It is a universal characteristic of human beings that we ask questions about ourselves, our relationships to one another, and our place in the world. As we discussed in the introduction, answers to these questions come out of our beliefs about reality. If what is real consists of physical, material stuff, then the essence of who we are is our material bodies. Ideas, dreams, beliefs, faith, and even love are not real in the same sense. During the mechanistic era, material reality was the realm of science, and everything else belonged to philosophy or religion or fiction. The spiritual, fictional world, according to an extreme interpretation of this view, was either determined by or made entirely of different “stuff” from the material world. In either case, it could not have an effect on material reality. This interpretation was never universally accepted, but in the 20th century, even its scientific anchor in Newtonian mechanics began to come loose. The result is a new set of answers to questions about the essence of humanity. And these answers make coaching relevant.

Stapp goes on to point out that the question of values is relevant to science despite the fact that scientific endeavor sought to be value-free during the modern era of Newtonian assumptions. “What we value depends on what we believe, and what we believe is strongly influenced by science” (Stapp, 2007, p. 5). Neuroscience has the potential to confirm a basic coaching tenet: that what we choose to value makes a difference in how well we move through life. In part I, we survey paradigm shifts in how we answer a question closely related to our values: “Who are we?”