#43 - Coaching Corner White Elephant Book Exchange 2024

2 min pitch on two wonderful guides to life at the Coaching Corner book exchange. An idea worth sharing.

Coaching Corner

I joined coaching corner, (CC) this year as part of my exploration into coaching and at the suggestion of one of its co-founders, Connie Liu. It has been a delightful community to be a part of; it’s full of sensitive, patient, insightful, creative and courageous humans. They come from all walks of life, with different stories, passions, professions. They have all united around a mission for catalyzing human connection and potential with unifying ingredients of service, growth and action. I’ve met a screen writer, a new mom, men who are rediscovering their relationship with playing music, rehabilitated engineers and I even reconnected with a former StartX founder who navigated a transition from machine learning for materials discovery to executive mentoring. Kelly Liu, Jori Bell and Connie have created something special: CC is supportive, connective and nurturing while simultaneously operationalizing knowledge for tackling the many challenges of being a coach: business development, sales generation, navigating pricing and unique content creation.

It’s the holidays and for the second year and earlier this month, CC hosted a holiday white elephant book exchange¹, which involved preparing a two minute pitch for books to be gifted. The pitch could have been in any form; multimedia, powerpoint, artistic, or even interpretive dance. Below is mine. The books wound up in Kelly’s hands. Side note,

Kelly Liu

, who delightfully builds community with random strangers by pushing herself out of her own comfort zone, writes a great personal substack at:

I received Connie’s offering of A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, which tips the scale at a little over eight hundred plus pages, and am deeply looking forward to reading it. Other offerings included: Victor Frankl’s Man Search for Meaning adorned with handwritten marginalia, a deck of creativity cards, Vladimir and other volumes which ranged from classics to newly published gems.

Books make intimate gifts and the book exchange exuded revelatory love. The pitches that each person made were unique presents in and of themselves, giving us a framed glance into each givers’ depth. Cultivating this amity, among those I have even yet to connect with yet, is an idea worth sharing. I’m looking forward to this again in 2025.

Ben’s epistolary offering

Of the books I have (re)read, many have been impactful, so I’m going to cheat on this. I’m actually giving two books because, together, is how they frame my thinking about being a coach, mentor, creator, father and human being. Also they’re both short. They’re both a series of letters, in the tradition of the epistolary form.

The first is “Letters to a Young Poet” by Rainer Maria Rilke, which I reread this year. I will let you know that I named one my daughters after this poet who so lyrically and simultaneously built the zenith of and destroyed romanticism, to bring about a much needed poetic form for modernity in the early 1900s. In this book, he responds to a young poet, a fan, who sought guidance in questions of life and art, crafting ten letters that, in essence, were really letters to himself. Rilke was in his twenties then, a poet of moderate repute, urging himself to become a more crystallized artist. And in it he crafts banger lines including on courage:

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

or on reading:

Live for a while in these books, learn from them what seems to you worth learning, but above all love them. Your love will be repaid a thousand thousandfold.

The second is a sister book to Rilke, letters to a young therapist by Mary Pipher, which I read for the first time this year:

Framed in a similar manner, Pipher writes to a young graduate student of hers, Laura², counseling her on the business, practice and limitations of psychotherapy with an amalgam of stories, counsel and recommendations on life, love, fear, medicine and writing. In it she writes of the power of tempo:

Epiphanies burst forth when it’s quiet and slow

and on the over-reliance of family as source of human suffering:

[we therapists have over] used the dysfunctional family as an explanation for adult misery and failure…while families are imperfect institutions, they are also our greatest source of meaning, connection and joy.

or on traveling on book tours:

it is no accident that “travel” and “travail” come from the same root word.

Together these books form a collection of apothegmatic exhortations on growth, living and inspiration. Flip to any page and you’ll find something worthy to consider. They’re a bit like a ouija board, but instead of predicting the future, these books shepherd you toward your becoming, toward making your soul grow³.

I hope you enjoy.

1. Where people can “steal” a book for their choice.

2. How fortuitous of a name. Laura being the object of desire of a young Petrarch, who dedicated so many of his sonnets to her before transmuting his love of her towards the divine.

3. Vonnegut’s Letter