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What Am I Tolerating? | The Question That Made Modern Coaching
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What Am I Tolerating? | The Question That Made Modern Coaching
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This week's One Question is one of the oldest, sharpest tools in the modern coaching tradition — a question made central in the early 1990s by Thomas Leonard, who is often credited as the founder of professional coaching as a discipline. His instruction to his clients was deceptively simple: list — not five, not ten, but fifty to a hundred — of the small, medium, and large things you are tolerating in your daily life. The list is meant to feel ridiculous. That is part of the point.
Drawing on Leonard's framework, Bruce McEwen's neuroscience of allostatic load (the cumulative wear-and-tear of low-grade chronic stress), the sociology of how we are trained — especially as women — to widen our window of tolerance, and a small story involving a broken cabinet hinge that I tolerated for nearly two years.
What am I tolerating?