Check out the full article here It’s always with a mix of excitement and a bit of apprehension that my attention sharpens when a credible source like Harvard Business Review or MIT Sloan publishes an article on polarities. The excitement: Finally, broader attention and value recognition. The apprehension: Was it represented well? In this HBR [...]
(This is a follow-on to PART I Cliff’sNOTE inspired by the book, The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. That one focused on the two “core” polarity tensions he implicitly discusses: Moral Intuition AND Moral Reasoning … Belonging AND Truth-Seeking.) There’s a part of most of us that still believes this quiet fantasy: if I just [...]
(And not losing humanity in the process.) Some backstory for the link and QR code above. This isn’t an “AI Cliff-coach,” even though the platform I used would happily frame it that way. I’m a PCC-certified ICF coach, and I’m increasingly careful about how we use the word “coach” in this space. This polarity-informed AI [...]
I can’t stop thinking about the steady decline in the quality of our dialogue. Not just online. Not just in politics. I see it in families. In teams. In organizations. In communities. Across states. At the national level. And yes—even in the so-called “United” Nations. The tone is harder. The listening thinner. The certainty louder. [...]
(This Cliff’sNOTE was inspired by the book, The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt) Let me start with a confession. I fall into these traps all the time. Despite knowing the theory. Despite teaching this work. Despite having Polarity Thinking™ tattooed on my professional soul. I still catch myself sliding into moral certainty, reacting before reflecting, [...]
A Practical Application Framework for Coaches The ICF Core Competencies describe the domains of effective coaching practice. What they do not explicitly name are the dynamic tensions that skilled coaches must continually navigate within and across those competencies. These tensions are not problems to be solved, but interdependent pairs of values that must be leveraged [...]
Borrowing—somewhat provocatively—from John Lennon’s frustrated refrain “Gimme Some Truth”—I’m not making this political.(Though I easily could.) Instead, I want to talk about something quieter, more common, and arguably more influential in everyday life: bumper-sticker wisdom. Here’s my definition:Bumper-sticker wisdom is a partial truth, packaged as universal guidance. It works because it’s short.It’s memorable.And it’s often [...]
Cross-walk, below… Backstory, here… Over a decade ago, I met Dr. Bill Benet at a Polarity Learning Community gathering where he shared his doctoral research on the Polarities of Democracy. I was immediately intrigued and deeply impressed by his work. In the intervening years, civic life in the U.S. was fraying at an accelerated pace [...]
Tom Atlee’s The Tao of Democracy was sitting on my bookshelf alongside several other Tao-focused favorites. It had been a while. I remember when it first came out in the early 2000s feeling genuinely excited. I was deep in my exploration of Eastern philosophy at the time and had just completed another iteration of my [...]
David Keirsey’s Temperament Model offers a practical framework for understanding human behavior by grouping personality patterns into four broad temperaments: Artisan, Guardian, Idealist, and Rational. Keirsey emphasized observable behavior, core motivations, and preferred problem-solving approaches. His approach built on classical temperament theory and was also informed by Myers-Briggs typology (see end of this note). The [...]