How Coaches Can Change the World

A few weeks ago, I was invited by Adri Rosenthal to join the PCC class of 2018’s community of practice conversation about the role coaches can play in building the future of our country.

In this instance, ‘our country’ was South Africa.

At the end of our conversation, I undertook to write down my thoughts, both the thoughts that I had going into the session and the thoughts that were catalysed by the conversation. It’s taken me a while to do, but here it is.

My conversation with the people of PCC 18 left me with the conviction that there was no need to limit ourselves.

The principles we addressed have universal application, they ripple into the world, and so this piece is about what coaches can do…Dare I say it?

What coaches can do to change the world.

As we started our conversation, I reflected that their invitation had felt straightforward. After all coaching is about enriching people’s lives. It is about deep listening, expanding the possibilities in our clients’ lives, about being a guide and partner on a journey to living a richer, more joyful, more effective life.

In this framing, all I needed to do was to talk about being an effective coach. Being an effective coach necessarily would contribute to building a better South Africa.

That felt both right and delightfully easy.

If I stuck to that, I could speak about the familiar. I would reaffirm best practice and in doing so, I would be speaking the language of the community that had invited me to join them for an evening.

I would talk about unlocking people’s potential, about the deep power of listening, and all the tools of the coaching trade.

I would share client anecdotes and they’d share theirs, because as you know coaching does indeed change lives, or at the very least, create more possibilities.

They’d feel fantastic because my words would affirm what they already knew.

You who are reading this piece would feel doubly wonderful because you would read that you know what they knew which affirmed what I said.

I would feel wise because we would have a rich resonant conversation.

We’d feel amazing for being part of such an agreeable community. It would be gentle and peaceful and affirming of what good people we all are.

Yet, as I contemplated what I wanted to say in that conversation, the above approach felt more and more of a cop-out.

Yes, at one level, it is self-evident that coaches can build South Africa’s future, or indeed, any country’s future by coaching but that couldn’t be all. ?

And so, I returned to the community’s invitation and ‘listened’ to it again.

Do countries exist?

In this year’s International Booker Prize-winning Time Shelter, Georgi Gospodinov writes,

“People didn’t stop to think that in and of itself, the nation was a bawling historical infant masquerading as a biblical patriarch”.

Don’t you love that? The nation is a bawling historical infant masquerading as a biblical patriarch.

And so, the ‘our country’ part of the invitation immediately took on a new look.

A stop in Charles van Onselen’s The Night Trains complicated ‘our country’ even further.

He reminds us “throughout most of the 20th century, the southern African states, and more especially most of the mine owners - whose primary, if not sole, loyalties in terms of culture, lifestyle, wealth creation and choice of domicile upon early retirement lay in the northern hemisphere - did better than hold black wages; they managed, over 50 years, to lower them continuously” (Van Onselen is one of the world’s leading historians. The Night Trains in his book on the railroads that linked Southern Mozambique to the Gold Mines of the Transvaal).

And so, what is our country, South Africa, when its wealth was used elsewhere, its people intentionally impoverished, and, indeed tens of thousands of the people that carved that wealth out of the bedrock, were not ‘South African’?

And then, Kwame Nkrumah, in speech after speech linked the liberation of Africa to the liberation of South Africa.

In his formulation, the continent would only be free when ‘our country’ was free. In both political and material ways, the continent gave birth to our country, and so can we understand South Africa, without seeing it in the web of obligations that it owes the world?

And so, a strand started to emerge, that what coaches can do to change the world, is to consistently affirm the deep interconnection of all people, to affirm that their ‘country’ is in the world and the world is in their country. That history is complex and interconnected.

It meant that to be a coach, to coach, one needs a sense of deep history, a curiosity about understanding what is this place that we are in and how did it come to be what it is today.

The future is here

I then sat with ‘future’ for a while.

I thought of psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz’s formulation in The Examined Life that “The future is not some place we’re going to, but an idea in our mind now. It is something we’re creating, that in turn creates us. The future is a fantasy that shapes our present.”

My initial interpretation of the group’s invitation felt increasingly shallow. ?

Pausing, reflecting on each word, and exploring their multiple meanings, started to reveal possibilities that in my initial haste I hadn’t seen.

I was excited, because if Grosz is right then the future is right here, this moment holds tomorrow in it, and what we think about tomorrow shapes what we do today.

Of course, in that was a potential freezing. We don’t know what the future is or what future we want, so we don’t set intentions.

Nevertheless, we continue to act, we just do so unconsciously.

The irony is that the unconscious action still unlocks a future.

We are always creating the future. Every moment, every action or inaction creates a future.

I reflected that it was the first time that I had met that group. I didn’t know what their view of the future was and so how could I speak to them about that future, because my present fantasy may be radically different from theirs.

What it is to be a coach

But they were a coaching community of practice. We had that in common and so I revisited the ICF Core Competencies of which there are seven – Demonstrate Ethical Practice, Embody a Coaching Mindset, Establish and Maintain Agreement, Cultivate Trust and Safety, Maintain Presence, Listen Actively and Maintain Awareness.

Do you know that there are 70 items beneath those 7? I don’t remember most of them. They’re great, but 70? It’s a tad tricky to remember them as one goes around the world being a coach.

So, I dug a little deeper.

The ICF defines coaching as “as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. The process of coaching often unlocks previously untapped sources of imagination, productivity and leadership”.

And in that definition, I found a spark of hope and inspiration.

A coach’s role is to provoke thought and inspire creativity, to inspire imagination and leadership.

I get a bit stuck on ‘productivity’ – I’d prefer ‘effectiveness’ or ‘capabilities’, productivity has that ring of more and more and I have yet to find that it is a source of joy.

That helped me make sense of what this future world was that we wanted to pull into our present actions and awareness. In this coaching world, the future has one aim, to help people maximise their potential, to unlock previously untapped sources of imagination.

As I explored, I kept returning to the simplicity of James Flaherty’s coaching conversation – build relationships, develop understanding, explore possibilities, and agree action.

And so, I sat with these individual flames of insight, wondering how I might bring it together. ?

It started to approach an answer that approximated something like, “we envisage contributing to the creation of a world in which all people are inspired to maximise their potential and we believe that we can do so by building relationships, developing understanding, exploring possibilities, and agreeing action”.

It felt a bit clumsy and wordy, so I left it there for a while and went back to reflect on the invitation.

Be kind

As I reflected, the fact that the best way to get a mood uplift is to engage in an act of kindness and the best gratitude practice is to remember when someone was grateful to us, filtered into my thinking.

It means quite simply that the best way to be happiest is to be kind in ways that move people to express their gratitude to us.

That refined my thinking a little. It started to mean that the best way coaches can create the future of our country is to be great coaches, or if we want to be a little fancier to embody the values of coaching.

But that felt circular, a bit too neat, and potentially even a bit trite…so let’s get a little practical…

Let’s get practical

First, you are the coach. You’re the foundation. I really suck at this but take care of yourself across all the domains that you know about. I am reasonable at some, maybe even good at some, but I always forget to regulate time, I often forget that I am in a body…you need to pay attention…protect and build your energy…your attention is the power you bring to coaching…it needs energy…

Teach your clients that too. Help them create spaces that build energy.

But your attention shouldn’t be something that is only paid for.

A coach’s attention should be a gift that you give the world.

Teach others the joy of being seen. Show others what it means to see people. Take the time to greet. Learn people’s names. Enquire about their families.

If you can afford to do so, tip more than the norm, pay the lower paid people around you more than the norm. Be generous where and how you can.

Learn to see.

I do it by counting shades of colour. As we drove into Franschhoek three weeks ago, the lanes of trees were aflame with autumn. I infuriated Roxanne asking repeatedly “what colour would you call that?” Her answers were repeatedly red, brown and orange and yet they were so much more than that. My head ached as I tried to think how I would describe them as something other than autumn or red, brown, orange…

Teach yourself to pay attention.

Read John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. Learn how to see.

Read great novels. Witness how others use words. Read George Saunders’ A Swim in the Pond in The Rain and Ann Lamott’s Bird by Bird.

Enrich your language.

Help your clients to see more which helps them imagine more, be more creative, and see more possibilities. Help your clients to describe their worlds in richer, more vivid detail. Escape the beige, the grey, the mundane.

We are our histories. Know them.

Van Onselen reminds us “History, when done well, is an appeal to the mind, and is about debate, contingency and questioning received wisdoms in ways that deepen our appreciation and understanding of who we are and why and how we did certain things, and perhaps even allows us to learn.”

The ICF’s core competencies don’t require us to know history, but it is our job, our calling, to provoke thought, inspire imagination, stimulate creativity.

How do you do that if you don’t do it for yourself?

In a South African context read Eskia Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue and Benjamin Pogrund’s How Can Man Die Better about Robert Sobukwe, Thula Simpson’s History of South Africa, listen to Miriam Makeba at the United Nations, seek out the writing of Sindiwe Magona.

Learn the country in which you live. Know the stories of its people. Learn the stories of how they connect to the world. Share them, speak about them. Become a storyteller.

After Youth Day, I stood speaking to the young men in my local butcher…I told them of Phillip Kgosana’s bravery in 1960, nine days after the Sharpeville Massacre…a road they travel each day to work but did not know his story…I told them how in 1976, 28 African nations boycotted the Olympics in defence of South Africa’s freedom fighters…they did not know that story…Youth Day was no longer only Soweto, a distant town, but it was a young man from Langa, it was Nigerian athletes…their sources of imagination were deepened…

Enrich your imagination.

Read the fiction of the continent. Read Chimamanda Adichie and Abdulrazak Gurnah. Fiction tells you far more truth about being human than any ‘ology’ book.

Immerse yourself in memoir.

Seek out the ones that aren’t pretty, where people grapple with the pain of life. Read Nadia Owusu’s Aftershocks and William Styron’s Darkness Visible.

Learn and appreciate that we are but one being on the planet. Explore our connections to other creatures. Understand the ecosystems of life, the ones that we are destroying and as we do so we kill our humanity. Revisit first people’s religions. Read Suzanne Simard’s The Mother Tree.

Practically, contribute where and what you can.

I always have a group of clients who don’t pay my full rate. My process is simple, I say make me an offer and I accept it.

From time to time, I take on non-paying clients – some respect the time, some don’t. I prefer the discounted rate.

Many of you will work with people of influence, remind them to think systemically.

It is the paradox of modern life that even the most powerful executives feel trapped by the processes and momentum of corporate culture. Help them think about the systemic changes that would make a difference.

Perhaps it is strange, even alienating, to quote Karl Marx in an essay about coaching, but I feel he put it best.

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, he wrote "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

The risk in coaching is that it is all intra-personal, but we live and work in systems, with process and policy, and inequality. Remember this. Help your client to remember and work with it.

You don’t need to be triggering a revolution. It might be as simple as changing the quality of food in the canteen. Or getting a policy agreed about meeting buffers or after-hours email. All of these liberate time and energy that enable people to be more creative, to imagine and create better lives.

Explore the systemic always…especially in South Africa…

You will get stuck with clients.

I have found what helps is to envisage my deepest wish for them, I think about the best versions of who they are in the world, I celebrate who they are, and I take that energy into a session.

Working with people is magical. Yes, process is important and knowledge and skill and, I think, it is important to know that there is magic, if you work with it. Call it what you want, but the intention you bring shapes the room. You can contribute to the future of the country by putting your spirit’s power into imagining them at their most powerful.

Connect with people, be generous with ideas and relationships.

So, yes, ultimately the best way you can contribute to the future of the world is by living as a coach.

·?????Build relationships.

·?????Deepen your understanding.

·?????Create possibilities.

·?????Enable Action.

Not just in the coaching room, but everywhere.

Remind people that countries are masquerading bawling infants, that our duty is to find ways to connect to each other across all the arbitrary boundaries constructed to control and extract.

Remind the world that we are all happier when we make others happy.

Whether you know it or not. People watch you. You are contagious. Choose how you’d like to infect the world.

Whether you accept it or not, you are creating the future at this very moment.

Each moment holds the possibility to make someone feel seen, to deepen connection, to create possibility, to enable them to act. ?

You can do so consciously with clear intent, or not. Either way, you’re choosing the future you’re building.

(You can find more of my writing here https://karlgostner.com/blog/)

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