After the other members of Ishi’s party died, he allowed himself to be captured on a late summer’s evening. No one else in the world spoke his language. According to his people’s customs, a person did not use his own name—that was for his family to reveal. He no longer had a family. The fugitive was turned over to anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, who arranged for him to live in the University of California’s Anthropology Museum in San Francisco. After attempts to record and learn his language, linguists such as Edward Sapir discovered that his tribe’s word for “man” or “person” was anglicized as “Ishi.” So that became his name. Ishi was the object of great curiosity until his death from tuberculosis in 1916. His story was made popular again in 1961 when Theodora Kroeber, anthropologist Alfred’s second wife, published Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America.

Ishi’s brain was removed from his body after his death in clear violation of his wishes and his people’s customs. In 2004 Orin Starn took up Ishi’s story again, tracking his brain to the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. But it is not just Ishi’s brain that captures our interest—it is the minds and brains of the people around him: the settlers who exterminated (their words) thousands of native people; the reporters who treated him as a curious, uncivilized “thing”; the anthropologists who, though in a very kindly way, saw him as in need of protection; and the scientists who thought they could learn something important about him from examining his disembodied brain.

Compared with people who thought of themselves as more civilized, Ishi proved to have advanced social and adaptive skills. After some time he made friends, laughed and explored, lent a helping hand around the museum and hospital, was respectful of others and adapted to his environment. He enjoyed teaching children and others the skills he knew, maintained a sense of dignity and held firm to his values. The point we are making is not to hold Ishi up as some icon, as nature’s perfect Noble Savage. Rather, he proved simply to be a human being. On the surface, he was very different from the men and women of San Francisco a century ago. Ishi’s experience shows us that the human brain, even that of a mature person who might be labeled primitive, is capable of supporting enormous changes in thinking and behavior, given the right context and relationships.

Coaching is a context that supports change across very large gaps between where a person is and where he or she wants to be. Professional coaching burst out of its start in the late 20th century (“No, not football, basketball, or athletic coaching!”) to become a valuable tool in the corporate and personal change arsenal. According to Career Partners International (2008), 40% of 400 U.S. and Canadian business leaders interviewed chose coaching as their preferred method for leadership development. Research is accumulating that shows a return-on-investment (ROI) of five to eight times the cost of coaching, or 500% to 800%. But ROI results prove only that something has changed. For coaching to become an established profession (see Grant, 2003), it is even more important to know what is working and how.

Although research on the brain has been around much longer than professional coaching, (there is evidence of prehistoric brain surgery), new technologies have enabled phenomenal advances over the past two decades. Some unquestioned assumptions have been overturned. Neuroscience is beginning to reveal even more about the “what” and “how” of coaching and related practices such as leadership development.

Yes, this book covers decidedly contemporary fields such as coaching, the brain, and the mind, but we started it with the story about a “wild Indian” from a century ago and the questions his treatment raises about minds and brains then and now. If we pay attention to where people direct their attention, we can surmise the questions they are asking. And the questions people ask reveal their assumptions about reality. Saxton Pope, chief surgeon at the University of California hospital where Ishi died, removed Ishi’s brain despite knowing that Ishi did not wish to be dissected after death. Starn suggests that Pope went against Ishi’s wishes, despite the friendship the two men enjoyed, because he believed that Ishi’s brain was of scientific importance. In other words, Pope paid attention to the brain because he believed it would reveal more about this primitive man than their five years of personal interaction and friendship had done. In particular, he may have believed, as scientists have up until recently, that the individual, disembodied brain equals mind. In its most primitive form, this belief assumes that if you can weigh or measure or ascertain the shape of a brain, you can know something important about how that brain operates or operated—you can know the mind and the personality and its thoughts. Although this simplistic assumption was disappearing even as Ishi was chipping arrowheads from blue Milk of Magnesia bottles, it still exists in a more elaborate form today: If you can describe the working parts of the brain in enough detail, you can see thoughts.

Compare this assumption to the contemporary claim by neuropsychiatrist Daniel Siegel (2007a) that “mind is using the brain to create itself” (p. 32). The “brain equals mind” assumption fits an older way of looking at the world that we have labeled “mechanistic.” The “mind uses the brain” assumption fits a new approach that we label in these pages “systemic.” This is more than just words, for in the century between the removal of Ishi’s brain and its return to the descendants of a tribe that is likely related to him, science has discovered that the rules for understanding the brain are very different from the rules for understanding how things work in everyday life. If the brain and the mind are in any way related, then we need to know the new rules if we want to change our minds.

One of these new “systemic” rules is that attention changes the brain. If, as many physicists assert, the brain is a quantum environment, then asking a question and looking for an answer, or observing, has an effect on outcome. When scientists asked what Ishi’s brain would reveal about his humanity, they were not paying attention to the fact that he had become deeply connected to the modern community around him and even contributed to this new society. What else do we require as proof of humanity?

Today we can see and talk with each other without physical wires and cables to connect us. We have pictures of the whole Earth that fuel our sense of being on a giant spaceship together. Yet we still question whether some people deserve being considered human. We still react to one another and to the world based on self-fulfilling assumptions. We continue looking for answers that result in suffering and inhumanity. As we compare the questions we ask now to the questions asked by scientists a century ago, we recognize the true challenge lying before coaching:

If that question interests you, please come along with us by reading this book.