You're at the Coaching Inn, 3D Coaching's virtual pub where we enjoy conversations with people who engage in the world of coaching. Hello and welcome to this week's edition of The Coaching Inn, which is an open table, an intimate open table about coaching and grief, which is something we get asked about an awful lot. So today my guests are 3D Coaching's very own Peronel Barnes and my friend Lis Whybrow. Welcome Peronel and Lis. Hello. Hello. So let's hear from both of you, each of you.
What's tell us a bit about your coaching journey. And then I'm really curious about what's the interest in grief. Hello, I started coaching, I suspect, about 15, 16 years ago. And during that time, I have continued to refine my coaching. So it's lighter, more gentle, and more specific. And most of my training, I have to say, has happened with 3D coaching, although I have nipped across the pond and learned some from the Americans as well. Thank you.
Well, welcome Liz. Yes. Well, my 3D coaching journey started only a few years ago when I came to the transforming conversations course that Claire was running and it was transforming. It opened my eyes to a different way of having really useful conversations that changed the way people thought about things and moved forward in difficult situations that were perhaps trapping them or certainly confounding them. And both of you are interested in grief, which is a kind of interesting interest.
Although I notice that some people are really, really interested in it and others are a little bit maybe afraid of it and then you have the kind of ambivalent people. So I'm just curious, what's the interest? Who's going to start? Shall I start? Yeah, go on. I've been surrounded by grief all my life, really. I think when I think back to my childhood, my father died when I was very young. I was only three and a half. So grief was sort of present in our home.
And I think I recognized as I was growing up, grief was never allowed an expression because in those days, probably you were told to suck it up and get on with life, certainly in terms of the parent surviving, bringing up the children, but also children probably were ignored in that process too. So I don't think I recognized that until I was much, much older. But before going to university, I worked in a hospital.
And one of my earliest jobs, I remember, was laying out a dead person because there was nobody else to do it. And I recognized, actually, we don't see that in life. And I pursued a career in the law, concentrating then on people, helping people prepare for death, practically, legally, whatever, but also helping them deal with the fallout from death, both. emotionally, in terms of if wills were contested, but also practically and legally. So that's my sort of how I've got here.
But not through perhaps a traditional route of coaching. Yeah, but isn't it interesting that we all bring unique things to the work that we do. And some of that is what's inside of us, which you've described beautifully. And some of it's from our professional skills and it forms us into the people that we are and the lenses that we engage with. That was a terrible metaphor. Perinelle, what's your interesting grief?
I think I straddle those two areas of being interested in facilitating conversations through my coach journey and having a sensitivity towards people in grief, experiencing grief.
For the very reason that you first mentioned that I grew up in a family where one side of the family said grief is nothing to be talked about because you might actually initiate another death if you refer to death and grief and We never really know how we are shaped and formed by our families until we bump into another family or another situation. And then I found other people who were very happy to actually be really honest about grief's rubbish.
It's very all-consuming and it isn't something, in some people's view, which you can ignore because it'll come back and bite you anyway. So. My interest developed about 30 years ago and has just got more intense, I suppose, as I've witnessed and been alongside more and more people who have experienced grief. Interesting, isn't it? Maybe I'll share a little about mine.
So about seven or eight years ago, having done some work with John Eisenhower from Coaching End of Life, a couple of friends were both diagnosed with life-limiting illnesses, and then two or three other friends died very shortly after them in their 50s. And that made me really see how we do or don't. engage with grief and dying. And what privilege to do the learning in that space with friends. And also notice that not everybody leans in, some people lean out. And that's how they choose.
Yeah, exactly. And I think many people lean in for a while, but it becomes too much. yeah. So both of you were on a journey about learning about grief before you learned about coaching. So I'm just really interested in what's the connection for you. I think in my coaching development, there's so much about being able to listen and listen well and listen without judgment and listen in some stages without any opinion.
providing a really good space to listen, to be there, to be present, to offer a safe place for people to do their thinking, expressing, understanding, or lack of understanding. And my learning as a coach has magnified my sensitivity towards those people who might need somewhere a safe. place to talk and to express without any sense of they need fixing. They're not broke. It's just a little bit out of kilter at the moment, which will go back into kilter. Liz? I was nodding through that.
I would endorse everything that Paranel said. I think the thing that led me to coaching was I realized that actually she said they're not broke. They don't need fixing. But actually in my professional career as a lawyer, I was able to do everything that was necessary to make sure that person's life was, when death was sorted out well. But the one thing I couldn't do was support that individual or those individuals well.
So the transition to coaching, I think, enabled a really different dimension in that you recognize that actually by fixing all the legal stuff, it wasn't addressing the grief. And so people were still broken, not broken by their grief, but they weren't addressing their grief. They were almost occupied by doing rather than enabling themselves to sit in that place and manage it and learn how to be with their grief and how to move forward in that.
And so the transition for me has been very much one of actually, let's make sure you as an individual learn to address that grief well for you. So what's the difference between coaching and therapy in the grief space? Because the assumption is, isn't it, you need, if grief is a thing for you, you need therapy. You're both smiling. But that assumes grief is an illness or something to be fixed. Whereas actually grief gives you an extra dimension, I think. Say more.
I think people who haven't grieved. don't understand it. I think when you have encountered a bereavement of somebody quite close to you, you can almost say, now I get it. And I think I fell into that trap just doing my legal job. I didn't get it. Even though I'd suffered bereavement as a child, it was until my own mother died. And I thought, now I get it. I get how... all consuming it can be. I get how disorientating it can be and you know I just felt bereft.
And I think once you feel that, you know you're not ill, but you know you need somebody to listen, to travel that journey with you, who gets it. And as well as travelling that journey, help maybe identify what other people's grief might look like to sort of normalise what's going on for you. Although everybody's grief is individual and everybody's going to respond individually, sometimes it's just helpful to go, so I'm not the only one feeling like that.
I'm not the only one who thinks they now live on a washing machine and can't remember how to turn off the spin cycle or permanently on a roller coaster of emotions or whatever it might be. I'm going to say rather flippantly, if you don't pay attention to your grief, you are going to need therapy. Whereas if you think about coaching as basically a safe space conversation.
which might hold a light to some of the nurturing you need to do for yourself and some of the leaning in and naming what's going on. You're a long way away from the therapy door. And I think coaching is such a relatively new thing for us. It's not an established profession over many years that actually I look back to my own experience with my mother and actually she was 70. Having been bereaved in her thirties, she was 70 before she ever allowed herself to cry.
That's nearly 40 years of storing something up inside. It's a lot of carrying. And it's very heavy. I was going to say it's a heavy burden to carry. So as we're talking, I'm getting a sense of something about enabling it to flow and not to get stuck. I think it's, yeah, enabling those four emotions, those gentle emotions, those conflict emotions and feelings to actually, yeah, once you've named them and normalized them, it's so much easier to move forward with them.
and also recognizing that grief isn't linear. I think so often the people say, in the book it says, I must feel this, I must feel that, I must feel the other. No, you mustn't. You feel what you feel when you feel it. And when you name it, you can then say, actually, how can I not feel like this next time? Or what might I do that can help me when I feel like this? I would say we name or help name so that navigation is easier.
once you can put a name on this bizarre behavior of wanting to sleep all day, for example. The next time you wake up thinking I need to sleep all day, it's so is this I'm sick or is this grief or is this something completely different? and that allows a sense of. Maybe I need to sleep all day. Maybe I need to get up and find out actually how I am and then choose to sleep for half an hour. or something like that. So then the naming to navigate. I like that. Liz writes that down.
Liz does write it down. As we're talking, I'm thinking about that quote from Morris Mitelink that says, 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. And that's what you're describing, aren't you? Yes. I remember when Don Eisenhower was in the UK doing his, well, I went with him doing a kind of tour around places, talking about coaching end of life.
One of the things he said to me was that if you're experiencing a high level of emotion, watching a film that will enable you to cry, can often release some of the other stuff that you otherwise would be trapped inside you. And after my dad died, we went to see the Nicholas Winton film, Life, and everybody was crying. It was one of those films. And I could feel myself with this in, you know, when you, it's that kind of wretched sob thing. I could feel it coming and it was such a good thing.
because it made me name, there's still more to come out. There's a whole pot here that needs to come out, probably not in the cinema sitting next to somebody I don't know. But being able to notice those and have them as normal things that need attention is such a beautiful gift, isn't it? So what do you, both of you are so beautifully interested in this in different ways. And I think my question is, what do you want to say to other coaches?
And what do you want to say to the world in no particular order? I think to other coaches it might not be what you want to do and that's fine. but possibly to challenge them as to why not. because maybe they need to deal with something. Because all of us grieve at different things actually. It's not just death. Grief turns up in all sorts of situations. Might be a loss of a job. It might be moving a neighborhood.
It might be a voluntary choice, but you're suddenly bereft of all of those familiar things. Or it might be... through a death or broken relationship might even be a pet dying. You know, these things, we can trivialise them and think, that's not grief. It is. So what would I say to a coach who's not doing it? Give it a go or maybe talk about it to somebody else, your supervisor. I think.
Yeah, it's a subject that often comes up in supervision actually, think, which is what's our own attitude to loss. or indeed what's our own attitude to anything that's coming up in the coaching space that might be doing some stuff with the thing that we're experiencing someone else bringing. Paranar. I think I would say to coaches because I'm a reflective thinker. It might be worth knowing a little bit about this before you actually have to know something about this.
And it doesn't mean that you are committing to do nothing for the rest of your working life except speak with people and listen to people who are in grief. It might just be 10 % of the people who you are able to have conversations with. But for those 10%, that's 100 % important. And I think. I think I'd say two things to the world. One is that each grief is different and all griefs become cumulative, whether you want them to or not. So own that one.
And also I read an African proverb recently which said, when death comes visiting, make sure you're alive. And I think I'm saying that to myself as well as to the world. I want to be living as completely as I am to enable other people to live as completely as they can. I have a little strapline that says, I want people to address and talk and think about death because I want people to live as fully as they can. So that dovetails into that.
You know, I want to live life to the full, but that doesn't mean ignoring death. In fact, it means acknowledging it. So, yeah, to live life fully now. so that I'm ready. And I think I would also say to the world, those conversations don't need to be had with a coach. You can have conversations and should, should, I hate that word, maybe it might be helpful to have those conversations with those you love and care for. Because actually there can be great release in talking about death.
It sounds an odd thing, but once you got over that barrier, if there is indeed a barrier, talking about certainly practical things around death, I mean, my mum had her lists of what was to happen when she died, even to the extent she wanted the cheapest coffin going. We went into the undertakers and they said, no, no, no, no, this is the one you want with. I said, no, no, no, no, no. And they really were pushing back all the time. In the end, we had to produce the letter.
They said, she didn't want because we just felt under pressure. If you don't want to feel under pressure at your most heightened emotional time, have those conversations. I had no problem with what music was to be had at the funeral, things like that. And that gave me incredible freedom. This was exactly what she wanted. We were honoring her in that funeral. know, Claire, you had that same experience, didn't you? Yeah, my dad produced and directed his own funeral.
It was almost nothing that anyone else had to do. We watched, dad watched and I watched the Ted talk by Catherine Manix. I can't remember what it's called. I'll put the link in the show notes. But so we were actually both, we didn't watch it together, but we, he watched it and I watched it separately. what it's like to die. And that meant that when we traveled that bit together at the end, it was a joyful thing because as well as a sad thing, because we kind of both knew what was happening.
Yeah, so preparation of ourselves and trying to open up conversations is really important, isn't it? I've just spent five days over the last three months doing a foundation training with a company called Living Well, Dying Well, which Catherine Mannix is the ambassador on their board. And over 80 % of the training was around how can you have these conversations with who you need to these conversations with? First, have your own conversations. Have you planned your own funeral?
Have you decided what you want to do? Who is your support system in your local community? What happens if? Have you thought about other faiths? Have you thought about what might or might not happen?
And the time spent addressing our own as in the first example we were going to deal with, then made it so much easier to go and have a conversation with somebody who maybe was culturally different, maybe comes from different background, maybe with a completely different expectation, because the homework had been done for ourselves first. And that impacts our presence, doesn't it? Because if we are afraid of something and we're pretending we're not, people can pick that up straight away.
As can dogs and animals. As per that blog post the other day. Yes. So how do we know something about it apart from preparing our own death? If there were one or two resources that you would recommend, what would they be? Well, I think you've alluded to Catherine Mannix and her book Listen, which is having those tender conversations with the people you love. But that's almost assuming that that's going to be a natural death, not a sudden death or an unexpected death.
And I think there are probably two different aspects of. dying, that if somebody dies a natural death in the proper time, somehow it's almost simpler. There are more resources available. I think it's the sudden traumatic deaths can be really the ones that shake us and can complicate our grief journey because there are all sorts of extra questions. You asked for resources. I haven't come with resources for but with me actually today.
So I'm going to pass that on over to Paranel, but I will think of resources and I'll email them into you. Yeah. So there's something, isn't there, about transition. So you've talked about a sudden death where there's no endings versus what you've described as a simpler death where the ending is, we might decide not to engage with it, but there is a, you can see the journey.
And yeah, and backfilling the endings after the end is over is a, there's a load of stuff from Bridges around transitions, which provides some interesting stuff. They're William Bridges transitions. Paranel. I did it over last 10 years. I've done a lot of reading. I read lots and lots and lots of books. and I will provide to you, Claire, my top five. Brilliant. So they'll be in the show notes? They will be in the show notes.
But I would also say, if reading's not your thing, their podcasts, their videos, their YouTube clips. maybe the curiosity is the place to start. And I think just don't think this is a taboo subject because it's going to happen to us all one day. So being prepared isn't going to kill you, but it might just help you. Thank you. So if people want to talk to you more about this, how do they get in touch with you each? Well, I've got a website.
I'm also on LinkedIn. Again, I can provide those to you if you haven't got those. And I always offer a quick conversation before we decide to work together. Thank you. And I would say there's a great deal of laughter which goes on in these conversations, as well as tears. It's not gloom and doom. It's just going, that was rubbish. Seriously rubbish. So how should we navigate the next corner or bend or grimness? As to getting hold of me, well, I know a very good company called 3D coaching.
Peranelle at 3Dcoaching.com. So we'll put all of the contact details in the show notes. Thank you so much, Liz and Peranelle, for coming to The Coaching Inn today to talk about tender conversations and about becoming more fluent in the language of something that is going to happen to everybody. Thank you all for listening. Bye-bye, everyone. Goodbye. Bye. If you've enjoyed what you've heard today, we'd love you to share the podcast with a friend or leave a comment on social media.
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