A personal journey. My convictions as a pilgrim coach

What makes you want to do what you do? How much of it is down to natural skills you possess? Have you been shaped by experiences that have opened up possibilities that you previously didn’t recognise as available to you? Do you have a driving inner conviction about your place in the world, or the kind of world you want to live in?

I’m Geoff Ashton, a professional coach, podcaster, and occasional spiritual director. The idea for the title of the podcast The Pilgrim Coach was inspired by a thought - I think it was from theologian and scientist Alister McGrath - about the difference between a pilgrim and a tourist. Whereas a tourist may visit a place looking for an experience, or a memory, or perhaps a souvenir, the pilgrim sees his or her journey as a search for transformation. When you leave a place of pilgrimage, something of the place stays with you, becomes part of you and continues to live itself out through you.

Two areas of expertise that have shaped my work in world are theology and coaching. Theology - particularly Christian theology - has provided me with visions for what you might call the good, or the thriving life. Coaching has given me ways to introduce ways of bringing those visions to life in someone's personal experience.

A major inspiration for these podcasts is Misoslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun and Ryan Mcannally-Linz from the Centre for Faith and Culture at Yale University in Connecticut, and their book: Life Worth Living, a Guide to What Matters Most. The book provides a wonderful journey of discovery. Come and join me on my own journey of reflections on life and see what discoveries you make yourself.

For this particular episode I am indebted to another work by the same stable - For the Life of the World, Theology that Makes a Difference -which has helped me shape my six convictions which underpin my approach to my work.

If you want to explore further any of the subjects I cover, please contact me at [e-mail]. You can find out more about my professional work on Linkedin.

What is The Pilgrim Coach?

Reflections on a coaching life

Hello, and thanks for tuning in. I'm Geoff Ashton. I'm the director of C21coaching, one time director of Coaching York, and producer of the Coaching York podcast, and a sometime spiritual director. I'm grateful to the various people who, over the years, have supported and commented on material that I've posted online. They're quite a varied bunch.

They include coaches, people interested in coaching, clients, and people from various faith traditions. And if you fall into any one of those categories, there'll be something in these podcasts that will be of interest. Just bear in mind that whilst I hope that all of the material I cover will have some interest and resonance with everyone who listens, for some it will be of more interest than others.

In these podcasts, I would like to invite you to join me on a deeper journey into my world as a coach. As with other material I've published on the Internet, these podcasts will include some practical coaching approaches and also some insights that will, for some, be helpful in Christian discipleship.

Okay. Here's a couple of preliminary comments about the focus of these podcasts. I have qualifications in theology and coaching, and one of my interests is in the long standing engagement, dialogue, and some cross fertilisation between theology and psychology. At its best, modern coaching practice draws heavily on psychological theory and practice. Some coaching approaches, consciously or unconsciously, also draw on the ideas of various faith traditions.

All coaching explores practical ways of achieving certain ends, things that the coachee wants to achieve or to see happen. And more advanced coaching moves into other areas, areas of needs, motivations, and even into deeper areas of personal fulfillment. In the words of the late Don Browning of Chicago University: ‘Traditional religion and modern psychology stand in a special relation to one another because both of them provide concepts and technologies for the altering of the interior life.’ Behind all of this, there are views of what it means to be human, how and why we think and do the things we do, and we inevitably stray into ethical questions, the right or not right ways to act in different situations. On a number of occasions, a client has said to me, be my conscience.

I'm also convinced that there's no purely neutral or objective place from which to coach. Into the coaching space, I will inevitably bring my practices, my personality, my experiences, my cultural influences, and my preferences. And as much as I am consciously aware of these, I'd like to share mine and how they affect my work. The last thing to say by way of general introduction is that since coaching is fundamentally about how to manage the challenges and opportunities of life, I'd like to explore a framework for what may variously be called a good life, a flourishing life, a thriving life, what that could look like. And my hope is that as you listen to these podcasts, you'll yourself be able to reflect more deeply on your own convictions, those that underpin how you live, how you do - whatever it is that you do do with your life at the moment.

In this episode, I'd like to share what I call my core coaching convictions. Why did I become a coach? How do I describe what coaching is and the convictions, intellectual and practical, that flow from my Christian faith? So here's a little of my story.

The question of why I became a coach has a history in my personality. I naturally have some skill to support coaching. I listen well. People trust me generally. I'm good at seeing situations from different and often novel perspectives. In my professional life, I've worked with a range of sectors and professions and became quite adept at cross referencing good practice from one to another.

In the 1970s, thinkers like Amitai Ezioni talked about three broad sectors in society. We've got the public, the government sector. Second, we have the private market sector. And the third sector talks about other organizational forms. In The UK, this largely became synonymous with the charitable and voluntary sector.

In my work as a UK government official, I worked with all three. I particularly remember three comments from my time in government. One ex colleague remarked, as I was about to go into private practice, that I would be missed because in his words, you remind us that at the end of every policy decision, there's a human being. Another commented that, “Geoff, you see the big picture and can bring that down to practical realities. Few people are good at both.”

A few years after leaving the civil service, I caught up with an ex colleague who was a senior consultant to another department, and he remarked that he could always see me as being a good coach since, in his words, “Geoff, you always ask the difficult questions. Not to be awkward, but to get a better result.” These are some of the skills that I developed that create a good fit between me and coaching. But the move to coaching wasn't just a way of exploring another career. During my time in government, I often found myself in conversations with people who thought I should be able to help them with some issue, professional or personal, and that issue had nothing to do with my role or position or subject expertise.

In those situations, would always do the best I could with the experience or wisdom that I had, but I frequently felt frustrated with not being able to give people answers to issues they raised. Drawing on a range of expertise is great, but still limited. So what could I do with people for whom I had no expertise to offer, but who nonetheless thought I should be able to help them? Well, one of the great liberators in coaching is that you don't need to have a solution to every question put to you. As one coach put it, don't ask me for answers, I don't know either.

So how do I answer the question, what is coaching? When I started as a coach, I had a bit of a problem explaining what coaching is to people who didn't already know. I'd give them a definition of coaching, but then I had to explain what the definition could mean in practice. Well, now if people ask me what I do for a living, I start with a functional description rather than a definition. My job is to help people think more clearly and make better decisions.

There's more to coaching than that, but the description includes two ideas that people can readily understand and relate to. And it easily lends itself to follow-up questions like, what have you been thinking a lot about lately? Or what do you want to be clearer about? Or what decisions do you keep putting to the end of your to do list?

Then people will ask me what happens in a coaching conversation, what goes on. And I talk to them about making four spaces for people. There's a safe space where you can be sure that whatever you talk about will be treated in confidence. There's an insightful space where you can start to make sense of what's really going on in a situation. There's a creative space where you can take your developing ideas and get them into a robust shape so that they don't get shot down because they're half baked, or worse, get stolen by someone else who makes on their own and gives you no credit for your contribution. And finally, there's what I call the liminal space, the zone of uncertainty - the space where you can explore the transition between one phase of life or career and another. It's a useful framework to keep in mind when I mentally prepare for a coaching conversation. What space or spaces will my client want to occupy today? As you're listening to this, what space would you like to share with someone?

So since Christianity is a big part of my life, as a follower of Christ, what does that mean for me? On a personal level, Jesus Christ is my guiding star, the centre of my life, the one around whom I set my priorities and make my decisions. He's the object of my worship, the source of my existence, and the basis of my hope in a world where there's plenty going on to entice me to despair. Jesus is my example to follow and the generous fount of the wisdom I need to navigate the world in which I find myself. Christianity is a mystical faith. You really can know this Jesus who lives by his spirit and through his church.

I've also found Christianity to be highly rational. It makes sense of the way the world is, what it could be, what's wrong with it, what can be done to make it different. And it's historical. The central Christian claim is that this Jesus crucified around AD 33 in Jerusalem came back to life on the third day from his execution. He lives in a new body, which is the first sign of God's new age breaking into this present age.

Christianity stands or falls on whether or not that actually happened as an event in history. And when I've had my darkest moments of wondering whether the Christian faith is true or not, I can't get away from this foundational historical event. It explains other events around it. It explains how Jesus' disciples became his missionaries contrary both to the teachings of their ancestral Jewish faith and their own personal expectations. It explains how someone like Saul of Tarsus abandoned his systematic persecution of Christians to become, as the apostle Paul, both the most successful advocate of the Christian faith in his day and someone who has had a profound part in Christianity's enduring impact.

For me, it explains why a third of the world today embraces Christianity and why millions of others have throughout history. And it explains why Christianity is the most massive mass movement in the history of the world despite persecution and attempts to eradicate it, why it stands up to intellectual challenges as to its validity, and and this is crucial both to me personally and professionally, why it remains relevant to the challenges of life in the twenty first century.

If that's what I understand Christianity to be, how does that shape my life and the way I practice as a coach? For me, fundamentally, it's because of my Christian faith that I'm motivated to seek peace and pursue the common good in the setting of my contemporary pluralistic society. Christianity may be exclusive in its claims, but it's inclusive in its practice.

You can't be a consistent follower of Jesus Christ and not seek to promote the prosperity and well-being of the place and people where you live. And here's six reasons, six broad convictions if you like as to why I say that.

First, God is the source of both the unity and diversity in the world. The Christian understanding, God is Trinity within himself. He's both relationally and internally differentiated. Difference and unity are fundamental and interdependent to who God is. The very possibility of difference in the world and between people is a reflection of who God is, the God who created them.

Secondly, Christians affirm that God is love, and love is something of a slippery and imprecise word in our contemporary culture. In the ancient world, when the most common language was Greek, they used a number of different words to describe different dimensions of love. There's a love for something that satisfies an appetite.
Once I've had that slice of lemon and poppy seed cake, my love for the confection evaporates. It's a love that comes and goes with the needs that demand satisfaction. This kind of love is one that needs to make use of its object. And that's all fine when it's love for a driving need for something like food or warmth or shelter. But it becomes more ambiguous when the object of this kind of love, the need that has to be satisfied is another human being who can be used for a while and then discarded. Then there's a love that's motivated by appreciation. We love something because it's, well, lovely. The focus or object of this love makes a rightful claim on our appreciation. There's something attractive that we're drawn to.

And then there's another kind of love which finds its history not so much in Greek thought as in both the ancient Hebrew and New Testament writings. In Greek, it's called agape and it conveys a different idea. Through agape love, something or someone becomes lovely because of the love invested in it or in 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 for no other reason than it chooses to love. And when Christians affirm that God is love, this is the quality of love that they're referring to.

My third conviction is that Jesus Christ is, in the words of the apostle John, the light of the world. What I take him to mean by that is that any truth, any light, whoever possesses it, Christian or otherwise, ultimately has its origin in Christ. Following the logic that God created everything, all genuine insights must derive from the God who was in Jesus Christ. As one theologian puts it, All truth, sought and found anywhere, takes us ultimately to Christ as its origin. This conviction opens up a whole world of discovery. Whilst Jesus and his teaching provide me with a framework to decide what examples of wisdom I will use in my work, anything I see as consistent with contributing to the kind of world God is seeking to build through the lives of human beings, I will gladly embrace, celebrate, and make use of.

My fourth conviction is the need to recognise the moral equality of all human beings. The basis of this is deeper than self affirmation or the opinions of other people. Our moral equality, our essential value has its foundation in our identities as beings created by the loving intention of God himself and made in his image. Christ came to announce the universal rule of God whose chief commands are love of God and love of neighbour, including one's enemies. In common with the rest of humanity, Christians are loved by the God who created them. And in common with the rest of humanity, we share the same challenges, successes, and failures to live up to the moral standards we intuitively recognise or consciously aspire to.

My fifth conviction is that Jesus' message promotes freedom of religion and of non-religion. When Jesus announces his call to come, follow me, this presumes that any individual who hears it is free to follow or not to follow. From the earliest beginnings of Jesus' mission, was clear that faith is either embraced freely or it's not embraced at all. To say that someone believes with their heart is to insist that people don't believe in order to conform to social pressure, ambient influences, or as a reaction to outside dictates backed by overwhelming force. To believe with the heart is to believe with the very core of one's being.

And my sixth conviction flows from the last one. Behind the stress on embracing faith freely lies the conviction that every person has the responsibility for the basic direction of his or her own life. Another of Jesus' early followers, the apostle Paul, said it wasn't his business to judge people who live by different standards to his own. The final evaluation of someone's motives and actions lies in his view with the one person able to make that judgment with complete objectivity and compassion, Jesus Christ. And on that one, I agree with Paul.

So when I sit down with another person, maybe with you in any setting professional or wider, how am I seeing you? How am I seeing myself? And how am I bringing these convictions into that space which we both occupy? Well, we're both capable of tremendous creativity and the ability to bring good into the world. We're also flawed and need to understand our capacity for suboptimal behaviour. For all the abilities we have as humans to be generous, collegiate, creative, and generative, we also have tendencies towards being greedy, selfish, tribal, and destructive.

Humans are complex beings who in any moment will be moved by mixed motives and priorities. And this isn't just a Christian insight. You'll find it in Plato. In his image, a human conditioners being like a man trying to steer a chariot pulled by two horses of different dispositions. You'll find it in Freud's description of the psyche as id, ego, and superego, Jung's idea of the shadow, and psychotherapeutic ideas around sub-personalities. Nudge theory popularised by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein alerts us to the often unrecognised external influences, which we often unconsciously respond to when making decisions.
So in our conversations together, we'll find ourselves exploring these desires and intuitions, where they might be coming from, what people may want from them, how we might prioritise them, and the implications of following through on any of them.

I enter these conversations aware that we experience life as a mix of certainties and uncertainties. I'm aware that you are on a journey, that your life is in the process of development, and that along with some foundational convictions, you'll be working through some uncertainties or even doubts. And we'll both be bringing into this conversation some guiding values. There are likely to be commonalities, but there may also be differences. And my job is to work with the difference. In the end, the responsibility for your life and what you do with it rests with you.

To support all that, I've worked hard to build up a valuable and extensive treasure store of wisdom, of ideas, approaches, models, images, anecdotes, experiences, and most of all, questions that I can draw upon. Overall, I approach this conversation with a profound humility and a sense of privilege. You are of inestimable worth of more value than I can ever show you. So I take these conversations seriously, prepare well, and look to make the next one, assuming there is a next one, more impactful than the last.

Well, there you have some of my foundational convictions. What then will we go on to cover in these podcasts? In my next episode, I want to talk about my commitments as a coach, how I've applied myself to my craft. And my fellow traveler in that is the New York Times columnist and author David Brooks, and I'll be drawing on one of his articles to explore how I've developed my practice as a coach.

And I'll be doing four podcasts exploring the fourfold shape of a multifaceted content of what has variously been described as the good life, the true life, the fulfilled life, the flourishing life, or as I will describe it, the thriving life. And I'll intersperse these with some bonus pods with friends and fellow travellers who use coaching in their own work and areas of service and who share their own relationship between their Christian faith and coaching practice.

In the course of researching and writing these podcasts, I've discovered what, for me, were a variety of fascinating and eye opening insights into the way the thriving life has been explored throughout history. Spotted many resonances with contemporary coaching practice. And I hope you'll join me on this personal journey of discovery.

And whether you're a coach, someone who finds the whole subject of coaching interesting and relevant, I hope you'll make valuable discoveries of your own.

So for now, goodbye and go well.