Coaching Ecologies to Meet The Moment We’re In
By “the moment”, I mean the polycrisis and everything that comes with is. Let’s unravel the other bit.
In recent years I've become devoted to contextualising my clients' experiences with them. Sas Petherick (whose training I embarked on in 2020) calls it thickening the story.
It doesn’t make sense to me when people say that whilst therapy is about looking back, coaching is about looking forwards.
For example, when people bring a situation to coaching that happened a few days ago, is that alright? The week before? Last month? Where are we drawing this line in time as if we can cut off what's present from everything else after an arbitrary number of spins of the Earth? Don't we become in relation with one another? How could this become irrelevant to the ways of being we can currently access?
In Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, Lola Olufemi writes":
“I want to demonstrate how these temporal regimes encroach on one another, so to tell the story of the past means telling the story of the present, which is already where the future resides. Maybe time is a many-pronged spiral: a thick and firm approach and retreat, steady and unrelenting. The place where memory and repetition are disguised and reconfigured.”
Our experiences of psychological risk (things like rejection, failure, disappointment), echo over time. Re-imagining our meaning making around the original events- inviting more texture, broadening the lens- allows for a new relationship to what occurred, and so a developed relationship with the self.
With your permission, I'm coaching the ecology of "you" across time.
Let's ponder more on this “you”, this “self” we are exploring in our work. What do we mean by this? Who are you?
I believe we are multifaceted beings in states of constant flux and symbiotic becoming.
Under Capitalism and associated systems of oppression, our fragmentation is demanded, and it makes us deeply unwell.
Fragment from the collective- stand on your own two feet and compete! Other people's suffering is not your responsibility! You can care enough to express sadness, but not enough to do anything about it, after all you are SO BUSY! Definitely don't acknowledge the ways in which your choices cultivate hell on earth for others, lol!
Fragment from parts of yourself- conceal your sub-optimal behaviours, your inconvenient concerns, your needs! Perform a tolerable, attractive character and be sure to account for cultural gender norms!
I believe that reclaiming our whole selves as loving, loveable beings, behaving in completely understandable ways in response to our environments is a route to increased compassion- for the self and others. And that from here, we can experiment with novel behaviours that are conducive to realising our longings for ourselves and the world.
I’m touching here on some of the themes from this podcast conversation I had with Peta O’Brien- Day on The Soapbox. “Could Coaching Help Us Navigate This Polycrisis?” I think so.
I’m grateful to Nora Bateson for her articulation of “nth order effects”.
And therefore the value of avoiding first order solutions. Actually, many of the difficulties we face are emergent from previous first order solutions- moments when we have individually or collectively sought to match an issue with immediacy and simplicity.
To ‘achieve’ this, we may have sought to isolate a problem, as one might when repairing a part of a machine. In the mainstream “self development” space, this approach often includes hacks and tricks and methods and ‘one size fits all’ processes, etc.
Many of my coaching clients are in a chapter of recovery from this culture and everything that goes with it. It’s one that denies the impacts of systems of oppression, culture, neurodiversity, trauma, and any other facets of our ecologies that we become with.
There’s a sense, in these spaces, that you need to be a ‘better’ version of yourself, in spite of everything that inhibits you.
“Develop” originally meaning “unfold” (like an inversion of envelop)
What if you just unfolded, within and around all that is part of you and all that you are part of?
I sometimes hesitate to label my coaching as developmental because of the ways in which the word has been wed to hierarchies and stages and milestones.
In coaching the ecology of you, across time and contexts, we needn’t pursue a “highest” or “best” self- I have no idea what such a thing might be, or how that might be measured.
There is simply a becoming, a deepening, a broadening, at your own pace. And the more we welcome the unfolding self, the more (internal and external) resources we discover.
