Behind the Sensei #1

Welcome everybody to the Common Sensei podcast where you, as a subscriber, will get added value with a behind the scenes look into the person, that's me, who is creating the Common Sensei Substack newsletters. And with me to guide the conversation is my lovely wife, Colinda, Dr. Colinda Linde, to everybody else out there. And she is going to be asking some questions and just helping guide the conversation and giving some of her very knowledgeable input into the subjects as well. Welcome Colinda and thank you for joining us.

What a lovely intro. Thank you. So one thing that I also am is your proofreader. So having proofread all your posts, I've noticed quite a broad range of topics, and one thing they have in common is they always make me think. You definitely are my Common Sensei. But back to your post. So there's a broad range of posts and I'm quite interested in what's the philosophy behind that.

Because you're obviously not doing a hard sell, you're not selling a course, you're not selling a product or some corporate solution. So tell our listeners a little bit more about the philosophy behind all of this.

I will indeed. And on that proofreading thing, yes, Colinda indeed. I give her a printout with a red and a green pen and a clipboard and I sit from a distance and I see which one is being used. And she always gives incredibly valuable input, which I mostly listen to. And to answer your question in terms of the philosophy behind it.

So I think where I'm at now is, is the coming together of a long journey. So. Probably some almost 20 years ago, I left the world of journalism and at that time was kind of looking at what's next in my career. I was looking, I thought I was going to be a freelance writer and a friend of mine who was working internationally globally as a photojournalist and was being represented by one of the top agencies working for the New York Times and similar publications invited me to join him on his expeditions around the world where he was reporting on major war zones and all the crazy stuff in the world and I looked at this and I thought well, is that really me and what it kind of said to me was to become a journalist what you're really doing is you're going out there and you're reporting on all the mad, bad, crazy stuff in the world, the leaders of the world, and what we're really doing when we're doing that is we're kind of in a way we're asking them to improve their behavior to show up as better leaders to, you know, that's the challenge.

And I think my philosophy, the way I've been brought up was always to look at yourself first to see the log in your own eye or in the words of Gandhi, to be the change that you wish to see. And this is what I can put together now when I look retrospectively, but I think that's what was working in me when I decided, no, I'm not going to go out there and report on the madness of the world, I'm going to look for everything in within myself and see Can I transform that within myself?

Can I change as a human being? Can I improve and how would one do even do that? And so I went on that journey and on that journey, I discovered many things the most valuable of which was the coaching modality that I ultimately trained in, became a trainer, and have worked in for close to 20 years now. And so The Common Sensei is really me coming back to that point and taking everything that I've learned through coaching And being able to put it out there Into the world and say this is what I've found and this is what makes sense for me and I hope this can help you in some way.

Okay, so that makes a lot of sense, as in the Common Sensei, okay. So I hope everyone else is having a chuckle like I am. So, you know, you mentioned the madness and the badness in your dictator post, that was in your second post, didn't it? It's absolutely about that. And you write about dictators and what if they came for coaching.

So tell me a little bit about that. You know, that's quite an interesting image. So is that a fantasy of what the world would be like if you got your hands on the dictators? Or tell us a little bit more about your thinking.