Mentoring the Aspiring Spirit

Michael H. Shenkman, Ph.D.

Transductive Analysis

Your aspirations need and deserve special attention.  Aspirations aren't mere wishes or fantasies -- they are strong, physically moving and affecting moods that overtake you whenever they want to exert themselves.  Aspiring feelings incite wild and roiling feelings that you can't ignore.  Even though these feelings don't make sense right away, they vividly convey to you that  you are ready to do more than what your current situation allows.

These feelings don't tell you what to do next, they don't tell you to go for that next promotion or make that next career move. In fact they incite feelings that defy the ordinary drives and solutions that are met by setting career goals, by getting that promotion, or wanting to take a vacation. These feelings are so moving and so persistent that you do know somethingdifferent is stirring. But since they don't steer you to the usual ways of quieting urges down,  you may be driven to think, "I need some help here." That's where Desert Sky Mentoring comes in.

Transductive Analysis is a process that is dedicated to exploring aspiring feelings. It does so by helping you articulate the continuity of these recurring feelings, and then seeing how coherent these feelings are, and how they really want you to look at your aspirations in new, holistic, affirming and enactable ways.

Transductive Analysis is a method that keeps the conversation between you and your mentor (who may even be yourself) on track. It focuses exclusively on exploring your aspirations. It keeps the conversation out of the pitfalls of coaching, or providing "life" advice.  It does not consider career options as primary, and it does not serve any institutional purpose, such as career advancement or providing you with contacts who can advance your career.  

Transductive Analysis ONLY considers YOU and your ASPIRATIONS.  Its ONLY subject matter is your aspiring, the kinds of work that aspiring moves you to do, and the ability to affirm your vitality as a primary value.  Using Transductive Analysis, your mentor helps you gather and organize your impressions into a strong, singular and logically consistent way of aspiring that we call a "figuration." There are four figurations of aspiring that Transductive Analysis delineates: Leader, Artist, Prophet and Mystic.  In our mentoring time together we ask, together, "Which one am I?"

Transductive Analysis regards your aspiring as special and unique to you. You don't have to learn how to do Transductive Analysis, and you don't have to learn any specialized terms. You don't have to frame your aspiring experiences in terms of past traumas, family scenes or presumed instincts.  The mentor concentrates on your figuration -- which is all yours, and comes from the depths of your very own way of living and being YOU.

You won't even know that this method is being applied in the conversation.  The mentoring isn't about teaching you this method, it's about helping you to gain clarity about your aspiring and reinforce to you how these unsettling feelings you have --- which coaches might characterize as "weaknesses" -- come from the core of your vitality, strength of living and drive to live  in the ways that are more expansively and more encompassing for YOU.

One final word about Transductive Analysis: it is a new mentoring method that has no precedent.  It is not a psychological therapy, because it views your aspiring as completely healthy and as a sigh of your strength.  It is not a cure, because it relates to what in you and in your vitality are already moving you to what Nietzsche calls "the great health."

It is not a merely advisory method that purports to promise "life balance."  In fact, our mentoring stirs actions which may knock you off balance for a while. But in the long run, as you learn to enact the aspiring in ways that your figuration is most comfortable with, you will appreciate that the process was worth the trouble.

Give our mentoring a try -- the first session is free -- and you can decide if you are ready to step into the life that your aspiring is calling you to have, be and become.