Bringing insight and awareness to inspire skillful leadership action
James Gimian
My view of leadership and coaching
Leadership is the power of bringing others around.
It sounds simple, but as we know, doing something simple is not always easy. That’s partly because learning to lead effectively is less about applying a list of “expert” practices than about gaining personal insights that illuminate the best next steps for us. Profound and lasting change happens from the inside out.
My goal in coaching is to help you discover the insights that energize your way forward in leadership and in life. Insights in coaching arise from clearly seeing our habitual, limiting patterns as well as our emerging, expansive possibilities. It’s about awareness of the “me” story we’re relentlessly building—and about glimpses of the gaps in that story.
“ We’re all hallucinating all the time, including right now, it’s just that when we agree about our hallucination, we call that reality.”
— Anil Seth, neuroscientist, Ted Talk 2017
“Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.”
— The Dude, The Big Lebowski
Neuroscience research about the brain and insights like the Dude’s help us shift our view, or mindset, enabling us to see ourselves and the world differently. And seeing differently is the beginning of the path to being differently. This shift leads to a place where authentic leadership actions become first thought, your natural behavior, rather than trying to act according to some latest leadership “wisdom.” When facing a difficult challenge, we can’t stop the action to consult the manual. We respond on the spot from the learning we’ve integrated into our being.
This shift in our way of seeing and being is where new, skillful actions begin to arise. Leadership gestures that previously involved tremendous effort and conflict become, in the phrase used in Sun Tzu’s Art of War to describe skillful action, like “rolling round rocks down a steep hill.” That’s what round rocks do: they roll downhill effortlessly. That’s how effective leaders accomplish more while doing less, by capitalizing on the existing energy in the system rather than struggling to change things. And this approach often produces the additional benefit of not leaving a mess behind.
The Practice of Working Together
I look forward to engaging with clients who yearn to weave together excellence in leadership, a fulfilling life, and a commitment to contemplative practice. I’m inspired by those who have a sense of urgency and a sense of humor, along with appreciation for the irony inherent in this kind of work.
If you’d like to explore working together, we will set up a time to chat to make sure it’s a good fit. If we decide it is, we will agree to a coaching contract. I favor an initial six-month commitment to ensure time and space for a successful outcome, though you may cancel at any time. We will meet every couple of weeks (twice monthly), with an option to meet more frequently as needed, including whenever time-sensitive challenges emerge for you.
The coaching sessions feature open inquiry and mutual deep listening, integrating awareness of the body as well as emotional intelligence. All of this is in service of exploring together the naturally arising gaps in our narrative about ourselves and our world. In addition to our meetings, I’ll suggest some practices—both dedicated (setting time aside) and integrated (done on the spot)—you can use in daily life.
“Each of you is perfect the way you are…
and you can use a little improvement.”
— Shunryu Suzuki Roshi,
Buddhist teacher, advice to his students
Our coaching approach will be tailored to your goals. No matter what framework or pathway we follow, developing skillful leadership always seems to arise from openness to our interconnected world, a deep and ongoing curiosity, and making friends with oneself.
About Me
My Path of Learning
My learning has comes from a unique blend of experience over the past 4 plus decades, including leadership in business and the non-profit workplace, Buddhist studies and meditation practice, and studying and teaching the Art of War’s lessons on effective action amidst volatility and conflict.
Another version of my story is that since my early teenage years I’ve followed the path of Diogenes, the cynic who was always looking for an honest person. I often made life difficult for myself by becoming impatient and vocal with teachers and coaches when I felt a disconnect between their expert “talk” and their different “walk.” Then, when I matured a bit, I realized that my impatience was really about my own disconnect between the talk and the walk.
Five decades of working on that disconnect has been a bit like Mr. Toad’s wild ride: a road strewn with successes and many failures, messes, and embarrassments. But as it has turned out, it’s been those very messes, failures, and embarrassments that have seared enduring and valuable lessons into my heart and mind. The journey of successes and mishaps continues to this day, and I am grateful for them all.
“Cows run away from the oncoming storm while the buffalo charges toward it—and gets through it quicker. Whenever I’m confronted with a tough challenge, I do not prolong the torment, I become the buffalo.”
— Wilma Mankiller, Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, 1985-1995
We live in an interconnected and interdependent world, which can give rise to nearly magical skillful means when faced with seemingly intractable situations. It also means that any leadership action inevitably brings some amount of resistance, obstacles, and even conflict. Those challenges are rich with information that can help shape our effective action. I’ve found that rather than avoiding or “splaining” conflicts, it is most helpful to embrace and gently lean into them.
My Life at Work
I’ve been coaching people informally since the 1980s. In 2019 I completed the ontological (study of being, presence) coaching training from the Newfield Network Accredited Coach Training Program.
My work life includes leadership roles in the magazine and book publishing industry since 1972, including Vice-President at Shambhala Publications, publisher of Lion’s Roar magazine, and founding publisher of the non-profit Mindful magazine and Mindful.org, a media launch in 2012 that grew to reach over 2 million people per month. I also founded Trident Booksellers and Café in Boulder, Colorado in 1980, which continues to serve the community as an employee-owned community institution.
Buddhist studies and practices have been an ongoing feature in my life since 1972. I feel fortunate to have a foundational practice of inquiry to see just a little bit more clearly when and how I grip too tightly and forget to appreciate the innate beauty and the suffering in our world. These practices have helped me see how coaching is a practice of servant leadership.
In 1980, frustrated by the limitations of conventional ways of dealing with conflict, I began studying Sun Tzu’s Art of War, and have found its profound lessons immensely helpful and timely in our rapidly changing and filled with battles at every level of our world. I’ve been presenting lessons from the Art of War to business and non-profit leaders in North America, Australia, and Europe since 1985 in the form of seminars, leadership training programs, consulting, and coaching.
I served as the general editor of the best-selling translation The Art of War: The Denma Translation (2001) which received critical acclaim from military officers, business leaders, and Asian Studies scholars alike. In response to the question ‘how do I genuinely employ the Art of War in these modern times?’ I followed with The Rules of Victory: How to Transform Chaos and Conflict—Strategies from the Art of War (2008), co-authored with Barry Boyce.