of innocence they long to share with those close to them, ultimately with everyone and with the universe itself.

There comes a time for each of us when we are willing to go for what, up till now, we had dared not ask. What is that for you?

Effectiveness is the capacity to produce an intended result. When asked, most people say they are not manifesting their full potential. They have more talent than effectiveness. The art of coaching is to see what inhibits effectiveness in each client. I will touch on some of the classic inhibitors I have found and what to do about them.

Ineffective people are reluctant to specify their intended result. Once intention is specified, of course, the possibility of failure is more real. “If I keep the desired result vague or secret, then I won’t look so stupid if I miss it.” We know where that goes. Determination wanes, actions are inadequately thought through and the support that could be available from others moves on to more alive projects.

Rarely, however, is this kind of fear of failure the bottom line. I was working with someone recently, who was willing to release his self-image as a good person enough to get more honest. He suddenly saw that he was choosing not to be effective, and doing so because he didn’t trust himself. “If I had the power to make happen whatever I intend, the result would be a mess.”

As you work in these ranges with people, you will find this is actually typical. Peel back the layers and most people believe that they and the world would be better off, if they were less than fully effective.

I have found three levels in addressing this. The first is to notice how ineffectiveness is a deliberate choice. Sometimes there is a mismatch between what the person thinks they should be about and what is actually theirs to do. In that case, you help them relax out of the “should” and into accepting their choice as valid.

The second level is to introduce self-trust. Usually I am struck how absurd it is that this person doubts that the ability to produce results will do anything but good in their hands. So it is easy to point that out. I look for a way to introduce the trust as close as possible to source of the original doubt. For example, if the belief in doing harm has spiritual overtones (which it often does given the backdrop of most religious cultures), it may be powerful for a person to see how God or spirit trusts them to be effective.

The third and deeper level is to release the image of oneself as a good person. Trying not to be bad, and not to be seen as bad, creates one defensive behavior after another. We want to make it safe enough for people to drop all that when they are with us. When a person can experience this feeling of being bad—or stupid, useless, greedy, whatever it is—and be held in love there, they begin to let go of image, both good and bad. Lifelong habits of hesitation lest they do something bad, or be found out as bad, are no longer necessary.

They are free to be effective again.

Of course, to assist others in this way there is no short cut but to do this for ourselves; to find safe ways to experience what we have been avoiding so that our own need to be seen as good, in whatever way, and the life-long habits of hesitation which go with that, can be let go.

I am writing from England, where my nephew Sam has just had his barmitzvah. This marks his transition from boy to young man. To assist in his passage, his father and I took Sam on a two-day vision quest in the woods. We agreed not to speak about what occurred. However, the basic elements of what we did are relevant in guiding people and organizations through crucial transitions, and I can speak of that.

To be effective, change has to be self-evident. I doubt if many of us will ever forget what it was like to be thirteen. Our very bodies were altering our experience as new hormones, new clothes and new ways of thinking began to have their way with us. Although more subtly, the same applies for the crucial transitions of later life. For those who are fortunate enough not to be able to deny the process, it becomes abundantly, if painfully, apparent that change is happening.

People don’t move so readily from “bad” to “good,” as if growth requires denigrating where we have been. Yes, it has to be acknowledged that new ingredients beyond the former ways of being and doing need to come on line. But people will move more readily from “good” to “great.” Until the past is honored and seen as a worthy starting point, the person hesitates to go forward. I have seen it so often: change resisted in the nagging sense that there is something to prove or make right about what has gone before. In truth, each person can say that he or she has done well to get here. And we can help let them know that we see that too.

In the case of Sam’s quest experience in the wild, we were in a different environment free of familiar comforts and discomforts. For executives, it is more about recognizing that circumstances have already moved them into new and unfamiliar territory. The human mind is trained to take what worked before and overlay it on new situations. Unless we are convinced otherwise, that is always what we will do. Somehow we have to get viscerally that the old rules no longer apply in the new environment.

Finally, it is hard to move forward without some vision, some sense of excitement about what is ahead. Usually we see some of what is awaiting us but miss the full potential that is there. The gift of a change agent is to make upcoming possibilities visible in a way that makes people eager to go after them.

My thirteen-year-old friend is still young enough to view the prospect of becoming an adult as enticing. His Jewish forefathers were wise to set this rite of passage at such a young age. Later on he will find plenty to reject in the examples of manhood he sees around him. Yet change and growth are not meant to stop at puberty. You are a change agent for the people in your walks of life. When we look, there are countless opportunities to help others see what is waiting to unfurl in them.

Clients often ask me for tools and techniques to make them more effective in working with people. In a coaching session, whenever we discuss and practice how to handle a particular person or situation, we usually end up recognizing that the connection is the most important thing. Even in the tensest engagement, if we find a way to establish rapport with the other, the rest of the communication will flow from that. Great tools and technique have their place but without rapport they won’t do too much. Here are three keys that I have found help me establish rapport.

Key one: notice what you are afraid of. Any exchange between two human beings involves risk. We may do harm, lose reputation or miss out on opportunity. Something may happen to take us out of our comfort zone where we won’t know what to do. Where there is risk, the natural instinct is to keep distance. Distance gives us perspective so we can map the safest way through. Yet it makes connection harder. Some people engage with avoidance and some with bravado. Either way rapport ain’t going to happen. Take the time to notice what is at risk, for you and for the other person. Once acknowledged, your risks won’t create distance in the same way. You will likely begin to feel appreciation for who they are and for what they are doing in the face of their risks.

Key two: resolve the superior-inferior dynamic. We create separation by upholding ourselves as special. No one has a perfectly undented self-esteem so, to feel good about who we are, we’re constantly tempted to identify as better than or less than others. As a coach or consultant, for example, my livelihood depends on having something to offer people or organizations that will help them. And I get great pleasure when good things happen for clients as a result of our work together. If I am not careful, I could easily surround myself with those I see as less whole or proficient. My wife, Chellsa, and I make it a practice before an important call or session to help each other see how we are holding ourselves as better or worse than the other people involved. The separation resolves, not so much into “I am the same,” as an enjoyment of the exquisite distinctiveness of each person’s character and skills.

Key three: be hungry to meet being-to-being. It is possible to develop an appetite for the depth in people. On the surface, our engagements with others appear to be primarily transactional. There is information to exchange or feeling to convey; a desired outcome from each engagement. Rapport happens inside of all of that. Along with whatever needs to be transacted, you are just eager to discover the other and be discovered by them. Is there anything more beautiful than to meet another in this way?

Make sure you give due attention to the desired outcome, the information and feeling that need to be conveyed in any exchange. Save some of your attention, however, for what is inside of all that: the quality of rapport you establish with another. If someone as stiff and reserved as I once was can find the way to create rapport, anyone can do it! Taking deliberate steps, such as those outlined here, can make a big difference.