Reflections on a year in systemic coaching
Reflections on a year in systemic coaching
Breaking down the process of figuring out how to help people who say "I need more meaning in my life"
I finished my period of trainings in coaching, mediation and teaching mindfulness about this time last year, wondering where things will take me next. I tailored my training towards conflict resolution work. But where do I start and where do I apply it? This was quite an anxious time of finding my focus, mixed together with pressures of normal life and making a living. This is a post about what happened next and how taking an opportunity helped me discover at least one spot where I can find myself useful - and what I’ve learned through that.
What happened factually is that I jumped on a chance to join a career coaching platform, Fired Up Space. Brilliantly run by founders Clara and Malte with 70+ coaches on its books, it supports people who find themselves unemployed with a coaching package funded by the the German government (yes). Within this, I found my own angle where I felt most qualified - helping people with career change and reorientation. Eight months later, I have had more than 300 individual coaching hours with clients though the platform and also private clients that came through referrals.
I love the work. I love the intimacy of the 1-1 encounter. I love the relationship that gets built in this container. I love how I can show up there both in full sincerity and full respect to the other and their view of the world - and witness the unfolding. I like the point at which this encounter occurs: a period of unemployment or transition more generally brings a lot of anxiety, but also potential.
The crux of this work is very practical, helping a client to solve a career challenge, but it is also utterly timeless and existential: how to change, how to move forward when what you got you to the place where you are is not getting you any further, how to develop a vision for a better work and life and how to get on with it.
Stumbling into meaning
Quite quickly, and somewhat to my surprise, I discovered how consistently this desire for change comes up tied with the search for meaning, often mixed with a great deal of frustration. One client in an intro call put it most bluntly: “I cannot do meaningless work anymore. This work eats me up alive.” I’ve had others voice it almost apologetically: “I know it sounds a bit unrealistic, but I want my work to have meaning”. In some guise, meaning is an aspect that is present in every conversation. The world of work is so absorbing, so demanding, so precarious, so ruthless, that you better do something that has at least some meaning. At the same time, there is a sense that meaning comes at a cost - a cost of financial stability, status, and progression. It is out of grain with how society is, but it totally with the grain of how we want it to be.
This call finds people in different places. Some people are ready and have the resources to make their current version of meaning at the centre of what they do. Others want to align things better with what they already have - in terms of their work sector, their role or work culture. Others look to arrange priorities in their life and to give focus to what is calling them. Some come knowing want to switch to working for themselves and are also terrified of the prospect. Others feel totally blank on what is next. And yet others feel that they have chosen meaning already, but spend more time keeping themselves afloat that making a difference.
We hear a lot about the crisis of meaning these says. It’s interesting to see that it’s an everyday reality and that people are dealing with it matter-of-factly and hands-on. It’s certainly not easy, but it is also an invitation. “The goal is to balance a life that works with a life that counts” is a quote from a book by Peter Block “The answer to how is Yes” and can be a motto for this work. This is exactly what many people I coach are looking for.
The path of conflicts
I remember how in my mindfullness training, my teacher Suryacitta asked me “but you do get it that all outer conflict is inner conflict, right?” Yes, I said, trying to be a good student. But I did not quite get it. Now I do much more.
The first conflict we encounter while entering in this process, is the conflict between resistance and desire for change. What happens is that we want our external circumstances to change while staying exactly the same. This state is often experienced as powerless, annoying, sticky stuckness. There are several “me”s in there fighting. We are suppressing this fight or fully engaging into it. We are often focused on outer circumstances wishing them to change. We can be feel depressed or be maniacally active, outwardly or inwardly aggressive, depending on one’s constitution.
This stuckness and frustration is what brings people into coaching. They want you to help them to get out of it. It’s only past this roadblock that the road will become shiny and clear. But that’s the paradox. The change one is seeking is directly at the centre of this entanglement. It is only by staying with it, one can see the start of the path emerge.
What I am also finding out is that this conflict contains a gift. The good news is thats the frustration and stuckness are a sign that the internal change the person is seeking and dreading in equal measure, has already occurred. But for very understandable reasons of self-preservation, it is so hard to allow this thing into being. It is resisted as much as it is wanted. The absolutely hopeful message, from my experience, is that the sense of frustration is a harbinger of readiness for change and the coaching process can help it unfold gently.
Conflicts and paradoxes are ever-present in the process of change and their gift is that they offer a way to go into the situation. “How wonderful that we have met with a paradox”, said physicist Niels Bohr. “Now we have some hope of making progress.”
The path of alignment
Another paradox we often deal with is that only action can unlock the stasis. It is by making a commitment to the life of internally-derived meaning, in however fuzzy form, the meaning begins to emerge and becomes more defined. Before we start with the “how” to change, it is by finding an internal “yes” to the fact that there will be internal and external change, you will find the “how”.
And next, it is only by giving that meaning a particular form of a “how” that one chooses to commit to, for at least a short time, opportunities arise. “Life happens at the level of events, not of words” says Alfred Adler, and it’s true. Trusting movement is an important part of this.
But what kind of movement? This is not forced or chaotic movement. This is less about the effort and forcing, it is more about attuning and following energy. What’s for us can be made visible by listening. Asking a question of “what wants to come through me”. And then letting it in, through small visible steps that are already available.
Working with what is
One of the most useful ways of working with this process I have found is having clients map the systems they operate in. We do this with physical objects or with visual representatives on a digital white board. Our aim in this process is to suspend judgement of right and wrong and map exactly what IS.
The simplicity of the task is that there is nothing to change, just to make things true. Bringing everything that feels relevant onto the board (ourselves, other people involved, tasks, places, issues) has a calming effect on the nervous system. There is nothing to suppress, everything can be faced, I am only human, and I am a project of humanity.
This shifts the focus from the individual to their relationships with the elements in the system. This is in itself relaxing too. By removing the stress of focussing on individual, yourself, and investigating relationships instead, there is more space for new information to enter. We can notice things that are out of alignment. We can feel where the tension lies. We can notice patterns.
The third aspect of this approach is that by looking at every situation as a “system”, we make sure we operate in the “real world”, the world we are already rooted in. The change we are seeking is grounded in this system. This brings an aspect of agency and tangibility instead of fantasy, smaller things matter and change can be seen more clearly.
And this work has bias towards action. Prone to over-analysis myself (which is a delightful activity but has to have limits), I appreciate this approach where it's the change in the outer world that creates inner change. By scanning for action and taking action steps, we change internally.
And incredibly, this mapping activity and subsequent investigation is often all that is needed to evoke some inklings of change, some “emergent future” that is standing in the wings. We can start seeing some tangible steps towards “better”. The question I often pose is “What does this relational system ask from me to make the first step towards better?” It’s not all on me. It’s not all for me.
Sometimes it becomes clear that something needs to be released, reoriented or updated. Often it becomes clear is that what you have been asking of someone or your circumstances, is the exact step you need to take yourself. It often becomes clear what this step can be. In all cases there is a release for some evolutionary potential that shows up in a visible form of movement “for the better”. The first steps of the path appear. And these steps have a relation to the whole. They are very individual. They fit our exact circumstance. They are not grand. They are more of an impulse and a hypothesis. They are also intentional.
The foggy path of joy and fear
I was thinking of this when hiking in the Austrian Alps this summer. Taking a lift up the mountain, and joining a winding path for a hike, there is childlike excitement of discovery. There is full faith that the winding trail is taking you somewhere, though it seemingly seems to drop off or goes on impossible angles and you can’t see where you are going, and the valley is covered in clouds. Someone’s done this before, left the markings, it’s a joyful scary-safe adventure. At the moment of transition, there are no signposts and no pre-walked trails. And this is how coaching can help - by having someone who’s done such journeys, many, though not this particular one. And also knows that the sense of joy and discovery can be experienced in this process.
The expertise of not-knowing
One hesitation I had when starting out with coaching a had to do with the sense of responsibility I felt for clients to give them results. Every client comes to coaching wanting to achieve a result and that’s the whole point of the process. But paradoxically, I can’t really help them, they can only help themselves. I held that paradox throughout my training and feel this has now transformed (is transforming) into a new knowing.
What I know now is that I cannot solve anything for anyone and I don’t need to. That would be a grandiose and even an evil presumption (I have tried, trust me). Nobody needs this as they have their own wisdom and their own path to walk. What I can do, is offer them a my presence and attention, my absolute benevolent regard, a coaching container, a process, tools, and my coaching stance.
And one of most useful parts in this “coaching stance” is my orientation of being “useful, not helpful”. And where this approach is tested the most is in the moment of not-knowing that is inherently present in every change process. That space between, that space where old ended and new has not begun. The space between that we don’t know very well and that we try to fill with concepts and strategies as soon as get even a whiff of it. But this is also the place of concentrated potential.
One of my favourite Buddhist teachers, Chögyam Trungpa, refers to this moment as a state of “bewilderment”. Without this moment nothing new is born and only old patterns are perpetuated.
“That bewilderment of not knowing what we are or who we are makes us seek the nearest situation to get a foothold in. We describe that foothold as, “This is me, and this is the situation. These are my projections, my house, my family, my enemies, my friends.” We immediately create this pattern. However, adopting those patterns doesn’t solve the basic bewilderment at all. Interestingly, bewilderment is an expression of wisdom as well as an expression of ignorance. The situation of bewilderment implies that you can’t label anything. That’s why you’re bewildered. If you can’t put a label on anything, however, there are also possibilities of space.”
Work, Sex, Money: Real Life on the Path of Mindfulness, Chögyam Trungpa
Discovering these possibilities of space with my clients is one of the greatest joys of this work. What I am finding out in my coaching practice is that people have incredibly different, idiosyncratic and creative ways of making sense of their reality, their choices and their steps forward. It’s often so different to what I’d do in their situation. What is invariable is that they have preferences, wisdom and desire to move to a more aligned, sane reality for themselves and the systems they are in. This multiplicity is a beauty to behold, as is the sense of agency and courage behind it. The purpose of coaching as I see it is to assist a client in their own unfolding.
There is another aspect of the work, and that is about pragmatism. There is a moment of waking up to own meaning, or it’s possible direction - and also of waking down to constraints that one is faced with. The question becomes about the shape of meaning given the systems I am in. This is a generative place too, a birthplace of the life that counts and the life that works.
My own meaning
There is also a moment of my own meaning-construction in this as I wrote at the top of the post.
I have a belief that an individual’s attunement to one’s relational system, creates reverberations with the systems around them. I like the concept of “Islands of Sanity” by renowned organisational and systems expert Margaret Wheatley - doing what we can, where we are, to create conditions for ourselves and others, where our “basic human qualities of generosity, contribution, community and love can be evoked, no matter what”. Nothing is too small. Small is good because it’s most real. Creating them sends signals to others that this is possible. Connecting them creates more possibility. I feel like this is the work of our time.
What I am discovering in this year is that there are plenty of people across the corporate world of work who want to have more space in their life for dealing with things beyond themselves and wanting to serve their communities in a more meaningful way. Having a chance to live your life with purposefulness and risk - that’s a good life.
And, of course, there is place for anger and outrage - a lot of it. I have had several clients open sessions in the past weeks with “how do I deal with what’s going on, how do I keep living my small life in the face of the injustice that I am seeing”. There is a place for both, one is fuel for another, slow fuel, not fast fuel. Supporting people on this way feels like one way of dealing with helplessness that I feel a lot of the time. Being a node in this process of supporting agency and alignment of others feels meaningful.
And this is also what I was looking for in myself a year ago. In a somewhat paradoxical way, while looking for work that holds meaning to me, I connected to people who are on the same path, and who, by the virtue of my own training and progress, I can be useful to at their critical juncture.
And in a meta way, just as I find with my clients, by saying yes somewhat blindly to intentions and pulls that I felt brewing inside me and taking action, I now find myself in a new place, a place from which I can build further, where I am interested in expanding my expertise in personal change processes, systemic and conflict lenses to organisations and their leaders who want to work in a more collaborative and purposeful ways, building out these “islands of sanity” at the highest “leverage points” I can find.
Having written this post, I let it rest for a couple days and then got an icky sense of "did you just write something in full seriousness about helping people to find meaning?” - aren’t you insane and grandiose? So there is a “me” to whom this is insane and a “me” to whom it’s the one sane to thing to do. And yes, speaking of things like meaning can take us down the same grandiose, competitive alleys. For me it’s about the small meaning that is right for us, right now. I love this quote from bell hooks: “Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.” Meaning, like love, has to be made new, like bread, everyday and right where we are. Making it is joyful in itself, as a process. And, like bread, it tastes so much better when shared…
I find that writing is the most effective process of self-legibility that I’ve found, and this is a primary purpose of this post, as per usual! But if this calls to you, I am open to 1-1 clients and here is the Calendly link where you can book a free 20-min intro call. I offer both one-off sessions and six-session packages at different pricing points and conduct most of the work remotely.