This is The Coaching In, a podcast from 3D Coaching. Welcome to The Coaching In. Today we're going to be thinking about coaching and spiritual direction. My name's Claire Pedrick and I'm a master certified coach. And today I'm talking to Sarah Broscombe. Sarah is a credential coach with the ICF as well. And she's also does loads of work around spiritual direction. So Sarah, tell us a bit more about you. Hi Claire.
So as you said, I'm Sarah Broscombe and I had never heard of spiritual direction or spiritual accompaniment until I got a social justice job working with the Jesuits in 2002. And part of the job, which was running a busy volunteer program with Formational Elements, was that they gave me extra days to go on a silent retreat if I wanted to. And I thought, well, pre-holiday, I might as well go. So I went off for eight days of silence. And it kind of turned my life around in some interesting ways.
It was a slow change, but really deep change. And that was the first time I encountered one-to-one listening, actually. So that was 2002, eight years ago. And gradually over time, I carried on being in a spiritual direction relationship myself. I carried on being in a one-to-one being listened to with somebody very superb.
And, I was often Guyana doing two years of, a community development work in a, in a Amerindian village and people kept coming to talk to me and I couldn't really put my finger on why, but I knew that I wasn't listening well. I could feel there was some kind of mystery to listening well, which I hadn't got. So when I came back, I trained in spiritual accompaniment because I wanted to learn to listen. That was in 2011 and I just fell in love with it.
Wow. So that's when I started doing formal one-to-one listening. And it wasn't until four years later after working in a management job, managing other managers at Safe for Children, again, with a lot of one-to-one, that I thought, coaching. Hmm. Don't really know what that is. Might go on a beginner's course. Went on a beginner's course. Handed in my notice the day after I came back. Because it was so clear. that there's people developing stuff that I'd love so much in management.
It was about the one-to-one listening. It was really core to it. So I trained as a coach over 2014 to 15, but I came first from that spiritual accompaniment setting. the kind of that sense of generative space and so on was, was vitally important to me. Presence at the scale of the big open, accepting space, unconditional positive regard. They were hardwired before I came into the coaching world. So I learned lots of great stuff.
I trained with the Coactive Training Institute and I learned loads of great stuff as a coach. But it came into the context of something that already existed about the power of one-to-one listening and the power of listening itself before any interventions are made, the power of creating a space and being utterly present. That was their first. And yes, then I went on to credential with the ICF and I've been doing a lot of coaching, quite a bit of executive and business coaching as well.
So I go on this kind of pendulum swing between times when I'm really struck by how much similarity there is between coaching and spiritual direction and times when I'm really struck by how different they are. I'm very interested in your name, one-to-one listening, because so often people talk about one-to-one conversations. So can you say a bit more about that, the difference between one-to-one conversation and one-to-one listening?
Yeah. think a good one-to-one conversation, mean, proportionally, it's probably going to be about, you know, 50-50, 60-40 of sharing and receiving. this kind of give, receive, give, receive is very mutual. the power balance is very even because both people are kind of in the same role and there's a kind of sharing of yourself, which means that the flow and the ed feel even in a good conversation at least. And both people are being self revealing and both people are being receptive.
And that's a great thing. in itself. It's a great thing. One to one listening for me I used to think that the listener needs to kind of disappear, that they need to kind of stop existing. And I would call that benevolent passive listening. interesting. yeah, I think again, it has a real place in life, in the world.
But benevolent passive listening doesn't give as much, I think, as a really deep generative one-to-one listening, because by listening very actively, I often find that the person dignifies what they are saying to themselves for the first time.
They hear themselves, but it's incredibly validating when this person where you're saying, this seems really stupid, but, or, yeah, I know it's ridiculous, but I, and I feel stupid saying this, but, I know it's pointless, but, and the person receiving it is like, wide-eyed, fascinated, accepting what you're saying, the speaker can dignify things to themselves for the first time.
That's interesting because in coaching I often use the spiritual accompanying words of coaching being bearing witness because for me coaching is a conversation between two people about one of us so that giving and receiving thing that you were talking about is so so for the thing for me that makes coaching different from other conversations and yet similar to spiritual accompaniment is that it's a conversation between two people about one of us.
And I guess spiritual accompaniment is a conversation between three people about one of us. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think, the, what, what's, what's most similar to me and a lot of coaching doesn't do this. So this is interesting. I think I work in fields of when I'm working as an executive coach, sometimes I'm completely free to set the agenda with the individual. Sometimes there's a set kind of pattern that I'm following with a group.
So it's quite, you're facilitating to a certain extent, but there isn't that complete freedom. Now for me, coaching at its heart is really similar to spiritual direction in that they're both about the whole journey of a person's life, their maturation, what they believe their life is for and how they make sense of their life. And I think, Both coaching and spiritual direction are really attentive, deeply attentive to a person's sense of self, to their self image and to what they value most.
In terms of differences though, three big things stand out to me. As you said, coaching is two-way. It's a conversation about one of us, but between two people. And coaching itself, I think, is the space in between us. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. It isn't either of it. It's not just the speaker. It's certainly not just the coach. It's what gets created because of the two of us, which could not have existed without it being two, I think that's fundamental.
Spiritual direction is a three-way conversation. And in a way you could say the most important party is the directee, is the speaker. You could say the most important party is God. I'd be wary about saying that, I think. I mean, for me, spiritual direction is a three-way relationship, but the focus is on the relationship between the directee and the mystery that they call God. because God is always a shorthand for something indescribable.
And I think spiritual direction is interesting there because for people who come with a very finite sense of God is a thing, I'm going to describe God to you now. One of the joys of spiritual direction is watching a person realize that they are immersed in a mystery. Some aspects of that mystery are what they call God. And that mystery is by definition unknowable and always will be. You'll never nail it. And, The absence of the absent other in the room is crucially important.
So I think for me, coaching is about growth, but spiritual direction is about relationship. coaching is two ways. Spiritual direction is three way. And the activity is different, I think, because coaching is about self development. And for me, that means that fundamentally it's about deciding and choosing.
So deciding, what my life is for, what direction I want to go in, and then living in conscious choice, making choices, becoming less unconscious about stuff that trips me up and so on, and being much more conscious about here I have power, what am I going to choose? I don't have to do something with it, but I am honest with myself about it, so deciding and choosing. Spiritual direction can be about action, but I think it's primarily about understanding how I was created.
So how my creator, whatever I mean by that, created me, what I really am, and then learning to live accordingly. So in a sense, I'm not deciding, I'm seeking and finding. And it was only actually as I was thinking about this conversation with you that that became really clear to me. For me, there's a sense in spiritual direction about finding what was already there. and then living more truly in the light of it. Who am I really?
When Rowan Williams talks about vocation, he says vocation is finding out who you are and then living the consequences of that, your fullest, truest, realest self. I love that definition of vocation. find it very helpful. It's interesting, isn't it? Because I would say that everything that you've just described, I would say is also useful in coaching. I love the thing about a mystery.
was an article in an American journal, which years ago, that said that actually these conversations that we have are more about holding a mystery than solving a puzzle. And I think often there's a fantasy in coaching that it's about finishing the puzzle. And the puzzle will never finish because we are a mystery and we live in mystery. you know, right now, do we not live more in mystery than ever before? Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's, that's fascinating. And I agree with you.
It's, there's no doubt that it's all useful. And I suppose what I find really fascinating is when you get around areas of boundaries. So for me, the person that I bring to coaching, or to spiritual accompaniment or to retreat guiding or to non-managerial supervision. The person that I bring is the same person.
Yeah. And everything that I have gained or learned or understood or learned to shut up about or learned that I will never know, everything that I gained in any one of those fields feeds into the person who is able to arrive at these sessions. My task though is different. I think. But underlying it, like I already said, there's that fundamental reality, which is this relationship is in service of this person's entire life journey.
You know, we're at one tiny moment of it, depending on the relationship, it might last for a long time or a short time. But this is the big journey we're talking about. This is the life. This is a person's life. And everything that we do together needs to be in service of that life being lived. thrivingly, abundantly, and in the real, in the real of who this person is. So I'm really curious about what you're learning that one of these can learn from the other. The kind of interconnectedness.
Because I noticed that when I'm training people to use coaching, some people that I train have spiritual directors, have a spiritual accompanying it, and often they go and decide to end that relationship and find somebody else. because they value the clarity that comes in coaching of working out together what we're doing and they find and they experience the real non-directiveness of spiritual accompaniment is experienced as a bit directive. The let's go where we go.
can be experienced as being directive if actually that's not where I wanted to start or where it felt right to start. So I'm wondering what your thoughts are about the cross fertilization. Cross fertilization, great word. So I think there's cross pollination, which is a great thing. And then there's blurring of roles, which is not a great thing. Interesting. So say more. So both coaching and spiritual direction are unregulated fields. People can set up and just do it.
And in the field of spiritual accompaniment or spiritual direction, many people have simply learned by doing, they've never been trained. They've learned by experience. Their ministry is mainly an act of generosity and they make it up as they go along. when when somebody is a very attuned, humble, a heartseize kind of person, they can be absolutely brilliant, absolutely brilliant. But they may not be clear about, they may not be able to articulate what they're there for.
Now, spiritual direction may be about a relationship, but it's about growing in that relationship. It shouldn't feel vague and wandering around it. And I think one of the risks for the field of spiritual accompaniment, I think is very much around that. It's around benevolent passive listening. I just sit here and receive. Which can be lovely. But... Kim Scott in her book Radical Candor calls that ruinous empathy? Well, yeah, mean, sometimes it manifests as ruinous empathy in spiritual directors.
Other times they're very free with it. They're not simply empathizing, but they think that the job is a passive one. So they're actually suffering. This is really interesting because I do love that book. The concept of ruinous empathy, I really get that and I've seen that in training, when I've been training spiritual directors. bless you, this kind of love that wants to get absorbed into this. My goodness, there's power in that. Woof, it's bit scary. But I've also seen ruinous humility.
Okay, say more. Where the spiritual director simply feels this is all God's work. I just need to disappear. So I have nothing to bring here. I simply need to create this space where the person will encounter God. Now, where I think that that's got confused is that I think that's what prayer is. A space where people encounter God and they can pray in whatever way they like.
Some people pray better riding a bicycle than they can ever do sitting down and saying words at some mystery in the sky, you know. Prayer is a mystery too. But a spiritual director is not simply there to enable prayer, but it's very understandable that somebody who's just learnt on the hoof might not be able to articulate to themselves what their job is.
And if, if they are a very humble person, they may take it as a virtue that they are not doing anything in the spiritual direction relationship, except receiving. Now witnessing is a different thing. think witnessing. It can be quite muscular. There's an act of really being there in powerful empathy with this person and they feel deeply seen. They feel naked actually when there's a good experience of witnessing.
I think the risk for spiritual direction often is that you get a much less muscular kind of listening than that, a much more passive, receptive. I'm not really here. Don't mind me. kind of experience. Now coaching, would say falls into the opposite end of that trap. I'd say where coaching can get a bit lost is where it's all too finite and instrumentalist goals, success, name your success to me, then go and meet it. Targets actions. There are brilliant forms of targets.
There are brilliant forms of goals and there are brilliant forms of actions. But I think where spirituality, can get too passive and flabby. Coaches sometimes can get too active and testosterone-fuelled. They can see the job as a kind of a level of dynamism which isn't equal between the coach and the coachee. Or indeed, I think, keep the conversation so woolly that it's not clear. I love the Chinese, I know you've lived in China.
I love the Chinese proverb, you're going to tell me it isn't, but anyway, I love the Chinese proverb, the banks of the Yangtze, give it depth, drive and direction. And for me, one of the things that we can bring into coaching, think, are banks, banks of the river. And I'm also struck as you're speaking about that T.S. Eliot quote from Burt Norton, one of his four quartets, where he says, at the still point of the turning world.
Neither flesh nor fleshless, neither from nor towards, there is the dance. And for me, I don't know whether you agree, but for me that's the heart of coaching, the neither from nor towards space, which is the best bit of coaching that's not the testosterone bit. And I also wonder whether that's also part of spiritual direction, isn't it? The neither from nor towards space. Yeah. Yes. And one of the so in terms of cross fertilization, which I realize I wondered from rather as a question.
And yes, I'd say yes. And and I think your two metaphors are both metaphors that make sense to me at the still point of the turning world. mean, T.S. Eliot isn't talking about the eye of a storm, but he might well be. where people come through this wall of storm and they come into this point and together you sit in the still point of the storm knowing that the storm is still there and that it's real. But finding clarity because you're in the still point and the world is spinning around you.
I think that that's true, but I love your image of the river as well because this person is on a journey and their life is almost certainly going to have rapids. slow points, irritating meanders where they get very impatient. And I think both coach and spiritual director are trying to be honest in, we're in meander now. That's okay. You know, be with what is.
I think in terms of cross fertilization, I don't know whether this is a cross fertilization or a similarity and that is resonance and dissonance. So In the model of coaching that I trained in, we learned about resonance and dissonance. We listen for resonance and we follow the resonance. So if you imagine a gong being struck with a big beta and it reverberates as coaches, we're trying to get better and better at noticing when that happens. And as we tune into it happening, we can feel it.
When the coachee resonates, we resonate. And I really noticed that growing in me. think it's there in all humans, but I think we put a lot of clutter in the way. And the clutter needs cleared away before we can really resonate. Now in the model of coaching that I trained in, they said, trust resonance and go with it. So the person comes along and they describe, and I love my dancing class and it gives me, I'm so excited. And I really love my job.
brilliant and I'm really, you know, and I'm loads of money and it's just fantastic. You think, I don't believe you. I'm not resonating to that at all. no spiritual direction. What we're listening for is consolation. It's the good spirit and we follow it. So in both cases, coaching and spiritual direction, we leave behind the evolutionary negativity bias, the cultural negativity bias. that I think we're inculturated into, know, cynicism is cleverer.
The old psychological framework of damage and deficit, that model of damage and deficit, seek out what is broken and help the person fix it. And for coaching and spiritual direction, I don't think we're trying to do that. So dissonance as a kind of incongruence, that flatness and the deadness. Now, one of the best descriptions I have ever read of dissonance is in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.
where he goes into in the first week rules for discernment and the second week rules for discernment, he describes in detail, what coaching talks about as saboteurs or gremlins. And it's the best description of the experience of dissonance that I've ever read. and he wrote it 1522. Wow. mean, it's really extraordinary. So I, I, and I've, I've, I've, I've got over a thousand hours of different forms of formal one-to-one listening.
And to me, the bad spirit, dissonance, saboteurs, gremlins, the voices sound the same. I think they are human experiences of flattening, of deadening. And that language around good and bad spirit resonance and dissonance, I find the crossover very powerful, the cross pollination of those very powerful. What's fascinating actually is that Ignatius didn't specify whether he was talking about the Holy Spirit when he talked about the good spirits. He talks about the good spirits and bad spirits.
he leaves it, even in 1522-23 when he started writing the spiritual exercises, he leaves it up to the person listening to decide, the person speaking, to decide whether their own experience of bad spirit is internal or external. So for some Christians that would feel like the devil is at me, I am going to fight him. And for them that's a helpful way to feel empowered to do something about it. This is a bad person outside me, you know?
This is not my fault that I am feeling this dissonance, flatness, deadness, that these saboteurs are getting to me, that these gremlins are getting to me. It's not my fault they come from outside. But there's also, leaves scope for you to think, yes, what is the bad spirit in me? Where am I contributing or colluding with negativity, cynicism, despair? And what action can I take against that? So there's a real cross-fertilization there, think.
But from the coaching direction, one of the most powerful things for me that I learned that I wasn't doing enough as a spiritual director is about Articulating what's going on. That's what they call it in co-active coaching. Articulate what's going on. Name it. Say what you see. They also talk about fierce courage and saying the thing the person doesn't want to hear. Now I know a lot of spiritual directors who will never do that. And I think that's a mistake.
When you see the bad spirits, the saboteur, the gremlin in action. It's often helpful to name it. Yeah. And I think for me, it's about saying what you see without judgment. Yes. And, that art needs quite significant amounts of development. was talking to someone the other day and in, a training course in, who, in quite a senior role. And he said to me, I could use this in a particular context because this. And I said, that's a judgment. What did you see?
So he comes in for next go and I went, that's a judgment. What did you see? Five times. Yes. Five times before we got to actually what is it you saw? So I'm really curious about Ignatius in 1522 talking about good and bad spirits. Cause I think that one of the things that clearly is in both of these is saying what you see without judgment and then leaving the other person to decide what to do with it. Yes. I've had exactly the same. I've had a very similar experience. It's hilarious.
You should say that I was running a workshop on listening and I asked the people to, I asked them to name what they saw and it's very easy as humans because our brains work so fast to name our interpretation of what we saw and really believe that we're naming what we saw. Like no, the actual thing. The actual thing and honestly it was also it was five times. Yeah, the person went you fiddled with your ring And so what I was doing it was it's a real fun activity.
Actually, I said to them, you know, Merabian statistics that of what we see When we're listening, yeah communication is Seven percent the actual words spoken 55 percent the metal in your cues the body language and voice and so on And then whatever is left, 33 % other. So he would say only 7 % of what gets communicated is through the actual word shared. And people always say, no, that's not possible. 50 % maybe. I recognize that when I'm on Skype, I lose some data, but not seven.
So I do a speech for them in Chinese. None of them know Chinese, right? So I'll describe a quandary I'm facing in Chinese and they have to tell me what they know from what they saw. And this girl was describing to me, so, I know that it's a personal situation because you were fiddling with your wedding ring. Wow. That was a judgment. Well, yeah. So I said, so how do you know? And she said, well, it's the wedding ring. So clearly you're thinking about the key relationship in your life.
I'm like, so you saw it's the wedding. As soon as you hear yourself saying so, or because you'll probably find you're slipping straight into interpretation. And it took a long time. But because it was a situation where there's no gray area, I was able to say, here's the scenario. Your interpretation was a step too far because actually it wasn't a personal scenario at all. So I had to stay true to what it was that I'd shared.
And I had to, because I knew exactly what I'd said in Chinese and I had to give them feedback on where they were interpreting and where they were simply saying what they'd seen. And then I asked them to interpret because it is part of our human function to interpret. But it's the coachees or the directees role to do the interpretation, not the listener. Yes. As I've just written in my book, if I make meaning for someone else, it's meaningless. Yeah. Because it's my meaning.
And if we know we're doing it, then there may be something useful to offer. But when we're doing it by accident, we're on very dangerous ground, I think. And it will never be as powerful as the person's own meaning making anyway. Never. Exactly. And what a great segue you've just offered there, Sarah. Is it useful to offer this? So asking them again, really important. So you've talked a lot about some of the interconnections between coaching and spiritual accompaniment.
So noticing without judgment, asking, inviting. Yeah, really interesting. So is there anything else that you'd like to say as we wrap this up? I started actually by talking about the person of the listener, the person of the director. That person is resourced by everything you do and you bring the whole person to whichever of the roles. But I think one of the greatest cross pollinations for me from spiritual direction to coaching has been humility as a listener.
As the accompanier, as the spiritual director, I know how little of this wonderful growth that is going on came from me. I know how... mysterious and glorious this person in front of me is. And that was really embedded in me before I started as a coach. Interesting. And it's helped me as a coach. That's what I'm trying to bring into my coaching from spiritual direction actually, to be a person equally free. just be.
The ICF define coaching mastery, the line I like love the most, which I think most defines journey to being an outstanding coach is that the coach trusts the process more than they trust themselves. So where we've come to here is the whole concept of trusting that space between because that's the process isn't it? It's the bit between you and me and trusting that space more than we trust ourselves is about humility because it's not about us.
Yeah, yeah and there's a real humour in that as well as a freedom in it. Yeah. It's much more light-hearted isn't it? Yes, yeah. Yeah. Well thank you Sarah very much. So I'm Claire Pedrick, I've been talking to Sarah Broscombe and Sarah if people want to contact you to talk about coaching and spiritual accompaniment how do they get hold of you? My website is sarahbroscombe.com keep it simple so my email address is contact at sarahbroscombe. Thank you very much Sarah.