Just recently, one of my coaching clients complained: “It’s truly horrible out there – scary – and I’m fed up with having to sit round a table with a bunch of morons [another consultancy outfit!] thinking that they know what they’re talking about, when it’s obvious they don’t.”
Then, as we discussed this, it became clear that he too was struggling to feel that he knew what he was talking about – and was actually feeling somewhat ‘moronic’ himself…
And so I was left with a question that recurs for us at Integral Change:
What sort of support might be especially helpful during ‘dark times’ like these – when the challenges ahead are apparently so daunting, and the leader (or the coach – or both!) feels so inadequate that ‘traditional’ coaching support – focused on mobilising existing skills more effectively, and/or offering ‘can-do’ emotional support – seem unlikely to deliver what’s needed?
Esther and I have learnt that there’s much value in the dark itself – and that a key coaching skill at times like this lies in being able simply to help our clients stay with the unpleasant truth of the situation, and all the anxieties and feelings of incapability that this provokes.
Our experience – for example, in helping an MD open to his management team’s criticism of his actions, or in supporting a Sales Director to receive the wisdom in his boss’s assessment of his leadership weaknesses – is that ‘the truth’ is ultimately supportive and strengthening for a leader, and can ultimately lead to powerful realisations of entirely new capacities and possibilities.
I was reminded of this rather beautifully at a Steiner-inspired nursery school session just before Christmas, where I was helping my 2 year-old son to make his way tentatively towards the centre of an ‘Advent Spiral’…
The task was to walk towards the centre of a spiral, delineated by cuttings of winter greenery laid out in a village hall. Here we were to light a candle, acknowledge some connection with a person or group in the wider world (a granny in our case!), and then walk back out of the spiral, placing the lit candle somewhere along the path as we exited…
This ritual was informed by a tradition found in many cultures marking the winter solstice and the longest night, which actively encourages a movement inwards at this time, to embrace the dark. Such traditions are guided by the wisdom that, paradoxically, it is here that one’s ‘essential light’ and deepest, inner resources can best be contacted and honoured…
Just like my son, many leaders I’ve worked with are hesitant in this movement. After all, it goes totally against a wider cultural expectation that leaders should continually be demonstrating an extreme competence and dynamism, rather than showing any signs of introversion or vulnerability.
Yet, just as the children were delighted to find light at the centre of their spiral, and seemed energised by making a caring connection with someone or something beyond the hall, so I have witnessed leaders alighting on a surprising new capability or resource right in the midst of their struggle and despair – and being immediately clear about how to deploy this well in service of a larger, organisational good…
As the complexity theorist and leadership writer Margaret Wheatley reminds us:
”Of course it’s scary… but the abyss is where newness lives. Great ideas and inventions miraculously appear in the space of not knowing. If we can move through the fear and enter the abyss, we are rewarded greatly. We discover we’re creative.”
My sense is that this is an excellent time of year for leaders facing great struggle and change to allow themselves to fully ‘enter into’ the darkness of their incapability – and to trust, somehow, that right in the heart of this darkness there is almost certainly some unlikely ‘light’ or renewal to be found.
And, with or without an ‘Advent Spiral’, I also sense that the particular sort of support we can provide at Integral Change could prove especially valuable support to leaders not quite getting what they need from more orthodox approaches to coaching during these challenging times….
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