My Knowledge Fields

Philosophy

I draw on philosophy, and I keep coming back to it, because everything else grew out of it. Epistemology and the philosophy of science, for what we can know and how reliably.

It begins with Plato’s allegory of the cave, still the sharpest image for how much of what we take to be reality is shadow. Ethics, for the question of the good life, which lies underneath all Purpose work, and Aristotle above all, for whom excellence is not a single act but a disposition trained by practice until it becomes second nature. Deliberate practice rediscovered that two thousand years later.

From existential philosophy I took Nietzsche on self-overcoming, and especially the Stoics, above all Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius together with their interpretations by contemporary writers, for their very practical application: working with emotions rather than against them, virtue as something you train instead of profess, and the discipline of separating what I control from what I do not.

William James stands at the hinge where philosophy meets the science of the mind: he wrote on habit long before the field existed, and on attention. That still holds: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.”

Among the contemporary ones I would single out Iain McGilchrist, whose two-hemisphere theory genuinely rests on neurophysiology, and what follows from it: the two halves offer different kinds of attention, and which of them leads decides what a person is able to see at all.

Wisdom Traditions

Close to philosophy stand the wisdom traditions and spiritual systems. Western philosophy tends to put its weight on intellect and thinking. These traditions put theirs on direct experience, on what a practitioner observes in himself over years of practice.

I am less interested in their metaphysics than in their practice paths and training protocols, which I find unmatched in precision, depth and effectiveness, and which are therefore an important part of my work and my life.

I am drawn above all, though not only, to Yoga and Buddhism. Yoga for its completeness: a system that stayed open rather than doctrinal, and that takes in breath and body where most others stop at the mind. Buddhism for the most finely differentiated account of mental processes I know, and for a practice of working with them.

During my yoga studies and in the years since, I have worked through much of this literature and argued about it: the Vedas at the root and the Upanishads at their end, the six Darshanas that grew from them, above all Samkhya and Advaita Vedanta, and the Bhagavad Gita, which stands a little apart from all of it. Then Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, the practice manuals Hatha Yoga Pradipika and Gheranda Samhita, and tantric texts such as the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra.

This included the intersection with Western psychology: where the two connect, and where they part company, both in what they are ultimately aiming at and in how they understand the relation between consciousness and matter.

Psychology

I also draw significantly on psychology. Developmental psychology, for the nature of transitions. Personality research and individual differences, for self-worth, identity, self-concept and values. Motivation and volition research, for self-determination (Deci and Ryan), goal setting (Locke and Latham), self-efficacy (Bandura), willpower (Baumeister), self-regulation and the formation of habits (Wood), a field whose relevance for performance and change has rightly carried it into popular science, above all in James Clear’s Atomic Habits.

Beneath motivation lie belief systems: what someone holds to be true about himself and about the world sets the limit of what he will even attempt. The cognitive tradition works on it directly: Ellis and Beck on the core beliefs behind a reaction, Rotter on whether a person sees the cause of things in himself or outside, Kegan and Lahey on the hidden assumptions that keep a change from taking hold. Close to it, and maybe even more important, sit faith and trust: Erikson on basic trust as the first thing a life is built on, Fowler on how faith itself develops in stages.

The question of what a person can grow into leads to humanistic psychology: Rogers and above all Maslow, whose work is still reduced to a pyramid he never drew (it was put there by management consultants, a decade after he wrote). Maslow never proclaimed a strict hierarchy of needs, but the needs he described remain important, above all self-actualisation and, in his late work, the step beyond it, self-transcendence, set out properly today by Scott Barry Kaufman.

Out of it grew its empirical successor, positive psychology, for strengths, meaning, purpose and happiness: Seligman first, then Lyubomirsky on what actually raises well-being and what does not. And of course Viktor Frankl, who asked the question of meaning before all of them.

Where positive psychology asks what lets people flourish, performance psychology asks how they deliver under pressure, a field that grew largely out of sport. Loehr on managing energy rather than time, and on building character traits rather than mental resilience alone. Ericsson on deliberate practice. Beilock on why skilled people choke at the decisive moment. Gervais on how the fear of what others think holds even top performers back, and why the answer begins with a clear personal philosophy: one’s own purpose and values as the measure, rather than the approval of others.

This is also where Carol Dweck’s “Growth Mindset” and Angela Duckworth’s “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance” belong, highly instructive concepts, even if neither is fully verified scientifically. And especially flow states, the optimal state for performance, with Csíkszentmihályi as the pioneer. The field has gained new momentum since, as imaging and research into neuroplasticity have brought its neurophysiological correlates within reach.

Because most of my clients lead within organizations, work and organizational psychology matters as well, for leadership, teams, culture and change. Weick on sensemaking, how people make a situation intelligible before they act. Schein on culture in three layers, from the visible artefacts down to the assumptions nobody states. Hackman and Edmondson on what actually makes a team work.

For leadership behaviour itself, there is a range of established models: transformational leadership (Bass, Avolio), servant leadership (Greenleaf), authentic leadership (Bill George), situational leadership (Hersey, Blanchard), adaptive leadership (Heifetz).

While every one of these models is scientifically contestable, they have nonetheless earned their place as archetypes: they give a leader a language for what he is doing, and a mirror for what he is not.

Neuroscience

I also use neuroscience, as the material correlate of what psychology describes. Cognitive and affective neuroscience, for how attention, emotion and decision-making actually work. Neuroplasticity, because it explains why change is possible at all, and why it takes repetition rather than insight alone. Interoception and the body’s part in emotion, which is where the contemplative practices meet the research.

The same holds for the research into altered states of consciousness: Andrew Newberg’s brain imaging of experienced meditators and of Franciscan nuns in prayer (Newberg et al., 2001, 2003) linked deep absorption to measurable shifts in the areas that govern attention and our sense of where the self ends. Arne Dietrich’s work on flow (Dietrich, 2003, 2004) and Charles Limb’s study of jazz improvisation (Limb & Braun, 2008) point to the brain’s self-monitoring regions quieting down when a person is fully absorbed.

The evolutionary perspective adds a further layer: it explains why so many reactions that feel irrational today were useful once, as shown, for example, by Randolph Nesse for anxiety and low mood (Nesse, 2019) and by Robert Sapolsky for the stress response, built for short threats rather than lasting pressure (Sapolsky, 1994).

While neuroscience rarely tells me what to do, it still tells me why something works, and that is often what makes a client willing to try it.

Systems & Complexity Science

My thinking has also been shaped by systems thinking: individuals are embedded in organizations, which in turn are understood as living systems, in which the relationships between the parts matter more than the parts themselves. I first came across it as early as the late 1990s, in Eliyahu Goldratt’s classic “The Goal” and his Theory of Constraints: a system performs only as well as its narrowest point allows.

In the German-speaking world, systems-oriented management gave this a practical form, above all in Fredmund Malik’s work, and systemic consulting turned it into a way of working with organizations, as developed by Roswita Königswieser and Barbara Heitger, among others. I trained in both.

Complexity science explains why a complex situation cannot be handled like a complicated one: it cannot be planned in advance, only probed and steered as it unfolds. David Snowden’s Cynefin framework sorts situations by exactly this, by how much can be known in advance.

In coaching, all of this is a reminder that no client changes in isolation (it also marks the border with the organizational topics, which I deliberately leave out here).