Veronica Olalla Love: Chief Executive Officer for the Newfield Network

A conversation with Veronica Olalla Love, the CEO of Newfield Network who shares her deep insights into the field of ontological coaching, a practice focused on understanding and improving how individuals show up in life. 

This approach emphasizes the importance of observing how one sees the world, which can unlock a host of possibilities and lead to profound self-exploration and transformation.

Veronica discusses the holistic integration of somatics in coaching, which considers the body not just as a physical entity but as a repository of experiences, impacting how we engage with the world and ourselves. 

Olalla highlights the origins of Newfield Network, rooted in her family's experiences of political turmoil and displacement, which profoundly shapes their commitment to addressing human suffering and promoting wellness through coaching. 

This background informs Newfield’s ethos of deep transformational learning and developing new ways of being that contribute to a fulfilling life. The episode is rich with discussions about the power of linguistic and emotional reorientation in coaching, advocating for a shift from action-oriented to being-oriented practices.

Transcript

Veronica: In order to address profound and deep sustainable transformation, I believe it requires us to look at that wholeness of who we are and bring all of that into the transformative dialogue. 

(intro)

Charlotte: Hi, I’m Charlotte Saulny, and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. I am taking over from Alex Pascal for the next few weeks and I am delighted to be your guest host. My guest today is the CEO of Newfield Network, one of the most reputable, longest standing coaching schools in the world. She has trained thousands of coaches in ontological coaching and has a strong expertise in the field of somatics. She’s the co-founder of eōs wellness center, a transformative wellness clinic in Boulder, Colorado, that blends ontological coaching with Chinese medicine. Please welcome Veronica Love.

(Interview)

Charlotte: Welcome, Veronica. I’m so happy that you’re here with me today.

Veronica: Thank you, Charlotte. It’s a complete delight to be with you. 

Charlotte: Oh, I love it when people tell me it’s a complete delight to be with me. That makes my day. So, as always, we start Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee, and I’m just curious, what are you drinking today?

Veronica: Uh-huh. So I have a chai rooibos tea with oat milk.

Charlotte: Oh, that sounds very nice. I love that. Why not coffee? I’m curious.

Veronica: I’m a little bit of a delicate creature at times and caffeine is a little bit much for my nervous system.

Charlotte: Okay. I love it. Well, I hope you enjoy your rooibos tea and I’m really excited to have this opportunity to chat with you and learn a little bit more about what’s going on in your world right now and all the fabulous work you do. So, with all that said, or all that started, for those people who don’t know about Newfield Network, and I think if you’ve been in the coaching community for a long time, you will obviously know about Newfield Network, but for those coaches in our community that don’t know about Newfield Network or aren’t as familiar with your work in the world, would you just share a little bit about Newfield, a little bit about the approach of coaching that you take, just so people have a feel and a sense of that?

Veronica: Absolutely, yeah. So, Newfield has been around for about 34 years, so a long time when we’re looking at the coaching industry. We were the very first school to be accredited by the ICF. And, actually, some of our members were the ones who began the ICF. And we have worked with leaders and coaches and individuals around the globe. We’ve, at this point, worked with over 70,000 people. And we’ve been in many countries. And so the work that we do is really connected to our name, a new field. Our focus is on a new kind of learning and a new way of being. And so, our work has been really dedicated to deep transformational learning and discovering new ways of being in the world that are bringing greater service, deep satisfaction, and joy in life. The work came from — so my father, Julio Olalla, is the founder and the president and so I work side by side with him. He’s considered one of the originators of ontological coaching. And ontological is a fancy word, as I like to call it, fancy word that is really connected to the study of how we’re showing up in life. So that’s the primary work that we’ve been doing for all these years and we’ve worked, again, with individuals, with leaders, organizations, many facets, many ways, as you can imagine, over that span of time.

Charlotte: I love that one-line description, how we are showing up in life. And so, ontological coaching deals with how you’re showing up in life and so if you were to sort of share a little bit about what differentiates an ontological coach, for instance, from another type of coach, there’s so many different types of coaching and methodologies out there, what differentiates yours?

Veronica: So the ontological work is really, in my estimation, very connected to beauty. It’s connected to recognizing the observer that we are, how we are perceiving and experiencing life, and so it looks at — in today’s world, in modernity, we’re often focused on actions that we take, “We’re gonna become more effective, we’re gonna do more, we’re gonna get it done faster, efficiency,” and this tends to be the focus is on our actions and what we find is that when we’re dissatisfied with our results in life, when where they’re not up to the standard that we’re wanting them to be, our collective dominant tendency is to examine our actions. “Well, we have to shift this, shift that,” and in the ontological work, what we foreground is the observer so we recognize that the human being taking action is already steeped in a certain worldview, in a certain way of perceiving life, and, therefore, that action is available to them and certain actions are not available. So, in the ontological work, we take a look at how we’re looking. We notice how we’re noticing. And that simple shift creates a world of possibilities and invites us into a profound exploration of self and how self engages in the world. 

Charlotte: I love your one-liners. We take a look at how we’re looking is such a great sort of nugget to describe. And, in the spirit of transparency for all of our listeners, have had the opportunity and been blessed enough to have been through some of Newfield’s training and well acquainted with sort of the depth of it and the substantialness of it, as it were. Share maybe a little bit around the role of somatics, because I think when I think back to my experience with sort of Newfield and the work that I did with you, somatics was such a huge part of it and I think it’s so important. Would you share with our listeners just a little bit more about that?

Veronica: Sure. I’ll back up a moment before I head to somatics to say that I think this is important to know the lineage and where things arise from and where they come from. And one of the other distinguishing factors of Newfield, I believe, is that it didn’t arise because of some theoretical interest or a business plan that somebody who wanted to make money, which are very valid but that’s not where it came from. It came from a place of profound struggle. In the 1970s, there was a military coup in Chile, which is where my family is from, and my family was exiled and so we left Chile, I wasn’t yet born but my family left Chile and landed in Argentina. A few years later, I was born and just that same year that I was born, there was an overthrow of the government in Argentina and so we then left Argentina to come to the States in what some would call unfavorable conditions, yes? So my family has a deep knowing of what happens to humans when we cease listening to each other and when we engage in extreme polarization, which I think is very relevant today. 

Charlotte: Today, absolutely. 

Veronica: And so, at that moment, once my family arrived in the States, my father began working with Fernando Flores and working in this arena of understanding the philosophy of language and so forth but it came from a deep existential inquiry around life. You can imagine being exiled with a whole family to support, landing in a country that you don’t know the culture or the rituals or the mannerisms or all of that, even the language, to some extent, so, from there, that’s the ground from which Newfield was born. And so, because of that, there is this profound desire to bring goodness into the world and to face human pain and suffering in a very tangible, real way. And so that heart and pulse still lives in Newfield in the sense of humans suffer, that seems to be a common dimension to being on this planet, and how do we face and encounter that suffering as a source of learning, as a source of developing and unfolding and of creating a brighter future? So I wanted to give that frame before I go into somatics because it’s connected.

Charlotte: Of course. 

Veronica: So I will also say that when we were in Argentina, I was very, very tiny, very young, and my mom was walking with my sister and me and we were going to the bus stop and we arrived at the bus stop and, suddenly, my mom heard gunshots from every possible angle and she had no idea where they were coming from, who was shooting, why they were shooting. But in that moment, my mother draped her body over mine and over my sister’s, what I consider it to be a heroic act of deep protection. And so while I was very young to not cognitively understand what was happening, my sense is that in myself, I have a very intimate understanding of human polarization, of opposition, and I also have in my body a deep sense of our human capacity for love and for care. So, when we talk about somatics, going into somatics, somatics is the site where all of these aspects of life come together and perhaps they collide or they crash or they fight or perhaps they’re in resonance or dissonance. But our bodies, our soma, is an archive of time. We have all these experiences and they live and they dwell and they inhabit our body. So anytime we’re doing deep transformational work, even if we’re not consciously attending to the body, the very act of speaking requires we move our mouth and our tongue and our teeth, perhaps our hands and all of it so we’re always in body. So, when we look at Newfield, we’re examining that, yes, there is a linguistic component to our humanity, there is an emotional aspect to our being as well as the somatic. So we are this multifaceted, multilayered being, and in order to address profound and deep sustainable transformation, I believe it requires us to look at that wholeness of who we are and bring all of that into the transformative dialogue.

Charlotte: Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. I’m a coach. I’m interested in deepening my understanding of the practice and deepening my capacity for facilitating transformation. What are some of the things that I would do at Newfield that would help me deepen that understanding?

Veronica: Gorgeous reflection. So, at Newfield, the first half of our program, which many people take as their first coach training, but many folks, once they learn about Newfield, they come back to do another coach training because of the depth that Newfield offers. The first half of the program is really geared around taking a look at ourselves. There really is a sense that in order to be a phenomenal coach, we need to cultivate who we are as a being. And so that is the first aspect that we look at and that, again, means that we look at our bodies, our habituated ways in which we posture, gesture, move, don’t move. We then look at also the emotional aspect. What are the emotions that we have learned as human beings? We tend to think of emotions as an individual thing. I’m angry and I’m sad and that’s one component, but there’s so many other dimensions to the emotional landscape. And then we also look at language. How do we become familiar with our internal dialogue and our cultural narratives, familial narratives, our national drifts? All of those are showing up in our being. And so then, as we explore and discover these elements and we bring them from what is often the invisible aspect, we bring them to the foreground, we bring them to the visible, we illuminate them with our awareness, that’s a huge piece about what we do in the beginning of Newfield. We also, I would add, have the privilege of listening to each other. And I think that this is so key. So we tend to have global cohorts, people from ten different countries all in one cohort, or however many it is, which means that we get to listen to each other with tremendous depth and to actually recognize that when one person is speaking, we are in the midst of reflection and learning if that listening is calibrated in that way,

Charlotte: I love your description of language. Perhaps I’ve been guilty of thinking of language as an external sense in terms of how you speak or in terms of how you communicate with others, and to hear you sharing the notion of language, there being an internal function for language in terms of how our own internal dialogue and how we speak to ourselves and our own internal narratives is a beautiful sort of way to stretch my interpretation around what language means and the scope of it. It expands the scope of it. So when you think about Newfield, and, as you said, been around for a long time, really done some incredibly deep work, when you think about where you’ve been and the work that you’re continuing to do in the world today, what’s most exciting for you now? What’s next for you? Given today’s environment, given everything that’s going on in the world today, where is Newfield going? What’s most exciting for you right now?

Veronica: Well, there’s so many aspects as far as where’s Newfield going, but I think right now, what I’m particularly excited about is the somatic work that we’re doing. We just launched an Applied Somatics course that is specific for folks that are already coaches that want to either learn how to integrate the body or somatics into their coaching dialogue or they want to really deepen and refine their skills. And so I actually just this morning was teaching our current cohort about these aspects of learning somatic competencies and understanding. So I’ll give you just a little taste. An acupuncturist works with meridians. A chiropractor is going to work with the bones and the skeletal structure. A Rolfer is going to work with fascia and so forth. So there’s a way in which they are orienting and framing what is the body and that’s their way of engaging with the body. But for many coaches, if you ask them what is body or now include the body, how do they hold that? How do they frame that? What is their relationship to the body? So, often, we jump this element of saying, “Okay, let’s just now work with the body,” without recognizing or even exploring what is the body. We take for granted that we’re all talking about the same thing, we assume it’s the thing. There’s all these assumptions that underride our way of engaging with body. So even to open up this question around, well, what was I taught about body? What are the dominant narratives that are infused in the way I experience my body? And so we can begin to tease that apart and I think, for me, this is just the beauty and the fascination with it is that it’s so powerful. I just did a coaching session with someone, for example, who was looking at their business and they were looking at, “Oh my gosh, there’s Twitter and there’s interviews and there’s this and this,” and just he was in this breakdown in this challenge around what do I do with my business and as we dropped in, he began to see this fundamental pattern that he embodies as he relates to business. And as we honed in to the body, he was able to recognize, one, see that because he couldn’t see it before, and then, two, begin to craft and to curate a new kind of practice and way of relating that enabled him to engage with his business in a completely different way. And, again, there is a cognitive component but that cognition is anchored in our biology. So we have a tendency to separate, “Oh, this is head, this is body,” and more and more the science is showing us and there’s more studies happening, recognizing that, actually, our intelligence is throughout our whole, not only our sensorial experience, but our full embodiment of who we are. And so when we can demystify the body and begin to understand how to access that intelligence, it opens up worlds upon worlds of exploration.

Charlotte: I love the description you gave earlier about, you said something along the lines of the cells in the body being an archive for your experience, and even as you describe it as that, it immediately conveys the level of wisdom, that’s the word I’m looking for, there’s a wisdom to the body, and I think often we sort of associate wisdom with the brain and so it was lovely to hear you describe sort of the biology of the body being an archive of all this delicious knowledge and understanding. So you’re excited about this somatics course. Is this in person? Is this virtual? How do people engage with this kind of training?

Veronica: So, at this moment, all of our training is virtual, which serves us very well in the sense that I think more and more people are coaching virtually, given pandemics and given all of the technology and everything that’s happening, so the beauty is that people are learning how to actually attune and how to utilize body through the virtual aspect so there’s no need to transfer, like, “Oh, gosh, well, I did this in this classroom or in this setting, but now I’m coaching on Zoom or whatever it is so how do I translate that from here to there?” So that’s already present in the training, which I think serves our participants very well.

Charlotte: So all virtual, that’s fabulous. Yeah, and I would agree with you. I mean, I feel like so much coaching happens virtually these days, to be able to leverage the wisdom of the body using technology is an important one. That’s wonderful. So, Veronica, we’ve talked about so much to do with Newfield and somatics, is there anything else that you think, when you think about coaching overall as an industry and profession and what the opportunity for us is as a profession, given sort of today’s environment and what’s going on in the world, share with us a little bit about your views on the profession as a whole and where we need to be going in order to be having the impact that we intend in the world.

Veronica: From the ontological lineage, really, the coaching work is so much about what we could say is how to human better. How do we be as humans in relation to our own selves and in relation to others from a place of depth, from a place of care? And as we’re speaking, there’s so much technology, and technology is a tool but who’s wielding the tool? And what is their level of awareness and care? So, my sense is that now more than ever, we need practices to cultivate our own humanity and our own depth because the implications are so huge. They’re colossal. And so for us to really practice those inner cultivation aspects enables us to then have different kinds of conversations, generative conversations. For us to learn how to listen to each other and hear the concerns that are underneath our speaking, we can listen to each other and we can simply listen to words being spoken or we can listen to the full body of what’s arising. And this is the piece that I find to be so deeply important is how do we find, as Bob Dunham would say, our shared care? Where is that place where I really get what Charlotte cares about and I see it how it connects to what I care about? And then I can be in the space of, yes, there’s difference. Yes, there’s all these multiple opinions. That’s fine. But that we can actually be in relation to each other from a place of learning. What is Charlotte’s life history? What are her experiences? Who is she? And how does all of Charlotte’s arising, how can that actually expand my own perspective and my own experience of being alive? And so when we recognize that, we always say conversation means changing together, turning towards, and I think we’re at a place that we so desperately need to learn how to turn towards. Our tendencies more and more are turning away, silencing, silos, separation, but when we actually come to that place of being in our own skin comfortably so that we can be in relation to another human, that’s when actually what you bring, what I bring, together, we can create a synergy, we can create something new, we can move in a different direction, we can collaborate in a new way. So this generative speaking with the wholeness of who we are, I think, is at the crux of what humanity needs because there is so much of that superficial interaction happening. We’re so quick, we’re so fast, that we missed that depth, and in order to go deep, we need to pause. It requires us to slow down enough to recognize that maybe the first time I heard something, I didn’t yet absorb the fullness of what’s available in that speaking.

Charlotte: I could listen to you all day, even your tone and your language and the way that you share creates a calm and me and a curiosity in me and I’m so grateful for that. And so I will just perhaps end our time together by asking one final question, which is, if there’s anything that is sort of on your mind that you would want to share with the coaching community or something that you would encourage the coaching community to be thinking about at this time, what would you say?

Veronica: I would offer that we are much bigger than we ever thought we were. We are so much more than we often believe that we are, and I don’t mean that in an arrogant, “Oh, yay me,” way. I’m talking about the bigness and the depth of our hearts, of our capacity to be generous and to be of service to the world, and that when we are in a community that supports our fullness of who we are to really come forward, magic happens. I have been with so many cohorts over so many years and seen what is possible when humans come together and in the learning environment that supports one another. Really, beauty is the word that keeps coming forth. It is so beautiful and so deeply inspiring to see humans with the fullness of their vulnerability, of their pains, of their suffering, without denying anything but that full embrace, to show up with that full embrace for all of who we are, the many dimensions of existing, that would be my heart’s desire is to really continue to build spaces and places where humans can explore that fullness of being alive. My sense is that it is messy. Life is not just compartmentalized, it’s not just this. I mean, I’m a CEO, I’m a mother, I’m a wife, I’m a daughter, I’m so many things, I’m a friend, I’m a coach, and every single person has a multiplicity of roles in life. And so, to bring and to nurture that sense of fully blossoming, that is something that I believe enriches every person that we come into contact with. 

Charlotte: Thank you. Thank you for your time, your wisdom, your fabulous distinctions which are very sticky and strike a chord deep within one’s soul. So thank you. Thank you for your time today, Veronica.

Veronica: Absolutely. Thank you for the opportunity to be here, Charlotte. It’s a pleasure.