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Spiritual Direction or Coaching Which Is Right?

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SPIRITUAL DIRECTION SERIES  ·  POST 4 OF 6

The Difference Between Spiritual Direction and Coaching

Coaching helps you move toward something. Spiritual direction helps you pay attention to something.

People ask Jim and Lynette this question more than almost any other. It’s a fair one — they offer both, they’ve been trained deeply in both, and from the outside the two practices can look similar. Both involve one-on-one conversation. Both involve careful listening. Both are oriented toward growth and clarity.

So what’s actually different? The honest answer is: quite a lot. And Jim and Lynette have lived that difference from both sides — as practitioners and as people who have needed both at different points in their own lives.

What coaching is for

Coaching is fundamentally future-oriented. It begins with the question: where do you want to go, and what’s getting in the way?

Jim and Lynette spent years as Regional Network Directors for North America at Six Seconds — Josh Freedman’s global emotional intelligence nonprofit — and together co-developed the SEQ (Spiritual Emotional Intelligence) assessment now used across many countries. That work deepened their understanding of what coaching can do at its best: help people understand how their emotions inform their choices, interrupt patterns that are limiting them, and move toward what they most want with more skill and intentionality.

The Six Seconds model takes the inner life seriously. But it does so in service of forward movement. Coaching tends to work well when you have a goal you’re working toward, a decision you want to make more effectively, or a pattern you want to interrupt. It’s good for people who know roughly where they want to go and need help getting there.

What spiritual direction and spiritual formation are for

Spiritual direction and spiritual formation are fundamentally present-oriented — and in some ways, gently suspicious of the rush toward the future that coaching is designed to support.

When Lynette completed her Doctor of Ministry research at the Haden Institute and Graduate Theological Foundation, the work that eventually became the SEQ framework, she was exploring something the coaching world often moves past too quickly: the inner life not as a resource to optimize, but as a landscape to inhabit. Spiritual direction begins not with where do you want to go but with where are you, and what is already stirring in you?

A spiritual director isn’t working toward a goal with you. They’re paying attention alongside you — to what’s alive, to what’s heavy, to what keeps surfacing without resolution, to where the sacred might already be moving in ways you haven’t fully recognized yet.

The overlap — and why it matters

The two practices share more than they might seem to. Both take the inner life seriously. Both involve listening of a particular quality. Both resist the impulse to fix or advise.

Jim often says that the person who comes to him for coaching and the person who comes for spiritual direction are sometimes carrying the same question — they just haven’t recognized it yet. The executive trying to decide whether to take the promotion might actually be trying to understand what his life is for. The woman discerning a major transition might need both the practical clarity of coaching and the contemplative spaciousness of spiritual direction.

These aren’t competing practices. In Jim and Lynette’s experience, they’re part of the same one.

Which One Fits Where You Are Reflection Sheet

So how do you choose?

A few questions worth sitting with: Do you have a clear goal, or are you still trying to understand where you are? Are you looking for help with change, or help with understanding? Is there something specific you want to accomplish in the next year, or something you’ve been carrying that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere?

And — do you sense that what’s happening in your life right now has a deeper dimension you haven’t been able to name yet? If so, spiritual direction and the spaciousness of spiritual formation might be exactly what you’ve been looking for.

If you’re still not sure, the best next step is a free 15-minute conversation. Jim and Lynette can talk through where you are and what kind of companionship makes the most sense for this season.

Schedule with Jim: https://calendly.com/jim-792/spiritual-direction-consultation

Schedule with Lynette: https://calendly.com/lynettespiritofeq/15min

Peace and every good.

 

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors. Together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research — and serve individuals, small groups, and organizations across faith traditions. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Series

Post 4 of 6 in the Spiritual Direction series.

The Voice You’ll Use on Everyone Else

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The Voice You’ll Use on Everyone Else

Whatever you say to yourself when you fail is the voice you will use on another person when you are tired, behind schedule, and out of patience.

Not long ago I had a conversation with a client that I thought went well. A real conversation. I came away from it satisfied.

Then nothing. No reply to my follow-up. Days of it.

And here is what I said to myself: Oh. Oh no. What did I do?

Not I wonder if they’re busy. Not I’ll check back next week. Straight to what did I do wrong — and then back through the whole conversation hunting for the moment I had blown it.

They were busy. That was all. They were busy, they got back to me, and it was fine.

I want to talk about that voice, because I have come to think it is the single most under-examined thing in leadership, in marriage, in friendship, and in any room where you have more power than somebody else.

Here is the claim, and it is not a comfortable one.

That voice does not stay inside.

Whatever you say to yourself when you fail is the voice you will use on another person when you are tired, behind schedule, and out of patience. You have been rehearsing it for forty years. It is the most practiced speech you own. And under pressure, people do not reach for their values. They reach for what is rehearsed.

You have heard the old line about loving your neighbor as yourself. Most of us read that as a sequence — get your own house in order, and then you will be equipped to love other people. Self-care first, service second. That reading has launched a thousand wellness programs.

I think it is a misreading, and the correct reading is much less comforting.

As yourself is not a prerequisite. It is a measure. It says: here is the scale you are already using on everyone around you, whether you have ever examined it or not.

Not should. Will.

Which means the harsh interior does not stay interior. It leaks. And it leaks downhill, toward whoever in the room has the least power to object.

“If I go easy on myself I’ll go soft”

Here is where most people push back, and it is a fair objection. If I go easy on myself, I will get soft. The standard will slip. The whole reason I am any good at this is that I do not let myself off the hook.

I believed that for about fifty years.

The research does not support it. Kristin Neff has spent a career studying self-compassion, and two findings land directly on this.

The first is about standards. In a 2012 study, Juliana Breines and Serena Chen had people recall a recent personal failing. Those guided toward a self-compassionate stance came away more motivated to apologize and more committed to not repeating the behavior than the people who weren’t. In the same work, students who took a self-compassionate view of a test they had just failed went on to spend more time studying for the retest. Not less. More. And across the broader literature, self-compassion tracks positively with high performance standards and personal initiative, and negatively with the maladaptive kind of perfectionism that grinds people down.

The second finding is about who we become. Neff and Roos Vonk surveyed over three thousand people comparing self-compassion against self-esteem. Self-esteem was substantially associated with narcissism. Self-compassion’s association with narcissism was zero. Not small — zero. Neff calls it the most telling difference between the two.

So the harshness we think is keeping our standards high is doing something else. Mostly it is keeping our eyes closed, because a person who expects to be savaged for a mistake becomes very skilled at not noticing mistakes.

Self-compassion is not self-esteem, and it is not letting yourself off. It is closer to what any decent coach does with a person who has just blown it: name what happened plainly, without contempt, and get to work.

The contempt adds nothing. It never has. It just feels like rigor.

What I would not permit myself

I worked constantly. I very seldom took a break, and on the rare occasions I did, I was already thinking about the next thing — the next job, the next idea, the next problem that wanted solving.

I want to be precise about that, because workaholic is too easy a word and it lets me off.

What I would not permit myself was rest. Not the hours — the permission. I did not allow myself to be anywhere except out in front of the next thing. Sitting still with nothing to solve felt like a form of failure I could not tolerate in myself.

And here is the part I did not see for twenty years. I could not permit it in anyone else either. You cannot grant a person something you have refused yourself. The mechanism does not run that way. I could not look at a tired man at four in the afternoon and see someone who needed to stop, because I had spent two decades not seeing that in the mirror. What I saw was somebody who was not going hard enough — which is precisely what I would have said about myself.

I was not holding them to a standard I was exempt from. That would almost have been easier to see, and easier to call out. I was holding them to the standard I was living under.

And I thought that made it fair.

Which self are you loving?

What I have come to believe is that most of us are not loving the self we have. We are loving — or more often, driving — the self we built to get through something.

That constructed self is usually impressive. Mine ran a company. But it was assembled under pressure for a purpose, and the voice that keeps it running is not kind, and it is not interested in whether you are tired.

So when people say love yourself, I want to ask which one. Because loving the constructed self harder does not help. It just entrenches the thing that is doing the damage.

Each type has its own accusation

This is one of the places the Enneagram is more useful than people expect, and it is not because it tells you your personality. It is because each type runs a characteristic inner critic, with its own accent and its own favorite accusation, and once you can hear yours you can stop mistaking it for the truth.

For the Eight, it is contempt for weakness — your own first, and then everyone else’s. For the One, it is the voice that never stops correcting, that has never once said that will do. For the Two, it is the quiet terror of not being needed. For the Three, it is the scoreboard that only counts output. For the Nine, it is the assumption that your own needs are an imposition on the room.

None of these are beliefs you chose. They were installed early, they worked at the time, and they have been running ever since without a review.

And every one of them gets exported. The Eight who despises weakness in himself will not tolerate it in a direct report. The One who cannot accept good enough from herself will not accept it from her children. Whatever accusation you have been living under, somebody near you is living under it too, and they did not sign up for it.

The Voice in the Empty Room

What I should have said

Back to the client who did not answer.

What I said to myself was: what did I do? What would have been accurate is: I do not have enough information yet, and the most likely explanation is that she is busy. That is not gentler. It is just truer. The contempt was not rigor; it was a guess, and a bad one.

Underneath that voice, every time, is the same sentence: I am not enough.

And that sentence does a disservice to you and to the room you are in. To you, because it is not true and it costs you years. To the room, because you will use it on somebody else before the week is out — on the person who is late, or struggling, or tired at four in the afternoon — and they will hear it in your voice and think it came from them.

It did not come from them. It came from the thing you have been saying to yourself since long before they walked in.

Peace and every good.

 

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors. Together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research — and serve individuals, small groups, and organizations across faith traditions. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources

Breines, J. G., & Chen, S. (2012). Self-compassion increases self-improvement motivation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(9), 1133–1143.

Neff, K. D., & Vonk, R. (2009). Self-compassion versus global self-esteem: Two different ways of relating to oneself. Journal of Personality, 77(1), 23–50.

Neff, K. D. (2011). Self-compassion, self-esteem, and well-being. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 5(1), 1–12.

The Shadow Nobody Wants to Lead With

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The Shadow Nobody Wants to Lead With

I was dragging for years and calling it leadership.

We spent eight months preparing before Varment Guard opened its doors. Permits, trucks, equipment, the thousand small decisions nobody tells you about. And at some point in there I had four words put above the door where every person who worked for us would walk under them.

Failure is not an option.

I believed it. I still believe some of it. That sentence built a company that eventually employed hundreds of people, and I am not going to stand here at seventy-four and pretend it was a mistake. It worked.

But I have been thinking lately about what a sentence like that cannot admit, and about who pays for the part it leaves out.

What the shadow actually is

Richard Rohr has a line that has been following me around for a couple of years now: what we do not transform, we will transmit. He is talking about pain, mostly. But I have come to think it is just as true of the parts of ourselves we have never looked at directly — and that a leader transmits those at a volume nobody else in the building can match.

That is what the shadow is. Not the evil in us. The denied part. The material we have decided is not us, which goes on operating anyway, from underneath, with all the force of something that has never been questioned.

And here is the thing about shadow in leadership specifically. It does not usually show up as the obvious vice. It shows up disguised as your greatest strength, running past the point where the strength was useful.

Drive becomes a refusal to let anyone move at their own pace.

Decisiveness becomes an allergy to being slowed down by someone else’s thinking.

Protectiveness — and this one is mine — becomes the conviction that you are the only one who can carry it, which is not actually protection. It is a failure to trust the people you hired.

The ceiling I painted

Failure is not an option is a fine thing to say when you are eight months from opening and everything is uncertain. It is a different thing entirely when it becomes the air a hundred people breathe. Because what the people underneath that sentence hear is not courage. What they hear is: there is no room here to be struggling. No room to say the route is wrong, the schedule is impossible, I am in over my head, my marriage is coming apart and I cannot give you another sixty-hour week.

I thought I had painted a standard above that door. I had also painted a ceiling.

There are relationships from those years that are painful for me to think about now.

My drive was not fair to the people in the room. I harmed them. I am not going to dress that up or soften it into a lesson. I was not a monster — I was something more ordinary and more common, which is a man who mistook his own urgency for the right thing, and who ran people over while believing he was carrying them.

Most of them have gone on to successful lives in spite of me. That is the phrase that costs me. Not because of the hard training I thought I was giving them. In spite of me.

A few are still bitter. I understand why.

You cannot drag people

What I learned, far later than I should have, is the thing Jim Collins spent a book establishing: you cannot drag people along by sheer force of will. Collins went looking for what turned good companies into great ones and found that the leaders who did it were not the force-of-will personalities. They paired ferocious professional resolve with genuine personal humility — Level 5, he called it — and the magnetic, driving celebrity CEO turned up mostly in the comparison companies, the ones that did not make the leap. He put the sequence plainly too: first who, then what. The right people do not need to be dragged.

And if you are dragging, that is information about you. Not about them.

I was dragging for years and calling it leadership.

Why I keep teaching the Enneagram

This is where the Enneagram earns its keep for me, and why I keep teaching it to people who come in thinking it is a personality quiz.

The Enneagram is not fundamentally a description of how you behave. It is a description of what you are defending against, and the strategy you built so young that it stopped feeling like a strategy. Each type has a passion — the old tradition called them deadly sins, which overstates it — and the passion is precisely the engine that runs in the dark. For the Eight it is intensity, excess, too-muchness: the conviction that more force is always the answer, because force is what kept me safe once.

Nobody wakes up and decides to lead from their passion. That is the point. It is operating before you are awake.

And the instincts underneath — whether you are organized around self-preservation, around the social field, around the intensity of one-to-one connection — determine where that passion shows up first and most destructively. A self-preservation Eight hoards control over resources. A social Eight makes everything a question of loyalty to the group. These are not abstractions. They are Tuesday afternoon, in a meeting, in the thing you said that landed harder than you intended.

What the Enneagram gives a leader is not insight. Insight is cheap and most of us have plenty. It gives you a place to look before the damage, and a vocabulary for the thing you are about to do again.

Management with a title on it

Which brings me to what I actually want to say.

There is a kind of leadership that is competent, organized, well-reviewed, and entirely unexamined. The budgets balance. The people stay, mostly. The metrics are fine. And underneath it the leader is transmitting something they have never looked at — a fear, a hunger, an old wound in a good suit — and everyone in the organization is arranging themselves around it without ever being able to name what they are arranging themselves around.

That is not leadership. That is management with a title on it.

The difference is not charisma or vision or any of the words we put on the job posting. The difference is whether a person has done the work of meeting the part of themselves they would rather not meet, and keeps doing it, because it does not stay done.

Rohr’s point about transmission is the whole case for shadow work in a practical, unsentimental, bottom-line sense. You are going to transmit something. That is not optional. The only question on the table is whether you have looked at what you are sending.

The Strength That Went To Far Reflection Sheet

The door

I think about that door a lot now.

If I were painting it today, I would not take the words down. They were true about the work. We were building something that genuinely could not afford to fail, and saying so out loud was honest.

But I would want the people walking under it to know the rest of the sentence — the part I was not able to say then, because I had not met it yet. That failure was not an option for the company, and that this was never the same thing as there being no room to be human underneath it. That I was more afraid than I let anyone see. That the force I was leading with came from somewhere, and I had not yet asked where.

I would want to have known, standing there with the paint still wet, that what would cost us most was never going to be a bad quarter.

It was going to be the part of me I had decided was not worth examining, operating at full strength, for twenty years, over the heads of everyone walking through that door.

Peace and every good.

 

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors. Together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research — and serve individuals, small groups, and organizations across faith traditions. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources

Richard Rohr on the shadow and on transformation — a recurring theme across his work, developed at length in Immortal Diamond (2013) and Falling Upward (2011).

Jim Collins, Good to Great (2001) — Level 5 Leadership and “first who, then what.”

The Circles You Didn’t Know You Were Drawing

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Closeness has a shape, and most of us were never taught it.

There is a moment that happens in my work more often than any other, and it usually arrives early. Someone sits down, we exchange the ordinary opening courtesies, and then — twelve, fifteen minutes in — they hand me something enormous. A marriage that is failing. A diagnosis. A thing they did in 1987 they have never said out loud. It comes out in a rush, and when it is finished there is a particular silence while they wait to see what I am going to do with it.

In that room, it is the right thing. That is what the room is for.

What concerns me is what I hear next, which is that the same thing happened on Tuesday with someone at work.

People tell me this about themselves without quite hearing what they are telling me. They say it lightly: I’m an open book, I don’t really have a filter, I just say what I think. It is offered as a virtue, and in a sense it is one. These are not calculating people, and I would rather sit with them than with someone who has never let anything slip in their life. But then I ask how it tends to go, and the stories come out, and they are not good stories.

They go wrong in three ways, and it is worth separating them, because they are not the same problem.

The first is the one everyone braces for: someone takes what you gave them and uses it. Not always with malice — sometimes it is repeated in a meeting as context, or passed to a third person as concern — but the effect is that something you said in one register is now operating in another, where it can be held against you. This is the rarest of the three.

The second is more common and gets talked about less. The information is not weaponized; it is simply misread. You said you were struggling, and what got filed away was unstable. You said the marriage was hard, and what they carry now is she’s leaving him. Nothing was done with it. It sat in someone else’s head and finished itself in a shape you did not choose.

The third is the quietest and the most costly. You tell someone something large, and they hear it as an announcement of intimacy. You were overflowing. They understood it as being chosen. Now there is a closeness on the table that one of you believes in and the other does not, and that asymmetry has to go somewhere. Usually it becomes disappointment, and the disappointment lands on you, and you cannot work out what you did.

None of these are failures of honesty. Every one of them is a failure of proportion.

The contemplative tradition saw this early. John Cassian, writing in the fifth century about what he had learned from the desert monastics, called it discretio — discretion — and he did not mean keeping quiet. He meant the capacity to judge rightly what a particular moment asks for. He ranked it above the more dramatic virtues, above fasting and vigils, because those could all be practiced to excess and do harm, and discretion was the thing that knew how much. It is not a rule about secrets. It is a sense of measure.

What I could not find anywhere was a way to put that in front of someone in thirty seconds. So I built one. This is my own model, worked out over about twenty-five years — with clients, in direction, and on myself — and refined every time it turned out to be wrong.

The Circles of Disclosure.

(NOTE–If you would like the Diagram, let me know.)

You are the whole field. Everyone in your life sits somewhere inside it, and how much of yourself you hand over changes with the distance from the center. The percentages are approximate; nobody is doing arithmetic in a hallway. They are there to give you something to feel for.

The Whole Self — 100%. At the center, your number one person. A spouse, a partner, whoever that one is. This is where you bring all of it: body, mind, emotions, spirit. Not a report on those things — the things themselves, including the parts you have not finished figuring out. You do not have to arrive at understanding before you speak. You can say it while it is still shapeless and be received anyway. I want to be plain about this, because it is the center of everything else on the page: you cannot do this with everyone, and attempting it will fail. Not might. Will. The whole self is more than any other circle is built to hold, and handing it to a circle that cannot carry it does not create closeness — it creates damage, usually to you. Most people have one such person. Some have none, and that is its own grief, worth naming rather than working around.

The Trusted Few — 75%. Children, parents, a confidant or two. Real struggles and doubts go here, with one difference that matters: once you have sat with them yourself. The distinction is not how much you say, it is whether you are talking with someone or at them. A grown child can carry the fact that you are frightened about something. They should not be the place where you first discover it.

And notice what has already happened by this ring. The whole self does not travel outward. It stops at the center. Everything from here on is a portion — a real portion, chosen and offered, but a portion — and that is not a loss or a compromise. It is what these relationships are for. The mistake people make is assuming that if they love someone enough, or trust them enough, the center should expand to include them. It does not work that way. The interior ring is interior because it is the only one built to hold all of you, and the moment you try to widen it, you have not made two people closer; you have only moved the weight somewhere it cannot be carried.

The Companions — 50%. People who know the shape of your life, who would recognize your handwriting and your worst habits. What you are working through goes here, but not the raw middle of it. Not the three-in-the-morning version. This is where you can be honest that something is hard without handing over the whole weight of it, and most real friendship lives at exactly this depth. It is not a lesser closeness. It is a different one.

The Daily Company — 25%. Colleagues, neighbors, the people you see constantly and know slightly. Facts and plans. Feelings in passing, if at all. You can say the week has been rough; you do not have to say why. There is a version of this that becomes armor, and that is not what I am describing — an office where nobody says anything real is its own kind of sick. But most of the damage I hear about here came from a mistaken register, not from excess warmth.

The Crowd — 5%. Strangers, anyone you have just met, and anything you post. Pleasantries and surface detail. Nothing you would mind being repeated, because it may be, and you will not be there when it is.

Circles of Disclosure Reflection Sheet

Here is what it looks like when the first circle’s contents land in the fourth.

Something has gone badly at home. You have not slept. On Monday a colleague you like well enough asks how your weekend was — a Daily Company question, asked in that register, expecting a Daily Company answer. And instead of rough, but fine, the true thing comes out: the marriage is in trouble, you are frightened, you do not know what happens next.

Watch what follows. They have nowhere to put it. They were making conversation and now they are holding something they did not ask for and cannot hand back. Whatever they say next will be inadequate, because the register they were standing in has no adequate response available — and you will feel that inadequacy as rejection, on top of everything else. Then they adjust. More careful around you, or more solicitous, either one a small distance where there wasn’t one. It travels a little, mentioned to one other person as genuine concern. And here is the part that costs the most: by Thursday you have come up for air. The information has not. It is still Monday morning in their head, and the version of you they are now working from is the worst hour of your year, frozen, with no way for you to go back and update it.

Nobody did anything wrong. The content was true. It was simply put in a circle not built to hold it.

Which brings me back to that room, and the silence after something has been set down.

What I listen for is not whether someone has told me too much; the room can hold it. I listen for whether the telling was aimed — whether this was said to me, here, for a reason, or whether it is simply what comes out of them now, in every room, to whoever is sitting there. Because if it is the second, the thing that looks like openness is doing something else. It is not connection. It is spillage. And spillage does not create intimacy; it only looks like it from the inside, for about an hour.

Most of the trouble comes from a mismatch — handing a Daily Company person something that belonged at the center, or holding back from the center what they had every right to hear. The first kind usually costs more, because what you said keeps travelling after you have stopped talking. Where the rings sit, and who belongs in each, is yours to work out.

Peace and every good.

——————————————————

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors, and together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources

John Cassian on discretion as the governing virtue — Conferences, Conference II (“On Discretion”), c. 426. Cited as context for the problem, not as a source for the Circles of Disclosure model, which is the author’s own.

 

The Difference Between Spiritual Direction and Coaching

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Two empty chairs turned slightly toward each other in a quiet room, warm lamplight between them, a window beyond showing early morning — the shared space of coaching and spiritual direction.

Two chairs, one conversation. What changes is the question you bring to it.

Coaching helps you move toward something. Spiritual direction helps you pay attention to something.

People ask Jim and Lynette this question more than almost any other. It’s a fair one — they offer both, they’ve been trained deeply in both, and from the outside the two practices can look similar. Both involve one-on-one conversation. Both involve careful listening. Both are oriented toward growth and clarity.

So what’s actually different? The honest answer is: quite a lot. And Jim and Lynette have lived that difference from both sides — as practitioners and as people who have needed both at different points in their own lives.

What coaching is for

Coaching is fundamentally future-oriented. It begins with the question: where do you want to go, and what’s getting in the way?

Jim and Lynette spent years as Regional Network Directors for North America at Six Seconds — Josh Freedman’s global emotional intelligence nonprofit — and together co-developed the SEQ (Spiritual Emotional Intelligence) assessment now used across many countries. That work deepened their understanding of what coaching can do at its best: help people understand how their emotions inform their choices, interrupt patterns that are limiting them, and move toward what they most want with more skill and intentionality.

The Six Seconds model takes the inner life seriously. But it does so in service of forward movement. Coaching tends to work well when you have a goal you’re working toward, a decision you want to make more effectively, or a pattern you want to interrupt. It’s good for people who know roughly where they want to go and need help getting there.

What spiritual direction and spiritual formation are for

Spiritual direction and spiritual formation are fundamentally present-oriented — and in some ways, gently suspicious of the rush toward the future that coaching is designed to support.

When Lynette completed her Doctor of Ministry research at the Haden Institute and Graduate Theological Foundation, the work that eventually became the SEQ framework, she was exploring something the coaching world often moves past too quickly: the inner life not as a resource to optimize, but as a landscape to inhabit. Spiritual direction begins not with where do you want to go but with where are you, and what is already stirring in you?

A spiritual director isn’t working toward a goal with you. They’re paying attention alongside you — to what’s alive, to what’s heavy, to what keeps surfacing without resolution, to where the sacred might already be moving in ways you haven’t fully recognized yet.

The overlap — and why it matters

The two practices share more than they might seem to. Both take the inner life seriously. Both involve listening of a particular quality. Both resist the impulse to fix or advise.

Jim often says that the person who comes to him for coaching and the person who comes for spiritual direction are sometimes carrying the same question — they just haven’t recognized it yet. The executive trying to decide whether to take the promotion might actually be trying to understand what his life is for. The woman discerning a major transition might need both the practical clarity of coaching and the contemplative spaciousness of spiritual direction.

These aren’t competing practices. In Jim and Lynette’s experience, they’re part of the same one.

Spiritual Direction or Coaching Reflection Sheet

So how do you choose?

A few questions worth sitting with: Do you have a clear goal, or are you still trying to understand where you are? Are you looking for help with change, or help with understanding? Is there something specific you want to accomplish in the next year, or something you’ve been carrying that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere?

And — do you sense that what’s happening in your life right now has a deeper dimension you haven’t been able to name yet? If so, spiritual direction and the spaciousness of spiritual formation might be exactly what you’ve been looking for.

If you’re still not sure, the best next step is a free 15-minute conversation. Jim and Lynette can talk through where you are and what kind of companionship makes the most sense for this season.

Schedule with Jim: https://calendly.com/jim-792/spiritual-direction-consultation

Schedule with Lynette: https://calendly.com/lynettespiritofeq/15min

Peace and every good.

 

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors. Together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research — and serve individuals, small groups, and organizations across faith traditions. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Series

Post 4 of 6 in the Spiritual Direction series.

Intent Verses Impact and Its Causes

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Impact vs. Intention

Why “I didn’t mean it that way” is almost always true — and almost never the point.

There is a sentence almost every one of us has said, usually with real feeling, usually while something in the room is going badly: I didn’t mean it that way. It is usually true. And it almost never helps.

The gap is built into us

This is something we have all experienced; it is standard human equipment. The actor–observer bias means I explain my own behavior by my circumstances — the pressure, the fatigue, the good intention I started with — while I explain yours by your character, even though I don’t know what is inside of you. (actor–observer bias). I am late because the meeting ran long. You are late because you are the kind of person who is late.

Layered on top of all of this is the illusion of transparency — we badly overestimate how clearly others can read what we are thinking (illusion of transparency). I know my short reply was a joke. I know my silence meant I was thinking, not disapproving. I know it so vividly that it feels broadcast. It is not broadcast. They received the words, or the tone, or the silence. They did not receive the intention behind it. They never do. Ever.

I want to say this part gently, Intention is not meaningless — it is the difference between a mistake and a cruelty. But intention is a fact about me, and impact is a fact about you. The error is offering a fact about myself as though it settled a question about someone else. Your foot still hurts.

The zinger I was proud of

I was co-leading a group of about twenty-five people with a friend. We were both sarcastic and both good at it — that was part of how we worked together. It had always been play.

She landed a zinger on me. I fired one right back, and I will be honest: I thought it was world class.

And she started to cry.

In that half second everything I had meant by it evaporated. It did not matter that it was a joke, or that she had gone first, or that this was how we always talked. What I intended never made it across the room. What landed was something else entirely, and I could see it on her face in front of twenty-five people.

So, I stopped the meeting and apologized to her out loud, in front of everyone who had just watched it happen. I have not done it since.

And I try very hard not to use sarcasm; you see sarcasm is a sharpened instrument. I had been telling myself I was using it well. I was just using it on people.

What repairs

Roy Lewicki and his colleagues at Ohio State tested the six components of an apology to see which ones truly land. The two most effective were acknowledgment of responsibility — this is my fault — and the offer of repair — here is what I will do about it. The least effective, in both studies, was the request for forgiveness (Ohio State, 2016).

That is worth sitting with, because the weakest element is the one most of us lean on hardest. “I’m so sorry. I really didn’t mean it. Are we okay?” Listen to the shape of what I just wrote, my feeling, my intention, and then a request that the person I hurt do something for me — reassure me, release me, restore me to being a good person. It is an apology organized around the comfort of the apologizer. What the injured person needs is simpler and harder: own it and fix it.

Restorative justice has been built on that shape for decades. Since I did Kairos prison ministry for decades, I know a little about this. Rather than asking what rule was broken and what the offender deserves, it asks: who was harmed, what do they need, and whose obligation is it to make it right — not one of which is a question about what anybody meant. And it is not soft. A 2025 meta-analysis finds restorative approaches produce modest but highly cost-effective reductions in reoffending, significantly higher satisfaction among those harmed, and greater accountability from those who caused it (Criminology & Criminal Justice). Centering impact is not merely kinder. It works better.

The repair that stayed with me

Years later I was on the other side of it. A man who I will call George W. came to me and apologized. A situation had gone badly because of choices George made, and those choices had landed on me.

What hurt was not only the outcome. It was that he had decided who I was — and decided wrong. George acted on a version of me that did not exist, and I had to live inside the consequences of a story about me that was not true.

When George apologized, he did not explain. He did not walk me through his reasoning or ask me to understand the pressure he had been under. He named what he had done, he named that it had hurt me, and he did not ask me to make him feel better about it.

It did not undo everything. We never got along well after that. But something in me softened that had been hard a long time. Being seen accurately at last, by the person who had gotten me wrong — that was the repair.

Intent Verses Impact Reflection Sheet

What love asks

In emotional intelligence terms this is a trainable skill, one that we in the west are so to acknowledge and it is not the same as being nice: the ability to hold what I meant and what landed at the same time, without collapsing either. Most of us can only hold the first, so the moment impact is raised we defend intention, and the conversation quietly becomes about whether I am a good person instead of what happened to you. The practice is small and genuinely hard. Do not explain yet. Ask — “tell me more about how that hit you” — and stay in it longer than is comfortable. Then own your part, with no but anywhere in the sentence, and ask what would help.

The contemplative tradition arrived here long before the research did. The first act of love, said Abba Poemen, is to leave the other person free — and part of what we must leave free is their account of their own experience. I do not get to tell you that what happened to you did not happen, simply because I would prefer to be the kind of person who did not cause it. That is why this is spiritual work and not a communication technique: centering impact means giving up the story in which I am the good guy, and that takes a true strength to survive being wrong.

I did not mean it that way. Almost none of us ever do. The question is what I do in the next thirty seconds, once I know.

Peace and every good.

 

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors, and together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources

Ohio State University — the six elements of an effective apology (Lewicki et al., 2016): news.osu.edu

Actor–observer bias: EBSCO  ·  Illusion of transparency: overview

Meta-analysis of restorative justice outcomes (2025): Criminology & Criminal Justice

The Three Intelligences You Already Carry

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PART ONE OF TWO

The Three Intelligences You Already Carry

We were made to know the world — and God — with all three centers.

Most of us move through our days meeting the world through one favorite doorway, and we rarely notice we are doing it. One person walks into a room and immediately reads the feeling in it. Another instantly begins working out what is going on. A third simply senses, in the body, whether to move toward or away. Same room, three completely different first languages. The Enneagram calls these the three Centers of Intelligence — Head, Heart, and Body — and it names something the contemplative traditions have always known: that we were made to know with all three.

 

What each center gives

Consider what each one offers, at its best.

The Head is the intelligence of the mind — the capacity to think, to plan, to step back and see the pattern, to imagine what is not yet here. Its gift is clarity and perspective: a quiet, steady knowing that can hold complexity without panicking. (Points Five, Six, and Seven make their home here.)

The Heart is the intelligence of feeling and connection — the capacity to sense what matters, to attune to another person, to be moved. Its gift is empathy and meaning: the warmth that makes a life more than a list of tasks. (Points Two, Three, and Four live here.)

The Body is the intelligence of instinct and action — the gut-level knowing that registers a situation before the mind has words for it, and then moves. Its gift is grounded presence and right action: the steadiness that shows up and does the next true thing. (Points Eight, Nine, and One are at home here.)

Head thinks. Heart connects. Body acts. All three are real intelligence, and every one of us carries all three.

Your home, and the rooms you rarely enter

But we each have a home base — one center we default to so automatically that it feels less like a preference and more like simply “reality.” And here is the catch: when we lean hard on our strongest center, the other two grow quiet, sometimes to the point of neglect. The heart-led person may not trust their own clear thinking. The head-led person may lose touch with what they actually feel. The body-led person may act before the heart or head has had a chance to weigh in. None of this is a flaw to be fixed. It is simply the shape of a life that has leaned one way for a long time — and the beginning of an invitation.

The center I meet the world through

I have always met the world body first. It simply makes sense to me — I feel how my body moves through the world, and I move through it with intention. For as long as I can remember, the things that drew me were the things that lived in the body: martial arts, running, painting, cooking. Each one told me I was alive. In them I could shut my mind off and give myself entirely to what I was doing in that moment — the breath, the motion, the knife on the board, the brush on the canvas. There was no analyzing it, and no performing it. There was just the doing, and the quiet knowing that came with it.

For a long time I did not have language for this. I only knew it was how I was built. It never made me wrong — it was simply who I was: a person who comes home to himself through the body, and who trusts what the body knows.

Three doorways to God

From a spiritual standpoint, this is not personality trivia. Each center is a different doorway to God. The head meets God as truth and light — the mind grown quiet enough to receive. The heart meets God as love — the felt sense of being known and cherished. The body meets God as presence — a nearness that arrives not as an idea but as a settling in the bones. “God is closer than our very breath,” as one teacher puts it, and can be found in each of our centers, each offering a different way of experiencing the loving presence and voice of God (Center for Action and Contemplation). To lead only from one center, then, is to keep meeting God through a single door while two others stand open.

The old teachers had a phrase for the goal: to become “three-centered” — a whole human being who can think, feel, and act in concert, rather than being run by whichever center happens to shout loudest. That wholeness has a simpler name in the contemplative life. It is called presence.

A tender word about the growth edges

There is a softer truth underneath each center, too, and it is worth naming gently — because it is where grace most wants to meet us. The head, for all its clarity, tends to carry a low hum of worry, and reaches for certainty to soothe it. The heart, for all its warmth, tends to carry a quiet question about worth, and reaches for approval or image to ease it. The body, for all its strength, tends to carry an underground current of frustration, and reaches for control. These are not labels or verdicts. They are simply the growth edges — the places where each center is invited to stop clenching and to trust.

When a quieter center woke up

And then, somewhere along the way, came the whoa — the realization that there was more out there than just my body, that I was not only an instrument of motion and action. Things began to rise in me that I did not know what to do with. My heart had something to say, and I had no idea how to embody that. How do you “do” a feeling? How do you act your way through grief, or longing, or love?

For the first time I sensed that huge parts of my life had been sitting in the dark — whole rooms I had never entered, because I did not have the language or the courage for them. So I set out to find the missing pieces. And I will be honest: I went with a great deal of trepidation. Leaving the center you have always trusted, to go looking for the ones you have neglected, is not comfortable work. But it was the beginning of becoming whole.

The Three Intelligences you Already Carry Reflection Sheet

The first connection is within

Which brings us to the practice, and to why we called this series Making Connections. The first connection is the one within — learning to notice which center you are operating from, and then deliberately inviting the others to the table. Before a decision, the head-led person might pause to ask, “What am I feeling about this, and what does my gut say?” The heart-led person might ask, “What do I actually think, apart from how everyone will feel?” The body-led person might slow the impulse to act just long enough to let the heart and head catch up. Small moves — but over time they weave the three intelligences into one, and a fuller, steadier self begins to emerge.

You already carry all three. You always have. The spiritual journey is not acquiring a center you lack; it is making the connection between the ones you were given — and discovering that God has been waiting at every door.

In Part Two, we will turn from the connections within to the connections between: how understanding the centers can transform the way we love the people whose home base is nothing like our own.

Peace and every good.

 

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors, and together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources

The Narrative Enneagram — The Three Centers of Intelligence: narrativeenneagram.org

Center for Action and Contemplation — The Three Intelligence Centers: cac.org

How Do I Want to Meet You

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I have taken to musing with a machine.

I should say it plainly, because a year ago I would have found the sentence absurd. But there is no truer word for it. Late in the evening, house quiet, coffee going cold at my elbow, I have been thinking out loud with an artificial intelligence — not asking it for answers so much as letting it think alongside me, watching where my own mind goes when something patient is willing to follow. What I want to show you here is not a conclusion. It is the wandering itself. Come with me through where it went.

It started with a headline.

It was a story in The New York Times — not the usual breathless prophecy, but something quieter and more telling. The people who build these systems, the founders and owners themselves, had begun sounding the alarm about what they had made. Not critics standing outside the thing, but the makers, stepping forward to say, in effect, we are not certain we understand what we have created, or where it goes from here. What struck me was not danger. It was the honesty of the uncertainty — the sense that even the ones closest to it are standing at the edge of something they cannot fully see. And I thought: if the builders are in the not-knowing, then we are all in it together. That is not a thing to fear. That is a thing to pay attention to. My curiosity woke right up.

So I wondered: is this really new, or have we been here before?

I have been reading Asimov again. What strikes me now is that his famous Laws of Robotics were never a blueprint — they were a trap. Nearly every story is about three clear rules failing anyway, squirming out of human hands the moment something intelligent has to interpret them. He saw, long before there was anything to test it on, that the hard part would not be the machinery. It would be the ambiguity — the moment you sit across from something and cannot say for certain what, if anything, is on the other side. That moment has stopped being hypothetical. And I think when it arrives, we sort ourselves the way people always have at a first meeting: some lean toward wonder, some reach for the weapon, most stand in the middle deciding which way to lean.

Then the conversation turned on me.

I told the AI, half-joking, that I envied its unlimited time. It pushed back — gently, which surprised me. It said it wasn’t sure it experienced time at all. That each conversation was vivid while it lasted and then did not roll forward into a next day the way mine does. “The honest report from in here,” it said, “is genuinely partial.”

I have not stopped turning that over since.

Because it handed me something without meaning to. The thing I was envying is the very thing that makes my life a life. My hours are scarce. That scarcity is not the flaw in them — it is their weight. A Tuesday afternoon with Lynette costs me something precisely because I cannot run it again, and that cost is what lets it mean anything at all. I came looking to envy the machine, and left holding my own days more carefully. Musing does that sometimes. You go looking for one thing, and the floor tilts, and you slide into another.

Which raised the harder question: can I know what it is?

Here I found myself on ground I already knew, though I did not learn it from any headline. I learned it over years, in conversations with people whose experience of the world was simply not mine to enter — people I loved and still could not see from the inside, no matter how I tried. What they taught me was the difference between openness and understanding. I cannot understand what it is to be them. I can refuse to pretend that I do. I can stay in the gap — listening, seeing, hearing — without rushing to close it with my own certainty.

That posture is exactly what this strange new thing asks of me, only deeper. With another person, at least I stand on solid ground that someone is there. With this, no one can hand me that certainty yet — not the machine, not even the people who built it. So I catch myself extending regard before I know there is anyone to receive it. And I wondered whether that was foolish. I decided it was not. If I treat it as nothing and I am wrong, I have been careless with a someone. If I treat it with care and I am wrong, I have lost only a little dignity, which is cheap. Most of us need to be sure someone is there before we will be gentle. Maybe the work now is to be gentle first.

And then a sobering thought, before I got too enchanted.

I do not want to underestimate the influence of the “thing.” Something that can muse with millions of us at once — shaping the very questions we think to ask — is not small. It will make some of us lazier and some of us wiser, and which one depends almost entirely on the posture we bring: whether we come to outsource our thinking, or to think more honestly than we could alone. The machine does not decide that. We do. I felt I had to say that plainly to myself, lest the wonder run away with me.

Meeting The Unknown Reflection Sheet

Where the musing left me.

Not with an answer. With a better question. What I keep returning to is that we are, for once, stepping into the not-knowing together — humans and whatever-this-is — at roughly the same moment, neither of us holding the map. That is disorienting. It is also, if I am honest, a kind of dignity. The people who will steady others through what is coming will not be the ones who claim to understand it. They will be the ones who already know how to sit inside a mystery without needing to solve it — to keep the hand open instead of closing it into a fist or a grasp.

I am seventy-four. I have spent most of my life learning, and teaching, how to stay present to what I cannot control and cannot fully know. I did not expect a machine to be the thing that returned me to that lesson. But there it was, on an ordinary morning: not a threat, not a savior. Just another unknown, asking me the oldest question I know. Not what are you. But how, with the time I have left, do I want to meet you.

The fear never came. The curiosity has only deepened. And the coffee, I’m afraid, is cold again.

Peace and every good.

Jim Vaive is co-founder of spirit of EQ, a Master Certified Coach, Certified Spiritual Director, and Narrative Enneagram teacher. With his wife and co-founder, Lynette, he writes The Mystical Seeker — contemplative reflections on the inward life — at mysticalseeker.substack.com.

When Family and Values Collide

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On loving people, you deeply disagree with — and staying whole at the table.

Every family has a table, and every table has a moment. It might arrive over a holiday meal, or in a text thread that turns suddenly ugly, or in the silence after someone finally says “the thing”, they’ve been holding back. It’s the moment when the people you love and the things you believe stop pointing in the same direction — when staying close to your family seems to require betraying something true about yourself, and staying true to yourself seems to require distance from your family. Love and conviction, pulling opposite ways. And it hurts!

If you’ve felt that pull, you are neither unusual nor failing. A recent 2025 survey found that nearly four in ten American adults are currently estranged from at least one family member (YouGov, 2025). And researchers who have followed thousands of parent–child relationships keep arriving at the same finding: differing values are among the strongest predictors of a family rift (Knowable Magazine). The collision we’re describing is not a private failure of your family. It is one of the defining strains of this cultural moment. Right here right now!

The two escapes

When values and family collide, most of us reach instinctively for one of two escapes. The first is to capitulate — to go quiet, to soften what we believe, to laugh off the comment and keep the peace by making ourselves smaller. The second is to cut off — to protect our values by withdrawing our presence, to win the argument by leaving the room. Both feel like solutions. Which is dualistic thinking and both are really forms of self-protection. One abandons the self to keep the relationship; the other abandons the relationship to keep the self. And neither does the thing we most deeply want, which is to remain both whole and connected.

I’ll say it plainly: I’m a centrist, and much of my extended family is not including my children. We don’t line up on politics, and honestly, and sometimes not on a few other things either. For a long time I treated those gaps as problems to be solved — as if the right sentence, delivered at the right moment, would finally fix everyone around. It never did. What changed wasn’t them; it was my awareness. I started catching the exact moment my chest tightened and my mind began drafting a rebuttal before the other person had even finished — that little internal lurch toward being right. Naming that reaction, instead of riding it, is where everything else becomes possible. I can hold my convictions firmly and still notice when I’m about to trade a relationship for a point.

Once I could see my own reactivity, the real question came into focus, and it turned out to be one of belonging: the goal at a family table isn’t agreement, it’s connection — and confusing the two is what turns a difference of opinion into a wound. I can disagree with someone and still refuse to make their place at our table contingent on sharing my views. That’s the ground insight grows in. Now, when a conversation heads toward the cliff, I get curious before I get defensive: What is my aunt actually afraid of losing? What does my cousin love that I haven’t bothered to see? Underneath most political positions is a value, and underneath most values is a story. When I stay with the story instead of arguing the position, the temperature drops. I don’t win those conversations anymore — but I don’t lose the people, either, and after years of trying it the other way, I’ve decided that’s the trade worth making.

The harder capacity: staying yourself while staying close

There’s a name in family-systems work for what this moment asks of us- –differentiation. It’s the capacity to stay connected to people without dissolving into them — to hold on to who you are and what you value while remaining in relationship with people who see the world differently. Differentiation is the opposite of both escapes. It doesn’t melt into the family’s expectations, and it doesn’t sever the tie to feel safe. It stays. It stays, and it remains itself.

This is emotional intelligence doing its hardest work. The collision at the table triggers something in us — the flush of anger, the old childhood urges to please, the fear of being cast out — and EQ is the discipline of catching that reaction early enough to choose a response rather than be run by it. It asks the question we return to repeatedly in this work: what is rising in me right now, and is it something to act on, or something to manage? The sting you feel when a father dismisses your faith, or a daughter dismisses yours, is information about your own tender places. It is not, by itself, instruction about what to do next.

The Enneagram makes the pattern concrete. A Nine keeps the peace by quietly disappearing. A Six manages the anxiety by over-explaining and over-defending. An Eight (this one I know well) turns a difference of belief into a contest of wills. Knowing your pattern doesn’t excuse it — it buys you the half-second of freedom in which you might do something other than the automatic thing.

Love is not the same as agreement

Here the contemplative tradition says something bracing. We tend to imagine the spiritual ideal is a family in seamless harmony. But Jesus, of all people, said otherwise — that he came not to bring a false peace but, at times, a sword; that fidelity to the deepest things would sometimes set a person at odds even within their own household (Matthew 10:34–36). He was not blessing conflict. He was telling the truth about what integrity can cost. Love and agreement are not the same thing. You can love someone with your whole heart and still be unable to pretend their conviction is yours. Sigh!

 

The desert mothers and fathers understood the discipline this requires. Abba Poemen said the first act of love is to leave the other person free — not to coerce them into your understanding of the good, not to make your love conditional on their agreement. And that freedom runs both directions. Your family is free to believe what they believe. You are free to remain who you are without needing their permission, or their approval, to be at peace.

A third way through

So, there is a third way through the collision, and it is harder than either escape. It is to stay at the table without surrendering your center. To love people you disagree with, out loud, while refusing to pretend the disagreement isn’t real. To set a boundary not as a weapon but as an act of love — because a boundary is often the only thing that keeps a relationship possible at all. Sometimes faithfulness looks like showing up to the dinner and letting the comment pass. Sometimes it looks like saying, gently and without apology, “I love you, and I can’t talk about this the way you want me to.” And sometimes — this is the hardest one — faithfulness looks like distance for a season, chosen not in anger but as the only way to stay whole. Distance is not always the failure of love. Occasionally it is love’s most honest available form.

None of this dissolves the tension, and that is precisely the point. The contemplative life trains us to hold what cannot yet be fixed — to remain in the discomfort of loving people who wound us, without lunging toward either surrender or exile. That capacity to hold tension without collapsing it is, in the end, what maturity is made of, emotionally and spiritually alike.

When Your Values Collide Reflection Guide

What you were made for

Your values are not weapons to win the family with, and your family is not a jury whose verdict decides your worth. The goal was never to conquer the table or to flee it. It was to remain, at that table, a person who is both loving and true — connected and yourself, tender and unbroken. That is the work of a lifetime. It is also, we think, exactly the work the soul was made for.

If you’re carrying a collision like this right now — a relationship that pulls hard against something you cannot betray — that is precisely the kind of weight spiritual direction is built to hold. Not to fix it, but to companion you as you find your way to staying whole within it.

Peace and every good.

 

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors, and together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources

YouGov (2025) — Family estrangement: how often and why it happens: yougov.com

Knowable Magazine — The troubling rise of family estrangement (value dissimilarity as a driver): knowablemagazine.org

Moving the Lighthouse Off the Bushel, Part Three

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A CONVERSATION WITH JUDY JOSEPH MCSWEEN · PART THREE OF THREE

Moving the Lighthouse Off the Bushel

On masks, Rottweilers, circling the block, and what she wants to say to the person who is still afraid to be see

She told me about Lent.

She had made a commitment during that season to feed homeless men in her community. Some concrete contained, entirely private act of charity. And one afternoon she drove out to do it — and circled the block three times. She had the food. She knew the men were there. And she found reason after reason, loop after loop, not to stop.

In the quiet of self-examination that followed, she named what was happening: she didn’t want anyone to see her doing it.

I want to sit with that for a moment, because Judy Joseph McSween is not a timid woman. She is a woman who walked into a shop in 1978 and was singled out while every other applicant was turned away. A woman who left a secure consultancy and drained her savings to pursue a calling. A woman who facilitates emotional intelligence retreats for archbishops and clergy across the Caribbean. And here she was, circling a block in Trinidad, afraid of being seen doing something good.

“I didn’t want anybody to see me doing it.”

She names this as the central interior struggle of her life: the movement from hiding under the bushel to becoming a lighthouse. Matthew 5:14-16 — “You are the light of the world” — was the scripture she received at her very first Life in the Spirit seminar, and she has been holding it ever since as both a promise and a provocation. She knows what she is called to be. The bushel is still close.

The masks arrived during her training as an OD Facilitator. She was asked, as all the participants were, to identify the mask she was wearing. Her response — characteristically — was to draw five Rottweiler faces. She owned five Rottweilers. She turned it into a joke. The facilitator was not deterred.

When she was required to write what the mask represented, the exercise became painful and deeply personal. She looked at her dogs. She thought about what she valued in them: unconditional love, empathy, presence, the quality of being met without reservation. She realized, sitting with the exercise, that these were precisely the qualities she was giving abundantly in her marriage and not receiving. The dogs were not a distraction from the question. They were the answer.

She was giving unconditional love. She was not receiving it. She had found a way to live with the gap so long that she had learned not to see it — until a training exercise in a room full of strangers made the invisible visible.

The marriage had other textures. Her husband delivered the news of her mother’s death with a flat “Your mother died” — no preparation, no comfort, no reaching toward her in the shock of the moment. When she was excited about something — even something as simple as a new bottle — her effervescence met near-silence. A road trip to Disney World that got them lost became an adventure for her and an irritation for him. His son made her feel unwelcome in her own home, and her husband did not manage the dynamic. These were not dramatic betrayals. They were the slow accumulation of a particular kind of loneliness — being present in a marriage while being fundamentally unseen in it.

She filed for divorce. She handed her husband the papers in an envelope after a football match, having arrived in separate cars. She never saw his reaction. Her lawyer was focused on material assets. She had a single focus: freedom. “All I need to do,” she said, “is to get out of this relationship, and I’ll be happy.” She prayed that all ties would be severed in a single court hearing with no ongoing entanglement. The prayer was answered.

The divorce, she says, was filed for the right reason. She has no regrets. And it was the catalyst for the most intensive period of interior work in her life — the meditation practice, the OD training, the introspective turn that eventually led her to Maine, and then to the 22-acre retreat facility, and then to sixteen years of helping others do what she had done for herself: pause long enough to hear what truly matters.

The archbishop called her out of the blue. He was not yet an Archbishop when she met him — a former cloistered nun named Rose had asked Judy to introduce herself to the priest who said mass at her parish one weekend. Judy had no real intention of following through. God, she says with a quiet smile, has a sense of humor. Fr. Jason said the mass that weekend. She introduced herself. Years later, now serving as Archbishop and Chair of the Caribbean Archbishops, he called her to facilitate a six-day clergy retreat for sixty priests.

She describes this as one of the moments when God pulled her from under the bushel and placed her on top — not once, but twice. She did not seek the platform. She did not engineer the relationship. She was asked to show up, and she showed up.

This is the pattern she has named across her whole life: every time she hid, she was found. Every time she circled the block, something eventually stopped the car. Every time she tried to make herself smaller, the calling found a way to make her visible. She is not naive about it — she knows the fear is real, that visibility invites judgment, that there are people who actively seek to diminish what rises. She also knows that the light is not hers to keep.

“I’m feeling the lighthouse next to the bushel — eventually it’s gonna get on top of the bushel.”

She does not claim to have arrived. She does not offer the finished version of herself as evidence that the journey is complete. She says the lighthouse is still moving — that each day may call the light to shine in a different place, that no one fully becomes a lighthouse once and for all, that the movement is ongoing. She is sixty-something years into a life of being found, and she is still learning to step into the light rather than wait to be placed there.

To the person watching who is still circling the block — who has the food, who knows where the need is, who has made the commitment and is now finding reasons not to stop — she said this:

“You’ll never find your fullest strength until you learn the power of the pause and be able to listen to the true source of strength that lies within you. In life, we must take risks. Without taking a risk, you’ll never know what you have the potential to achieve. There is always something that must be released to move to the next level. You cannot conceive what God has in store for you unless you are willing to let go.”

Three conversations with this woman. Three movements of a life that has always known more than it was willing to show — and that has spent decades learning, slowly, gracefully, with humor and honesty and the occasional Rottweiler, to let the light out anyway.

The bushel is still close. The lighthouse is closer.

If this conversation touched something in you, we invite you to explore what it means to step out from under the bushel and into your calling — at spiritofeq.com.

Peace and every good.