Life Reflections from a World Class Executive Coach

In celebration of the New Year, A Dose of Zen brings you this beautiful interview on life reflections.

Chad Stose is not your typical executive coach. His path has been guided by his humble and isolating upbringing, self-exploration, curiosity and following his intuition across the United States, eventually landing him in the San Francisco Bay area. He’s devoted most of his life, both personally and professionally, to work that focuses on human development. His approach is thoughtfully crafted and based on a holistic process that works with the mind, body and emotions. Here, Chad shares his perspective on change, growth and overcoming stigma and fear.

Casie: Let’s start with you sharing a bit about your work with A Dose of Zen readers.

Chad: I am an executive coach focused on leadership development and helping others find the best part of themselves to lead more fulfilling lives. While I have the opportunity to work with some of the biggest companies in the world, I also have the unique pleasure of working with individuals, like yourself, who are high performers and who really want to contribute back to the world.

Casie: I started looking for specific opportunities to fuel my curiosity and my desire for more purpose and meaning in the work that I do. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to work with you. You challenged my thinking, helped get me out of my (routine) comfort zone and truly embrace my curiosity and growth mindset. The result is more than I could have ever imagined.

How It All Started – Search and You Shall Find

Casie: How did you get started on this path?

Chad: Well, in large part, it was me just choosing what felt right. I started a PhD program right out of undergrad (1997) in Washington State, and it didn’t feel right. I didn’t know what to do, so I moved back to my hometown in Ohio and shifted my focus to a Master’s in Cultural Studies. Upon completion of the program, I knew, again, that it didn’t feel right. It became this process of elimination. During graduate school, I got very involved in yoga and, after teaching it for about five years, I realized that this was not enough for me either.

Casie: During your process of elimination, was there a specific event that propelled you in a new direction?

Chad: Yes. Currently, I have been meditating for 27 years, and I remember along the way I met three amazingly different women that happened to be executive coaches. I thought these women were interesting and seem to not only be devoted to their meditation practice, but they had a way of being in the world that seemed to be more expressive of the wisdom that was coming from the (meditation) practice itself. I thought they were fascinating, and I was drawn to their energy. I would take them out for coffee or tea and we’d just talk about their journeys and experiences. These conversations really changed things for me.

While living in San Francisco and teaching yoga, one of my students was an executive coach for Apple. She facilitated the Apple team responsible for creating the Apple Store. She took me out to dinner one night after yoga, knowing I was interested in learning more about coaching. She explained that there was a new cohort forming at New Ventures West Coaching School and she was confident that I’d really resonate with the program. The program was due to start in two weeks and I took the leap while scrambling to meet the prerequisite course. In that moment, it all felt right.

Casie: Meditation is a huge part of your practice both personally and professionally. Can you elaborate more on this?

Chad: When I was 18 years old and in college, a friend invited me to a meditation group and I went. I remember how amazingly impossible it was to sit still, and this drove me crazy. I was also 18 and I think that made it even harder. At the same time, there was something about the teacher and his presence that I found remarkable. He was supremely present. I’d never met anyone like him before. His name is Marvin G. Belzer, now Associate Director of UCLA’s Mindful Awareness and Research Center (MARC).

Over time, my initial foray into meditation was just going to see his teaching once a week. Yet, my practice outside of the class was virtually non-existent. In the beginning, I was a passive practitioner. Yet, as I grew into my practice, I started to appreciate him more and trust the process more too.

It wasn’t until years later when my meditation and yoga practices collided that I knew the pieces had fallen into place for me. It all felt right. I was able to still my mind and my body. It became more comfortable.  I could sit for longer periods of time, without being distracted, and I started getting more out of it personally. This teacher was a grounding force for me. He was so amazing. He suggested that I attend a silent retreat and lent me his car for 10 days to ease the burden. It’s like he knew I needed this retreat and removed the one barrier, my shitty car, for me to make the trip from Toledo to Chicago.

I participated in the 10-day silent retreat and my epiphany happened around day eight when, with my mind, I dissolved my body. I had a revelation that paralleled what quantum physics says about matter – most of what we think of as solid is actually empty space. I actually experienced my body as that emptiness. From here, I got very interested in psychology and coaching allowed me to integrate my various studies.

Understanding Vulnerability and Psychological Safety

Casie: When you work with large clients, how do you get the leaders to feel comfortable opening up, digging deep and embracing vulnerability amongst their peers to create a positive work environment?

Chad: Great question. The process of getting a group of people to appreciate a growth experience together is to create a space where everyone feels safe and understood. A lot of my projects are around psychological safety.

For example, Google spent years studying team effectiveness and as a result concluded that successful teams share five common traits.

1. Psychological safety: Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed?
2. Dependability: Can we count on each other to do high quality work on time?
3. Structure & clarity: Are goals, roles, and execution plans on our team clear?
4. Meaning of work: Are we working on something that is personally important for each of us?
5. Impact of work: Do we fundamentally believe that the work we’re doing matters?

In a nutshell, psychological safety can show up in so many ways and can also be violated in many ways.

Obvious examples are the collective set of behaviors that led to the MeToo movement. Then there are the more passive-aggressive things that all too frequently happen in an office environment such as not feeling free to speak your mind without fear of repercussion.

Here is another example that I see a lot with clients, especially high performers. High performers accomplish a lot and are respected for their work but often feel afraid to tell their boss when they have too much work. In these environments, bosses are often also workaholics. High performers fear pushback from their managers for sharing they have too much on their plate. This is psychologically unsafe.

Casie: How do you create this level of safety in a group setting, especially not knowing the history of the team?

Chad: Well, there are many ways, but it comes down to creating shared vulnerability. One of the most useful things to do, regardless of the topic you want to explore, is to get people to share openly in the group. In these moments, everyone will be able to see that there are many layers to vulnerability and in sharing these experiences they start to realize that we are all organized very differently as people – what’s safe for me could be unsafe for you. This allows teams to start flushing out the bigger picture of what this concept is, what the impact is, how to look for it and to see when it’s happening.

Reducing Reactivity

Casie: How do you establish trust using meditation?

Chad: Through meditation practice one of the things that happens for us is that we become less reactive. Normally, when we are reactive in social situations is when we get upset because we have our own interpretations of what has happened, our projections. What remains when reactivity is reduced is curiosity.

I think that is a genuine way to build trust with someone because it is so clear that you don’t have an agenda because you can be good at understanding who they are. People feel seen.

Casie: Have you had a pivotal moment in your life where you really felt seen?

Chad: Yes, the more articulate I get at my self-awareness and self-development work I can feel the emergent process of being seen by others and seeing myself.

When I was 28 years old and completing my yoga training in Massachusetts, I experienced an extraordinarily pivotal moment. It was at the end of a year-long program and I was traveling back and forth between cities for the week-long programs. For the graduation ceremony, we had to walk through this tunnel of love. This was 50 people, 25 on each side and people are always crying, but I had not cried yet. I stood at the end of the tunnel, friends on either side, teachers at the other end, and I suddenly just broke down. I was sobbing, it was intense. I was letting go of anger that stemmed from a childhood of being bullied.

Accepting Yourself in an Environment that Doesn’t Accept You

Casie: How did you find the courage to break away from the mold you were forced to fit in?

Chad: There are a couple of things that were unique to me. Growing up in Ohio, I never fit in socially or politically. Being gay was part of that, but I also had a deep sense of justice and a drive to evolve. I also had a strong need for more intellectual stimulus; more so than the people I grew up around could offer.

Casie: Did you think you were searching for yourself or just looking for new experiences at that time?

Chad: I found myself through the experiences of those impulses. It was an impulse to meet like-minded people, to connect, etc.

I found myself through the search and it wasn’t my intention to find myself. My intention was to be curious and learn. I wanted to see more, experience more. I didn’t have any direction growing up and would have liked to have had more direction. I think my parents did a fantastic job for the skills they had but I was resentful that they didn’t have more skills. It took me until my late 30’s to figure out how to have real direction.

Accepting Pain and Facing Fears

Casie: How did you accept your pain and fear in order to grow and become the coach you are today?

Chad: My personal growth process has been so rich and the struggle so real. It has made me well suited for the work that I do because I struggled so much to figure it out.

I realized there is pain and suffering in growth. You can choose to live within these emotions, with a closed heart. This is a safe and predictable option, but deep down the pain and suffering will still be there. You can also choose to live with an open heart and accept the pain and suffering. This path is uncertain. I’ve seen in my practice both personally and professionally that our fear convinces us that it is safe to live with a closed heart.

I was determined to grow and face my fears. In the beginning, I don’t think there was anything skillful about it. It was my blind determination along with a survival instinct to break away from beliefs that were holding me back.

Finding Balance Between Heart and Mind

Casie: How did you find the courage to break away from the mold knowing it may impact you and your relationships?

Chad: For me, it was not a single pivotal moment where I just woke up and realized it. I knew it from the beginning, I felt it. I had breakdowns all the time, even still. However, I think what’s happening during the breakdown is more of a breakup with ourselves. I can feel the conflict when my heart and mind are going in different directions. In the process of a meltdown, I can drop into what is more real and then integrate heart and mind again.

Casie: Does this give you peace or a reset?

Chad: It absolutely does. I can feel peace and have clarity. I think there is something amazing when you can experience something so deep: to learn, grow and move forward.

Pain is real, and it is something that you cannot run away from. You can’t run away from physical pain, but emotional pain you can, and people do it all the time. Yet, there is always a breaking point of how much emotional pain you are willing to tolerate. Or what you use to distract yourself from the pain no longer works. When that happens, we find something else to distract ourselves until it can no longer be ignored.

People spend a great deal of time and energy through defensive strategies, avoidance, and reactive strategies to not feel because when we do it is scary. This fear and pain often mean that we have built lives that are incongruent to who we truly are and there can be consequences of that. For a lot of people this can be a major jolt. For example, leaving a marriage, leaving a job and subsequent loss of financial security, all can lead to a huge sense of uncertainty. One of the most painful things to process is the lack of certainty.

Selfcare versus Tasking

Casie: An important part of your coaching methodology revolves around self-care. Can you elaborate on the importance of self-care personally and professionally?

Chad: There is more pressure than ever before to constantly deliver top results and be available at any and all cost, including our health and happiness – there is a stigma around self-care. I think that’s gross negligence of values.

Casie:  One of first questions you asked me during almost all our coaching sessions was – How is your self-care? What have you done for yourself lately? This question always caught me off guard. In fact, I don’t believe I had ever been asked that question. And in hindsight, I appreciated it so much.

Casie: How can self-care provide value to others in a professional sense?

Chad: Without self-care, we end up trying to solve our problems by tasking. And then the entire way we see the world and the way the world shows up for us in a way that makes us task masters. This is not fulfilling. It just creates another item on a to-do list and life is more than a to-do list. To truly understand what makes our lives fulfilling, we need to be able to ask ourselves the hard questions. Part of it is being able to be functional in our lives, in our bodies and in our emotions. This is healthy. Being emotionally and physically healthy allows us to do things and feel good about doing things.

For example, when I work with executive leaders, one of the biggest areas in which they are lacking is self-care. And a lot of teams don’t have the courage to tell their boss that they feel overworked because of guilt or loss of identity.

However, that is not always the case. For example, I am currently working with a top global company and one of their Senior Vice Presidents. This leader takes their self-care very seriously and it shows. They are respected by their team. The level of trust is high on their team as is the team’s productivity. Their team knows that they take care of themselves and they support their team members taking care of themselves too.

Casie: So, this Senior Leader promotes self-care within their team and the company?

Chad: Yes, they do. They encourage people to do what they need to do to be in their fullest sense of self and not just an empty shell of a worker. This leader also understands they get better work output from their direct reports if they are in a good place, emotionally and physically. They are all thriving together.

Making the Intangible Tangible

Casie: Being a sought-after coach in Silicon Valley, how do you find the common ground between your coaching philosophy (holistic and nurturing) and Silicon Valleys’ constant push for more?

Chad: I promote human development. Human development, as rooted in Western and Eastern psychology, makes clear that we can only become so great without integrating all parts of our lives. When we don’t, we are like dogs chained to a tree – we may have control over a 10-foot radius, but beyond that we have none. Beyond this 10-foot radius of perceived control there is much need for capacity building.

An example would be to pull back the veil and actually see all the ego behind working too much. Americans work more than medieval peasants. Europeans laugh at Americans because of this. Research shows that employees working over 40 hours a week have a diminishing return on the quality and quantity of the work output you get from employees. Why don’t we just work more humane hours and take more vacation?

Sometimes I feel like I am swimming upstream. However, I strongly believe that if you can give people an experience to feel and understand the role that human development can play in business, then companies get it.

I mentioned a two-year long study that Google published a few years ago to understand what made their high performing teams exceptional. The common ingredient was psychological safety.

Casie: How does your coaching leverage everyone’s strengths to help companies move forward?

Chad: To really understand the mindset of people who have flourished in other environments, you need to be willing to look at all aspects of success and failure. Companies can care about their employees’ well-being and still have conversations specific to their bottom line and profits. It’s the integration of the input and output of both the employee and the company where success happens. It is making the intangible, tangible. Happy people will do good work, interesting work that makes interesting products that a very interested public will want. In contrast, employees who are overworked and teams that experience breakdowns cannot achieve the same levels of results. So, focusing on self-care has a direct, positive impact on the bottom line.

Casie: You shared a beautiful abundance of personal and professional viewpoints from your experience. I think now more than ever your approach and your work with the mind, body and emotions is timely and very much needed to reconnect corporate culture with humanity. Thank you. It’s been riveting.

In closing, can you share 3 simple joys of your daily routine?

Chad: Absolutely:

1. My morning ritual of meditating and drinking tea.
2. Making a conscious effort to earnestly connect with my husband, Michael.
3. Exercise.

Currently, Chad is writing a book on brand and leadership with an expected release date of Spring 2020.

To learn more about Chad Stose and his coaching philosophy please visit his website.

*Photos courtesy of Chad Stose.