This is The Coaching Inn, a podcast from 3D Coaching. Welcome to this week's Coaching Inn. I'm Claire Pedrick and today I'm speaking to Shaun Lambert, who I met when I did my only on -site of the year a couple of weeks ago in the Yorkshire Dales and thought we must have Shaun on The Coaching In. So Shaun, welcome. Thank you. And it's lovely to have you. Would you like to introduce yourself to us? Yes, Claire. So thank you for having me. That's very exciting. So I'm a Baptist minister.
I'm a psychotherapist. I'm also a mindfulness researcher. And I'm currently living on community at Scargill House. And I'm particularly interested in of mindful community, mindful church as a fresh expression, especially for young people who are suffering from mental health distress, but asking spiritual questions.
But we did feel in coming to Scargill that community would be at the heart of what we would want to offer, so we felt we had to intentionally live on community and learn some of that wisdom. So we've been here. about seven months. Fantastic. Good. So what I need to tell everybody is that we had such great conversation at Scargill and I thought I must talk to Sean again. And then I thought, well, maybe other people would like to listen. So here we are. Yeah, no, that's fantastic.
So the thing that really captivated me when we had that conversation a couple of weeks ago was the idea of of paying attention and attentiveness. Can you say a bit more about your take on attentiveness? Yeah, so I mean, I started looking at sort of attention and awareness, which is what mindfulness is really, back in 2006. And I was doing some secular counseling training at Roehampton University, and I got very stressed. anxious, close to burnout.
And what I realized was that actually, if you start being attentive and aware, then it's very healing. And often when we're anxious or stressed, we're actually not paying attention. We're not being mindful, we're doing things automatically. So that was really fascinating for me. And I started looking at it. And then I came across just the idea that you could be mindful of your body, of your senses, of your mind, of your imagination, of other people, of nature, of God.
So there's so many aspects to it. And we don't really teach people to pay attention. You know, we tell children, pay attention. It's really unfair. We never teach them how to do it. So it's just sort of like a new language that we have to learn. and often in the West, we're taught about information thinking, that's our currency. And we've really neglected attention and awareness, which are just a beautiful or beautiful capacities that we have within us.
It's very timely that we're talking today, Sean, because on last week's podcast, people will have listened to the interview with Tunde Adosh, which was about presence. and noticing the kind of space between people. So what have you particularly learned about this attention awareness thing that people can apply? Yes, I think what people have got to ask themselves is where are they in their body, in their mind, in their senses, in their imagination?
So a lot of people are living just in their heads. So we live in a virtual world and obviously because of COVID and lockdown, we've been forced even more into living in our heads. And so we're not living in our bodies, we're not living in our imagination, not living in our senses and so on. And actually just living in our head is very bad for us. And research says that we sort of suffer from hypertension, so we're easily bored. We need constant streams of information coming at us.
And if you want to know if you suffer from hypertension, just lock your phone away for three days and see how twitchy you get and how quickly you get twitchy. You would not be able to, you know, access everything that a smartphone can give you. So it's bad for it, you know, takes our attention sort of captive really. And we've got to try and take it back. So we need to be in charge of our attentional capacities, not culture or media having taken it captive. And you can learn to do that.
And I think the other thing I've learned is that mental time travel, which we do in our heads, reliving a past we can't change or pre -living a future we can't control is also really bad for us. That mind wandering makes us unhappy. So if we can learn to take back control of our mind wandering, we can then actually find wellbeing, creativity. There's so much energy that's released when we do that. Living in the present.
Do you know, after we left you and traveled onto a friend for the weekend, she was telling me she was learning Spanish on Duolingo. And she said, I'm only learning the present tense. That's right, isn't it? And she was doing it because she said, you know, in the moment, you only need the present tense. But that actually got me really thinking about what staying in the present really means. Yeah, so it's...
It's quite easy to do, because basically, any practice where you pay attention to your breath, or your senses or your body, always take you into the present moment, because your body, your senses, your breath cannot be at any other point of time. So one of the things we can talk about is, you know, you and I have a narrative self, we tell each other stories, they're often negative, distorted stories. And we don't realize we've got this body, these senses, which is our experiential self.
And we can step into that self and take a rest from all the stories and the narratives. So anything that gets you out of your mind, into your body, you know, drinking a cup of tea, knitting, listening to music, going for a walk, just paying attention to your breath, immediately takes you out of your head into experiential self. And that's very good for us. And that's always in the present moment. The trouble is that we, it's a bit like the candle you put on a child's birthday cake.
You know, they blow it out and it relights. So immediately we go back to mind wandering. And so we have a muscle of attention that we can learn to exercise. And behind every practice is this muscle of attention, which is quite easy to learn, but just needs practice to get it sort of fit really. And you've been exploring mindfulness from a faith perspective. So I'm just interested what's unique about that or different from from the kind of headspace app?
Yeah. So secular mindfulness headspace app is really popular, you know, millions of people using it and it's very good for our well -being. And so, you know, even from a faith perspective as human beings are very fragile, we should use secular mindfulness. But I came across a phrase from a fifth century Greek bishop who'd pioneered a sort of early contemplative prayer called the Jesus Prayer. And he talked about mindfulness of God. Now, secular mindfulness doesn't talk about mindfulness of God.
So that's a distinctive. from my perspective, but we're actually using the same capacities. And when we do that, and when we're attentive, then actually, we actually more aware of God's presence, if you like. And CS Lewis wrote about this in the screw tape letters, letters of the senior devil to a junior devil, where CS Lewis says that the present moment is the point. at which time touches eternity. So there's another dimension here when we're in the present moment.
It's easier for us to get in touch with God. When we're doing our mental time travel, reliving the past, reliving the future, it's much harder for us to be aware of what God wants to do. Because we're all over the place. We're all over the place. Yeah, absolutely. Any point of time, we have this often negative distorted. stories we tell ourselves. So we have to learn to catch them, notice them, let them go.
But I think it's the release of energy and creativity when we start using this muscle of attention. So you might focus your attention on chocolate, people are good at that, but even with chocolate, your mind will wander and you have a lovely capacity called meta awareness. So one part of your mind, can notice that another part of your mind has wandered. But it could take a while.
Some people's mind wanders for days, you know, but we notice that our mind has wandered, what it has wandered to, and we direct it back. Our minds will wander again, we notice it, we direct it back. As we do that, we learn to switch attention, which is an important capacity, we learn to sustain attention. And what we're looking to move towards is deep attention. And that's something that... Jesus, for example, would have modeled for us.
He paid deep attention to people and often people other people thought unimportant. So that's a great capacity in whatever sphere we are involved in to be able to be deeply attentive in an undistracted way to other people. starting with being deeply attentive to ourselves. Yeah. And I think it's interesting, a lot of what's going on inside us is out of our awareness. So people have different, you know, it might be 90 % that we're not aware of. It might be 95%.
The real skeptics think we're only aware of what, you know, 1 % of what's going on. So we often get caught out by what's going on out of our awareness. So the more... attentive and aware we are, the less likely we're going to get caught by our automatic reactions. So, you know, people know how to press our buttons and we, you know, we get into conflict and immediately withdraw, we flare up. And that's our automatic reaction.
And we can learn to catch that in the moment and decide to do something differently to choose a wiser response. Thank you, Sean. Lots to think about there. And it just does go so beautifully with with last week's podcast. I'm just really interested about mindfulness and young people and mental health, because actually there's also talk in the coaching sphere about how do we support young people. What are you noticing? Yeah, so we've got, Claire and I have got two student aged children.
We've been working a lot with students. And I think there's so much mental health distress around, whether it's anxiety, whether it's depression, whether it's, you know, just fear about the future, lack of a sense of hope. You know, we're living in a world where it's very difficult to know whether you can buy a home, rents. a sky high, getting a job is difficult. You know, there's a very uncertain world in which we live in.
And I think because they live in such a media saturated world as well, you know, we've got climate change conference coming up. There's research about eco anxiety, you know, is the earth got a future? And I think COVID and lockdown has amplified, magnified these distresses, if you like. So, yeah, it's, it's and I think it's really important to be compassionate and not to judge. And often people think, well, they can't be very resilient, but actually they are resilient.
They've got amazing energy and creativity. I think they're just living in a very difficult time. And so, you know, I think mindfulness can help them shift. into their creative self, their resilient self can help them access well -being. So that's, yeah, that's my heart is because I believe in them. You know, I think something can be done. And I think coaching is a brilliant addition to that, you know, because they often respond relationally if somebody talks to them authentically.
and they think they're having a real conversation, not a fake conversation, then I think they often respond to that. So it's trying to have a real relationship, real conversation, rather than a distorted one or a fake one or, you know, a lot of stuff on social media is curated, isn't it? We present an image. So I think they're intuitively searching for something else. In systemic practice, they talk about making things the right size.
And I think what you're describing is that that the anxious side of ourselves can become huge because it shouts very loudly. And that actually, if we can make that the right size and access the resourceful part of ourselves, then things begin to change. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, I think that's a really helpful phrase. I love that phrase, the right size.
So what mindfulness research would say is that actually our capacities to see, to perceive, they're distorted, they're negative, they're biased. And actually what mindfulness enables us to do is to see clearly and actually to see things the right size, to see reality as it is, not as we imagine it to be. So yes, anxiety casts a big shadow. It creates monsters in our heads.
And actually if we can reduce those monsters and those shadows down to their real size, it's not that life isn't difficult, but actually sometimes the stories we tell ourselves about life is like shooting ourselves. You've already been shot by life, but then we shoot ourselves because we're distorting what's going on. So yes, it helps us see things the right size. About a hundred years ago, a Belgian called Morris Mitelink, who doesn't seem to be famous for anything apart from this phrase.
He said, it's far more important that our lives be perceived than that they be transformed. For once they have been perceived, they will transform themselves of their own accord. Yeah, I think that's beautiful. And so one way you could define mindfulness and certainly mindfulness for a faith perspective is paying attention to what is real with a small r, so the reality around us, and to what is real with a capital R, to the, you know, spiritual reality as well.
And I think when you do that, mindfulness has this phrase of re -perceiving. There's a shift in perspective. We re -perceive things. We see clearly. And that is, I think, the most freeing aspect of it. And as you say, then, transformation begins to happen. Because until we see things clearly, you know, we can't be self aware, we can't regulate our emotions, our thought patterns, and so on. And we can't transcend, you know, this, this sort of crap we've got, got caught in.
And so I think that's absolutely a beautiful phrase. So yeah, we begin to reperceive. What an amazing thing. I mean, even as you say that, I think, well, you know, even saying that as a sentence, which says, you know, there's a possibility to re -perceive, that brings hope, doesn't it? Yes. Yes, it does. And I think another phrase they use, which is quite a helpful phrase, is decentering. So you don't put your anxiety or fear or whatever it is, centre.
You... you're not a victim of that, you're able to, and this is the other part of us, you know, we've talked about our narrative self and telling stories and we've got this body that we can experience our experiential self, but we have an observer self. So we can observe our narrative self, we can observe our, you know, feelings and bodily sensations, and that de -centers the narrative self, it de -centers the anxiety.
And so we become, you know, witness of our thoughts and feelings, not a victim of them. And I think that's a really important thing to do because we often become our thoughts and feelings, you know, an anxious train of thought will come into our mind, you know, into the train station of mind and we'll go off on that train rather than just saying, look, the anxious train has come in. I've noticed it. I'm gonna let it go. I'm gonna get back to what I'm doing.
So I think, you know, this idea, am I my thoughts and feelings? Are you your thoughts and feelings is an important question to ask. And very often people think they are their thoughts and feelings, but actually they're much bigger than them. They're part of us, but we can decenter from them, defuse from them, notice them, let them go. So that's an important part of what's going on as well. Decentering enables us to re -perceive everything in a new light.
And re perceiving has so many possibilities, doesn't it? I've got in my head, we've got a conversation coming up with somebody who works with very disempowered women. And she and I have been having conversations over time about how does coaching work when people actually don't have options. But what I'm hearing in what you're saying, Sean, is that re perceiving, brings its own sense of possibility, even if the actual physical practical options don't change.
Yes. No, I think that's, that's absolutely right. And that then gives you hope, which if you haven't got hope, you're not able to see. And I think the other thing that's helpful. So we talk about the alarm brain in, in mindfulness and when that triggers and it can be, you know, a tiny little thing that triggers it, our smart brain is switched off. And so we live in this little tiny room in our head. That's the fear -based room.
And if we can switch that off and turn our smart brain back on, which mindfulness does, then suddenly we're inhabiting a much bigger space. So I'm in a room which has like eight windows and a lot of the time the curtains are drawn on all the windows on our life, but mindfulness can begin to open the curtains. We can look out different windows and you know, It's not denying that reality can be very difficult.
But when we begin to inhabit a bigger space and open the windows, then opportunities sort of begin to emerge. We begin to think differently. I love how simply you describe it. It's not difficult mindfulness. It's remembering to do it. It's like anything. It's daily commitment and practice. So you have to... intentionally do it. That's sort of part of the definition of it. And you have to work on your capacity to be attentive.
But also the other thing you have to work on is your your own judgmental attitudes. You know, so we're often our own worst critic, you know, our own thoughts can bring us down quicker than any enemy. So if we can learn to be compassionate towards our own self and less judgmental, Again, we're not having the inner critic telling us we can't do things. So a lot of us, I think Brené Brown, who's a social researcher, says we carry creativity scars.
And we were told as children, you can't paint, you can't write, you can't do poetry, you can't do this. And so we never try to be creative. But I think actually we're moving into an age of creativity, and all of us have that capacity. So, and it's the most joyous thing in the world when people, you help someone access. their creativity and mindfulness is very linked to our capacity to be creative. If you're willing to share, you don't have to.
I'm really interested in what's been the biggest difference for you in this journey. Yeah, I think that's a really good question. So yes, I've been working 38 years. So 2006, you know, I had this very stressful time. And since then, I'm not saying life has always been easy. And there are times, you know, that I've been splinched by life, you know, had bites taken out of me. But I think just being able to access my creativity, to actually believe. in myself, you know, in a realistic way.
I think that's very helpful. And then actually noticing other people more, because obviously again, when we're anxious or in our fearful self, we're not seeing very much the world or other people. And I think when the fear goes and mindfulness helps reduce all of that, then suddenly again, you see the possibilities, you see the beauty, you see the wonder, you see the fragility, but there's an energy to, yeah, that's waiting to be released.
And this phrase I came across from this bishop, you know, mindfulness of God, it actually rang me like a bell and I just was filled with this energy that's never gone.
So I think, I do believe that there's a creative, project waiting for everybody and that they have this creative part of themselves which if they can access or somebody like a coach can call out or another wise person then suddenly you are living life in its fullness, you're living life as it's meant to be lived and I can't think there's anything more beautiful so I think it's our capacity to be attentive and aware that enables that. to emerge.
You've made me think about a book by a guy called William Damon called The Path to Purpose. And in it he talks about how do we find purpose and it's particularly about young people. And he said that we find purpose by reaching for something outside of us, we make meaning for reaching for something outside of us. And then he makes a really interesting comment and he said that's where that's where scientific research and religion agree.
Because the scientific research says that it's about finding meaning that's beyond us, that's connecting to something bigger. Yeah, I think that's really helpful. And I got a friend called Steven Sylvester wrote a book called Detoxing Your Ego. And there's this research in sort of sport that if you can do it without ego, you perform better. So if you have a higher purpose, then actually the ego doesn't get in the way. And I think that's really important for anything that we do.
If we can sort of get rid of our ego to some extent and have a do things for a higher purpose, you know, not just to bless ourselves, but to bless the world or other people, then I think you discover something that's much bigger and actually enables you to be fulfilled in a way that you wouldn't be if it was all about your ego. So I think they have a phrase in this that he who thinks about winning loses.
So you know, if you're serving for Wimbledon, and suddenly you think about winning, your your serve goes to to pot, you know, so you have to be able to not think about the end goal, you just have to enjoy the process, I think. But if you can have this higher, purpose and do it for other reasons than just for yourself, then I think something amazing happens. That's amazing. Because I was teaching class this morning about trust.
And one of the things that I was sharing with them is that our coaching professional body says that mastery in this work that we do is where the coach trusts the process more than they trust themselves. And that's what you're describing there, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, and I think, you know, they call it different things, don't they? But like the idea of flow. When you're in the process of flow, then then, you know, like in sporting terms, you see the tennis ball, like a football is.
And I think we have this beautiful, these beautiful capacities within us. And fear anxiety takes us out of flow. And mindfulness helps us get back into flow. And once we've experienced it, I think, you know, we we just want to experience it again, whatever we're doing. And mastery can be in anything, can't it? Absolutely. Because it feels like you're a master of mindfulness and yet a beginner. Yes, that's right. In the same way that people say I'm a master of coaching and yet I'm a beginner.
Yeah, and that's it's like anything, isn't it? The more you realize, you know, the more you realize you don't know and how much more there is to learn. And what a joy. So if there was one thing that you wanted our listeners to hear, what would it be? Yeah, I think the key thing, you know, why should I do it, is the question, so what? And I think the question you should ask yourself in that is what is the deepest desire of my heart? What is I really want to do?
And it might be your creative desire might be a desire that God has given you, might have come from somewhere else, but what is that deepest desire? And are you fulfilling it or is it, you know, just a dream that you, you don't dare grasp. And I would say mindfulness enables you to begin to get in touch with your deepest desires and fulfill them. And again, you know, life is fragile, short, there's no guarantees.
So what, what better thing can we do than, access and inhabit those deepest desires and, and live life as it was meant to be lived. live life as it was meant to be lived. That's something to think, isn't it? Thank you, Sean, so much. What a pleasure to spend some time with you today. How do people contact you if they want to find out more? Yeah, so I've got a website. You can just Google SeanLambert .co .uk. I'm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram.
Again, if you just Google Sean Lambert, you'll find me. Brilliant. So yeah, love to chat and talk to people. Thank you so much. So I'm Claire Pedrick and I've been in the good company of Sean Lambert. Thank you, Sean. Bye bye, everybody. Bye bye. If you've enjoyed what you've heard today, please share the podcast with a friend who might also be interested. And if you'd like to become one of our regulars at The Coaching Inn, you can subscribe at Podbean or on iTunes.
We look forward to meeting you on the next podcast. You've been listening to The Coaching Inn. Find out more about us at www .3dcoaching .com.