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Reflections on a coaching life
Hello and welcome to our exploration of the four facets of a thriving life.
Before we get into the fourth and final part of this series I need to let you into a secret about coaching. In the world of coaching there really is nothing new.
As I mentioned in the first podcast in this series, concepts that underpin coaching largely come from the world of psychology, with some coaches finding inspiration from philosophy and world religions. Coaching provides a way of bringing to life, and giving expression to, ideas and approaches that were originally thought up by people in other professions or vocations.
What the coaching profession is really good at is taking such ideas and making them more widely accessible, which has been part of my aim, working with the wisdom from the Yale Centre of Faith and Culture.
As we have seen, the main components of a thriving life are circumstantial - a life going well, emotional - a life feeling good and agential - a life lived well, consistent with values. Our fourth facet is what I’m calling a life of impact. A thriving life is one that makes an impact or leaves a legacy. For all you grammar buffs out there, you could also describe that as agential since it’s also about having agency - the ability to make stuff happen.
So let’s get to it, and think about how we can explore having a life of impact. Here’s two dimensions that I reckon need to be part of that exploration.
It expect you have a CV - or as its called in other parts of the world - a resume. Through this brief record of your key achievements, someone will be able to see what you’re good at, what qualifications you have earned, what positions of responsibility you have occupied, and they will rad about some of the really positive things that other people say about you.
As you go through life you are also collecting evidence in support of another record of your personal impact on the world - you’re character CV. This is a description not of what you have done, but of the kind of person you have become, and are becoming.
When people bid you a final fond farewell at your funeral, they will draw on both for your eulogy. They will remember the impact of your work, and the impact of your character. Practically, they may remember that you attained high office in your chosen profession, pioneered work that improved the prospects of many people, or that you were deeply invested in a very few individuals whose lives were enriched as a result. In addition to these objective and quantifiable achievements they may also remember that you were scrupulously fair, generous and appreciative, and selfless.
Living a life of impact will contribute both to your achievement CV and your character CV.
Is there a convenient way of bringing these ideas together in a coaching approach, or even a coaching tool?
One approach, is called Ikigai - a Japanese word used to refer to a driving passion or your life purpose. It uses a Venn diagram to built up a picture of a life purpose build around four things - things you love, things the world needs, what you can get paid for and what you’re good at.
The combination of these gives you a sense of your personal mission, vocation, profession and passion. I’ve put a link in the show notes if you want to explore this one further.
I found working with my own clients that some of the cultural and contextual drivers of Ikigai weren’t translating that well, so in the best traditions of coaching I’ve adapted the concept to produce a conversational structure, capturing a vision for a thriving life. I’ve called this, Hereditas.
Here’s a thought for you. I was born in the UK, in the Midlands, in the 1960s. I could have been born in another part of the country. Or abroad. I could have been a child of my parents in another decade. There is a possible world in which I could have been born in another century or another continent. Here’s the point. Because of where you were born, the culture in which you were raised and the people you engaged with over life, you have had a particular impact on the world. You’re like a stone dropped into a pond whose ripples move the water and anything on it. If you had been born in another time and place - the same stone but in a different pond - that impact would have been different.
So the idea behind Heredidas - Latin for inheritance - is that we - inescapably - have a sphere of influence in life and some choices in what to do with it. In one of the Old Testament psalms of David - Psalm 16 we read - “The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance.” In David’s mind, the “boundary lines” were around a small empire with its centre in Jerusalem. That was his direct sphere of influence. Exploring, and revisiting, what we see as our own spheres of influence is a good way of giving life focus. When faced with the many opportunities and challenges visible in our world it helps us answer the question “what’s mine to do?” It’s a powerful safeguard against jealously, and helps us rejoice with those who rejoice - who have different spheres of influence to work in. Why on earth should I feel in any way jealous of someone else’s success when their boundary lines have fallen in a different place to mine?
So let’s unpack my Hereditas idea. As with Ikigai, I’ve gone for a series of questions that build on each other to give us four dimensions of life which we can display -visually in four concentric circles. And as a useful mnemonic I’ve come up with a handy alliteration.
Our first circle captures our Passions. This circle explores those motivations which are strong enough to lead to some kind of action. These passions can be positive - what we love and want to see more of or negative what we want to see less of.
Positively, I coach because - among other things - I love the variety, the joy of exploration, the chance to meet new and interesting people, and because it plays to some of my natural strengths. Negatively, coaching allowed me to address the dial on my emotional continuum which ranged from frustration to annoyance at the impact on colleagues and others being told “this is all you will ever be able to do,” with people being put into boxes, or being deprived of personal investment because they were considered not worth the effort.
Good questions you can ask people to help them explore their passions include “What are you doing when you feel that time’s standing still?” and “what are you so disturbed by that you feel you can’t rest until it changes?”
So around the passions circle are the twin ideas - I love this and I’m drawn to it, and I am disturbed by this and need to see it changed.
Building up our Hereditas, we next take our discoveries from this circle and carry them into the next one which I’ve called People. Who else is motivated by what motivates you? Who else wants to see the change you want to see? How can partnering with other people increase your impact? In the words of Dr Edgar Cahn, the founder of modern Time Banking, if you have cereal and I have milk then together we have breakfast.
Finding people to travel with - or work with - to explore a common passion is both highly rewarding and risky. One question that’s always worth bearing in mind here is whether the other party or parties involved see you as a partner - in pursuit of a common objective, or as a useful commodity to help them fulfil their own objectives.
Are these people you will shake hands with - just wish them well - or join hands with, combining your resources as you seek to serve each other, as well as some common good.
Speaking of resources takes us to our third circle - our Powers. Primarily, our powers are our personal gifts and skills. They are what we discover when we ask questions like, What things are you so good at that you could teach someone else to do them? Or When you are having the greatest impact, what’s going on around you?
And it’s the place where we might explore potential - What jobs or activities have you seen other people doing and thought: “I could do that?”
There are various skills audits you can access online or work through with a coach. Or you could go old school and ask a range of people what skills they recognise in you.
In this section we find evidence to enable us to say with confidence, I know I’m good at the following and part of the reason I know that is because I can see the results, and so can other people.
The final part of Hereditas is what I call Persistence. To make an impact in life we need to be able to press on in the face of set-backs, and to find motivation when the going is hard. It’s about what we do when we recognise the gap between the challenge we are working to meet, and the level of skills that we have to address it. It’s where we commit to upgrading those skills to meet the level of challenge that we are only just starting to recognise. It’s where we really need the support of our partners to help us through the hard times, and to keep us connected to the driving passions that started our journey in the first place.
If the first three circles on our Hereditas diagram focus more on our achievement CV, the last one gives us our particular focus into our character CV. It’s been rightly said that we are most like tubes of toothpaste when we faced challenges. What’s really inside of us comes out most clearly when we are squeezed. In the persistence section we find ourselves having to re-address the questions of what we want, what we really want, and what makes that worth wanting. We can draw on the inspiration and encouragement of what we are grateful for, and to whom. We will need to draw on our investments into what makes the thriving life feel good, and we will come face to face with the reality of the power of our values.
In our last episode, on living well, we looked at the idea of virtue, and noted that virtue was strength for living. We looked at the four cardinal virtues - fortitude, justice, temperance and wisdom. These are all potential sources of strength in the perseverance dimension of life. I also mentioned there were three others, the so called theological virtues of faith, hope, and love.
I quite like the way Christopher Kazcor describes the theological virtues in his book The Gospel of Happiness, how secular psychology points to the wisdom of Christian Practice. He says
“These virtues are called “theological” because they are received as gifts through God’s power (as opposed to acquired virtues, which are attained through human effort), and because they focus in distinct ways on God himself.”
The theological virtues are gifts that flow from another world. To encourage my listeners who are fellow followers of Christ, and perhaps to intrigue my listeners who aren’t, I’ll briefly explain how the theological virtues provide us with strength to persevere.
In his seminal definition, the anonymous author of the New Testament letter to the Hebrews describes faith as :The assurance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. I’ve long been intrigued by the idea that faith is a type of evidence. Whilst most of our decisions in life are sensibly made on the basis of reason and experience, there are some based on faith. I have, at times, made decisions on the conviction that God wanted something to happen, that I had a part to play in that something, and that he would arrange circumstances to enable that outcome. The reason I needed faith was that I didn’t know what God knew, and couldn’t point to any process or succession of events that would bring that outcome about.
As I was coming to the end of my studies, and looking forward to marriage, in I had a firm conviction that I would be spending the next phase of my life in Cambridge. To cut a longer story short it turned out that my most likely source of employment in that locality was as a civil service direct entrant. As part of the application process I could nominate a department I would prefer to work for, and a place where I would like to be posted. There was no guarantees that, if accepted, I would be given either preference.
I had taken the direct entrant exam, and left the wheels of the civil service recruitment machine to grind towards whatever conclusion they would come to.
I still remember the moment, some weeks after I had sat the exam, of a verse from the Proverbs of Solomon coming to mind as I was about to drop off to sleep. Like fresh water to thirsty ground is good news from a far off country.
Now some people would regard Basingstoke - then the home of civil service recruitment - as a far off country - but regardless of that, the very next morning there was a letter on my doormat inviting me to an interview for a civil service post. As a result of this news I was, as the apostle Paul says of Abraham, strengthened in my faith.
The interview was a success and I was sent a preference form for department and location. I wasn’t too bothered what Department I was allocated to, but was clear in my preference of a posting to Cambridge.
Between submitting my preference and my posting two things happened. The first was that my fiancee, now my wife Hilary - was offered a job in London. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to write back to civil service recruitment and change my posting to a London where there were plenty of vacancies and a wide choice of Departments. But we were convinced that Cambridge was the place the Lord Jesus wanted us to settle and we had faith that he would bring that about.
The other thing was happening behind the scenes in the Cambridge office of the Department of of Health and Social Security. The acting office manager had successfully made a case for an additional manager of my grade. He could have filled the post with an existing civil servant applying to transfer from their current post - there was always a waiting list since Cambridge was a popular place to live. However, the acting manager wanted some new perspectives and new blood and was specifically after a direct entrant to fill this post. Had I applied a year earlier, or later, there would have been no vacancy for me. I was completely unaware that I was in the middle of a perfectly aligned combination of circumstances.
It was the late Pope Francis who said “Faith, by its very nature, demands renouncing the immediate possession which sight would appear to offer.” That sums up very powerfully the nature of Christian faith. Yes it’s assuring - it also demands a choice. Do you make your choice on the limited picture of reality that you can see, or do you act on the basis of that quiet and strange assurance that God is working through a plan, the details of which you are largely or even completely unaware.
So if faith is evidence that God is working out a plan that I’m unaware of, what of hope? There are two dimensions to Christian hope. Unlike the common modern English usage, Christian hope isn’t a wistful longing for something good to turn up, perhaps unexpectedly. Hope is a positive sense of optimism, grounded in the deep conviction that history is arcing towards a conclusion where the end is not destruction or the triumph of evil but and end where is evil is overcome by good. It’s also based on the conviction that this life is not all there is, and that our actions in the service of Christ, however small, will be used by God towards achieving that eternal goal. Hope gives us the answer to the question “Is it all worth it?” And “What’s the point of it all?”
The aforementioned writer to the Hebrews describes hope as an anchor for the soul, with the shank held securely in eternity in the presence of Christ. When the storms of life and circumstances threaten to blow us off course, it’s hope that provides our anchor.
If you are holding onto a chain of hope, to what is yours anchored?
Using a tool like Ikigai or Hereditas we can discover a centre to our lives which starts by exploring our motivations, skills, actions and relationships. Alternatively, instead of looking to reveal a centre by starting with ourselves, we can begin with a vision for life which then becomes our centre, and from which we build up our picture of our life of impact.
In the Christian tradition, Christ is the centre and the rest flows from him. Our desires reflect who we are created to be, our relationships who we are created for, our abilities - the gifts and potential God has placed in us and our perseverance the overflow of the ever-flowing, heavenly gift of grace.
There is amazing liberty in seeing all as gift. We don't feel under pressure to pursue what God has chosen to give to others. We are secure in our own identity as people who are loved. We are confident that God will provide the resources we need to fulfill our various missions in life. We are sustained by the hope that success, ultimately, is in His hands. We accept humbly our limitations and trust him for the rest.
The foundational value that enables all this is the final Christian theological virtue - agape love. Through agape love, something, or someone, becomes lovely because of the love invested in it or them. Agape does not primarily seek to satisfy some need in itself.
It’s not driven to love by some other quality. Agape seeks to bestow good on someone or something else for no other reason than that it chooses to love. When Christians affirm that God is love, this is the quality of love they are referring to. Following the example of Jesus, and strengthened by his grace, whatever the circumstance of life and however we feel about our lot, one choice we can always make is the choice to love.
In 1938 Harvard University started a longitudinal study into adult development - the Grant Study. It’s one of the longest running, and most in-depth studies of human thriving ever undertaken. Its lead researcher came to this conclusion, “The seventy-five years and twenty million dollars expended on the Grant Study points . . . to a straightforward five-word conclusion: ‘Happiness is love. Full stop.’”
So how have you got on - thinking about your own vision of a thriving life? If you are looking to formulate your own picture of what a thriving life means for you, is Hereditas a good place to start? What are you more drawn to - starting with yourself and seeing what emerges as you build up an Hereditas picture, or finding an existing vision for the thriving life and making that the centre from which you start?
I conclude these reflections as do the team from Yale with an observation and a challenge. They observe that you will find many competing visions of a thriving life which are interesting, intriguing - even exciting. But the key criteria of any such vision is that it rings true and that it’s credible.
So here’s the challenge. We need to be able to see how this vision of a thriving live can be lived out in different stages of life - for children, teenagers, people in mid-life later life and at the end of life. And how is it lived out under different circumstances of life? What does this thriving life look like in cities, rural areas in affluent societies and those struggling to survive in the face of disorder, disaster, or chronic uncertainty? What does it look like under the conditions of late modern capitalism, emerging populism, or under an authoritarian regime?
And through coaching and spiritual direction I need to be able to explore the question, what would a thriving life look like for you? And if you want to reflect on that with me, you can email me at Geoff.ashton21@gmail.com. You can see the address is at the top of the hosting site.
I hope this short coaching journey is valuable in helping your own pursuit of the thriving life. My hope for you is that you go well, feel good, live well, and find your inheritance. Thanks again for joining me and for now, good bye.