Why is it so hard to choose the life you say you want?
Vicissitas™
The philosophy and practice of turning towards, rather than away from, the challenges and troubles of life, to alchemize them into opportunities for growth and empowerment.
We all have choice. Few establish the practice to use it well.
Vicissitas provides personal and professional coaching services in the field of personal growth and development.
PRACTICE Licensed Professional Counselor (Texas). Clinically informed coaching, offered worldwide by secure telehealth.
Coaching
Coaching for personal and professional growth, with Michael MaeRhys, LPC, Certified Coach. Sessions are conducted by secure telehealth. Coaching is not psychotherapy; it is deliberate work on who you are becoming.
Personal Growth Coaching
For the person who has done the reading and still feels stuck between knowing and doing. We work the gap: what you value, what you actually choose, and the distance between them. Grounded in the Prohairesis Tree Model, my framework for building the capacity to choose well. (Prohairesis: choice with agency behind it.)
Professional & Executive Coaching
Decision-making under pressure, values conflict at work, the cost of leading without a center. For clinicians, founders, and people whose judgment is the product.
The Vicissitas Intensive
A structured passage through the full model, root to canopy. Six sessions, for people in the middle of a real turn.
Begin with a consultation
A 30-minute conversation, no charge. We find out whether this is the right work, and whether I'm the right person for it.
The Philosophy of Vicissitas
Change arrives whether you consent to it or not. Life is what happens while you are constructing your well-laid plans. Vicissitas identifies the seeds of growth and change carried within the vicissitudes of life, those unpredictable turns of fortune. Seeds that, when identified and tended, nurture your greatest personal responsibility in life: your own becoming.
Vicissitas is not just about getting through change. It is about turning toward change with deliberate intention: to integrate it, to transmute it, to inhabit it. This isn't a practice of survival, stability, or resilience. This is stewardship, alignment, and honest living.
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I
Choice is faculty, not moment
Prohairesis is the standing capacity to choose, not an isolated act. It is tended, grown, and harvested from the ground you are given.
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II
The faculty of choice is intact; the conditions it grows in are degraded
When a person cannot choose well, it does not mean they are broken. The work is on the conditions of choice, not on the person's worth or will.
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III
Virtues are tools we construct, not traits we are born with
They are not things you may have. They are things you can cultivate. Virtues become the tools for how one becomes rooted, and how rootedness becomes embodied.
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IV
Growth is a process, not a purpose
The purpose is honest living, embodied living: alignment to what is actually in you and asking to be expressed. Growth is the cost of that living.
The Prohairesis Tree Model
A tree (you), the weather it must endure (life), the ground it grows from (your biology, your upbringing, your subjective meaning-making), and the tools of tending and growth (virtues, values, and Vicissitas).
Prohairesis
Not the bare fact of choice. Choice exercised in the most informed, regulated, and connected way available to you. It is the product of a cultivated ground, not a starting condition.
Vicissitudes
The unexpected, usually unwelcome turns of fate and fortune that we must all face in the process of living.
The Tending
Growing the capacity to choose, with tools that are practical, powerful, and portable. Not by managing yourself harder, but by tending the ground that choice grows from.
You are the tree.
We are all born with the faculty of choice. But the ability to choose truly, freely, and wisely is grown. That is Prohairesis. When a person cannot choose well, it is not from brokenness, it is from untended ground. Virtues are the tools for tending it.
What is Prohairesis?Connecting the Dots
Making the connections in the spaces between philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, and lived experience. A place where the clinical meets the practical. The dots are already present. The applied understanding is in the lines between them.
Self-Development Course Offerings
Structured, self-paced courses including: Anxiety, Anger Management, Emotional Intelligence, Emotional Fitness, and Virtue Ecology.
No enrollment, no purchase. Announcement only.
Michael MaeRhys
I am a Licensed Professional Counselor in Texas and an International Certified Coach. The credentials let me do this work. The life came first. I have lived through a good deal of what brings people to my door, and came out the other side of it empowered rather than beaten down. Vicissitas is not a synthesis of coaching and counseling. It is the synthesis of a life actually lived, held in the context of coaching and counseling.
We all have choices. But choice does not guarantee agency. Prohairesis is choice with agency: a capacity you construct, deliberately, over time, to power your choices with agency, emotional independence, and integrity. It is what makes a life well lived possible rather than merely wished for. Building it is the work.
- LICENSED PROFESSIONAL COUNSELOR, TEXAS
- CERTIFIED COACH
- FOUNDER, VICISSITAS™
- AUTHOR, THE PROHAIRESIS TREE MODEL (FORTHCOMING)
- HOST, CONNECTING THE DOTS
- HUSBAND, SON, FATHER, BROTHER
- HUMAN BEING, AND BECOMING
Book a Consultation
Thirty minutes, no charge, no obligation. Tell me what's turning.
- michaelmaerhys@vicissitas.com
- Practice
- Licensed Professional Counselor (Texas)
Clinically informed coaching, offered worldwide by secure telehealth - Scope
- Vicissitas offers coaching for personal and professional growth. Coaching is not psychotherapy and does not constitute mental health treatment.
- Seeking therapy?
- If you are a resident of Texas and in need of mental health services, visit Michael MaeRhys at ResonantChangesCounselingPLLC.com.