Story & Lesson Highlights with Ted Whetstone of Santa Monica

Ted Whetstone shared their story and experiences with us recently and you can find our conversation below.

Ted, it’s always a pleasure to learn from you and your journey. Let’s start with a bit of a warmup: What’s more important to you—intelligence, energy, or integrity?
Integrity. People often hear the word and think purely in moral or ethical terms, but I mean it like the structural integrity of a building: without it, everything collapses. Integrity is the backbone of alignment: to yourself, your purpose, your commitments, and your word.

Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
What readers should know first is that my ultimate commitment is to self-actualization (à la Maslow), and that is not always easy. It comes through personal development and the work of becoming the best version of ourselves. As an executive coach, I partner with senior leaders in larger organizations to help them be the most effective version of themselves in their roles.
Coaching is often confused with motivation or basic performance improvement. Developmental coaching focuses on strengthening competencies (behaviors), not just adding capabilities (skills). My approach is transformational, ideally even transcendent. Leaders reach their current roles by being good at what they do; however, “what got you here” does not always “get you there.” To reach the next level of impact and influence, leaders need to question the paradigms they operate within, see how those paradigms limit them, and then build a new model, along with new habits, so they can step into their full potential and greatness.

Thanks for sharing that. Would love to go back in time and hear about how your past might have impacted who you are today. Who were you before the world told you who you had to be?
As a kid, I wanted to be an inventor. I was mystified by electricity and magnetism, and I knew I wanted to create things that would give others the same “magic of discovery” those forces gave me. My heroes were Copernicus, Newton, Einstein, and Darwin. What strikes me now is that they did not simply invent things; they learned to perceive reality in a new way.
My first shift was realizing that ideas are just as real as tangible objects. Yet ideas confined to a fixed paradigm can only grow so far. When we reimagine the very container our thoughts live in, the context through which we see ourselves, we open doors to possibilities we never thought were available.

Do you remember a time someone truly listened to you?
I remember a book titled I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was. Early in my career I felt unfulfilled on a well-trodden path. It was boring and unremarkable. I was making money, but was I making a difference?
I began working with a career counselor who was extraordinary. For the first time, I felt truly heard – not just my words, but the thoughts and feelings I could not yet name. It was as if my daimon (an innermost guiding spirit) was being called forth and listened for, beyond the purely known or intellectual. That kind of listening is powerful, and it is one of the reasons I became a coach.

Next, maybe we can discuss some of your foundational philosophies and views? What’s a cultural value you protect at all costs?
I protect the belief that people are inherently good. I choose this stance, and in almost every case I find it to be true. We are all big kids trying to figure out life as best we can. Yet humans carry a natural negativity bias, a legacy of evolution, that nudges us to assume the worst. Consciously or subconsciously, we slip into a “guilty until proven innocent” mindset. That is completely backward. It comes from low self-awareness and needless fear. Try listening to someone in your mind as wonderful, kind, loving, and well-intentioned, and watch how they rise to meet it. If you listen with contempt, suspicion, and distrust, you will create a very different experience.

Thank you so much for all of your openness so far. Maybe we can close with a future oriented question. What do you understand deeply that most people don’t?
We are nature, not separate from it. We often mistake “reality” for our immediate experience, which seems reasonable, but we now know too much to keep reinforcing that ignorance. We are adaptive organisms, intimately and inextricably connected within a larger natural system. To see ourselves as discrete and separate is a distorted and painfully limited view. Too many man-made, disempowering notions still shape how we see ourselves and each other. I imagine nature sitting back, shaking its head, and asking, “When will they get it?” We will. That is my mission!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.tedwhetstone.com/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tedwhetstone/