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Reflections on a coaching life
Created by AI and may contain errors
Hello and welcome back to my journey as a Pilgrim Coach. Join me in this scenario. You've been invited to a job interview. There's a traditional three-member panel of a chair and two wing members. The chair begins, as chairs normally do, with some gentle and generic questions to help you relax before handing you over to the wing member on the chair's left. Wing member left asks you about your skills, career history, achievements, how you handle situations that didn't go well and some technical questions on your specialist area.
You're well prepared for all these, the interview is going swimmingly. You're handed back to the chair who passes you to the wing member on the right, who will be asking you some questions to help the interview panel get to know you better on a more personal level. Hello, says the wing member, tell me, they ask. When was the last time you made a decision at work that cost you something?
The third facet in the gem, which is a thriving life, is a life lived well. In general terms, we can describe the life lived well as one that is lived consistently with one's values, thoughts and heart attitudes. These lead to right acts, habits and virtues. Today I'd like to think about how we could use the skills of coaching and the insights and wisdom of theologians to help ourselves and others explore this facet of the thriving life. A subject that frequently comes up in coaching is the client's values. And, so we're not smuggling in a concept by stealth, let's be explicit here.
I'm talking about moral values, convictions that shape or drive behaviour. And for whatever other reason, we may hold a value, it's useful, pragmatic, stood the test of time. To some extent we hold it because we believe it to be right. One of the ways I've explored this with clients is with a deck of cards, a values deck, in which each card gives the name and a short definition of a value.
The idea is to sort and refine the deck to identify a number of your top values. Depending on the deck you use, this could be anywhere between 5 and 10. When you have determined a number of top values, there are some great coaching questions you can use to explore them. Let me give you an example. Some years ago I had a colleague, not a client, whose top value was Patience. He would say things like, Patience is its own reward.
And once when someone commented that he was a very patient man, he responded by saying some would say too patient. Lots there for a coach to play with. If I was involved in a coaching conversation with this colleague, some of the questions we would explore would be these. What are you doing when you're being patient? What are you doing when you are acting in a way that's the opposite of being patient?
What does patience give you? What might patience be keeping you from? Asking what someone is doing when they are acting contrary to a top value is a way of identifying a challenge to that value, which is the point behind the interview question I asked earlier. It can also expose a values clash. Some of the most difficult issues to resolve on a personal level are when two values, good in themselves, come into conflict with each other.
A common example of this is the clash between loyalty and fairness or justice. Let's say you're part of a team that are committed to looking out for each other, watching each other's back, always looking for the best in each other. Loyalty is the glue that holds you together. But then one of your team, and let's make it really difficult, your team leader starts to bully other people or to act dishonestly. Out of loyalty,
Wanting the best for him, you remonstrate with him about these behaviours, but he's not interested in listening to you. Out of loyalty, you want to protect him. But justice tells you that you need to escalate the issue and see that he's held to account because of the harm he's doing to others. The rest of the team are turning a blind eye to his behaviour and don't want to get involved. On this one, you're on your own. Which value will come up trumps?
Well if you want to resolve that one you can probably find some good ideas in theology. So what can our friends at Yale, authors of our guidebook, A Life Worth Living what wisdom can they share with us that will be useful here?
Here they would say we need to have regard to the twin issues of responsibility and accountability. Responsibility has a defined scope. We are responsible for some things, not for others. And responsibility has a source. There is someone or something to whom or to which we are responsible.
The second issue, accountability, means that there are consequences to our actions. If we want some guiding principles to help us clarify what we are responsible for and who we might be accountable to, where can we go to look for that? The work of another theologian and prolific author, Tom Wright, provides some helpful signposts. In the search for the content of the life lived well, what do we follow? Do we follow our hearts follow our family, follow the crowd, follow the rules, or follow the one.
Let's have a quick look at each of these and as we do see if there is, within each one of them, a decisive value to which we can refer when we face a values clash and apply this to the dilemma we're facing with our team and our boss. Let's start by thinking about following our hearts. William Ernest Henley, in his poem Invictus, affirmed his own agency and self-sufficiency in the face of the uncertainties of life and his own mortality.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears looms but the horror of the shade. And yet the menace of the years finds and shall find me unafraid. It matters not how straight the gate, how charged with punishment the scroll. I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul. What is Captain Ernest responsible for? Well, whatever he decides.
To whom is he accountable? Himself. Wherever he is on the journey of the oceans of life, he can decide these questions depending on what he thinks is best at the time. If we're looking for an overriding value here, could be autonomy. What's of most value to me is the unconstrained ability to make my own decisions. With respect to our dilemma, we could pick either loyalty or justice, or decide that on reflection neither of these is important enough to lose any sleep over. Well, what do make of that as an idea?
It seems to me that Captain Ernest's decisions aren't as absolutely free as he would like to think. To work with his nautical analogy, he will, from time to time, need to dock into a port to pick up provisions and make repairs. To do that, he needs to make arrangements with the harbour master someone who will have his own ideas about what the captain can and can't do, what resources he will be able to access and what he'll have to pay for the privilege. The other question for Captain Ernest is how he could describe any of his values as meaningful. If I can affirm a value one day and decide to abandon it the next, was it ever a value in the first place? As the team from Yale put it As the team from Yale put it,
In your game of cards you decide what the winning hand is and you can change this after every deal. Is that really a problem? Can't we just trust that we have some natural understanding of what's best so that whatever we decide will be good decision? Anthropologist Thomas Huxley had an answer to that.
The assumption that we naturally know the right thing to do comes up against the complexity and diversity of human experience. As Huxley famously wrote, the thief and the murderer follow nature as much as the philanthropist.
If your defining value is unconstrained autonomy, you have to face the conclusion that none of your choices has any greater significance than any other. Not only does justice have no greater value than loyalty, justice has no greater value than injustice. For our values to be in any way meaningful, they need an external reference point.
In the ships of our lives we can't escape the fact that at some point we all have to answer to the harbour master. If we don't, we will literally live a life that is all at sea.
So who else can we tag along with to find a foundational value to resolve our values clashes? What happens if we follow the crowd? In September 2013, the then UK Department of Business Innovation and Skills published a valuable piece of social research on the different approaches people take to career planning. Within the research is a questionnaire on decision-making styles used to identify someone's preferred approach to career planning.
One of the options on the questionnaire was this. I take a reactive approach to decision making. I often take opportunities pointed out by others. My social networks, online and offline, provide the most important stimulus to me making decisions. That strikes me as a good illustration of an approach to following the crowd.
It has some advantages when addressing our values dilemma.
If you follow the crowd, you have the answer to the question, to whom am I accountable? And you don't have to think too hard about your foundational values since you've subcontracted those to others. Applied to your conundrum with your boss? Well, the issue will never arise for you in the first place, you just turn a blind eye to the issue along with the rest of the team. As for the interviewer who asked, when was the last time you made a decision at work that cost you something?
Well, they might be inclined to wonder whether you're a good fit for their organisation.
You may decide that there are situations when following the crowd is the best way to resolve otherwise troubling values clashes. You will need to decide whether the benefits you gain are worth what you're giving away in terms of having a value centre of your very own.
What of our third option, follow the family? A lot of what we think about values will have come from our family, even if in adult life we decide to modify or even abandon those values and find a value source elsewhere. In Western society we are inclined to think that we are independent thinkers who can find our own sources of wisdom. Other cultures are less confident of this.
A philosopher who still has a profound effect on, for example, modern Chinese culture, is Confucius. Arriving in a world in which the Zhou dynasty was disintegrating, Confucius had to wrestle with the pressing issue of what holds the social fabric together. His sayings were collected by his followers into a book known as the Analects. Here's one them. A man who respects his parents and his elders would hardly be inclined to defy his superiors.
A man who is not inclined to defy his superiors will never foment a rebellion. To respect parents and elders is the root of humanity. Another saying is, I simply love antiquity and diligently look there for knowledge. For Confucius, our responsibilities are mediated through our parents. The origin of the traditions that our parents mediate to us is transcendent. They originate in heaven.
which means the ultimate source of our responsibility is the Dao, the Way of Heaven. In passing on these traditions, our parents are fulfilling their responsibility to ensure the perpetuation and dissemination of the Way. One of the results of this is a clear order in society, a bulwark against societal breakdown. Traditions have been tried and tested through many years and generations of application.
Any interpretive framework we use to make sense of the world is one that has been handed down to us by previous generations, as has the very language we use, not to mention the relationships on which we have been dependent since birth. We might describe the foundational value here as respect. Respect for our traditions and respect for our parents and forebears who transmit them to us. And one of the ways we display this respect is by knowing our place in the social order. I remember a coaching conversation with a soon to be graduating student who had come to the UK from China. We were exploring her next steps in life. She wanted to make use of her degree, which she had worked very hard on. She was engaged to a young man who didn't live in China and she had to take account of the wishes of her parents.
Her parents had financed her studies and were very proud that their daughter had obtained a degree from a British university. Now they wanted her to come home, run the family business and ensure they were looked after in their old age. I asked her what she considered her priority, herself, her fiancé or her parents. She answered without hesitation. Her first priority was to her parents. As a coaching conversation developed we explored ways of honouring this priority without necessarily abandoning other things she wanted out of life.
I'm not sure what Confucius would have had to say about our values dilemma. Perhaps he would say that, as a team member, our place is to follow the lead of our boss. Is there another way in which the traditions of our parents or our family wisdom can help us navigate the route to the thriving life? Here's an example from closer to home.
Some years ago I made some time available to lead a reflective walk in a Yorkshire village. Put very simply, I would take whoever was interested on a walk around some landmarks and places of interest in the location and use them as the basis for some coaching questions. I'd never previously been to the village in question and basically had about half an hour to work out my route and decide what to draw attention to.
Under time pressure in an unfamiliar place, creating work on the fly is a time when I pray about my work even more than usual. The first place I found was a splendid house with a gated entrance and a Latin inscription over the entrance arch. I decided this was the place to start and had a question to get this brief coaching journey underway. I had one taker for my walk which made this an example of niche art of perambulatory coaching. After exchanging the usual pleasantries we found ourselves in front of the gate, I pointed out the inscription and asked my guest, did your family have a family motto? She went very quiet for a minute before saying, this is spooky. We do have a motto. And it's in Latin. Who'd thought?
Well, how about you? What sayings of your family or ideas wrapped up in a family motto, if you have one, provide the kind of guidance you need to decide your own priority values? We've thought about following our hearts, following the crowd and following the family. Isn't there an easier way to think about all this? What if we just had an authoritative source to go to for all the answers we need?
Don't we just need to follow the rules?
As coaches, one of the ways we try to head off potential values clashes in professional contexts is through contracting. The contract with the client says what we expect of each other and refers to the internationally recognised professional standards the coach works to. Even within the boundaries of the contract, ethical dilemmas can still arise, which is one of the reasons why any coach worth his or her salt will have a practice supervisor to help them navigate such mazy issues. Now it would be mightily convenient if we could all consult a book, a code, or library of authoritative wisdom that would give us a specific answer to every value clash we might ever come across. If you hope for that you will be disappointed. But perhaps there is a next best thing. Perhaps we can find a body of rules that we regard as authoritative and combine this with way of interpreting them that will give us the answers we need. Having had around 2000 years to work on this, the best approach that Christianity has come up with works like this.
We have an authoritative text, particularly the collection that makes up the books of the New Testament. They hold special authority because they include the words of Jesus and also the words of people who are closest to him, both physically and chronologically. Then we have an authoritative tradition. Christians have been reading these books for centuries, so it makes sense to take seriously what they've had to say about them.
And then we have a dynamic interpreting community. Broadly that would be a local church or some kind of monastic community. I call it dynamic because Christian communities have to make sense of what they believe and what they do in different cultural and geographical contexts. Have a read of the book of the Acts of the Apostles, the earliest history of the Christian church and you'll see how the practicalities of what it meant to be a follower of Jesus were worked out, frst in the Jewish world where Christianity was born and then in communities in which more and more believers were non-Jews. In one of their books the Yale scholars describe working on the content of the Christian life using the image of jazz music. Jazz is famous as a genre of musical improvisation but jazz is based on certain harmonic and rhythmic structures.
You can do jazz wrong.
In reading our authoritative texts and outstanding figures from our history, Christians look for examples of great improvisation that are deeply consistent with the life of Jesus that we find in the New Testament and the communities that have faithfully sought to live this life out. The Yale authors emphasise the importance of these communities and by way of encouragement to the church today they write
We should search them out, learn to hear in them the voice of the author of the tune, and imaginatively improvise the next few bars.
Following the rules won't give us an overarching value to resolve our dilemma, but it can narrow down our options. Building on wisdom from the wider ancient world, the early Christian church adopted what it called seven virtues as a guide to right living. Virtue is derived from a Latin word meaning strength.
It takes strength to live the thriving life well and cultivating the virtues will help us develop the kind of character we need to live it consistently. The seven virtues are made up of two sets. There are four virtues that can be found in many societies, the so-called cardinal virtues, and three more that are understood in the light of the teaching of Jesus. The cardinal virtues are fortitude, which is a mix of courage and perseverance. Then we have justice. Justice is about people getting what they deserve. A perpetrator rightly gets consequences for their actions and a victim gets justice when they receive recompense for the wrong done to them. Prudence or wisdom is making the best decision we can with the resources we have. And the fourth, temperance, is the strength to say, no to ourselves or to restrain the power we have to meet our own ends and ideally redirected in the service of others. The other three virtues are called the theological virtues of faith, hope and love.
In terms of resolving our dilemma with our boss and team, we could ask ourselves which of these virtues or strengths we need more of. We might notice that justice is in the list and loyalty isn't. Following the rules, at least in a Christian context, brings us to perhaps a surprising idea. We're not following the rules just to find out the right thing to do. The rules aren't a test from which we get a pass or fail mark.
The purpose and objective of the rules is to shape character. When we are deciding between values in any given moment, they lead us to the question, what sort of person am I becoming if I take this course of action?
All of which leads us to the last option on my list, which we will need to explore in more detail in our final podcast, but for now a wee anecdote to tee up the idea.
In the course of a professional development conversation, was hosting with colleagues from Coaching York who were talking about the difference between a coach and a mentor and how important that difference was. I offered the idea that one way of exploring the question was to think about the difference between a centred set and a boundaried set. In a boundaried set, the people in a group decide who is in and who is out by focusing on the boundary - the boundary that divides them from others.
So if, just to illustrate the idea, we strictly define a coach as someone who never gives their clients an opinion based on their experience, and define a mentor as someone who does, then any coach who presumes to give a personal opinion to their client crosses the boundary from their profession and into another one. By way of contrast, a centred set has its focus elsewhere, in the centre.
The centre is something that holds everyone in the group together from which the details are then worked out. If our centre, what holds us together as coaches, is the conviction that our job is to empower clients to be able to make better decisions for themselves, then the details of where the boundaries are between our profession and others becomes less important.
Intrigued, my colleagues asked me where I got the idea from. Well, I got it from Jesus. In his first century world there were many boundaries sets, groups with strict definitions, around what you had to do if you wanted to be in, and what constituted the line that you could cross in order to be out. As far as Jesus was concerned the boundary would become clear as people carried on the journey with him.
First and foremost, he didn't call people to follow the rules or to follow tradition.
The heart of his message was this, count the cost and follow me. I think it was Pope Paul II who said that whenever he was faced with a choice, he would always take the one he thought would be the most difficult. It's a profound thought. If they are to mean anything, living out your values will always cost you something. Perhaps the best way to decide which value you value the most is to decide what price, in order to be true to each of those values, you are prepared to pay.
Where then will you look to find the content of a life lived well? Perhaps this is one of those podcasts where it's worth spending a little time reading through the transcript or listening to the recording again to see what you're drawn to.
Well in the final episode of this series I would like to bring this journey to a conclusion as we scope out a framework for what it can mean to live a life of impact. So until then, goodbye and go well.