Julio Olalla’s exile from Chile forced him to reinvent himself. Today, the former lawyer runs Newfield Network, delivering transformation through magic, sacred spaces and a little bit of salsa. Liz Hall reports
There is something of the shaman about Julio Olalla, founder of the Newfield Network. Not that he shakes a rattle or goes into a trance, but he does talk of mystery, magic and creating sacred spaces. He uses dance to bring about transformation. And just as shamans reportedly experience the ‘calling’ after a major breakdown or illness, so Julio came to coaching following a personal meltdown.
The former attorney in Salvador Allende’s Chilean government, Julio was exiled from the country in 1974, following the coup d’»tat of the previous year. He fled to Argentina, then in 1978 moved to the US with his family. Unable to continue working as a lawyer, and suffering the “tremendous pain of losing my safety cocoon”, he was forced to reinvent himself. He became a coach.
In touch
He sees his exile as a great gift: “I’m convinced that life gives us gifts but they’re never wrapped in gift paper and we don’t usually look for gifts. For example, my exile has put me in touch with questions I would never have usually asked.”
Enabling people to encounter questions they wouldn’t otherwise have come across is a hallmark of Newfield’s approach to coaching. So, too, is its view of human beings as seeking coherence between their different dimensions – linguistic, physical, emotional, transcendent (spiritual) and social.
We’re not worthy
Julio describes humans as a “unity” of language, body and emotions. “These shape our capacity for action. It’s not just about the coach cheerleading. Often the client can’t listen to me because their body can’t. “The coach has three gates to the soul: linguistic, emotions, somatic. Sometimes the body is not following and you work with it, for example, by standing differently, and suddenly boom!”
He says the coach’s role is to provide the context for the coherence. If someone is living with the assessment that the world is dangerous, they will hold their body in a contracted way; if they’re living with the judgment that they’re unworthy, they will look for coherence around that statement.
“We’re the guys called in to generate the space of learning that embraces the whole of human experience. The learning here involves the learner fully and that in itself is a major thing that coaching brings to the world.”
In California, Julio met and worked with Chilean philosopher and politician Fernando Flores, one of the forefathers of ontological coaching. Also in the picture were Rafael Echeverria, author of The Ontology of Language, and biologist Humberto Maturana.
Maturana’s work around humans as linguistic beings and observers influenced Julio and Echeverria greatly, and in 1990 they co-founded the Newfield Group to coach people in their quest for personal growth. Six years later, the pair went their separate ways and the company became Newfield Network.†
Mood swings
Working with emotions is a “very critical” part of what ontological coaches do, says Julio. Emotions help us to learn.
“When I work with clients and they say, ‘I’ve got such negative emotions’, I say, ‘They’re not negative, they’re emotions that tell you different things.’ Sadness, for example, tells us we’ve lost something so sadness is a connection with meaning.
“When someone comes to me and says they’re sad, I say congratulations, you’re right on the path of learning. Once sadness knows we’ve received the message, it withdraws.”
Julio makes a distinction between emotions and moods though – living in a mood of sadness is different from experiencing the emotion of sadness, he says.
Head of coaching and training for Newfield Europe and Julio’s ‘apprentice’, Aboodi Shabi says: “I can’t imagine the coaching profession without Julio because of what he brings – the legitimisation of negative emotions such as despair, anger, grief. Also his speaking to the questioning of basic suppositions. For example, people talk about sustainable economic growth. No one questions economic growth.”
Julio says there is a connection between values and emotions: “If you talk about values, you enter right into the world of emotions.
“When it comes to the emotional realm, people believe the only approach is therapeutic. We need to put the emotional realm into the learning agenda. We’re hungry for something but we don’t know what it is because our education is not about that.”
Including the learner in the learning helps people deal with anguish of living in our times, he says. “People aren’t coming for coaching because they want to be more effective.”
Apart from Flores and Maturana, Julio has been influenced by George Leonard, who helped shape the human potential movement at the Esalen Institute, philosopher Richard Tarnas, who is also a friend, and US mythologist Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
“Campbell said that every time in history a culture confronts the limits of its knowledge and knowing, people realise the present knowledge is not sufficient and they need to gather in a sacred – special, not religious – place. There is a sense of committing to seal the place so it’s safe inside to speak about anything. Once in place, learning doesn’t happen by the intellect leading it but by the conspiracy of learners in that place. It’s not me that’s teaching. If I believe I’m the one that’s making it happen, I’ll be on an ego trip.”
Campbell notes that the role of the shaman or high priestess here is not to teach or give information but to keep the place “sacred”.
In such a space, says Julio, a very simple interaction will produce a shift not only in the two people engaged in conversation but in all those present.
“Something inexplicable happens in a room. Every listener is engaged in the conversation beyond what we can explain. We’re moving to territory where a new understanding of learning has developed but we can’t see it because the present way of explaining doesn’t give us the words.”
When I ask him if it’s evolution of consciousness, he nods. “We’re changing our belief systems. What is a belief system? All those beliefs that allow me to organise my ways in the world. The problem is, when you have these experiences they don’t fit so people deny the experience. When people develop the courage to question their belief systems it is the most glorious thing to see.”
He recalls an 82-year-old woman who said she was so grateful for her experience during one of his programmes. She said, “Life is so full of possibility.”
Synchronicity
Julio admits that while he is fully open to the “mystery of life”, he has no idea how some of the experiences come about. On one teaching programme he was talking about how we deprive life of magic, using the metaphor of masks that we wear:
“As I used that metaphor, in walked a racoon, with his big mask.
“If you talk about synchronicity, I believe that when the separation between the learner and the learnt is melting, you begin to receive signs that are in you already, that you were too shy to admit before.
“Is life more magical than we imagine? The devotion, love and care people manifest, the freedom to look where we’ve not looked before – it’s simply exquisite.”
Playfulness and joy are themes that recur in Julio’s approach to coaching, and to life. Participants on his programmes are drawn into salsa dancing.
One UK-based coach who has trained with Newfield says: “Being on a learning journey with Julio is about learning through your whole self, mind, body and emotion.†Julio has the capacity to really see people and connect with us in a profound way and yet he brings playfulness to the learning. So the music comes on and there he is leading us in a salsa dance… what joy!”
For Julio, dance is a metaphor for how we interact with others. He says that every time we limit our ability to dance with others, we limit our ability to become. The more powerfully we dance and engage with others, the more possibilities and horizons we have.
Distinct possibilities
If keeping the place sacred is important, so, too, is providing guidance and distinction. Studying the philosophy of language led to a dramatic shift in how Julio observed the world. He is excited about human beings’ ability to make distinctions between what they and others observe.
He offers an example: “I was in North Chile, in the most deserted place on the planet where it rains once every 10 years. I went with a group of friends and we lay down on the floor looking up at the extraordinary world of the stars. The next day our friend came with us and started telling us about the planets, galaxies, satellites and stars. So the sky was completely different because she was providing so many distinctions.
On the third night, “by beautiful synchronicity”, they met an astrologer with another perspective: “Where were all these things before we met this person? Nowhere for me. I lacked the distinctions.”
We are “exchanging eyes for a while instead of following the internal. And when you enlarge the distinctions, something becomes available”.
Julio says there was a time when he didn’t have access to a spiritual life because he didn’t follow any religion. Today, he says his “spiritual life is very much alive”.
“I’m not religious in a traditional sense but I’m drawn by something – perennial wisdom, being in touch with the mystery of life – this is very, very important to me.
“Nothing of what I do comes from a place of intellectual curiosity. I’m dealing with my interior’s soul and there is no room to go into lovely thoughts just for the sake of it. I’m very grateful to life for this.”
Julio says that one of the benefits people experience from going through his programmes is that they begin “to live with gratitude”, developing the presupposition that instead of life being a gift to us, we should be a gift to life.
Julio’s enforced exile and his subsequent reinvention is not only a gift to himself, but one to the coaching profession, and to humanity.
- For more information about Newfield Network go to www.newfieldnetwork.com
- See news, p10, Coaching at Work, vol 5, issue 3.
Coaching at Work, Volume 5, Issue 4