Navigating your life requires you to start moving, or you won’t go far. It doesn’t matter if we trudge in an unknown path or end with a detour; authentically living your life means living it meaningfully. Today, Jonathan S. Marion, a Cultural Anthropologist and Life Coach, delves into the BEING Model to live truly aligned, rewarding, and meaningful lives. His insights guide navigating the flow of the river of life to create a ripple effect in our waterways. Let’s tread in today’s discussion and let Jonathan lead us to transform our lives.
—
Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
Jonathan S. Marion, Ph.D. – Cultural Anthropologist And Life Coach
Dr. Jonathan Marion believes that when we live, connect, and communicate authentically, we send out ripples. These ripples make the world a more caring and connected place, one ripple at a time. Having seen this dynamic over twenty-plus years as an award-winning cultural anthropology professor and author, Jonathan feels that how we show up is the key to living deeply meaningful and fulfilling lives.
He now works as a transformational life coach to be a catalyst for exactly such transformations. As a coach, consultant, and speaker, Jonathan draws on decades of experience teaching diverse audiences. He’s trained in emotional intelligence, group coaching, positive psychology coaching, clear beliefs coaching, and body-oriented coaching.
Overlapping his coaching and academic work in powerful and unexpected ways, Jonathan is also passionate about his work as a photographer and a partner dance instructor, primarily focusing on Brazilian Zouk. Bringing all of this together, Jonathan is passionate about supporting clients and audiences in transcending external relationships as measures of success so that they can live a truly aligned, rewarding, and meaningful life.
—
Jonathan, welcome. Thank you for joining us here.
Thank you so much for having me. I’m delighted to be here.
I’m hoping you can share with us a little bit about how you got into the work you do and what drives your passion for it.
It’s really interesting. I have been working as a cultural anthropology professor. In the first half of 2019, I was down in Brazil doing research and staying with a very good friend of mine. I was sitting in his living room one day and looking out the window across the street. It’s not a touristy part of town. It’s where locals live. I was thinking, “Why is it that I’m in a room here that’s smaller than the closet at my house and I feel more at home here?”
It struck me that it had to do with the quality of relationships. It wasn’t people around me who were concerned with what I did or my accomplishments, but were genuinely interested in connecting with who I was as a person and loved that person. It was also that staying in academia, especially as it leans more into a business framework, at least in the United States, wasn’t serving me.
I took a step back and said, “What part of the job have I loved?” I’m good at the research, but I don’t love it. That includes academic publishing. I’m good at professional service including leadership, but I don’t love it. I do love teaching, but it’s not delivering information. It’s helping people figure out their own questions and how they’re going to find their own answers.
I got to do a lot of that with my Master’s and PhD students. I got to do it with the undergrads who would come in either ten minutes before or after class and have these ideas that had popped up in their minds from whatever ideas we’d been discussing. I realized that’s life coaching. That’s helping people figure out their questions and how they’re going to find their own answers. That’s what led me in this direction.
That is quite a gift, that realization you had there, that you felt more at home in that small space than in your own home.
It’s interesting because I didn’t know it at the time. Since then, as I’ve transitioned out of academia and into this other life, I’ve gone from, first, a 3-bedroom plus an office house to a 1-bedroom apartment, and I’ve been living as a nomad for the past few years. While I will resettle sometime next year, it realizing how little the things and the accomplishments that lead to a meaningful or fulfilling life.
What is it that you’ve replaced that with?
For me, it has to do with authenticity and how we live, how we communicate, and how we connect with other people. In doing that in a certain way, we send out ripples into the world. It’s not just as far as who we impact, but also how they show up to other people in their lives and how they impact those people. That helps create a more caring and connected world, one ripple at a time.
How would you define authenticity for these purposes?
There’s a lot of good work out there that’s been done on finding your meaning, everything from the work of Viktor Frankl and logotherapy to Simon Sinek and his work. There’s a lot of value there. At the moment, it can be really hard to connect with your why. What I found is it has to do with how I want to show up. How do I want to be in my life? How do I want to be in the interactions and the relationships I have? How do I want to be in challenging situations? If I look back on this moment, this decision, or this interaction five years from now, I’ll be like, “I’m glad I did it that way,” that’s being authentic.
In that definition, it is being aware at the moment and being able to assess as you are in the process of doing something, “Will I be satisfied with these results?” It is almost as though, “Are these words or actions that I’m putting forth in this moment in alignment with who I’d like to be or the kinds of qualities that I value in myself and others?”
What you’re pointing to is the most important part, which has to do with the values part. I don’t know what the outcomes are going to be. I can’t say, “This is how I want to show up for X result,” because we don’t control the results. Much of life is beyond what we can do. I don’t even remember where I heard this when I was younger. It is the idea that life is 10% how we make it but 90% how we take it. It has to do with, “Things are going to happen that I have no control over, but how do I want to show up in this situation? How am I going to be pleased with my decisions and my actions despite how things may go?”
BEING Model: Life is 10% how we make it but 90% how we take it.
The other thing that happened when you were talking about having this realization brought to mind the movie I Am by Tom Shadyac. Are you familiar with that?
I vaguely remember having heard it, but it’s slipping my mind at the moment.
The idea is that he was this highly successful director of movies like Liar Liar and other things. He had millions coming in and people telling him, “You need a bigger house. You need a bigger car. You need a bigger mansion,” after he’d had his post-concussive syndrome with critical headaches that push a lot of people to want to end their lives. He was lucky enough to recover from it. He started questioning, “What’s the value of life, etc.?”
The bottom line was that he ended up selling the mansion and moving into a mobile home park that was close enough to be able to ride his bike to work. He was restructuring his life in that way, and downsizing is one of the phrases a lot of people use but with the clarity of what he wanted to accomplish and the kinds of relationships he wanted in his life. It was a tremendously positive result for him.
That resonates a lot. It’s not a parallel, but a rather analogous experience. I had come back to the US in the middle of 2019 from that trip to Brazil and had the direction. I knew I wanted to get training to become a coach. That was the direction I wanted to go. I had thought a lot about the value that’s intrinsic to being and the idea that we’re human beings. It’s not human doings. We’re not all about doing an accomplishment. I really thought I understood the idea and I was on that team being.
In early November of 2019, for reasons we still don’t know, I had a very severe spinal injury with nerve damage. For five weeks, I couldn’t even roll onto one of my sides on my own. I was faced with that existential challenge of, “Am I the same person? Do I have the same value in the universe if I can’t do all the things I did before?”
While I would never want to repeat the experience because nerve pain is no joke, I also wouldn’t give it back because it helped me gain clarity on what were the things that were most important and what were the things I could influence, which was how I showed up even when circumstances were beyond my control.
That’s powerful. It’s a blessing when we are able to use those life events to gain a positive perspective. We all know of people who’ve had those kinds of things and it devastates them and leaves them with a much more negative outlook. It isn’t automatic that you get a positive outcome, so congratulations. That’s a nice piece of luck. I felt fortunate that when I had that kind of thing in my life, I had the right kind of parents and I had the mindset where I chose the path of, “How can I make the best of this?” rather than using it as motivation to give up.
Unfortunately, I’ve seen up close the other side of it. Unfortunately, when I was eighteen, my mother was in a pretty bad car accident that left her with some permanent brain trauma. That is tragic. It had a massive impact on her, our relationship, and the family dynamics, but it happened. What was the saddest to me was not that it happened, but through the end of her life, 38 years later, it was always, for her, what she got cheated of as far as the relationships and the life she could have led. Something tragic happened, but getting so attached to what could have been never allows you to lean into and discover what could be.
Getting so attached to the 'what could have been' never allows you to lean into and discover the 'what could be.' Click To TweetIt’s a blessing when we have the ability to look for what could be and appreciate what already is.
That really is the key because what is, is. The minute that we start using terminology even in our own brains, even in our own self-talk about should, like, “Things should be this way. This person should act that way. The outcome should be this,” we’re fighting with what is. It’s not. For me, one of the key realizations and tools that I use with myself and with clients or in speaking engagements is replacing those shoulds with coulds. You could even keep a journal throughout the week every time you say should or think should, and then at the end of each night go through it, cross out should, put could, and think through how different that is. See what happens over a week of doing that.
BEING Model: Replace those “shoulds” with “could”.
Are there other structures or tools that you use with people when you’re assisting them in this kind of realignment of view and perspective?
There are few. As far as quick touchpoints to get people started, because sometimes, you need something or you need some point of friction where you can hang something on it, could, not should is one of the powerful ones. It is shifting the idea from blame to responsibility. Sometimes, that is important as far as how we look at others, but it’s also really important with how we look at ourselves.
It’s so easy to fall into self-blame for not doing things the way we think we should have. Those shoulds get attached to ourselves a lot, too. It’s recognizing, “I have responsibility for the consequences of my actions, but it doesn’t mean I’m to blame.” Here is a simple everyday example. A parent is on their way to pick up their child at school, but because of a traffic accident, they don’t get there in time. They’re still responsible for picking up their kid, but they’re not to blame that they weren’t there on time. It’s so easy to fall into that trap of not recognizing the difference.
A third starter point that I think about and suggest a lot is differentiating interest from intention. I’m not talking about our intentions for ourselves. It’s important to set intentions and try and follow them, but when we’re interacting with other people, if we have intentions for the outcomes, it’s problematic. It means we’re acting and interacting with them in very instrumental ways. We’re doing things for an outcome as opposed to, “This is how I want to show up. I’m interested in what happens. I’m interested in where this goes.”
This one shows up the most in interpersonal relationships and communications, whether it’s with family or romantic partners. I’m expressing where I’m coming from. I’m asking you questions, but it’s not because I have an intention for what the specific outcome is. If so, I’m not interacting with you authentically as what emerges between us. I am working instrumentally to try and get an outcome.
That’s a lovely way to put that. The idea of my being interested in how this will unfold rather than my having an intention that it unfolds a certain way leaves that flexibility. It puts me in that space almost like in the canoe on the river where I can use what the flow is to some impact, but I’m also being affected deeply by the flow of the river itself.
Any good conversation follows a similar thing. If I know what I’m going to ask and I know what my answers are going to be regardless of what the other person brings to the conversation, it’s not a conversation.
My mind instantly wants to take that same approach and apply it to life itself. It’s not just my interactions with another person, but my interaction with the flow of life events throughout the day. I have some kind of intention about what I’d like to do and how I’d like to show up. I’m interested in what’s going to unfold. Often, it’s very different than what I had planned for the day.
That’s beautiful. It speaks the idea that it is one thing to have an intention for what my output is going to be. That’s different from having an intention for what the outcome is going to be. What am I going to put out into the world? Have an intention because you have the ability to choose that. As far as what’s going to come back, that’s when it’s really important to navigate those waterways and figure out where the flow is and how to ride those in the way that you want to rather than trying to fight them.
Figure out where the flow is and how to ride those in the way you want to rather than trying to fight them. Click To TweetWhat are some of the other approaches, tools, tricks, or tips that you use in working with people?
I break it down into two categories. The first is strategic as in big-picture, what is it that someone is going to be able to do to live what is going to be a meaningful and fulfilling life for them? The second one is tactical as in how do they go about doing that? The strategic one is what I came up with as the BEING model. It goes back to that real crucible experience when all I could do was be when I didn’t have the ability to do anything when I had the spinal injury.
In BEING, B is for Begin where you are. All too often, we rush to try and figure out what outcomes we want. If you think about navigating, whether it’s on a map or using the GPS in your car or on your phone, if you don’t have a signal that tells you where you are or you don’t have a, “You are here point,” you can’t navigate anywhere. That’s one of the places where that idea we were speaking about before of what is, is is super important. The beginning of where you are has to do with what is.
Depending on where someone’s coming from, one of the strategies I’ll lean into there comes from positive psychology. All too often, we grow up in a society that criticizes gaps and lacks. Certain versions of early psychology also leaned into the deficiencies model. We all have things that are aptitudes and abilities. Taking full stock of those as part of where we are and what we bring to the table can be really important.
The second step for me, the E to BEING, is Explore where you’re going. That’s so important because it’s very easy to say, “I want to get out of here. I want to go on vacation.” Accepted. That’s why we’re having the conversation. That’s why we’re looking at this. The places you want to go, why those places? Are those really the places that give you the most?
A classic example that gets used a lot here is people who are always trying to get promotions at work. Oftentimes, that’s the right step for people, but sometimes, it’s because there’s a pressure of that’s what you’re supposed to do. Sometimes, it’s an idea of, “I’ll have the resources to go on vacation with my family more.” That’s great. Why is that important? You’re like, “I love spending time with them.” How important is that? You’re like, “That’s the most important thing.” Will you get more time if you take this promotion and the nature of the job is you have less time? Exploring where you’re going, what’s important about it to you, and what’s the right place is a really important step.
Once we’ve done that, I is Identify your options. We’ve all traveled to different places even if it’s from home to work or to the neighbors. There’s more than one option. Are you someone who likes taking the most efficient route or the most scenic route? Are there stops along the way that you want to visit? Are there relatives and friends from back in the school days who were somewhere along the way? Are there opportunities to go to a training seminar that you wouldn’t have normally but given the route options, they may be opening up? It is about identifying what are all the options.
Part of that is also identifying how you have made the choices that have been best for you in the past. Are you someone whose pro and con lists have led you to the decisions you’re the happiest with? Are you someone who leans into what pulls at your heart and that’s given you the results you’re the most satisfied with in the past? Identify your options for identifying what are the best options for you as part of that as well.
The N is Now start. This is so often easily overlooked. We get so busy planning that we don’t begin. That’s part of the trap of perfectionism. Perfectionism is a version of shoulds. The fact of the matter is, especially if you’ve assessed where you are, where you want to go, and your options for getting there, if along the way you decide you change your mind, no worries. You’re already on your way. You know why you’ve made the decisions you have. It’s very easy.
In life, detours happen all the time, but if you’re very clear about where you’re trying to go and how you’re trying to get there, it’s not a big deal. It’s a detour. Maybe you decide, “There is a sign that there’s the largest ball of twine in the world, only 30 meters down this street. Why not? We’re here anyway.” If you don’t start, you stay stuck where you are. If you have a perfect life already, that’s great. Congratulations. I want to know your secret. If not, starting a change is the most important change you can make.
BEING Model: In life, detours happen all the time, but if you’re very clear about where you try to go and how to get there. It’s not a big deal.
The G is Getting your best life. I don’t mean that it’s perfect and everything is set. What I mean is that it’s far too easy to lose track of the things that are fulfilling and the things that are meaningful. We’re so used to chasing what we’re supposed to do and external measures of outcomes. As you start to live in a new way and arrive where you really wanted to, appreciate both the journey, but also what these differences are. From having done this process, it is recognizing that you have the capacity to go back and do that partially or entirely at any point if what’s meaningful to you and your life shifts along the way.
That BEING strategy is the strategic piece. It can be tricky to keep track of all of that at once in the flow of life, especially in heated moments and charged moments. I already alluded to it before, but I ask myself the question, “Whether it’s with this person or in this particular interaction, how do I want to be? If it’s so charged that I’m really struggling with that, then it’s what I call future casting. I ask myself, “What will five-year-from-now Jonathan have wanted me to have said or done right here and now?”
Believe me. I’ve had too many experiences in my life where whether it’s 2 hours later, 2 weeks later, 2 months later, or 2 years later, I go, “I wish I had answered this way. I wish I had done that.” It is stepping back enough to ask not, “How do I want to be right now? If it’s too heavy, too complicated, too charged, but, “How will the five-year-from-now version have wanted me to show up right now?”
When that’s a challenge, exhale. All too often, we’re told to breathe deeply, but we start by inhaling. You can’t inhale very deeply when you already are tense. There’s this air in your lungs that’s already most of the oxygen’s out of. Exhale as deeply as you can, then take in the air for a new breath. Exhale again, take in a new breath, and ask yourself, “What will the five-year-from-now Jonathan have wanted me to do, say, or be in this moment?” It may be hard to do, but it’s pretty simple to identify if you’re willing to look at it.
It’s an excellent practice. There are a number of those that come from indigenous people that talk about, “At this moment, I’m doing this for all my relations and generations and/or how will the decisions that we are making here affect seven generations down the road.” Those kinds of framing and questions, there’s a reason across cultures that people say, “This is a really useful thing to do because it helps us get centered and get out of the intensity of the moment, and we often come up with a solution that we find more useful.”
You’re probably familiar with the Lakota saying of Mitakuye Oyasin, which variously translates, “As all my relations,” or, “All my relatives.” It doesn’t mean humans. It means the spirits of everything from the animals to the plants to the rocks to the streams. As a greeting and as a goodbye, it’s an important constant reminder that how we live and how we show up is never divorced from everything else.
How we live and show up is never divorced from everything else. Click To TweetThere is all this wonderful stuff that we open to if we start reading some of the indigenous people’s wisdom. I was going to say literature, but a lot of it comes down as oral traditions and then has been written. There is a wonderful book by Pierre Pradervand on The Gentle Art of Blessing. A number of years later, he wrote a book about 365 Blessings to Heal Myself and the World. In that, he has a number of different blessings from indigenous people that are deep and rich.
One of them, when I read that book, I chuckled. I’d read an anthology of Native American literature in high school and used it for a banner, one of the quotes. It was, “I seek strength not to be better than my brother but to fight my greatest enemy, myself.” That came across in at least 2, if not 3, different places in Pierre Pradervand’s research of blessings from indigenous people. Being willing to step back, take that breath, hold it, and let that long, slow exhale out is the way I coach people to do it. It is a great way for me to get centered and give myself the space to step back and view and get a whole different perspective on the present moment situation.
One of the things that we don’t pay enough attention to is the difference in speed of physical evolution versus cultural evolution. We only have 1 nervous system, but it’s the 1 that’s physically evolved. We’ve expanded the fight or flight model to include freeze, fawn, and some other things along the way. If we think about evolution, what triggered that? It’s the actual life threats.
For example, a big bear. The flight is to run away and I get away. The fight is to bonk bear on the head with a rock and I get away. The freeze is the bear ignores me and I get away. Fawning doesn’t work so well with bears, or there’s an unfortunate outcome and I don’t get away. If I get away, then the actual threat is gone. All of those stress hormones that get released into our system get to dissipate.
What are the things that trigger that same onset of stress and those autonomic responses in this society? It’s traffic jams. It’s your boss. It’s conflicting pressures at work. It’s being torn between different family obligations. Where’s the point where we ever escape those things the way we escape the bear and get to let that all drain out of our system? That’s part of why it’s so important to find those different strategies from indigenous traditions or different apps. Whatever works for you is what’s important to use. What are the things that allow you to step back and release all those things in a society that’s not built to ever let you out of that space?
One of the most useful things that I’ve learned in the past many years of doing therapy is that the parsing of the language is so important. You’re saying what’s causing my stress is the traffic jam, the boss’ pressure, etc. If we study this and realize, it really isn’t that external thing causing it, it’s the interpretation that I’m choosing and placing on it. I’m using that same physical tension system that I’ve adopted without any adaptation. I took it from fight or flight with the bear to this upset because I think the boss shouldn’t be doing that.
It’s all accessible if we learn to shift the interpretation and then the response. That’s so useful. I really appreciate having another acronym like BEING, the one you’ve given us. I also appreciate the idea from a slightly different perspective shifting what we’re making something mean because it’s the meaning we give it that we then use to generate the physiological or stress response within us.
Learn to shift the interpretation and then the response because it's the meaning we give it that we then use to generate the physiological or stress response within us. Click To TweetThe boss criticizing you at work or the traffic jam is not an existential threat the way a bear is, but because we don’t pay attention or because we’re not as mindful as we could be, the response is that natural trigger. To think about horror movies or things like that, we know it’s make-believe, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t trigger something in our system.
The idea of whether it is things in magazines or what have you where it’s photoshopped and you’re like, “I know it’s been manipulated,” that doesn’t make us immune to it. If it did, there would be no advertising industry, which is worth how many billions. It’s not because you intellectually know something that it, on its own, changes its value to you unless you do pay attention and do the work to say, “I’m not going to choose to let it play out this way. I am going to shift the stimulus value it has for me and the meaning that I allow it to have in my life.”
I don’t want us to be rushed here. I’m looking at the time and thinking it’s a good time for me to ask you to take a breath, get centered, and think about what we’ve talked about so far. Maybe there’s something in that that you’d like us to go back to and highlight or something I haven’t even asked you about yet with your work with people that you want to get in here before we move toward wrapping up.
Thank you for that invitation. It’s a good reminder for all of us that you can step back and take stock a little bit. There are two brief things that I would follow up on slightly, one which has to do with this stress response, but also why are some of the tactical strategies of future casting and the like so important. It’s because a lot of stuff is coming up in the body. Attention to that in different ways to navigate can be not so mainstream or important.
This whole idea of mind-body connection is really important, but there’s a little bit of a mistake there because it’s still rooted in the idea that mind and body are separate. How can there be a connection between things that aren’t separate? A lot of indigenous approaches don’t differentiate between physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and even social health. That’s wise. It’s for a reason that those traditions have existed as long as they have.
Whether it’s separate from taking a breath at the moment, look outside and find something in nature that your eyes want to rest on for twenty seconds. If they’re happy there, let them rest there. If they want to move on, let them move on. Do that. If you can take a walk outside, breathe the air around plants or trees, or whatever it is that lets our nervous system say, “The world’s okay even if I’m stressed at the moment,” is really important.
For people who aren’t used to having a way to release those things in their system, it is finding approaches that allow those things. For some people, easy enough, they find if they go running or lift weights, they do it. For some people, it’s playing a sport or dancing. Whatever it is for you is great. If it is finding someone that can help, that’s great. It’s a really important part of the picture as well.
The last thing I would expand on then, and you bringing in the value of different indigenous traditions really speaks to this, is the idea of other hows. There are lots of ways that people all over the planet have done things through time and different traditions. None of them are inherently any better or worse than others. Yet, at the same time, they all deserve full dignity and respect.
They may not make sense to us because we’ve grown up with different frameworks, but no one on the planet woke up in the morning ever and said, “This makes no sense to me, so I’m going to do it that way.” They may have thought their options sucked, let’s be honest, but I guarantee you that whatever they decided on they thought sucked less than the other things that they were aware of as possibilities.
No matter what someone has chosen to do, it made sense to them. If we can hold that idea as true and with real integrity and look at, “They did this. They thought this way. They came up with this because it made sense to them,” then we can both have a lot more compassion for choices that we don’t agree with. We can also recognize some of the real possibilities in systems that we don’t yet understand and approaches that we’re not yet familiar with.
That’s excellent. I’m flooded with all kinds of different associations there. I frequently tell people when they come to see me in therapy that my assumption is, although I’m willing to be proven wrong, that they’re not sick, crazy, stupid, lazy, or masochistic. That means they’ve got really good reasons for everything they’re doing even if they can’t figure them out with the conscious and logical part of the mind because the unconscious is so deep, rich, and full.
What that means is everything they’ve done doesn’t matter. There could be 5,000 people observing and saying, “That’s stupid,” but out of the options I can see at this moment, I’m always going to choose what I think is going to hurt less even if I’m doing something that’s going to cause me fairly direct discomfort or distress. It’s because it’s the least disruptive or distressing thing out of all the possibilities I can see. There is a lot of overlap there in the work and in some of our source material that we’ve been tapping into over the years.
The other thing is the idea that within the context of our culture, there’s been a lot of ebb and flow over it in my lifetime. The stresses that we have imposed on us from the outside and the things that require us to make adjustments ebb and flow, but they’re getting more intense in terms of demand for our time and attention.
There was a gentleman who was the second to the Dalai Lama. He was out in Oregon. He came across some work that was the root of the Journey’s Dream material. He said, “Over in Tibet, we don’t need this, but here in America, our monks need this work.” If I’m in a pressure cooker, I’m going to need a different set of coping mechanisms that I’m in this idyllic island situation with all my needs easily met.
That’s why someone from your perspective can be so useful to people to help them identify, “If this is your current context in your family, your job, your ideals, and your environmental situation, what might develop you in terms of strategies and adjustments so that you can create a culture that leaves you feeling good about yourself?” That’s to paraphrase Tuesdays with Morrie.
BEING Model: You develop in terms of strategies and adjustments so that you can create a culture that leaves you feeling good about yourself.
Thank you for that. That feels resonant for me. Part of the difference is from approaches where it’s like, “Here’s a recipe to follow,” versus, “Here are techniques for preparing different things. Here are the ideas between complimentary flavor profiles and the like. Let’s make sure that you gain as much expertise in that as you can.” You can cook whatever you want with whatever’s available at any time wherever you happen to be and with whatever tools you have on hand.
I will reach out to you after this and send you a couple of links that got sparked in my brain as we were discussing that I didn’t talk about previously. I appreciate your being willing to share with us. I wish you well wherever you land in this next year or two.
Thanks greatly. I am looking forward to reading the links. There are a lot of overlaps in some of our areas of interest and background. I am looking forward to adding some more tools to my own kit as far as frameworks and strategies.
I will send those along. Thank you so much for your time.
It’s my pleasure. Thank you.
—
Dr. Jonathan Marion believes that when we live, connect, and communicate authentically, we send out ripples. These ripples make the world a more caring and connected place, one ripple at a time. Having seen this dynamic over twenty-plus years as an award-winning cultural anthropology professor and author, Jonathan feels that how we show up is the key to living deeply meaningful and fulfilling lives.
He works as a transformational life coach to be a catalyst for exactly such transformations. As a coach, consultant, and speaker, Jonathan draws on decades of experience teaching diverse audiences. He’s trained in emotional intelligence, group coaching, positive psychology coaching, clear beliefs coaching, and body-oriented coaching.
Overlapping his coaching and academic work in powerful and unexpected ways, Jonathan is also passionate about his work as a photographer and a partner dance instructor, primarily focusing on Brazilian Zouk. Bringing all of this together, Jonathan is passionate about supporting clients and audiences in transcending external relationships as measures of success so that they can live a truly aligned, rewarding, and meaningful life.
Important Links
- Dr. Jonathan Marion
- The Gentle Art of Blessing
- 365 Blessings to Heal Myself and the World
- Tuesdays with Morrie
About Dr. Jonathan Marion
Dr. Jonathan Marion believes that when we LIVE, CONNECT & COMMUNICATE authentically, we send out ripples…. which send out ripples… which make the world a more caring and connected place, one ripple at a time. Having seen this dynamic over 20+ years as an award-winning cultural anthropology professor and author, Jonathan feels that how we show up is the key to living deeply meaningful and fulfilling lives, and now works as a transformational life coach to be a catalyst for exactly such transformations.
As a coach, consultant, and speaker, Jonathan draws on decades of experience teaching diverse audiences and is trained in Emotional Intelligence, Group Coaching, Positive Psychology Coaching, Clear Beliefs Coaching, and Body-oriented Coaching. Overlapping his coaching and academic work in powerful and unexpected ways, Jonathan is also passionate about and has worked as a photographer and partnered dance instructor, now primarily focusing on Brazilian zouk.
Bringing all of this together, Jonathan is passionate about supporting clients and audiences in transcending external accomplishments as measures of success to live truly aligned, rewarding, and meaningful lives.
Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!
Join the On Your Mind Community today:
