Change Masters

Who are the Change Masters?

 

The role of the Change Master for Coaching

 

• According to Angeles Arrien in her book “The Four Fold Way” medicine men and women, chiefs, shamans, teachers and seers are the “change masters” these are the magical people who can summon energy in a directed way to deliberately cause change. Arrien goes on the write that throughout the centuries in shamanic traditions indigenous people have used the wisdom of nature and ritual to support change and life transitions. Energy causes change in the world described by modern physics. But there has always been a role in traditional societies for a few people to cause directed change to help the tribe or community transition through change peacefully and without violence.
• The term Change Masters was first used by Rosebeth Moss Kanter in her book “The Change Masters”. I notice that a number of individuals on the coaching and Organisational Development world have adopted the concept and name of Change Master. There is a company in Canada called Change Masters International and another in the UK.
• The profession of business and life coaching aims at helping clients create and overcome change in their lives and business. Since coaching in both organisations and for people in their own lives is often used to help bring about change, I would like to explore this concept of a Change Master. Can we become a master of change in own life and play that role for our clients?
• I believe that a trained coach can help or support change by “holding the energy”. That is, by being a stable influence in which the coach is being present and is unwavering and unmoved by whatever is going on the flux of emotional output of the client, the client can ride through his or her problems. In so doing the coach does not try to solve a problem, nor feels a need to do so. He listens and holds a space open for change. The coach can instead validate her clients’ feelings and emotions by listening and not trying to fix or make better. By just being present and by not forming any judgement, finally the person or client can come through the issue and find peace or resolution.
• Arrien says that being present allows us to access the human resources of power, presence and communication, and by paying attention to what is present (what is being said) opens us to the human resources of love gratitude, acknowledgement and validation. Through my reading and experience of change, I would like to hold up a definition, although it is not the only one, for a Change Master: “One that can create a step change to a situation or state with higher energy and greater light.”
• Looking at this definition more closely, I think that the role of a Change Master is to change a situation so that it moves into a new state of higher energy, greater light and understand, so that a new potential is born for fulfilment, accomplishment, happiness and success. On the other hand a Change Master can help guide change in a community or people through a transition that is peaceful and not violent. Barbara Marx Hubbard in her book “The Revelation” writes about our choice as a species to choose the gentle path in opposition to the violent path. When speaking of the coming word changes, she writes “It can be graceful. It can be violent. That is up to us”.
• Can we then define “levels” of a Change Master? Perhaps Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi were change masters for the fundamental changes they brought about through the influence of their lives. Black Elk and Buckminster Fuller also were change masters for their visions of future change. Could the Lord Buddha and Jesus Christ be the highest form of Change Master since they were catalysts in aligning humanity with universal laws and wisdom? When Moses brought down the knowledge and codes of living from the divine levels of creation, he too was a Change Master who was instrumental in helping mankind take a step towards joining the ways of the higher evolution.
• In all these Change Masters we see: vision, direction and evolution. Vision is the prophesy. Direction is the new energy state, and Evolution is the result of change whereby the choice to evolve is our choice, but we are helped to see the new energy state through the vision and direction of the Change Master. We also see in the lives of these great Change Masters that the most profound change is accomplished by accessing the non-changing field of life deep within. Modern physicists would call this the Ground State of all the Laws of Nature, the Buddha called it nirvana.
• If a coach is to take the role of a Change Master, she must work in the vertical dimension which Michael Neill describes as a “deepening of the ground being of the client, and greater access to inspiration and spiritual wisdom”.