Meet Us
Our Story
Our partnership started twenty-two years ago when we met and fell in love while in a doctoral program in education at the University of Colorado. Since then, it has included co-founding a school, parenting two boys, mountain biking all over the mountain west, caring for our ranch and herd of horses, and most recently partnering on Blue Dot Coaching.
While our life is now defined by ease, joy, freedom and possibility, it didn’t always feel that way. Sixteen years ago, when our boys were babies and we were co-founding a school, we found ourselves struggling with exhaustion, overwork and overwhelm. We’d been soulmates and best friends from day one, but what had begun as our fairy tale relationship had somehow turned into more of a nightmare.
Luckily for us, that’s when we first encountered an understanding known as The Three Principles. It completely changed our lives, both individually and as a couple. Our marriage, our parenting, and our relationship to our work were all transformed in ways that bring us so much gratitude. The greatest gift is that we know the same unfolding is available to anyone open and curious enough to hear something new. Our greatest joy is to share this understanding and watch as it unfolds in beautiful ways for our clients.
Meet Jason Berv
What one word captures who you are?
Hands down, it’s LOVE. While I have always enjoyed using my mind well, I am a person who cares deeply for others, and it is easy for me to tap into my huge capacity for love. I’m easily moved by the beauty I see in others, and it’s a pretty good bet that I’ll cry while watching a movie.
What makes you come alive?
Talking to people about deeply meaningful aspects of their lives makes me come alive. Connecting deeply with others feeds my soul. I feel lots of joy when I’m being of service in simple ways. I’ve also got the entrepreneur’s spirit for taking on big challenges, thinking out of the box, and creating solutions. And flying down a trail on my mountain bike makes my whole body smile.
Every human comes into this world with superpowers. What are yours?
X-ray vision into organizations and their culture. I can very quickly assess the key issues and dynamics that currently characterize an organization. I also have a well-oiled metaphor machine. I often think in metaphors, and I’ve found that the images that leap to mind can be very helpful for my clients to see something in a new way.
What are the most interesting things you've done in your life?
Founding and running a very innovative middle and high school was a phenomenal experience, not least because the hands-on and community-based aspects of the school fostered countless opportunities to meet inspiring people and develop a deep connection to where I lived. Spending time studying religion in Nepal as an undergraduate at Brown University was pretty cool. Dressing up as a superhero at a trade show was unusual. Being an avid mountain biker and skier has taken me to lots of breathtakingly beautiful places all over the world. And being married to a philosopher-rancher-adventurer has been endlessly interesting.
What do you love about coaching?
Oh my gosh, I love helping people unburden themselves. I love feeling connected to people. Seeing when people have insights about their lives is the most wonderful experience. I love the simplicity of what we do. I love that I feel more filled up the more I’m with people in a state of real presence. I love spending time being a conduit for Mind. I love seeing what shows up when I get quiet. I love that I feel so loving towards so many of my clients.
What do you love about living at Lucky Dog Ranch?
I feel incredibly blessed to live in a place of such staggering beauty and peace. I love that it is an oasis of calm, always inviting me to slow down and connect with the beauty and simplicity of the world. Lucky Dog Ranch is nestled in a quiet valley, with breathtaking views of snowcapped peaks in every direction. In the summer, I can be moved to tears when I stand on the edge of the pond and see the perfection of sunshine reflecting off of a rainbow trout. Morning walks listening to the songs of blackbirds and the call of hawks soaring overhead. Seeing the horses grazing with such strong beautiful bodies. The relaxing sound of water flowing through the ranch. And all of this just minutes from one of the cutest towns I’ve ever seen.
How have the three principles changed your life?
The immediate change was that my marriage which was under stress and which constantly felt like hard work was entirely transformed and became an effortless partnership with so much love and joy and connection and freshness. As my understanding has deepened, my whole life feels different.
I parent far more often from clarity and connectedness.I’m much more graceful with my ups and downs, and spend very little time feeling stressed. I stopped working on myself all the time, and that freed me up to feel joyful and content.
Getting a Ph.D. and being a consultant to organizations for many years, I valued being an expert. Now I live much more from curiosity and what I don’t know, than from certainty and what I do know.
What do you love and admire about Sumaya?
Wonder and grace. That’s Sumaya. Overflowing with curiosity, she is a joyful learner with boundless patience for the exploration of new ideas, new perspectives and new paradigms. I’ve never met anyone who is more gifted at mastering anything and everything so quickly. She can spend countless hours quietly observing her horses, coming to understand how they communicate, and what they have to teach us. Or she can tear through books on philosophy or quantum physics, fueled by her love of the big questions and the big picture. That big picture thinking, along with her uncanny ability to communicate big ideas with simplicity, came in handy when she was mayor of her town. Years ago, she made an Ivy League undergrad degree and a Ph.D. look easy because she loved what she was studying. She’s fluent in three languages, and can get by in two others. She plays piano. She was a hang glider pilot. When we first met, she drove me around on the back of her motorcycle. The rest of the picture: she loves afternoon tea, stretching, powder days on skis, and her family. She’s too modest to claim the title, but she’s the real deal wonder woman. Brilliant mind. Beautiful heart. Feet planted firmly on the ground. And full of wonder.
Meet Sumaya Abuhaidar
What one word captures who you are?
WONDER. I’m all about the feeling of wonder at seeing something new about the world and how it works. Wonder is what keeps me curious and makes me feel alive!
What makes you come alive?
I feel most alive when I’m with my horses, either alone or with others. I simply love experiencing and sharing the wonder that they point us to, the universal truths that they share, the profound insights that come from the space they invite us into. It’s a space of deep quiet, a quiet beyond words, a quiet from which a profound feeling of presence and peace emerge. It’s in that quiet that I feel most like myself, most fully alive in the moment.
Every human comes into this world with superpowers. What are yours?
Learning and communicating. I was gifted with a great intellect, an abundance of curiosity, the capacity to speed read and an ability to make connections and see the big picture when I encounter new ideas. I’m also a good writer and communicator. I enjoy sharing that spark of wonder that I feel when I have a “aha” moment. I especially enjoy creating opportunities for others to feel that same giddy feeling.
What are the most interesting things you've done in your life?
I grew up in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war and then lived four of my teenage years in New York City. During my undergraduate years at Dartmouth College, I fell in love with wilderness, became a hang glider pilot, rode mountain bikes across Mongolia and spent a summer training horses in New Zealand. I spent two years in Alabama teaching French, hang gliding with an all-male flying club and flying my glider all over the South. I wrote a PhD dissertation on education policy while also falling madly in love with Jason and enjoying the heck out of mountain biking, hiking and taking frequent dips in cold mountain streams. Birthing two babies without an epidural certainly comes to mind as “interesting,” as does serving as mayor of Nederland, Colorado.
What do you love about coaching?
I love sharing the wonder about how it all works. I love engaging in conversation about the mystery, the biggest possible picture, and having that conversation change both my life and the life of my clients. I’m enthralled by the wonder of horses as coaches, as spiritual guides. They blow me wide open and point me to my best self and to the best coach that I can be for others.
What do you love about living at Lucky Dog Ranch?
I love the towering, awe-inspiring mountains that surround the ranch. I love watching the weather move in from the north and feeling fully a part of the landscape, rather than just being an observer of it. I love falling asleep to the sound of frogs and waking up to the sound of the birds. I love the deep quiet that defines this place. Most of all, I love living with my herd of horses, always surrounded by their beautiful grounded presence.
How have the three principles changed your life?
It’s hard to even know where to begin! Before Dicken Bettinger shared this understanding with me and Jason for the first time, we were headed down a pretty rocky road. Despite truly being soul mates and very much in love, our marriage was starting to get more than a little rocky. I was also very prone to anxiety and lived much of my life in a fog of worry. Sixteen years later I have a whole new relationship to my own experience: I’m madly in love with Jason and have a joyful and resilient marriage; I feel loving, grounded and resourceful as a parent; I know where to look for joy, creativity and impact in my work.
What do you love and admire about jason?
Jason is simply an amazing human being. He has a brilliant, wide-ranging intellect and can dance around complex math one minute and engage in deep spiritual conversations the next. There are few people whose brilliance includes the philosophical, mathematical/scientific and practical all at once. Whether it’s budgets and financials, the heart of mystical teachings or how to work a tractor, there seems to be nothing he can’t figure out! He also has a preternatural capacity for perseverance and an out-of-the box creativity that mean that he seems to be able to create, design, envision, implement and fix just about anything.
But the most amazing thing is that in addition to being brilliant, he’s one of the most open-hearted people I know. The depth of his caring for other people just blows me away. Making other people happy seems to truly be his greatest joy in life.He’s also relentlessly optimistic, playful, and goofy. He fills our house with musical instruments he never plays, he buys one journal per year that he never writes in, his cooking is just awful and he is inordinately attached to the pair of geese who nest near the pond on Lucky Dog Ranch.
