James J. Flaherty

James J. Flaherty (born January 18, 1952) is the founder of New Ventures West, a coach training and business consulting company, and author of Coaching: Evoking Excellence in Others.

Biography
Flaherty was born in Boston, Massachusetts. The second of seven children, he was educated in the public and parochial schools of Massachusetts and New York until age 14, when he moved to California. There he attended Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose.

After high school he entered the Jesuit seminary in Santa Barbara, intending to become a Catholic priest. He left after a year, clearly seeing that that way of life was not for him, and returned to his home near Palo Alto, California. After a year of attending junior college classes and volunteering at an elementary school and a pediatrics ward, James returned to formal education at the University of California Santa Cruz, where he studied literature and psychology.

At age 23, he moved to San Francisco and became involved with the work of Werner Erhard, learning to lead workshops and holding various staff positions. He met Fernando Flores, who was then a partner with Werner in bringing public workshops designed around Fernando’s work to Werner’s network. In this same period of time James was also trained as a Rolfer, and Fernando became his client. Based upon many mutual interests, a friendship arose and developed into an interesting working relationship: James worked free for Fernando one day per week, and Fernando tutored and mentored him in philosophy, human biology, language and adult learning. The education was intense and far reaching, forming in many ways the foundation for what would follow. James eventually went on and led the workshops that Fernando had designed and offered through his company, Hermenet.

When Fernando and Werner’s partnership ended, James went out on his own, taking what he had learned and adding his own experience to it. After various twists and turns, in 1985 he founded New Ventures West, a coach training and business consulting company. Since then, much has been added to the intellectual foundation of James’s work. He became a serious Zen student, studying with Norman Fischer, and folded the wisdom of that long tradition into his work, as well as that of Ken Wilber, Jürgen Habermas, Martin Heidegger, Humberto Maturana, Robert Kegan, George Lakoff, Charles Taylor, John Searle, Robert Solomon, Richard Strozzi-Heckler, and many, many, others to invent a new discipline that he calls Integral Coaching.

He wrote Coaching: Evoking Excellence in Others, a book is now in its second edition. The programs of New Ventures West are offered in the United States, Mexico, South Africa, Canada and soon in Asia.

James married Stacy Keller in 1977 and they have a daughter, Devin, born in 1985.

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