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COLIN BEAVAN

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The most energetic and helpful people
are those who are aligned with their whole
selves. Awake people thrive. Communities,
organizations and societies filled with
awake people also thrive.


The most energetic and helpful people
are those who are aligned with their whole
selves. Awake people thrive. Communities,
organizations and societies filled with
awake people also thrive.


Free Stuff! Get free my free How To Be Alive Workbook, free book chapters, and more by clicking here!


Free Stuff! Get free my free How To Be Alive Workbook, free book chapters, and more by clicking here!


Hi! Welcome! You’ve arrived at the part of my webpage where the marketing people might tell me I should kind of show off. The conventional thing to do in this space would be to go on about the crazily innovative clients in my coaching and group work practice or the movie I starred in or my famous environmental project or the over one hundred thousand books I’ve sold or how I ran for Congress or the many tens of thousands of people who have been through my lifestyle programs or the colleges I’ve taught at or the number of times I’ve been featured in the New York Times and NPR and on TV or my international speaking or the number of foundations that have supported my work or the Zen tradition I teach in.

Those things are cool to know, especially if you want to justify to yourself or your boss or board why you should hire me or publish me or interview me. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to work with you (and you can find a more formal biography and CV here), but really, I want to connect, especially if you share my questions and want to be in conversation about what really makes for good lives, good organizations and good societies. That’s why I’m going with authenticity instead of accomplishments on this page.



I am obsessed with 3 things:

1. Living an authentic, purposeful life that has a meaningful impact on the world
2. Helping other people to do the same
3. Creating a world where the freedom to find that kind of human dignity is available to everyone.

Hence, I write, speak, coach, consult and am a social activist.

coaching

speaking

consulting



When it comes to my life, here are the kind of thoughts that arise: I want to prioritize friendships and companionship. I want my spiritual life and self-development and community never to get short shrift. Loving my daughter endlessly, I want her to be happy and safe. I want to use the skills and talents that make me go into a flow state and not get lost in busy work and being hectic. I want to have fun and be in love. I want to experience so much and feel creative. And I really want to do all this while addressing myself to the many kinds of suffering I see in the world– I want meaning and purpose.

In fact, it turns out that I want those things so much that I have quit pretty much everything that stands in their way. I quit a teenage addiction to alcohol and drugs. I quit trying to get rich through an unfulfilling career as a PhD engineer. I quit being bored in my life as the director of a public relations firm that didn’t use my talents. I quit a career as a magazine writer that won me nothing but status. I quit writing history books that didn’t address the things I really cared about in the world.

Meanwhile, I have studied, trained, thought, written books, given talks, and been in movies about what actually makes for the good life I’ve been looking for–and also about how we can make the good life available to everyone. My writing is about how we can all find the good life for ourselves and also how we can work for a world where the good life is available to everyone. In my coaching practice, I help individuals and groups find the good life. Through my consulting, I help organizations discover and align with their values and bring the good life to their customers, employees and stakeholders.



The Change-Maker’s Guide To Using “Vision Cards” To Create The Life And World You Want
Never Be Lonely Again: Build a Great Community, Part II
Choose The Romantic Partner Who Will Make The Best Ex

And as an activist, I promote, work towards, and write and speak about how societies can bring truly good lives to their people. There are many issues I care about but my actions and writing tend to be related to environmental justice, racial justice, and generally creating a world and society that prioritizes progress towards dignity over progress towards profits.

Through my writing, coaching, consulting and activism, I help people and groups of people to follow their own internal compasses in the hope that we can all concentrate on what really matters to us and our stakeholders, what dignifies us, and what creates a world that is safe and just enough that becoming fully human is an option available to everyone.

I do all this because–in balance with parenting and playing frisbee and meditating and being with friends and resting and having fun and appropriately choosing where I live and how I spend my time–it makes for the good life for me. Maybe I can help find the good life for you or the groups or organizations or societies you care about?

Maybe you’d like to start by reading my blog or signing up for my newsletters.


Want to join the many thousands of people receive my writing for free? All you have to do is sign up and I will send you an email when there is new stuff to read. You’ll get free tips on how people and organizations can live and operate in ways that feel purposeful and have a meaningful impact on the world.

Want to join the many thousands of people receive my writing for free? All you have to do is sign up and I will send you an email when there is new stuff to read. You’ll get free tips on how people and organizations can live and operate in ways that feel purposeful and have a meaningful impact on the world.

 

I found my spaghetti sauce jar. It's the reusable container I use as my to-go coffee cup and water bottle. Corny joke: My water bottle came with a free quart of spaghetti sauce. Anyway, I thought I'd lost it. Had spaghetti the other night just to get a new jar. I found it again and now I have two. Want one?

#Values #zerowaste #plasticfree #NoImpactMan #environment #caring #compassion
Response to the courage in a post by my friend @deliciousalex. #TrustWhoYouAre

Alex, I've been watching you making art and paintings. I'm not sure whether you strategized or just trusted. These turns our psyches force us to make... At least that is how I experience it--being forced. They are scary!! They don't make sense. And they aren't necessarily what we think we "want." I am writing a novel. That's not what I "want". I "want" another breakout non-fiction book that will add to my prestige and bring me more clients. But my body insists on working on the novel every day. So, at a certain stage, one can deaden oneself or enliven oneself. You seem to be in an enlivening place. I love to see that. I haven't seen you in a long while and you haven't told me so directly so it could be pure projection. But the evidence on social media seems to point in that direction. I hope my conclusions are right and that it is so good for you! Xoxo

#Repost @deliciousalex (but slightly shortened)
• • • • • •
2019, you have been a YEAR! Anyone else feelin’ that?? Stepping into this creative leadership space shook up my own creativity, productivity, upended my old definition of self-worth, and surprised me with fresh doses of Imposter Syndrome I didn’t expect....✨ Looking back over 2019... I caught my B!tch Bra!n asking “did I succeed this year? Is there “enough” to show for it?” There were no 6-Figure launches or massive events...✨ Ha! I see you, Ego! There were a steady stream of small shifts + opportunities + new kinds of clients that came my way. And I stayed the course with my painting + writing our next book, SO... it’s not like nothing happened! ✨ This was a planting year. A tending + working the soil year. I grew up on an old organic farm, so I know that things look quiet when actually the stage is being set for growth. ✨ We’ve planted seeds + now we are waiting. Tending. I beta-tested a lot of ideas + made subtle adjustments, committed to my own Success Energetic practices. ✨ It’s not super flashy, but it’s profoundly important. ✨  It’s about tuning into our unique truth + not squashing our instincts to try to gain outside validation. That’s where the MAGICK is ✨
We cling to our ideas of how thing should be and it stands in our way of working effectively with how things are. Return to not-knowing, our original home, also where heaven and hell both disappear. Then we can help our lives and the lives of others with tremendous energy. 
#Repost @kwanumzen
• • • • • •
"True confidence is completely accepting your not-knowing." Quote by Zen Master Bon Haeng. #zen #meditation #confidence #onlydontknow #noboundaries #kwanumzen
How's that for a #vegetarian Thanksgiving. A father/daughter hike in Harriman State Park.
#Repost @ecowithem_
• • • • • •
I’m in full Christmas mode. Two points on this ☝🏻As I said on my sketchy post the other day, making Christmas eco does, generally, require more time. When I look at my life in general (and Christmas specifically for this example) times where in the past I have made poopy choices 💩 have been when I’ve been rushed or stressed or both. That’s when you just grab whatever you can. You just need to get the job bloody done. This is what I like to call “Lizard Brain Buying” 🦎 🧠 💵. It’s when your thoughts step out of your Monkey Brain (the cortex), down through the limbic system (mammal brain) and into the full on lizard mode where you’re anxious and flicky and just focusing on survival 🦎. You don’t rationalise, you stress, you make quick (often questionable) decisions. So be that gorgeous primate and start now in sourcing local or handmade gifts, start searching through your vintage stores and op shops, start getting your craft on. ✌🏻 Secondly, I know lots of eco hoomans who get really angry about Christmas and the commercialisation of it. That’s fine of course but it’s not where or how I want to be. About 33 of the happiest memories in my memory cache happened at Christmas. Being with my family, watching my very cute mum absolutely FIZZING with excitement while she watched us unwrapping presents, Santa (aka my papa bear) always obliging by eating the cookies and drinking the sherry that we left out, that time my kiddies woke up and got so excited to find snow (icing sugar) sprinkled all through the house and reindeer hoof prints leading up to the tree, that that time my husband and me got the giggles because he couldn’t believe I sprinkled a substance that gets sticky when wet all through the house 🤦🏼‍♀️🤦🏼‍♂️. We don’t have to reject traditions and be the Grinch to be green - just shift the focus a bit. Reindeer rant over 🦌.
I love this. To self-actualize means to put down our ideas and opinions, which we treasure but which actually constrain us, and then we have the freedom to intuitively act in line with our Truth.... Read below. What do you think? 
#Repost @kwanumzen
• • • • • •
Deep down inside, each of us knows we have no idea what’s going on. We don’t know. We don’t know why we occupy this body. We don’t know when we are born, where we came from. Don’t know why we are on this planet. We don’t know. Nobody knows. So what we do very interestingly, is we pretend we know. Some people take it quite vigorously. They take on a set of beliefs. They are ready to fight over them or kill over them. Abuse other people over them. And that reinforces their beliefs. The question isn’t, "I need to figure this out." The question is actually here [pointing to his abdomen.] What am I? What is this? What is true nature? In asking this question we are opening ourselves up. Zen practices itself is actually a self actualization practice. It’s not dependent on anything else. It’s up to each one of us to self actualize. If deep down inside we don’t know, then really the self actualization is becoming completely comfortable with not knowing. That’s what human beings are. — Zen Master Bon Haeng (Photo by Sven Mahr.) #zen #dontknow #belief #truenature #selfactualization #humanbeing #kwanumzen
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