Executive Coaching
Speis means ‘spirit’
and connotes life, wind
and motion
Speis is a proto-Indo-European word that means “spirit” or “breath” and is synonymous with the animating force: Life, wind and motion. It connotes lightness, presence, courage, devotion, Loyalty, warmth, aspiration, joy, force and vitality.
The Mother of [almost] All Languages
Indo-European is the class of languages that encompasses the most number of spoken languages in the world today, including English, Hindi, Greek, Slavic. German, Persian, Russian, French and Spanish.
Proto-Indo-European refers to the language that was spoken before all these other languages broke out and became individualized. So it’s the closest we have to being, if not the mother of all human languages, then the mother of the most number of languages spoken today.
I chose the term to catch the universality of the force that the word refers to, a force composed both of dynamism/life and presence/warmth. I chose images for this website to correspond to the idea of Speis.
Explaining SPEIS Paradox
SPEIS Paradox is my approach to coaching and consulting.
SPEIS speaks to the positive energy that is desirable, sought-after, and the ultimate mover of change. It is commitment, determination, creativity, spark, devotion, warmth, and lightness.
Paradox speaks to the groundedness and contextualization of real life problems. Paradox acknowledges real life, in which every event is enmeshed in its own unique context and apparent limitations.
Speis as a Philosophy
Speis draws inspiration from mindfulness, positive psychology, and psychoanalysis. All three trends are actually rooted in ancient wisdom traditions.
All three emphasize the power of truth, the energy of authenticity, and the strong power of positive investment (love), which in organizations can take the form of good citizenship, personal motivation, generosity, and joy.
The bottom line is, humans are motivated by two strong forces: the force of affiliation and the force of defense, which could be roughly translated as: “we” vs. “me.” The paradox is that we can’t really do without both, contradictory as the behavior associated with each may be. The solution is to recruit the power of each of these powerful trends in human nature, rather than suborning one to the other.
