People who work in the helping professions are familiar with the vicissitudes of incremental change. However, coaches occasionally encounter greater dramas than the small victories of day-to-day coaching exchanges. Most coaches have witnessed special "Aha!" moments, tipping points in clients’...

I have always liked kōans — those baffling, challenging, frequently infuriating, thought-provoking, learning tools that in the Zen tradition are the way to enlightenment — perhaps because, in my role as a psychoanalyst, I see parallels between the master-student relationship of Zen Buddhist...