What Is SkillfulChange℠ and The Moffitt Method℠?
I’m Phillip Moffitt, the founder and president of the Life Balance Institute. I work with clients and lead Changes & Transitions Workshops℠. Additionally, I personally train and certify Change & Transition Strategists in The Moffitt Method℠ in an intensive two-year professional training program. The Life Balance Institute is a non-profit development and training organization dedicated to helping individuals and executives find more balance, freedom, and meaning in their lives. SkillfulChange℠ is a branch of the Institute that offers individual sessions and group programs that focus on how to skillfully navigate major life changes.
The Moffitt Method encompasses the wisdom, tools, and protocols I have developed over three decades of work with individuals and groups. Our approach is a unique category of help for people dealing with the inevitable changes and transitions that arise in the unfolding of life – it’s different than coaching and psychotherapy. What follows is the story of how this approach came about and what it is.
For most of my life, I have been interested in understanding the dynamics of change in people’s lives, my own included. During graduate school, I was in charge of running a freshman orientation program that I designed to support the incoming students in their transition from high school to college and to foster their personal growth. In those years and for a long time thereafter, my friend David V. White and I would regularly ask each other questions to prompt self-examination about the stage of life we found ourselves in and the tasks and empowerments we were facing. Those long, in-depth conversations have influenced the diagnostic tools I have developed that we use in SkillfulChange work today.
In my career as an entrepreneur and editor-in-chief in the magazine business, which included being CEO and editor-in-chief of Esquire from 1979 – 1987, I focused on publishing content that helped people understand the changes they go through at various stages of their lives. Since leaving the business world, I’ve spent over three decades developing an extensive set of protocols, tools, and methodologies for guiding people through major life changes. I did not set out to create a consulting and training business based on this work. Rather, this body of work that is now called The Moffitt Method grew from a natural progression of responding to requests for help from many individuals who knew me and others they referred.
Another important component of The Moffitt Method is that it is infused with the wisdom I’ve gained from being a Buddhist meditation teacher and practitioner for the past 25 years. The time-tested truths that the Buddha taught over 2,600 years ago about the nature of mind and the traps people fall into that cause suffering are integral to our SkillfulChange work. These principles help our clients relate more skillfully to their inner and outer experience.
When clients come to us for help navigating pivotal life changes and transitions, we get in the trenches with them and help them sort out their priorities, identify what’s possible versus magical thinking, and together create a strategic plan that we then support them in implementing. The goal of our work is to equip our clients with skills to navigate all their changes and transitions and to have more of the life they’ve always wanted – getting unstuck and making important decisions, having clarity about their values, gaining a deeper sense of purpose and meaning, and experiencing well-being regardless of conditions.
Besides helping our clients strategize about the steps of their current change and transition, a key aspect of our approach is for our clients to recognize the nature of change as both an impersonal phenomenon as well as a personal experience. We emphasize the normality of change and the fact that so much of what we all deal with is due to the impersonal nature of change – to be a human being means adapting to the constant flow of change. Just because change is hard doesn’t mean something is wrong, or you are wrong.
So often our clients come to us struggling with some sort of reactive state of mind, be it fear or uncertainty or indecisiveness, and are caught in their fear and confusion such that they’re unable to make a good decision. Through a series of techniques, we help the client move out of being absorbed by the drama of the situation and see what is characterizing their experience in such a way that they are no longer identified with it. When you can move from a reactive state of mind to the clarity of responsive mind, you can see what matters most in your decision. In this way, you are coming back to the wholeness of yourself and are able to access more wisdom, compassion, and intuition. These are the benefits of The Moffitt Method.
To explore our help empowering you to skillfully deal with change and transition in your life, Contact Us to Connect with a Strategist.