What Am I Tolerating?
The question that made modern coaching
The word tolerate comes from the Latin tolerare — to bear, to endure. It is a word that, at its root, implies something we should not have to bear, but are bearing anyway. Which is why it is strange that we have adapted it, over time, to describe the slow accumulation of small frictions in our daily life. The things we have quietly decided to just live with.
This week's One Question is one of the foundational questions of modern coaching, made central by Thomas Leonard in the early 1990s: what am I tolerating? Drawing on Leonard's framework, Bruce McEwen's research on allostatic load — the cumulative wear-and-tear of low-grade chronic stress that the body keeps paying for even when the mind has stopped looking at the invoice — and the sociology of how many of us, particularly those socialised as women, have been trained to widen our window of tolerance until it includes things we should not actually be tolerating.
