[UNKNOWN]: music playing [SPEAKER_00]: Welcome back to the coaches rising podcast. [SPEAKER_00]: Today I'm joined by Peter Hawkins again, and this is similar to our past conversations, just a really exquisite conversation for me. [SPEAKER_00]: Peter's one of a handful of people, a small group of people who've had such a profound impact on the way I hold this craft of coaching. [SPEAKER_00]: Today, we're going to get into the meta crisis.
[SPEAKER_00]: What that means for us as coach is why it's inviting us into a radical revision of the work that we do. [SPEAKER_00]: And it would be a super practical conversation. [SPEAKER_00]: Peter's going to share tons and tons of examples of moves he makes with his clients, of questions he asks has been inquiries he invites them into.
[SPEAKER_00]: We will talk about why we've got to move beyond this notion of just coaching an individual where we atomize the individual, separate them from the life around them and the consequences of that. [SPEAKER_00]: And so we'll talk about how we have to coach not just individuals but their teams, the organizations, the family systems, the world, the ecology. [SPEAKER_00]: We have to include all of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: This ecology of life inside the coaching [SPEAKER_00]: and how we can do that on a level which is... [SPEAKER_00]: not just conceptual, but deeply embodied and attuned. [SPEAKER_00]: We're attuned to the flow of life and how it wants to emerge through us and our clients and our organisations in this deep sense of collaboration and generativity. [SPEAKER_00]: It's a really exquisite conversation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Peter even gets into topics like prayer, prayers becoming incredibly important for me. [SPEAKER_00]: And I've been wondering about prayer in coaching [SPEAKER_00]: And then lo and behold, Peter shares in this conversation, the place that he feels prayer can become extremely potent in a very practical way. [SPEAKER_00]: Just a little bit more about Peter.
[SPEAKER_00]: Peter is one of the top global, one hundred coaches, an international thought leader on systemic coaching, executive teams and board development. [SPEAKER_00]: He's an emirator's professor of leadership at Henley Business School, unrepresident of the Association of Executive Coaching and Chairman of Renewal Associates. [SPEAKER_00]: He's a teacher in some of our programs, reimagine leadership being one of them, and he's a prolific author of many books.
[SPEAKER_00]: In this conversation in particular, we're going to be tapping into two of his most recent books. [SPEAKER_00]: beauty in leadership and coaching and his newest book team of teams coaching using a teaming approach to increase business impact. [SPEAKER_00]: I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I enjoyed it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So just to say, if you want to join our mailing list, you can head to coachesrising.com and join our ever growing global community of [SPEAKER_00]: transformational coaches called to serve the evolution of consciousness in our times and you can also find out there about our acclaimed online programs that all being said let's dive in here as the podcast with Peter Hawkins so Peter I thoroughly enjoy our conversations and so we're together again and how are you doing first of all
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm great. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm staying cool amidst the heat wave for currently experiencing. [SPEAKER_01]: And it's always a pleasure to talk with you. [SPEAKER_01]: I always find our conversations rich and generous if. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, you know, there's already like, fifty different questions inside of me from my little check in.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'd love to start to contextualize our exploration today with something we have talked about in the past, but I think is worthy of [SPEAKER_00]: as going into again, which is, what's the context within which coaching is occurring? [SPEAKER_00]: Like the current world we find ourselves in, which I think, since we last spoke, is only increasingly become more uncertain and chaotic. [SPEAKER_00]: And so could you talk about why it's important to talk about the metacrisis?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think in both that the two books that have been published since we last talked, [SPEAKER_01]: I very purposefully start with what is the great work of the great challenge of our time. [SPEAKER_01]: And that is that as I said, our loss conversation, that there are many great challenges like the climate crisis, like pollution, like migration, increasing mentally on this conflict. [SPEAKER_01]: But but out, there's a bigger challenge.
[SPEAKER_01]: which is they are all interconnected. [SPEAKER_01]: We cannot deal with a climate crisis without dealing with growing inequality between countries and in countries. [SPEAKER_01]: We can't deal with the growing spread of mental illness right around the world. [SPEAKER_01]: If we're not dealing with what's happening both ecologically and economically, we can't deal with pollution without dealing with [SPEAKER_01]: with lots of biodiversity, you know, they're all interconnected.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's the polychrysis, but behind that's the metacrysis whereby they are all symptoms of a failure for us to involve human consciousness at the speed to which we have changed the world around us. [SPEAKER_01]: So human consciousness is not [SPEAKER_01]: keeping pace with the complexity and the interconnections and the way we have created the Anthropocene as it's now often called.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I think whether we're a coach, consultants, an educator, spiritual teacher, an HR director and leader, we're all in the same work, the great work of our time, which is how do we involve human consciousness [SPEAKER_01]: for human beings to be future fit, to live on this planet. [SPEAKER_01]: That is, if you like, what I would say is the only game in town. [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, that's what we really stand for, coaches rising as well. [SPEAKER_00]: And what are we saying?
[SPEAKER_00]: What is that? [SPEAKER_00]: What is this evolution of human consciousness? [SPEAKER_00]: One of the things we've explored on the podcast is, [SPEAKER_00]: this certain idea of what it means to be human that we've inherited from modernity, which is different from other conceptions of what it means to be human and why that's important when it comes to coaching. [SPEAKER_00]: Could you share your understanding of that?
[SPEAKER_01]: So in the book, on beauty and leadership and culture in the [SPEAKER_01]: and its role in transforming human consciousness. [SPEAKER_01]: My second chapter is to look at how particularly accelerated by modernity, as you mentioned, we have shrunk human consciousness from indigenous participatory consciousness, where there wasn't a split between human and environment.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was a [SPEAKER_01]: We were indigenous, we belong to a place, we were part of a place, we were part of the ecology, wasn't something out there. [SPEAKER_01]: To the movement to urbanization and the humans become a human centric. [SPEAKER_01]: And then the movement to being individualistically centric.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then the move from embodied consciousness to head consciousness with people like Descartes and Newton, [SPEAKER_01]: And then an even further one from sort of whole brain consciousness to left hemisphere. [SPEAKER_01]: And this is what in Miguel Christ writes so powerfully about in his two volumes on the matter of things. [SPEAKER_01]: And you can see that also what happens in consonance in coaching.
[SPEAKER_01]: If we stuck in the left hemisphere, we become focused on the individual. [SPEAKER_01]: We become focused on [SPEAKER_01]: the issues and the problems and how to resolve them. [SPEAKER_01]: That's going to have left hemisphere coaching. [SPEAKER_01]: And the great work of our time is partly to how do we expand human consciousness to whole brain, to embodied, to collective to back to being participatory.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's where I think the work that this needed in [SPEAKER_01]: development professions generally. [SPEAKER_01]: And then if I can perhaps link that in the book on team of teams coaching and how to coach, which is all about how do we move from coaching individuals to coaching connections and not just connections between people or in team, the connections between teams and between divisions
[SPEAKER_01]: between organisations and their stakeholders, between the stakeholders, between countries, between us and the environment, that the work, the great work requires that we help coaches understand how to coach connections rather than individuals. [SPEAKER_00]: So let me see if I can articulate one sat with which is [SPEAKER_00]: I spoke to Jill nephew recently, who was searching how we learn and how technology can really enhance human learning.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's very critical of large language models. [SPEAKER_00]: It's really worth listening to it because she's kind of saying in a sense that the danger is they start to double down on the picture you described where [SPEAKER_00]: accentuates a kind of ungrounded, atomized, fixed knowledge, you know, knowledge and we live more and more in that world. [SPEAKER_00]: So, so what I'm hearing is in a sense that there's an invitation into our embodied and participatory experience, knowing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I know. [SPEAKER_01]: Right. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think with AI, the opportunity is that AI can actually do better than we can with a lot of what our left hemisphere neocortex does, which is data gathering and sorting, problem solving, collecting data and sorting it. [SPEAKER_01]: And that should liberate us to do the things that AI can't do, which human beings do have the capacity which they've shrunk and begun to lose, which are pointing to.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the problem is that at the moment AI is perhaps training us to be more like AI. [SPEAKER_01]: that liberators. [SPEAKER_01]: So like Immigure Chris phrase about the left hemisphere, have a spinio cortex applies to AI. [SPEAKER_01]: It's, it's a great servant, but a terrible master. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I like that phrase.
[SPEAKER_01]: And just to continue that thought, this notion about, um, hoaching the connections is also where caught in this culture, [SPEAKER_01]: that's come from what I, you know, I talk about modernity is the three seas of capital carbon and colonization, which kind of drove that whole era of human history.
[SPEAKER_01]: We've become very kind of problem centric, an issue centric, so you know, we ask what you want to talk about in coaching, and we see the individual is the client, [SPEAKER_01]: and we see their agendas what we should be focusing on. [SPEAKER_01]: Where I would say no, that's going in the wrong direction. [SPEAKER_01]: We should be on their agenda or my agenda. [SPEAKER_01]: We should be on the agenda that life is knocking on the door asking to be attended to.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that is a fundamental shift whether you're a coach, a team coach, [SPEAKER_01]: a consultant working the development profession at any level. [SPEAKER_00]: So I want to ask how you do that, actually. [SPEAKER_00]: And I think this is where I was going to go before is that from one wave understanding and learning, as I hear you name, you know, that, and I think, I'm not sure if you said this in our live conversation or in the check-in beforehand.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I want to, you know, coaches need to know how to coach the individual, the relationships, the team, [SPEAKER_00]: the system, etc, which I shared with you, sounds like maybe you want to correct me on that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: So, yeah, because I share this in our pre-talk, if I look at what the world's growing up or I, you know, you know, I got to permit the privilege of working in many different countries right across sectors and training people [SPEAKER_01]: hundred and ten countries. [SPEAKER_01]: So I'm always looking out, what is it? [SPEAKER_01]: Organizations and the world are requiring.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when I was saying to you, I don't think they're requiring lots more individual coaches or team facilitators or consultants. [SPEAKER_01]: About one CEO said to me in the research we did, I got lots of people who coached my [SPEAKER_01]: leaders. [SPEAKER_01]: I've got lots of consultants who consult a different parts of my organization, but that's not where our challenges lie. [SPEAKER_01]: All our challenges lie in the connections.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not just the connections between people or across the team or between the teams, or between the divisions. [SPEAKER_01]: It's also the connections vertically horizontally between the organization and its stakeholder world between their stakeholders. [SPEAKER_01]: So a lot of conflicting organisations that gets enacted internally and internationally is actually not interpersonal conflict.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's different systemic needs that are being held by different parts of the system. [SPEAKER_01]: So the HR director is holding the employee need and the sales director, the customer need, but that's direct to the investor need. [SPEAKER_01]: the poor corporate and social responsibility person holding the ecological need and the community need.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, it's systemic conflict, unless we can create collectively to share, that don't just hold on to their part of the system, but actually are working together to hold the connections and [SPEAKER_01]: and disconnection between the wider system. [SPEAKER_01]: You end up with an organisation with a lot of disconnect, a lot of non-alignment and a lot of conflict and coachy can make that worse. [SPEAKER_00]: I think you helped me reframe what I was going to say before.
[SPEAKER_00]: So because what I was going to say was when I hear all those different aspects of, you know, the possible territory of coaching, there's a way in which that could feel like it almost accentuates the intellectual knowing that we were highlighting before you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now I've got to have knowledge about this and I've got to have knowledge about that and what I'm sat with is [SPEAKER_00]: that also [SPEAKER_00]: Do we not need people who can coach the livingness of those connections and the way that they move through the individuals and the way the individuals and the teams and the systems in a sense like the flow of intelligence or life cannot move through those in the way that it might want to so that we need coaches who can help
[SPEAKER_00]: The language is new to me, but the constrictions of that flow to metabolize so that new, more flourishing connections and relationships can come forth. [SPEAKER_00]: That's always manifesting through the individual you're within the room or the team you're sat within the room. [SPEAKER_00]: How much can they conduct? [SPEAKER_00]: How much can they hold? [SPEAKER_00]: And there's a kind of felt sense. [SPEAKER_00]: It's not just a concept, is it?
[SPEAKER_00]: These are not just ideas. [SPEAKER_00]: They're actually living connections. [SPEAKER_01]: I think I said enough to... So, let me dress that to two very practical ways. [SPEAKER_01]: But first, before the two practical ways, you see, there's a very important consciousness shift, which is your never just coaching an individual.
[SPEAKER_01]: Individual learning, individual development, personal development don't exist, because all learning or development happens in and through relationship. [SPEAKER_01]: That is, for me, very fundamental. [SPEAKER_01]: And therefore, the second concept which is important is that every systemic level we are part of, like a family, a team, a division, an organization, a stakeholder world, the ecology, every level we're nested within is also nested within us.
[SPEAKER_01]: So people talk about the system as though it's something out there. [SPEAKER_01]: Now it lives and breathes through us. [SPEAKER_01]: So this basic systemic awareness that the whole exists through the particles, right? [SPEAKER_01]: And the particles, but the whole is more than some of the particles. [SPEAKER_01]: It is very fundamental.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that means if we bring that down practically, that when we're within individual, it's not just individual it walks through the door. [SPEAKER_01]: Their team dynamic comes into the room because it's living in breathing through them, the organizational culture, which I define as something you stop noticing when you've worked somewhere for three months. [SPEAKER_01]: So it's no good asking them about their organizational culture.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not out there or in lives in breathes in the way they speak, their habits, what they focus on and don't focus on. [SPEAKER_01]: What they leave outside the door is part of the culture. [SPEAKER_01]: So our skills have to be to not listen to the coach, or the team, but to listen with and through, to make an example of that. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, love that. [SPEAKER_01]: So, yeah, let me give a very practical example.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, so what I'm doing when I'm, I was with someone who said, oh, I'll see the person, so I don't need leadership development, he said, [SPEAKER_01]: There was three, sixty been done for all the senior leaders in this growing organization. [SPEAKER_01]: So I've earned more than I've ever needed, you know, the I ever thought was possible, and I, and more senior than I ever thought. [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, so why do I need leadership development?
[SPEAKER_01]: So you know, you're still in your midlife, so what?
[SPEAKER_01]: really a passionate part and he started telling me about his children and what his children do and and and supporting them on their their horse riding and all sorts of other things in their music and he was probably very passionate so his family dynamic was living in breathing in the room and as I said that and I said what what would you like your children [SPEAKER_01]: if you died tomorrow to hear your colleagues saying about the difference you made in this organization.
[SPEAKER_01]: Or would make you feel that they're part of you and your pride of what they've seen from that unity. [SPEAKER_01]: And he's suddenly, this guy who was very, resist was very emotionally present. [SPEAKER_01]: And he started to tell me things, I said, if you died tomorrow, is that what they would hear? [SPEAKER_01]: A long fall, as he said. [SPEAKER_01]: All right, yeah, I do need some leadership development.
[SPEAKER_01]: But now you see what we were looking at was the split between, you know, I don't, I've got enough to do all the stuff I really care about back at home. [SPEAKER_01]: that these two are different worlds. [SPEAKER_01]: But now, it's not just about work being to earn the money to support his kids and to have what he didn't have. [SPEAKER_01]: It's about what's the bigger system that connects his family world and what's needed by his colleagues for him to make a greater contribution.
[SPEAKER_01]: to birthday what's next at the organization, not just birthday what's next in his children's development. [SPEAKER_00]: So did you work for then with him about what he wanted to be as who he wanted to be as a leader through that inquiry as well? [SPEAKER_00]: Was it more about the relationship between him and his colleagues and what could come into being through there?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, as you know, very practically, and I teach this on the program that I've been dealing with you on revisiting leadership, I don't start with what sort of leaders you want to be, what you want from coaching. [SPEAKER_01]: I often start by saying, tell me the story of your life in just two minutes. [SPEAKER_01]: It connects [SPEAKER_01]: the moment you go up on with being here in the room right now.
[SPEAKER_01]: And people go, oh, because that stops them, giving me their pottyed CV, which they've plotted out many, many times, or their LinkedIn profile. [SPEAKER_01]: Then I'll say, and I teach this on the program as we do, often I'll say, so I get a feel if you take me to a moment in your last three months, [SPEAKER_01]: where your heart was singing. [SPEAKER_01]: And notice I wouldn't say, tell me about it, I say, take me to. [SPEAKER_01]: Take me with you to that back-to-that man.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that moment is living between us right now. [SPEAKER_01]: And that creates a kind of different heart connection. [SPEAKER_01]: And it provides the platform, I can then say, so tell me, Joel, who? [SPEAKER_01]: who and what just your life and work serve. [SPEAKER_01]: It is a great value for them when you tell me about your partner and your daughter.
[SPEAKER_01]: We were talking about earlier when you tell me about the company and people working at and the people come on the course. [SPEAKER_01]: It's now able to hope beyond the people who come on the course and who else. [SPEAKER_01]: who be on that. [SPEAKER_01]: So I'll really open up more and more windows. [SPEAKER_01]: And who be on the human realm? [SPEAKER_01]: And who be on your lifetime? [SPEAKER_01]: You know, I'll extend and extend.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I'll say to you, well, if all those people in the room, if your wife was here, Joel, your daughter was here. [SPEAKER_01]: She's four-ishy. [SPEAKER_01]: Five, five. [SPEAKER_01]: Your daughter is a grown-up in a parent was here. [SPEAKER_01]: Um, you know, the people of your organization, the people who haven't yet come to coach rising we hear, what would they be telling us is the most important word that you and I need to be doing together.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because now we're on not not your agenda or their agenda, we're on the agenda of you, you and all the connections in your, in your nested systems, you know, [SPEAKER_01]: And at the end, I wouldn't say, you know, what's been helpful, Joel, and what's not been helpful, because that makes me the supplier of coaching rather than something we're doing together in service of a bigger world.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll say, if those people we've talked about today were in the room, what would they value about the work you and I have done together? [SPEAKER_01]: And what would their challenge be to us? [SPEAKER_01]: So now it's not feedback from you to me, it's feedback from your world to our joint partnership.
[SPEAKER_00]: I can feel, you know, without even engaging in that inquiry, I can feel, as you name, those different people and the perspectives, what it opens up in me, which is, you know, a wider sense of self, like a sense of self, which is rooted in those perspectives and relationships that exist made of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it like physiologically feels [SPEAKER_00]: quite different, you know, quite expanded and, you know, whilst we didn't have the space to explore it, like I can feel the possibility of quite different things arising inside of those invitations that you made, which is, which is really beautiful. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: Could I just mention, kind of the, another very kind of practical way.
[SPEAKER_01]: All right, you know, I always say, since you get on many executive team meetings and supervising many team coaches and individual coaches and coaching many leads, the biggest, well, let me say, the quality work in team meetings or coaching all happens at the learning edge. [SPEAKER_01]: Well, you don't have the answer. [SPEAKER_01]: I don't have the answer, but we're both clear. [SPEAKER_01]: that life is requiring an answer.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and through that sort of acquiring, we've just opened up just now. [SPEAKER_01]: It will start to see how is the future nothing on your door, Joel, and asking you to step up to something new or give birth to something new. [SPEAKER_01]: We'll just cover that together. [SPEAKER_01]: When we get to that learning edge in a team on individual or an organization, [SPEAKER_01]: There's always a panic, and that's what I say said. [SPEAKER_01]: Well, we'll see you on the step, Peter.
[SPEAKER_01]: And at that point, I have to say, well, I've no idea, but it sounds like that's what we're going to have to discover together. [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: So I'm not there as expert, but I'm not there is doing the coach because we're partnering in that. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm not there on the origin, I'm there on what life is requiring. [SPEAKER_00]: So just staying with that's beautiful, being at that learning edge.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you have an example to mind where you stayed at that edge with a team or a leader you worked with? [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, then some kind of clarity or sense of what needed to happen emerged. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm wondering about how that kind of [SPEAKER_00]: invitation you made, which opened up so much, then kind of translates into things changing, which you know, I can get a sense of how it would, but do you have an example? [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I have a lot.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've just think of one that would be very useful for the people listening. [SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, this one came to mind, because it's another thing I often say when people say, well, what happens if you're at the learning edge? [SPEAKER_01]: And [SPEAKER_01]: Neither of you can discover what's needed. [SPEAKER_01]: And I often say, well, at that point, you pray. [SPEAKER_01]: I don't mind who you pray to, as long as it's a system bigger than you.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it could be whatever your religious notion of a higher power is.
[SPEAKER_01]: that it could be to the collective wisdom of humanity or of the universe or I don't mind but that notion of prayer at that moment is what's always made a big difference which is at that moment I don't trust they have the answer because at the learning edge my experience is the coachy despite what lots of coach training teachers don't have the answer I know I don't have the answer but I trust [SPEAKER_01]: that the wider system knows what's needed.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: And so it's going back to your request for an example. [SPEAKER_01]: I was having dinner with a chief executive, certainly with the challenges and his organization. [SPEAKER_01]: It was a really rich exploration. [SPEAKER_01]: He suddenly felt his arms. [SPEAKER_01]: He said, Peter, so convinced me that we ought to have systemic team coaching. [SPEAKER_01]: like this, right? [SPEAKER_01]: We're just about onto the dessert and our dinner's together.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I said, um, what, why would I want to do that? [SPEAKER_01]: So is that what you said? [SPEAKER_01]: I said no. [SPEAKER_01]: Now I'm here and having a very enjoyable conversation. [SPEAKER_01]: It will keep to the edge of what are the emotions, challenges in your organization and to discover with you if our partnership is the right partnership for going on the journey to address those. [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, oh, so I said, let's talk about that agenda.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's talk about, you know, what is it? [SPEAKER_01]: You feel confident you could do an addressing that is by yourself, but who else do you drown the table? [SPEAKER_01]: What do you need to do your leadership team? [SPEAKER_01]: And when someone like me can be helpful or not helpful, let's discover that together. [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, I'm right. [SPEAKER_01]: And suddenly, there are all things which is because now I'm not a supplier.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm someone willing to walk the journey with them if needed. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah? [SPEAKER_01]: And that's a different actually. [SPEAKER_01]: The other thing, just to mention, I may have mentioned this on the last podcast that is worth mentioning again, just in terms of what gets brought.
[SPEAKER_01]: The biggest interruptor to be at the learning edge [SPEAKER_01]: is what I would call the blame frame or the blame game, which is talking about the awful bus or the terrible wifi at home or the difficulty employee or the non-exacts who don't have any value. [SPEAKER_01]: And in the beauty book, I described this very simple practice from Grumble to Gratitude.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the first step, which is very practical, is whatever somebody comes to says, you know, I have a problem with the chair of our board, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Or non-exex, they don't add any value. [SPEAKER_01]: I simply change the word problem to challenge. [SPEAKER_01]: You have a challenge, because there's a need you have from your board that you haven't yet, that way of partnering with them to achieve.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the step two is also embedded there, because the second step is you locate the challenge, the problem that's now in challenge, not in a person or a part of the system, but always in the connection. [SPEAKER_01]: So you tell me, you know, you've got a problem, we've got a team member, as I say, you know, who never really adds any value.
[SPEAKER_01]: I would say, I hear you have a challenge, you haven't yet discovered a way of engaging this person in a way that [SPEAKER_01]: you feel creates value in the organization. [SPEAKER_00]: Can I reflect back what I'm hearing in that is there's a kind of move from reifying our experience to opening it up into a flow. [SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, we're adding yet to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's changing the dynamic from this being something fixed and the way things are to a sense of possibility. [SPEAKER_00]: I hear this is where I would say there's a need for an individual, the individual in avert commerce. [SPEAKER_00]: I notice I do that when I'm with you a lot because I'm like, [SPEAKER_01]: That I'll finish with an individual rather than. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: So I want to come back.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to kind of tie a few things you said together. [SPEAKER_00]: It's like what I notice is in my own experience speaking for myself. [SPEAKER_00]: And with others is that there's this way that I make things wrong. [SPEAKER_00]: It's like a fundamental aspect of being human. [SPEAKER_00]: It's like, and it's nuanced and profound and often not nuanced. [SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes it's very loud, but it's like this reification of experience that fixes it.
[SPEAKER_00]: This person's like that, this situation's like this, and I become a victim to it. [SPEAKER_00]: Now I'm separate. [SPEAKER_00]: There's a sense of separation. [SPEAKER_00]: There's a way in which we can [SPEAKER_00]: begin to notice that that we're doing that to our experience in ourselves which freezes up from that and then creates opens up the possibility of learning, you know, of being in a sense of more wonder, you know, and that has a that has a kind of flow to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, so I want to tie that to what you said about being at the learning edge, which is really beautiful for me, because it's like, and you said prayer, and I'm so touched, you bring that in, because prayer has become incredibly important to me. [SPEAKER_00]: Radically important, not as something I'm praying for all the time, but as an acumen to being at my edge.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, [SPEAKER_00]: So we could say there's this, you know, way that I reify, I kind of fixate into victimhood, but then I can open up that sense of flow into this kind of transpersonal sense of connection. [SPEAKER_00]: You know, so one of the most powerful questions I had in my life at one point was like life. [SPEAKER_00]: life, what do you want with me? [SPEAKER_00]: That was very different than what do I want for my life? [SPEAKER_00]: What do I want?
[SPEAKER_00]: I still think there's value in that question, but this other one, it was a very consoled question. [SPEAKER_00]: I've been wondering about how to bring prayer into my coaching because it does open, you know, there's like, as many people have said, as you're saying, there's a kind of pandemic of this kind of solo self, you know, it's all down to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm separate and encapsulated within myself and I've got to make life work and it seems like collectively [SPEAKER_00]: we've got a breakout of that entransment and recognize that there is life is supportive in some sense and there is a wider intelligence that we can connect into and that prayer is an important aspect of that. [SPEAKER_00]: So I'm just feeling this whole thread of what you're talking about and what that means for us as practitioners.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: That's lovely and and that way when we said just now by [SPEAKER_01]: It touches on, often on the advanced retreats that I run for kind of experience. [SPEAKER_01]: Caches, consultants, leaders. [SPEAKER_01]: Here, where we do a lot of work outdoors and in the college everything. [SPEAKER_01]: And we use bits of tai chi and net near tai chi and all sorts of practices.
[SPEAKER_01]: By often to say, you know, this is all on a journey to the point where we realize [SPEAKER_01]: or we can shift our consciousness to not, I have a life, but life has a me. [SPEAKER_01]: And, and, get it.
[SPEAKER_01]: People might find that very other wordly, but in a very practical way, it is from that we get to my very practical [SPEAKER_01]: One line, strategy question, which you could use at any level of the system, what is it, Joel, that you can unique you do, that the world of tomorrow needs. [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I don't know the world of tomorrow in an abstract, global universal sense, but the world that you are part of needs.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because it's in that connection, [SPEAKER_01]: that your life is going to be the richest it can be, and your contribution is going to be the greatestistic it can be. [SPEAKER_01]: So that's a very kind of practical way of, you know, in that prayer, you know, at a coach or a consultant or an organization, a transformation partner, I'm asking, you know, what's necessary here, what's needed, I don't know, I need help.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's then that I'm kind of opening up all my being to not just listening through the other, but I'm tapping into all the levels that I'm part of as well. [SPEAKER_01]: And it's through that that I think we co-discover what's needed. [SPEAKER_01]: But not working at ages, it depends your human beings. [SPEAKER_01]: What even is that? [SPEAKER_01]: Even as two people having a dialogue, we're discovering a place of openness and humility.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's beautiful and that's one of my prayers is to, you know, may I fully embody or fully, may it fully enlighten me my unique place in this ecology, you know, that I may be of service. [SPEAKER_00]: And that speaks to me of when you, when you're in your book about beauty and coaching and leadership around [SPEAKER_00]: the craft of being a coach as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this might segue as into as what you said before about the developmental professional and what lies beyond our current conceptions of coaching. [SPEAKER_00]: I just want to tee that up, but I think I want to stay just before we put the recording on you talked about three levels of coaching. [SPEAKER_00]: And there was a third level where you talked about stop punctuating the coaching with an I and B in service. [SPEAKER_00]: Are we talking about that level here?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's my kind of adaptation. [SPEAKER_01]: Many years ago, it's pretty solid available on my website. [SPEAKER_01]: I wrote a paper of the spiritual dimensions of the learning organization. [SPEAKER_01]: This is probably back in the early [SPEAKER_01]: I was very influenced, one of my most influential teachers with Gregory Bates, and who was one of the great polymaths of the twentieth century.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was already saying in the nineteen sixties that if we do not shift our way of thinking and knowing and engaging with the world, we don't have a snowball in the house chance of surviving the twenty-first century. [SPEAKER_01]: So he was talking about the ecological crisis way before most people. [SPEAKER_01]: He and Rachel Carlson in one or two others were wear ahead of what we took another forty years to catch up with.
[SPEAKER_01]: But he was one who invented single loop and double loop learning that Chris Arteris and John Schuren and few others kind of then popularized. [SPEAKER_01]: But he talked about these levels of learning and their levels of awareness and their, they are, in some ways, levels of systemic awareness that you could use in coaching. [SPEAKER_01]: You know, the level one is where your focus is on the issue, the problem, the presenting issue.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you're looking at what's the best way this individual can address that, that problem stroke challenge. [SPEAKER_01]: Level two is, as you're seeing, the pattern of which that is a symptom. [SPEAKER_01]: Right? [SPEAKER_01]: How is that problem? [SPEAKER_01]: Something that is, could be a person within the cultural organization or it could be that it's just an interpersonal issue that's holding a systemic disconnection between the needs.
[SPEAKER_01]: Say it's a, for instance, a local government, you've got the needs of the taxpayer, you've got the needs of the service user. [SPEAKER_01]: and that they may be the same people, you know, local government. [SPEAKER_01]: But actually, we're all schizophrenic and we want better quality services and lower taxes. [SPEAKER_01]: But that not attending to that split, they think and get enacted interpersonally within the local government organization. [SPEAKER_01]: That makes sense.
[SPEAKER_01]: So what you're listening through is to see what is the deeper pattern of which this is just [SPEAKER_01]: one symptom. [SPEAKER_01]: But then there's a third level, which is actually going beyond being able to see and hear and listen to the pattern, to see more the immersion evolution of life, that's creating the patterns that's creating the symptoms. [SPEAKER_01]: What I quoted to you was Gregory Bateson's phrase, it's quite elliptical about how it describes learning level three.
[SPEAKER_01]: But he uses his phrase, which I've always loved, is level three awareness begins when we stop punctuating experience with the eye, with the individual eye. [SPEAKER_01]: So we're not, you know, you could see that [SPEAKER_01]: In a team, I'm not listening to lots of individuals. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm listening to the dance of the team. [SPEAKER_01]: Yep. [SPEAKER_01]: And level two.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then level three, I'm listening how the dance of the organization is being played out by the dance of the team. [SPEAKER_01]: And level three, I'm also listening to how what's struggling to evolve through humanity and through the wider ecology right now. [SPEAKER_01]: is playing out to the organized stakeholder world, which is playing out to the organization, which is playing out to the team that's playing out if I'm talking to an individual.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when you said earlier, well, this guy's got slightly overwhelming. [SPEAKER_01]: It does, but I always say to people, [SPEAKER_01]: It's overwhelming. [SPEAKER_01]: It could try to do it with this part of your brain. [SPEAKER_00]: That's what I was getting at before, you know, when I was like, if you try to do it from that other part of your brain, you're trying to hold all the bits of information. [SPEAKER_00]: That's exactly what I was getting at.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: But if you're doing it in the other way, it's a flow of experience. [SPEAKER_01]: Yes. [SPEAKER_01]: And so that's where we get it's getting to the simplicity, the other side of complexity. [SPEAKER_01]: And actually, [SPEAKER_01]: I was going to say reprogramming ourselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't really want to use that metaphor, but but but be able to shift and involve our consciousness is hard work to go through the complexity, but but when you get to the side, it all becomes simple again.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because because you're not trying to work, you're not trying to create your next clever coaching question or [SPEAKER_01]: or try to work all out in your head and hold all the data about who's in their team and where they are in the organization and what's going on and what's happening in their customer base and their investor conflict. [SPEAKER_01]: You're not holding all that.
[SPEAKER_01]: What you are is you're being able to sense through to what is being required to get connected here. [SPEAKER_01]: What's nothing on the door asking to transform. [SPEAKER_01]: What's requiring to come into birth? [SPEAKER_00]: And that becomes a simple again. [SPEAKER_00]: So could you, I mean, the whole conversation has been about that, but could you, could you kind of say how are you a tune in, you know, you're in the simplicity of that?
[SPEAKER_00]: How would you tune into that? [SPEAKER_00]: What's knocking on the door in, you know, when you're, when you're with people? [SPEAKER_00]: What shows that? [SPEAKER_00]: What are the signs of that? [SPEAKER_00]: Because [SPEAKER_01]: The first of all, I'm not, when I'm listening not to, but with and through, I'm listening with my whole body. [SPEAKER_01]: And I'm noticing what's emerging in the space between them and myself.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm also not only listening to my whole body, I'm watching, if you like, the dancers, I'm part of with them and how that is. [SPEAKER_01]: you're watching up through it through that interpersonal connection. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm listening and that the sentencing in the body is where we do participatory consciousness is much richer unless hard work and trying to work it all out in your head.
[SPEAKER_01]: And people talk about intuition, but actually intuition is something that emerges out of all these different levels of listening, which you could not have constructed. [SPEAKER_01]: But it emerges out of the patterns. [SPEAKER_01]: But it's partly because I'm not. [SPEAKER_01]: One of the things we have to give up to be to do that simply is [SPEAKER_01]: is wanting to impress our coachy or wanting to have good feedback or want it to be liked by them.
[SPEAKER_01]: I always say that the only side I'm on is the side of what is struggling to get born. [SPEAKER_01]: And if I can hold that with an individual team, team of teams or organization, my focus becomes quite simple. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm not trying to get right by any one. [SPEAKER_00]: And do, so I really love this.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this again was what I was trying to get out earlier when I was saying that it's like an attenement, you know, more than a conceptual, I'll be the collection of all the maps. [SPEAKER_00]: It's like, so it's a whole body attenement.
[SPEAKER_00]: But do you find yourself [SPEAKER_00]: like attuning to a particular kind of aspect of that whole ecology of, you know, people, you know, aspects of it, or like, I guess people listening would be like, wow, amazing attuning to what's coming in, but how does that at a toolman then start to reveal? [SPEAKER_00]: Is it, were you, you know, would you start to suddenly feel a quality? [SPEAKER_00]: Well, I agree.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I'm very interested in all the things that interfere with that. [SPEAKER_01]: So you know about my concept to why I go to empathy, because you know, having in the past dreams, psychotherapists and consultants and coaches and team coaches, what are the things that by becoming more emotionally literate and empathic is a very human thing, particularly in the West, to have enormous empathy for the person is in the room with us. [SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: And to start to see the world through their eyes, hear about all these awful people out there. [SPEAKER_01]: And then we start to imagine there are awful people out there. [SPEAKER_01]: And a wide-angle empathy is a very simple practice to try and hold to having as much empathy for everyone in the story as you do for the person immediately present with you.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I have to monitor, because what's going to interfere with my ability to not only empathically resonate with the other, but to resonate with all the nested systems that are living and breathing through them, is to avoid going to judgment or taking science or becoming reactive. [SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, I say this, you know, what you're listening to the news, [SPEAKER_01]: train yourself to be able to listen, you know, it gets hard and harder, but it's a great training ground.
[SPEAKER_01]: To listen to the news without becoming judgmental or reactive or taking sides or critical. [SPEAKER_01]: But to have to be able to hold, I've just written a whole new blog about systemic tongue land, which is a Buddhist practice, but I've developed it so that you listen to [SPEAKER_01]: So then ski and put in.
[SPEAKER_01]: But then you listen to what's the dance between them and then you listen to what is put in holding for all the people, healies and what's the length ski holding for the people they need and what's happening with space between those two people. [SPEAKER_01]: So then beyond that is the history. [SPEAKER_01]: It's not I need to know all the history.
[SPEAKER_01]: But what I'm focused on, what I'm having compassion for isn't for Zelensky coping with a awful putin or putin coping with the awful NATO. [SPEAKER_01]: It's de-personalised. [SPEAKER_01]: It's empathising with the suffering that's grown up in the space between the Russian people and the Ukrainian people and how that's emerged through history. [SPEAKER_01]: Now, I'm not seeing it as the work of a bad evil leader.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is essential training, I think, for doing coaching work. [SPEAKER_01]: Because otherwise, we are the all sorts. [SPEAKER_01]: And I just get very sensitive to how you know, we talk about this, I can't, you can't do that in this system or this organization. [SPEAKER_01]: The organization, it's not the thing, it's a living into connected organism.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm hearing for you that it's been a, you know, it's a, it's a whole body whole sensing experience and you're, you're aware of [SPEAKER_00]: where you might be trying to, or coach, could be aware where do they reify into a part that wants to please the client get results, where might you start othering, which also co-ops conscious that consciousness and kind of, you know, narrow as it down in a particular way.
[SPEAKER_00]: So to notice those aspects, and then to kind of listen to [SPEAKER_00]: being, you know, to move to that edge in a sense and attune to what might be wanting to connect together or to happen, or, you know, that there's a kind of theme or quality that becomes present that wasn't before. [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, that's why I think we're in a generative collaborative [SPEAKER_01]: inquiry process of just scalping what's needed.
[SPEAKER_01]: But what is what's your world leading the only you you because of where you are located in the wider system can respond to. [SPEAKER_00]: What is yours to do? [SPEAKER_00]: And that that feels to me really exquisite because it feels like it's then
[SPEAKER_00]: Inviting emergence in a sense is like there's a sense of tuning into the ecology and that you're broaden now and now there's an invitation, you know, I think you said before it's like I can't remember the phrase you use but it's like life having a me experience and I certainly like it's coming back into the unique emergence and evolution of the system through the individual team and its connection and [SPEAKER_00]: So I can really, I'm really tuning into that.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm just going to say the point that I think there is that the emergence is happening, not in me, all the coaching or just in our interpersonal relationship. [SPEAKER_01]: The emergence is always happening for me in a triangle between the two of us and their world and what it's requiring. [SPEAKER_01]: It's that third part of the triangle that I think that is the most significant place we have to focus. [SPEAKER_01]: So the co-creation is triadic, not diadic.
[SPEAKER_01]: The emergence is in that, that dance between the two of us, but the dance between the two of us and what life is, how life is changing, what's lead is changing. [SPEAKER_01]: and what's struggling to get born. [SPEAKER_00]: It's really beautiful. [SPEAKER_00]: So then, what do you think is the core? [SPEAKER_00]: I know we have, we have it, I would love to give this question more space.
[SPEAKER_01]: But, well, let me just link it to get a conversation we had earlier, Joel, which is, I managed to do the team achievements book, which I know you've briefly read.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a chapter where I make an urgent plea for the fact that we developed all these fragmented development professions, as far as going of different sorts of, we've got a hundred flavors of coaching and we've got at least fifteen, sixteen, accrediting coach bodies around the world who compete with each other.
[SPEAKER_01]: We've got differences between team facilitation, team coaching, systemic team coaching, [SPEAKER_01]: team of teams coaching that you know I've written about it late. [SPEAKER_01]: Organizational consultancy, organisational development, organisational learning, appreciating quite inquiry.
[SPEAKER_01]: We've got strategy consulting, we've got HR, organisational psychology, kind of seeing what it, and actually we had the development profession this even more siled and fragmented than the organisations we're trying to help. [SPEAKER_01]: The communities we're trying to help. [SPEAKER_01]: And what I'm sort of making a call for is, you know, go about what I said, the great work of our time is how we evolve human consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that has to be not at any one of those levels. [SPEAKER_01]: It has to be across them. [SPEAKER_01]: And the world is crying out for people who could connect [SPEAKER_01]: debt development at the individual interpersonal team, team of teams, organization, stakeholder world, you know, between organizations, between organizations and investors, customers, between the stakeholders, between countries.
[SPEAKER_01]: In it, for instance, at the moment we had these constant cop conferences with great commitments or agreements that don't transfer [SPEAKER_01]: transfer and sustain in terms of changed action. [SPEAKER_01]: And you know where the people who can consult to that and break that pattern. [SPEAKER_01]: And then ultimately between the human healing the split between the human and the more than human world.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because it's in that final split we will not solve the climate crisis. [SPEAKER_01]: by through technology and and and let brain intelligence. [SPEAKER_01]: We're only going to do it if we realize that we are just one small part of the ecology, you know, with the youngest child of creation. [SPEAKER_01]: There's been a how much longer than we have. [SPEAKER_01]: And as soon as we let's we fall in love with it and see it's part of our family and we're a small part of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no way we would deal with the ecological crisis and I suppose [SPEAKER_01]: That's the bigger picture that we all need to be in service of, and to realize as a matter of which level we work at, we're working at all the levels. [SPEAKER_01]: And it can be simple, but the work to get to that simplicity is hard work. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Which speaks to me, you know, I've been thinking about [SPEAKER_00]: What would be a practitioner who lies beyond coaching, you know, as it feels that word becomes inadequate perhaps and maybe it is just the evolution of consciousness, you know, someone who serves the evolution of consciousness, maybe all labels of problematic if it labels the individual, maybe the label is in [SPEAKER_00]: you know, it's actually that collective evolution.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's something simple in that that I'm taking away with me. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, Peter, I know we're at our time and just, you know, as usual, I so appreciate our conversations. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: You know, I think you've mentioned your books, but yeah, would you like to name them again and where we can find out more about what you're up to as well? [SPEAKER_01]: The book that came out last year, which I've had an amazing response to from so many people.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's the one that has more of my heart and soul in it than any of my other books. [SPEAKER_01]: It's beauty and leadership in coaching, and it's role in transforming human consciousness. [SPEAKER_01]: And I do get quite practical towards the end of that book. [SPEAKER_01]: It starts off very philosophical, but what does that mean in terms of how we do dialogue and write down in coaching and in leadership?
[SPEAKER_01]: that, and the other one is the K-Mart, I wrote a Katherine Carr, a team of team's coaches using a teaming approach to increase business impact. [SPEAKER_01]: How do we link team coaching to organizational transformation?
[SPEAKER_01]: And there are many case studies in that, very practical case studies, all it actually looks like in practice, that's from Kogan page, that they're all on our website, which is WWE Renewal Associates, [SPEAKER_01]: .co.uk and there are lots, there are lots of free material on there like my blog, some things like why I got empathy in systemic tunnel and how do we move from grumble to gratitude?
[SPEAKER_01]: So please go there and see what's there and may it be of help to you widening your ripple effect [SPEAKER_01]: and the beneficial impact you all are creating for the world of our grandchildren. [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe so. [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you, Peter. [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you, Joe. [SPEAKER_00]: Here we are. [SPEAKER_00]: We're at the end of the podcast. [SPEAKER_00]: Just do a heads up again.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're not on our mailing list and you want to stay in the loop about other things we create, then head to coaches rising.com. [SPEAKER_00]: Put your name in the sign up box there. [SPEAKER_00]: You'll also find some of our other offerings online trainings for coaches there. [SPEAKER_00]: And just want to end by wishing you well. [SPEAKER_00]: And I'll see you again next time.