Jake Bio

It’s still a mystery to me how I found myself in a position to be coaching and mentoring. Somewhere between searching for my own sense of direction and my current exploration of the stories we inhabit that shape our world, I started to regularly find myself in conversations that were transformative, orienting, and life-defining. There were places in me that needed to be met by others for me to start living into them, and since then, I’ve been on a quest to learn how to invite others into these spaces in themselves.

I graduated high school with no real aim except vague musical aspirations that I never truly worked towards. After a profound experience of recognizing the depth of beauty and goodness that lies in wait within every human heart, I realized that I needed to start taking my life seriously if I wanted to live up to this call. And thus the journey began. It started with taking myself seriously as a musician, which meant practicing, writing, and performing. I soon ran into the hurdles of lack of discipline, motivation, and inspiration that anyone Pursuing anything worth doing will meet.

This led me down the road of psychology, philosophy, and spirituality. As it turned out, people had been wrestling with these problems for a long time. I started meditating, reading books, watching lectures online, and while I was learning a lot, it became clear that this wasn’t a journey I could undertake alone. I needed people to talk to. This eventually led me to the conversational practices of Circling and Dialogos. Now, not only did I have people to talk to, I had people who were taking seriously the question of how we can talk to each other in ways that are healing, connective, and transformative.

Circling is the practice of deeply relating. It asks the question: What does it really mean to know and understand another person, as well as what does it mean to really be known and understood? Dialogos is the process of dialoguing in service of aspiration. How can we explore the virtues and character traits we want to inhabit not just by talking about them, but by embodying them? As soon as I found this work I was enraptured by it. I’ve been regularly training in and hosting groups teaching others in both of these modalities for the past 3 years and it has changed the direction of my life. The combination of both of these modalities along with my studies in psychology, philosophy, language, and mythology has dramatically deepened the way I relate to myself and others. My approach to mentoring is based on the transformative power of deep dialogue to encourage and realize our aspirations as well as heal the wounds that hold us back from pursuing them. It’s also deeply informed by looking at the stories we live in and how these shape the way we relate to ourselves and the world and, therefore, how much agency we have in it.

Getting to witness the flowering of another’s potential is the greatest joy in my life. What continually draws me to this work is the way that every relationship is like a new song. The growth comes from the way I’m unfolding jamming with the way you’re unfolding, and like a good jam, it’s new every time. The edge of growth for you reveals more of me, which reveals more of you, which reveals more of me, which reveals more of you, and up the ladder we climb together. And it’s in getting to listen to this new harmony we’re making that the magic happens. Tuning my ears to listen for the deepest music in each person is the garden I till, and witnessing others listen to their own song with new ears is the fruit it bears.