Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Reflections on a coaching life
Crearted by AI and may include errors.
Hello and welcome back to my journey as a pilgrim coach.
A question for you - how’s life? And after you have answered that, here’s my follow-up.
How do you know?
Underneath the various ways we ask the question - how’s life, how are you, how’s it going, there’s the assumption that there exist either some kind of ideal life, or at least some kind of optimal experience of life which it’s possible to find.
But what is it? How would we recognise it? What it’s like to be living it?
A great book on the subject is by three academics from Centre of Faith and Culture at Yale University Connecticut. In their New York Times best-selling book A life worth living, a guide to what matters most, Miroslav Volf, Matthew Crausman and Ryan Mackinally-Linz guide us through the big ideas that have shaped the centuries old human exploration of what constitutes a life that is worthy of our humanity.
Drawing from many different religions, traditions and philosophies, the authors digest the intellectual tools, and key information, with which they equip their students on Yale’s Life Worth Living course.
From the outset of the book we get some great insights and ideas that form the basis of some really effective coaching questions.
Here’s a taster. The authors begin by exploring what they call four levels on which you can live your life.
The first way of living is what you could call living on autopilot.
You do what you because it’s there.
Life in this dimension is reasonably straightforward. Much of our lives are, quite sensibly, lived on auto-pilot inasmuch as there are things we need to do every day that we don’t need to spend too much time thinking about.
In a second dimension we can think of life lived with a focus on effectiveness. A life focusing on effectiveness requires a strategy. The question which motivates this way of life is “What do I want?” This question can lead us to think about the previous way of living so we find ourselves asking “Is what I do, giving me what I want?” Coaching spends a lot of time in this space.
But we don’t stop there. A third dimension of life is one that is being lived out of a deeper sense of self-awareness. This may result in finding, or at least seeking, a vision for life. The question here is “what do I really want?”
The fourth dimension is what the authors call self-transcendence. This just means that the motivation for life comes from a source beyond ourselves. We look for a reliable guiding star around which to make our decisions and apply our energies. We are, in short, looking for a source of truth.
The question we find ourself asking here builds on the others. We’ve asked what we want, asked what we really want, and now we are exploring what makes that worth wanting.
When I use these four perspectives in coaching conversations, I add in another question to link them together: “and what does that give you?”
So, for example, if I want to explore how well a client is using their time we can look at the auto-pilot idea and see what it is that they are doing to fill up their average week or month.
With that data we can go on to explore the question: “and what does that give you?”
It’s a useful way of teasing out behaviours that have being driven by habit, behaviours that were developed in response to previous challenges and opportunities but have now, perhaps, ceased to be useful.
By adding the question “what does that give you?” To the question “what do you want?” I can both help my client think through the implications of a proposed course of action, and give them the opportunity to explore the next question “what do you really want?”
Here’a an example. My client says “I want to get promoted” When asked to consider “What will that give you?” The most important result was that they could get away from the current team they were working with. “So what do you really want?” Well there’s the negative - I want to get away from this lot, and the positive, I want a more collaborative and supportive working environment. The conversation then moves on to other ways of achieving that in addition to promotion, since promotion may bring with it a host of new challenges that my client doesn’t actually want either.
Moving onto the last question “what makes that worth wanting?” ..we find a question that’s succinct but may need expanding a little to make it accessible to some of the people I work with. “What is it about this thing you want that makes it worth investing your time and energy in it?” Is an alternative I sometimes use.
We’ll have more to say about this fourth dimension as we continue this journey together. It’s a question constantly lurking in the background of life, waiting to jump out and arrest us at unexpected moments.
Now if we take as a useful starting point that there are four dimensions from which we can live our lives, what kind of life might emerge from them?
In their extensive study of work philosophies, traditions and religions, the Yale authors came up with three components that are almost universally held to be essential in a good, true, or thriving life.
In themselves they are unsurprising. What emerges when we explore the ideas that gave rise to them is anything but.
First, we can say that a thriving live is a life going well. Here we’re thinking about the circumstances of life.
These can include security, health, opportunities for development and fulfilment, friendships and collegiate relationships and a good reputation.
Secondly, a thriving life is one that feels good. In this space we explore desirable emotions of contentment, joy, maybe empathy.
Thirdly, the thriving life is one that is lived well - lived consistently with our values, inner motivations, and thoughts which flow into actions, behaviours, habits and virtues.
To these I’ve added a fourth. A thriving life is a life of impact. We make a difference beyond ourselves, perhaps as part of a bigger cause, or by leaving a legacy in a phase of life, a particular location, with particular people, or at the end of our mortal existence.
Whilst I’m sure the Yale authors would point out that this fourth dimension can be found within the other three, I’m making it explicit since it’s a common focus in my coaching conversations.
The four areas aren’t separate building blocks you can put together to form a thriving life, they intersect each other. At different times, one or more of these will be more important to us than the others. There’s no formula here for a thriving life. But we can certainly say that all four of these facets need to be addressed in any consideration of a thriving life.
So how can we explore the first of these. What kind of circumstances, external factors, contribute to a thriving life?
One of the ways of exploring this for ourselves, or if you’re coaching a client, is to think about what you are grateful for. The things you are thankful for will reflect what you think you need for a thriving life. Work through this train of thought with me.
As you think back over the last week, about what can you complete the sentence “I am thankful for….” What? Since we are thinking about the shape of your life this is worth spending a little time over. So as you consider what you’re thankful for, have a look at the question through the following perspectives.
What are you always thankful for? If you are asked this question every week for the next year, what’s going to come up every time? I’m grateful for the love of my wife, my ongoing relationships with my adult sons, a safe and secure place to live and a warm home. There are others, but these will always start my gratitude list. Whatever is coming to the top of your mind now is likely to be a recurrent feature of yours.
Second, as you are thinking about this, what are you especially grateful for?
The answer to this question will say something about your current priorities.
At times in my life when I have been under particular stress or pressure, I have been especially grateful for true friends, and genuinely supportive colleagues.
Then we have things we are unusually grateful for - circumstances that seem to come out of the blue. In 2018 I was invited to join a team of coaches in Manchester to support a research project, exploring the potential benefits of soon-to-be graduates - of a career coaching offer.
At the time, this brought together both coaching and past experience in supporting the development and delivery of a research project.
Opportunities to be involved in this kind of work are few and far between for a coaching freelancer. For this I was, and still am, unusually grateful.
Then we have what I would call things for which we are surprisingly grateful. What I’m thinking about here are circumstances that at the time we thought would be unwelcome, but in retrospect turned out to be far more welcome than we could have realised at the time.
I’ll come back to this in a later episode.
But what might that be for you? What are you thankful for now, that you regarded as unwelcome at the time?
We now have a list of a number of circumstantial things that we’re grateful for. As you think about your list, what themes do you see recurring?
How about any of these.
Security. Secure place, secure job or occupation, personal safety.
Maybe you see gratitude for success - you’re grateful for what you’ve been able to achieve or accomplish.
Perhaps you’re gratitude is in the areas of status, reputation, or recognition.
It’s important to you to get credit for what you do.
It’s also important where you stand in relation to others. You may regard it as particularly important to be recognised amongst colleagues or peers.
One of the greatest challenges people face when they retire, is the loss of personal context. In my job I knew who I was. Who am I now?
Or perhaps your gratitude is focused more on wider society. Your personal sense of good life circumstances is inextricable bound up with the wider social context in which you live and work.
This is particularly the case in more collectivist societies where there is no sense of individual success without success of the team of which the individual is a part of.
Perhaps you’re part of one of those. Or do you work with people from that kind of background?
Having thought about circumstances you are grateful for, the next area you can explore is asking to what end are you grateful for each of these circumstances.
Here’s why I suggest that.
One of the most influential people in the history of thought is the fourth century BC philosopher Aristotle.
Amongst the many other subjects about which Aristotle shared his wisdom, was the subject of the thriving life. Essential to such a life was, according to Aristotle, efficacy or the ability to make things happen.
Now if something is worth having or worth doing, we need external goods like money or political influence or friendships. If the end is worth doing, finding the means to achieve it is also worth the effort.
Building on our question from earlier on in the podcast we can look at each of the circumstances for which we are grateful and ask ‘and what does that give you?’
Desirable circumstances can both be and end in themselves and a means to a further end. With this line of thought, gratitude can help you bring greater clarity and visibility to your personal priorities in life.
And this will then lead you into a further question around the circumstances for which you are grateful - who pays?
In the book A life worth living, the authors relate the following account. In the 1990’s, American writer Frank Conroy wrote a piece for a brochure for the company Celebrity Cruises. It’s full of gratitude, for the cruise line, the staff, and other overall experience. In the piece, Conroy writes:
“I realised it had been a week since I’d washed a dish, cooked a meal [or] done an errand.” Lucky Frank.
But hang on a minute. Someone had been cooking his meals, keeping his cabin clean and putting on his entertainments. The good circumstances Frank Conroy was enjoying, well these were available to him, but not to the people who were providing them for him.
For the nineteenth century Prussian philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, this was how life should be. For Neitzsche, the highest aim in life is the development of artistic genius. That means the artist must be freed from worrying about the everyday necessities of life. Therefore, says Friedrich “..the overwhelming majority has to be slavishly subjected to life’s necessity in the service of the minority.”
How do you feel about that idea? To have a thriving life is it just enough for you that your own circumstances are personally preferable.
Does it matter who pays for them? Or does thinking more about gratitude take you into the next area of thought - from gratitude for what, and to what end, to gratitude to whom?
On the day we were born the air that we breathed was already provided for us. It was a gift. If there is any since in which life, in which existence, is a gift, to where should be directing our gratitude for it?
Here’s some options.
A few years ago I got chatting to a fellow-traveller at my local railway station. He was in a life transition with multiple components - relational, geographical and in terms of his career. This interesting and engaging man had worked in various nautical industries and was just awaiting news about work he had applied to do in the Mediterranean.
Although we didn’t have a lot of time together, a coach and someone in transition will always have plenty to talk about.
Over a period of weeks we spoke, perhaps, on three occasions and, it seems, he got his job and moved abroad.
In the course of one of our conversations he referred to The Universe. He was convinced that the Universe had plans for him, and that the Universe had got him out of some difficult and dangerous situations in the past.
He was, he said, grateful to the Universe.
In our second casual chat I asked him what he thought this Universe was that was apparently looking out for him.
He didn’t really have an answer and we didn’t have the time to explore the question in further detail. I did leave him with the thought that if the Universe was personal, was he just using the label - Universe - as another word for God?
How, then, did his idea of the Universe affect the way he lived?
It certainly made him a more hopeful person, hopeful that in all the vicissitudes of life he could look out for something better coming around the corner.
And it made him a routinely grateful person. Even if he wasn’t entirely sure what this Universe was he was grateful to, he was convinced that gratitude - to something numinous and beyond his comprehension - was an appropriate response to life.
For others, the totally of wider reality can be summed up in entirely materialistic terms. The universe is the totality of matter and energy. And, as we say in Yorkshire nowt else.
Cosmologist, the late Carl Sagan took this view.
In 1977 NASA launched the Voyager 1 space probe, the first man-made object to enter interstellar space.
On February 14 1990, Voyager took a picture of earth from around 3.7 billion miles away.
Carl Sagan famously called this view of death a “pale blue dot.”
According to Sagan in the scale of the vastness of space “humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal.”
In the light of this, thought Sagan, we should be immensely grateful for the opportunity of being alive, deal with each other with greater kindness, and in his words: “..preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever know.”
There is, of course, another way of responding to our tininess and insignificance in the cosmos. Since life if short and the goods of life are unequally distributed on this tiny planet of ours, why not grab what we can while we can. As an ancient Epicurean might have said: “Let us eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die.”And when we look at people elsewhere on the plant who suffer the deprivations of war, disorder, and hunger we could respond with a different kind of gratitude. To mis-quote Bob Geldoff, why not be grateful “it’s them instead of you.” A telescopic camera can tell us what is. Can it really tell us what matters?
One group of sentient beings for who are attitude to the planet does matter, are the generations that will come after us. A broad coalition of people from all kinds of backgrounds, traditions and world views, affirm that we should, in some sense, be grateful for the world we live in as a gift to be celebrated and cared for rather than just a resource to be exploited.
An increasing number of coaches, for example, make the point in their contracts of saying that they are committed to behaviours that will reduce damage to the environment, and advise clients that as coaches they will always be open to exploring the environmental impact of their client’s life, work, organisation and industry.
Their hope is that if we *do* regard our planet as a gift, an inheritance to be passed on rather than just as a means to our immediate ends, we will view it, and hopefully treat it, in a more considerate way.
So where does the thought of gratitude for circumstances take me?
One of the authors of a Life Worth Living, Ryan McAnnally-Linz, is very taken with the fourteenth century English mystic, Julian of Norwich.
Julian is now famously remembered for fifteen years of reflections she had about sixteen visions she was, in her words, shown.
You can read about them in a the book Revelations of Divine Love, which is the earliest surviving example of a book written in the English language, known to have been written by a woman.
In one of her visions, Julian saw everything God made revealed to her as a tiny hazelnut in the palm of her hand. ‘It lasts and will last forever because God loves it; and everything exists in the same way by the love of God.’
In reflecting on this, Julian concluded that humans are made in God’s image and have a special place in this creation. But by failing to live well, we have broken the relationship of love that God intends for us.
Nonetheless, God doesn’t stop there. Julian writes: “He who made man for love, by that same love would restore man.”
It’s insights like Julian’s that provide for the basis for my own gratitude, whether that be for my circumstances, my achievements, my friendships or anything else that moves me in a grateful direction. I exist in a world that God has made because he loves it. God loves me as part of this world he has made. I don’t command this love - it’s given freely.
I regard every good thing in this world as a gift - the circumstances of life, the skills and abilities I have been able to develop, the kindness and respect I am offered, and the myriad of people I will never meet whose work and energy contribute to all this - all this keeps me in a constant state of gratitude.
And, however poorly expressed, that gratitude moves me along the trajectory of God’s love which is, in the face of the many forces that seem to want to resists it, a trajectory towards restoring humanity and making all things well.
So how’s life? And how do you know? How does it help you to think about living life out of routine, out of strategy, out of deeper self-awareness, and out of a guiding light which exists beyond ourself?
As you think about the desirable circumstances of life, how does gratitude give you an insight into what these are, how you rate their importance, and what else these circumstances may be enablers for?
And where do you direct your existential gratitude - gratitude for your very existence which is the foundation of all the other circumstances of your life?
In our next episode we will reflect on happiness. What does a thriving life feel like?
But for now, I’ll leave you with the image of existence that Julian wrote down in her revelations.
“And in this he showed me a little thing, no bigger than a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand, as round as ball. As I reflected on this I thought, ‘What might this be?’
And this answer came to me, ‘It is all that is made.’ I marvelled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing since it was so very small.
And this answer came to me: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it.
And so have all things their beginning by the love of God.
In this little thing I saw three properties.
The first is that God made it.
The second that God loves it.
And the third, that God keeps it.”
Goodbye, and go well.