Soul Coaching
The door closed behind me and I took my usual chair around this small table in my client’s office. She picked up a black notebook from her desk and after a furtive glance at her computer screen, joined me. From behind her tense smile, she began the conversation with a question.
“Can we talk about anything?”
“This coaching is for you and we can talk about whatever will help you be the best you want to be in your job”, I replied.
There was a meaningful pause.
“What I want to know is, is there a God?”
She was a very senior leader within a global organisation and the question she asked would be a great one to put before a group of trainee executive coaches and ask them ‘What kind of coach do you think this leader needs?’ I’ve been around long enough to know how long is the list of possible types of coaching are on the menu in the market place these days.Executive coaching, leadership coaching, transformative coaching, co-active coaching, management coaching, change management coaching, life coaching, therapeutic coaching, psychological coaching…….
After many years of inner wrestling with this question as a coaching professional I have settled with calling myself a Soul Coach.
Of course, as soon as I say this I realise, or I fear, that it will be career limiting. I will be dismissed from the serious world that I have functioned in, that of what is usually called Executive Coaching. I have fought off being labelled or dismissed most of my life.
But that is what it is. Soul Coaching. So why not just call it what it is.
For much of human history, from the ancients to the moderns, the deepest part of a human being has been called their soul. While we might debate whether we also have a spirit, a part of us connected to the transcendent, soul is actually a pretty safe name to stand on. It is the deeper place of ourselves where we intuit, imagine, have meaning and purpose, our longings and desires, where we most deeply connect with ourselves and others, as well as seek to connect to something bigger or beyond. That place is core to who we are.
Why did this woman I was coaching ask whether there was a God? Because her life within her pressured role was unravelling. She was on and off planes, her body was suffering and her relationships has left a trail of disasters. She didn’t ask for a conversation about time management, workload management, work life balance. She was wanting to talk about God, about meaning, about purpose, about who she was at her core and who she was becoming. Her questions, that played out on the stage of her leadership role, were actually deeply existential. A crisis of existence. Soul. She wasn’t expecting me to actually answer these questions, but she was looking for a very safe place to bring these deepest searchings and fears into the light so that she could look at them for herself. She needed someone who wasn’t afraid and was experienced enough to go to those places with her.
One thing that pressure does is that it forces open the cracks and vulnerabilities within us. It forces light into the darker, shadow parts of ourselves that we successfully hide from, often by the very strategies that have made us successful up to this point. But what happens when we sense that those strategies don’t work anymore? When they no longer can be duct-taped together? When we sense the old ways are breaking down, disintegrating, and we fear what will happen next? We sense we are trying to outrun our own unexamined life.
Leaders are leading in unprecedented times, among some of the greatest upheavals and transitions that I have certainly witnessed in my own life time. Things are changing, becoming more chaotic, uncertain, more senseless, more meaningless, more isolated, disconnected and stressful. All of these external pressures surrounding the work place simply mirror the internal theatre of the leader, they get inside of them and reflect the internal drama of insecurity, isolation, breaking down, and senselessness, where they all begin to find an internal echo.
Who was I?
Who am I?
Who am I becoming?
How do I navigate this internal journey that few people around me even suspect exists?
So who does a leader go to for help?
A coach?
What kind of coach?
A Soul Coach.
I’d like to suggest that we need something more than is usually on the coaching menu. Someone who is experienced not just in the structural challenges of change, mission, strategy, spreadsheets and influencing, but is also dexterous in the internal landscape of the spiritual, the psychological, the relational, the gendered and the existential – the soul.
Religion literally means to re-join the ligaments. That’s what Soul Coaches do. They facilitate their client’s inner realignment at the deepest levels of their identity and support them as they then work out how to realign themselves with their external working world.