About This Site
The Mission
About Me
Hi, I am Chris Chittenden.
My journey in this work started in 1992. I was attending pre-natal classes before the birth of my son and we were asked a couple of simple questions. “How do you picture your mother?” and “How do you picture your father?”
My mother had just died after suffering from lung cancer. I saw her in the kitchen making dinner with a cigarette in her mouth. I pictured my father in the garden working. Both were alone. Those images brought home to me the lack of connection I had felt between myself and my parents for my entire life. It was not a pleasant experience and I decided there and then that I would be a different parent to my children. It was a watershed moment in my life.
However, that declaration left me in a quandary, although I didn’t recognise it at the time. Although I knew I did not want to be like my parents, I had no idea of the parent or for that matter the person I wanted to become. Indeed, I did not really know how to even begin to work that out.
Two years later, I was introduced to the world of ontological coaching. It started in a friend’s lounge room as he explained to me the idea of ‘different observers’ and our way of being as seen through the lens of body, emotion and language. Although I was unaware of it at the time, this encounter would define the rest of my life. It seems I had discovered a vehicle to understand the human experience and my own becoming. I was hooked.
The Journey
Since that fateful meeting, I have been immersed in and ultimately made my living as a professional coach using the ontological methodology as the basis of my work. Even though the ontological approach I was taught seemed comprehensive in its methodology, over time inconsistencies in it tugged at the corners of my mind. There was an itch and I just had to scratch it. Without really declaring any intent to do so, I found myself developing differing interpretations to what I had been taught. I began to look for greater coherence and alignment.
My inquiry led me to explore to many different disciplines in areas such as philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. As with the ontological approach, the more I looked, the more I found inconsistency in the ideas. Ultimately, I found myself seeking to address a key question; what lies at core of the human condition? I felt in answering that question, I would be able to build alignment from that answer. I finally came to a premise that I could not fault and from there I rethought the ontological work and added different interpretations from other disciplines that I felt formed the greatest coherence and alignment. In doing so, I realised that what I had initially considered subtle inconsistencies in the ontological approach sometimes turned out to be quite profound.
Suffice to say, this approach, whilst retaining some of the core ontological ideas, now differs in many ways from what I had originally learnt. At the risk of sounding rather cliché, I think of it as the ‘ontological approach+’. Not just a set of principles and coaching approaches but an extensive and well-aligned philosophy and set of practices from which all aspects of the human experience can be explored.
Central of my work is a simple idea and, on the surface, a somewhat obscure one. The idea is the present is not a space in time but simply a boundary between the past and the future. From this idea, I draw the implication that we do not exist in the present, but we are always stepping into the future. As the future is inherently unknown, this means that we are always stepping into the unknown. The unknown means uncertainty and so we are always living with risk. The human condition is essentially about predicting what will come next and navigating the uncertainty and the risk. Rather than living in reaction to the world as we find it, we live in the world as we expect it to become. This work delves deeply into that idea.
Using This Site
One of my profound disappointments in life has been the lack of penetration of the ontological work into the world. The approach that has been so influential in my life is not readily available. Indeed, most people would have no idea what ontological coaching is and certainly not what it is all about.
This site is my way of introducing the ontological work to more people and I am doing this by simply offering my work to those who want to use it without any costs or caveats.
I would welcome any conversations you might want to undertake on what is available here and, above all, I hope you might discover the value this work can bring to your life.
Foundational Values
These foundational values form the basis of my self-story. They are used as the basis of questions I ask myself when dealing with various situations. You can find out more about using foundation values to develop your aspirational self in the soon to be released notes on living a constructive life.