Glossary

Words used regularly in coaching for life after financial independence

Belonging
Belonging is the experience of shared aliveness that emerges when I am mutually attuned with others. Something opens. New possibilities become available.

Contribution
Contribution is the experience of my essence meeting right action. It has a rightness to it that I can feel.

Ecotone
An ecotone is a threshold space where two ways of being meet. I may experience these places as unstable, uncomfortable, exciting, isolating, or full of possibility. This is often where real development actually happens—before anything feels clear.

Embodiment
Embodiment is when insight and values are lived through my body rather than held as ideas. It is developed through practice. What is embodied reliably appears under pressure.

Enough
Enough is having what is required for my life to be present—financially and otherwise. It looks different for each person. I know I’m there when decisions stop coming from urgency or fear.

Financial Independence
Financial independence is when I no longer need to earn income to cover my living expenses. My number is my own, shaped by my values, needs, and chosen ways of living. It often brings freedom. It also tends to surface deeper questions about identity, meaning, and direction.

Inheritor
I am an inheritor when I receive wealth, opportunity, or social positioning without having generated it myself. Inheritance can bring ease and constraint at the same time. It often carries ethical and developmental questions that are rarely spoken about.

Inner Critic
My inner critic is an internal voice that measures my worth through judgment and comparison. It once helped me belong. Now it often gets in the way, narrowing choice and muting deeper inner guidance.

Integral Coaching
Integral Coaching is a developmental approach that works with me as a whole person—body, emotions, thinking, relationships, and context. The aim is not improvement. It is a shift in how I live my life from the inside.

Meaning
Meaning is the ongoing way my life hangs together from the inside.

Metanarratives
Metanarratives are large cultural stories about what matters and what counts. They shape my choices and sense of self quietly, usually without my awareness.

Narrative
My narrative is the mostly unseen story through which I understand who I am, who others are, and what is possible for me. It organizes how I see the world. It also shapes how I move within it.

Nervous System
My nervous system is the network of brain, spinal cord, and nerves that helps regulate safety, connection, and threat. It strongly influences what feels possible or overwhelming, often before conscious thought shows up. It is always being shaped by experience, and can be shaped intentionally through practice.

Performativity
Performativity is the belief that my value comes from productivity, outcomes, or visible success. When this belief dominates, my worth becomes conditional. Life starts to narrow around performance.

Practice
A practice is a deliberate, repeated action I take to develop a new way of being. The point is not results or improvement. It’s what becomes embodied over time.

Way of Being
My way of being is the patterned manner in which I live, relate, and make meaning. It shapes what feels possible, how I interpret situations, and how action naturally arises for me. It is always being reinforced or challenged by experience, and can be shaped consciously over time through practice.