The question Rich Strilowich carries into every coaching conversation is a quiet one: what’s the foundational truth underneath all of this?
He first started asking it as a child. He didn’t have language for it then — just a sensitivity to the gap between what things appeared to be and what they actually were.
That question followed him through a computer science degree, forty years at IBM, and a parallel immersion in every form of inner development he could find.
His new book is called The Corporate Sage.
The central claim, that your corporate career is your spiritual path, not a detour from it, sounds, as I put it to him, like something some people will find consoling and others will want to throw across the room. We spent time on both reactions.
What shifted for me in this conversation was the precision of Rich's meaning of grace. He quotes a definition from Cheryl Richardson:
“Over time you recognise that a benevolent force or energy has been available to guide and direct your life all along... Grace leads us to the exact events and experiences we need, exactly at the right time.”
In Rich’s reading, that includes the boss who made your life miserable, the redundancy you didn’t see coming, the project that collapsed.
The invitation is not to feel good about those things. It’s about stopping treating them as interruptions and starting to ask what they’re here to teach.
I’m not sure that’s always the right move. But I know from my own coaching work that some of the most costly things senior leaders do is fight reality, burning energy trying to make things other than they are, rather than meeting what’s actually in front of them. Rich is pointing at something real there, and in the GRACE Framework®️, this is ‘A’ for Acceptance.
Listen to the full episode by clicking the button below:
If this lands for you, share it with someone who’s been splitting themselves in two between the job and the rest of their life.
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