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Finding your north star with Martha Beck, Ph.D.
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Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live - An Interview with Martha Beck, Ph.D.
Martha Beck (www.marthabeck.com) is a New York Times bestselling author, an innovator in life coaching, and a monthly columnist at O: The Oprah Magazine. Martha has coached hundreds of individuals over the past fifteen years; recently, NPR called her “the best-known life coach in America.” She has taught career development at the American Graduate School of International Management, performed research at Harvard Business School, and consulted to Fortune 500 corporations.
Interview conducted by Rheba Estante, Originally published in Tiago Transformations.com
I loved your book “Finding Your North Star”. I picked it up in the spring of 2004 and my life began to steer clear on my own north star. For those who have never heard of the term north star, how would you define it to them? The north star is the one star in the north sky (northern hemisphere) that never appears to move. All the others stars revolve, but it (Stella Polaris) is the one that always points due north. Navigators have used it for millennia to navigate at night or if they are lost. Everyone has a fixed point inside. It tells us what one needs to do in life. Part of you knows yours already. My process as a life coach is to help people find the metaphorical “north star,” or guidance point, within themselves. Then they work to create a life, follow a path that leads true north Why is having a north star so crucial in life? First of all, it’s crucial because it’s the essence of who you are. You can’t get away from it because it is part of you. To live a life that is wrong for you is a form of dying. There are people who have lives that look perfect. They try to happy, they believe they should be happy, they are trying to like it, but if it’s off course from their north star, they aren’t satisfied. By telling yourself, “I should like my life,” you simply deepen your commitment to what’s wrong for you. You might as well say, “I should not be poisoned by arsenic.” Suffering results when a person leaves their north star to do something else. I know famous people who thought fame was the answer but it was off course. Fame is poisonous for them. Your own north star is yours alone. No one else can define it. You alone know if it feels right. What about going to psychics? There are now workshops and seminars devoted to spending time with a psychic on discovering your soul purpose. Can psychics tell a person what their north star is? It comes down to testing anyone’s advice against your own instincts. Do you feel that a psychic’s advice resonates with your sense of truth? Fine. It’s still yourself you need to believe. Sometimes a psychic tells you something and it feels wrong and others may be right on the money. It’s your choice about whom to trust, and giving that trust is something we do ourselves. Dependence on a psychic or any other kind of divination message can become a form of social oppression if it overrides our own personal sense of what’s right and true. You choose whether to believe it or not. So how can religion help people find their north star? Religion can be wonderful, because it gives us tools to reach north star. All religious leaders and spiritual teachers emphasize finding a place within us that is true. People who obsessively follow these leaders instead of their own purpose attach to the spiritual leader and become fanatical and controlling. That’s why Jesus tried to tell his followers not to get attached to outward form. He said, “there is one good, and that is God.” The overall goodness of the universe is God. And, he said, that is written on the tablet of your heart. Yet people can claim to follow Jesus, and kill others who don’t believe the same way as they do. Religion can be a wonderful pathway to the inner light or cause the worst atrocities in darkness. The self-help industry has many products on finding one’s soul purpose but it too can lead consumers on an endless search for the Holy Grail. There even was a book written by Steve Salerno titled SHAM that examined whether such a billion dollar industry has any measurable returns on the investments people spend. What is your guidance on not losing oneself in self-help? Don’t be doctrinaire about anything—not religion, not your own ideas, and definitely not self-help books or gurus. People can be obsessive about anything from religion to feminism to pet rights. It is the rigidity and intolerance that people hold within their system that does damage. When you start to try to control other people that is a red flag. Your north star has nothing to do with making people be, do, or say anything. It is not about imposing truth on others. We know the truth for ourselves but not for another. As soon as you think you know someone else’s truth better than they do, you are in deep water. There are also plenty of New Age modalities in metaphysical circles that also offer a path towards one’s purpose. Once again, there is a phenomenon of people getting way into Angel workshops, Divination Intensives, and all sorts of vision quests to find themselves. Do you have any insights on these tools as paths to finding one’s North Star? An imbalanced approach is all about the fanaticism, needing external validate, being obsessed with external approval. New Age ideology can be a surrogate religion—a New Age devotee can decide that they, too, have an absolute doctrine. You know you are going overboard when you are pushing other people to do it your way. If you are clinging to a philosophy or need to justify your existence, you need to let go. I like the Asian ideal of letting go of delusion instead of ingesting in more ideas. In all your years of coaching how do so many people lose their north star? What are the common reasons and what basic things can someone do to find it? Losing a north star invariably is the result of some form of social learning. Given natural instincts, without social pressure, we do what feels right. But if following our hearts means going against what people around us would say, we pull back. Sometimes realizing your North Star is terrifying because of social consequences: destruction of relationships, loss of approval. But losing your soul by following other peoples’ course is a no-win proposition. Also be careful how you define “destructive” behavior, because it is a relative thing. One example is an enabler who tells an alcoholic that they will no longer make excuses for them at work, pay their bills, lie for them, or rescue them from the consequences of their actions. To the alcoholic, the other person is being destructive. In fact, the person is working against alcoholism, trying to save the alcoholic’s life. The alcoholic may feel like they are being attacked. We live in a morally ambiguous world. Consult your inner compass so you do what is moral for you. What about when the body seems to love an obviously unhealthy thing, such as an addictive substance? I can best answer this using the concept of muscle testing to get a yes or no response. I once asked a man who was dying for a cigarette to hold out his arm and say out loud that he wanted to smoke. When I pressed down on his arm to test the response, the body went weak. It did not want a cigarette, even though the man thought he did. The body doesn’t lie. In my other book “The Four Day Win” I write about a man who studied morphine addiction in rats. He took them out of cages and put them in a place called “Rat Park,” which was designed as perfect environment for rats to feel at home. During the experiment the rats had a choice of drinking clear water or water tainted with morphine. When the rats were in the park they chose the clear water, but in their uncomfortable cages, they wanted the morphine. Their lives hurt in the cage so they started too ingest the tainted water again. Outside the cage, they didn’t want to get high. Addiction is medicating the pain of the wrong life. Why does it take so long to get out of the wrong life sometimes? Social pressure and the beliefs we absorb from others. People around you socialized you to be in that life. They may get very upset if you want to live in a different life. There’s a period in most cases of life change that I call the empty elevator. You have to wait until an elevator car is empty before other people can walk in. Changes can bring a dramatic shift in the relationships. Tell me more about how the body has wisdom in letting you know you are off track or about to do in making vocational decisions. Make a decision, then imagine yourself going through with it. As you imagine this breath deeply and observe what is happening. What are my various body regions feeling? You will feel a lot of contraction and discomfort when the choice is wrong. Very consistent, it doesn’t lie. Choices made in a deep body level. What are some practical ways to build a life around your heart’s desires by staying the course? Life does have its daily obligations and one can easily get distracted far away from their north star’s wishes. How can one stay the course? Do periodic evaluation. In Christian monasteries, bells ring at set time. In Asian temples they ring at random to signal someone to check if they are still in tune. Random checks are important. For example, you could decide that whenever you see a red light, you’ll relax and see where anxiety levels are. What are you feeling? What is your heart feeling? What is it feeling about? Check in regularly. The more you tune in the better you will be. Suffering will remind you if you forget. Nothing else is as powerful as suffering to get you oriented to a north star life. The blame game makes people feel safe. It is all about control, control, control. It is very easy for human psychology to slide into that. This is common in coach training, and our coach training is very careful to prevent it. We stress that the most important thing for a coach to say to a client is: tell me where I am wrong. Polaris trainers seek disconfirmation. We tell our clients to notice what’s wrong with our advice—any advice—so that we can all learn what is right for them. We don’t want to ever impose. All our North Star coaching tools are about opening client up to what is inside. Point it out to us. This helps the client get to their true selves. Humility sounds like a powerful virtue in Polaris coaching. The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu said all things flow to the sea because it is lower than they are. Humility gives it its power. Help someone you do not impose, rather you put yourself below them, hand them back to themselves. It is the person’s transformation not the coaches. What are the checks and balances in place for Polaris Training? How do you keep a tab on quality control once someone is certified and out in the field? We have a three-level check, though nothing is an absolute guarantee. My Harvard mentor used to say that there are infinite ways to misunderstand. Working as a partnership, my colleagues and I do an intake process, then aggressive training. We apply sound psychological theory and science combined with personal intuition. We administer a written exam and evaluation. My partners and I (all of who have done doctoral work on human psychology) work personally with no more than 12 person groups so we know that the training is consistent. |
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