Courage (in coaching)

This time last week I was in the beautiful Batsford Arboretum, reflecting with my peer supervision group about what it is to be courageous as a coach and how we might draw on aspects of our lives outside of work to help us access courage when it’s useful to us and to our clients.

Nature generously offered an opportunity to open our awareness, and experience alongside her many possibilities and an embodied sense of how we might experience courage.

As I wandered around the arboretum, conscious of my reputation for having a poor sense of direction, it definitely felt courageous to pop the map in my pocket and trust that I would arrive at our agreed meeting place at the right time! To trust in myself and my surroundings and step into ‘not knowing’ felt simultaneously liberating and brave. I held my goal of reaching a particular place at a particular time lightly and gifted myself the chance to be present with nature in the most wonderful autumn landscape.

I learned from a small acer that there is a time for being bold; courage doesn’t need to be constant and in fact, there are times when being bold can inhibit or drain us. To find courage and allow it to flourish, there are times when we must also be still and steady; times to blend in, conform and grow; times to let go of our courage completely so we can allow the elements to run through, like a winter wind through our branches, stronger and wiser for having shed the weight of expectation.

The little acer taught me to honour the cycles of life, for we are not robots on a linear mission, continuously pushing forward, faster. Sometimes, courage is what it takes to be yourself, to show up authentically, to honour what you need and what your client needs, even when that takes time and is contrary to what we might have learned and lived up to now. It can be courageous to slow down, to be in silence, to trust that our client knows and that we don’t have to.

Footnotes

• I was a couple of minutes late back to the meeting point after being distracted by a pink-tipped hydrangea!
• After connecting with the acer, I engaged with my latent librarian, and had a dig around the literature on courage in coaching.
  • I was drawn to Wood and Lomas’s article. In it, they tell us that “courage is a component part of a coach’s ethical maturity, with ethical awareness helping the coach to make courageous choices (van Nieuwerburgh, 2014, p.178) while the absence of courage might compromise effectiveness by causing the coach to mask fear and anxiety through the use of tools (Bluckert, 2006, p.16)”  (Wood & Lomas, 2021). They talk about courage over the course of a coaching career and the impact a coach’s courage can have for a client. Do go and have a read.
  • In contrast to my experience at Batsford, executive coach Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries, in the Harvard Business Review takes a scientific approach to exploring the nature of courage and how it shows up in business. You can read his article ‘How to find and practice courage’ here: https://hbr.org/2020/05/how-to-find-and-practice-courage