What an extraordinary series about love in coaching this has been. I’d like to thank all my guests for their best thinking. It’s certainly been shaping my practice. How about yours?
It’s also helped me to midwife my next book, working title Love as a Revolutionary Coaching Practice, which will be out in the Autumn. Watch this space for more news on that.
One thing I’d like to anchor us back to though, is why we’re all focusing on love in our work. Life is not all about hearts and flowers. Never has been, never will be. I learned of the Via Negativa recently from Claire Genkei Breeze. The paths of pain, suffering, loss, dissolution, of the unwanted, of confusion, of difficulty, these are all a part of our human reality. There is much that distresses me in the world today. It activates my fear and my rage. I find it hard to love in these circumstances, but it’s necessary for me to understand my relationship to the Tough Times (as Helena Clayton calls them) to be able to then lean into Acts of Love.
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced”, James Baldwin.
So let’s face the Via Negativa with what Teresa Wilson calls “radical hospitality”!! Showing it as much love as we might show to those things that bring us awe and wonder and delight. Let’s include it rather than excluding it. Make space for it. Because this is the path to the Via Transformativa, the path of being altered, the path of possibility, the path to social action, reparation and justice.
We need to be willing to be altered ourselves, if we are to serve those with whom we work. This inner work is vital. To liberate us from all that holds us back.
That’s where supervision plays such an important role. As does therapy. As does coaching itself.
If you aren’t investing in this triumvirate for yourself, why is that? Maybe there’s some fear in that? If you were to inquire into your own fear, what would you come to know?
I’ve just been reading Erik DeHaan’s book The Gift of Coaching: Love Over Fear in Helping Conversations. In it, he articulates all the ways that we, coaches, are fearful in this context of coaching, and how that can get in the way of us being loving towards ourselves and to our clients. Yes, we can bring love to our clients to assuage their fear, but we must attend to our own fears over and over again.
One other place to continue this exploration is through the Association for Coaching podcast series on Love in Coaching, hosted by Helena Clayton and featuring yours truly amongst others, some of whom have written here and some additional voices. I’ve found them to be inspirational.
Perhaps that’s a good place to continue to build your own love practice. It’s certainly what I’m looking at for myself in service of my clients.
