Episode 7: The Future of Coaching

Coaching Conversations with the AoEC – Podcast

Episode 7 – The Future of Coaching

Join us as we take at look at how coaching is evolving and ponder what its future looks like.

In this episode we explore the topic through a lens of issues including the need to democratise coaching, the climate crisis and anti-racism in the profession. We also examine why a wider step change is needed in the consciousness and philosophy of coaching in order for coaches to be truly in service of others.

Our special guests tackle the necessity for coaches to go beyond the client agenda and how coaching practitioners can and should, open and broaden client mindsets. Discover why it is important to continue the journey of learning and why it is legitimate for coaches to bring the big issues facing society into their coaching conversations.

You can link with the host and guest panellist here:

George Warren, AoEC - Host
Hetty Einzig, Coaching Perspectives – panellist
Jonathan Passmore, Henley Business School and CoachHub – panellist

LINKS

Find out more about some of the resources mentioned in the discussion here:

Andrea Watts – Collage as a Creative Coaching Tool 

Alex Burn – outdoor coaching 

Charmaine Roche and Jonathan Passmore racial justice research 

Common Purpose - Sky Blue programme 

Anti-Racism in Coaching by Charmaine Roche and Jonathan Passmore - Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice 

Diversity in Coaching by Jonathan Passmore - 

Coaching in the Climate Crisis – A Certificate in Climate Coaching 

Transcript

George 0:06

Welcome to the Coaching Conversations with the AoEC podcast. I'm your host today, and my name is George Warren, and I'm a faculty member here at the AoEC. And today we're going to look forward to the future of coaching and have a fascinating conversation about where the coaching industry could and should and maybe will evolve and mature into in the coming years. And I am in equal part delighted and honoured to be joined by two fantastic guests today, Hetty Einzig and Professor Jonathan Passmore. And I don't think I could do a justice to an introduction, so I'd like to let you both say hello and say a bit about the work that you do to our listeners. So Hetty, perhaps we can start with you. Welcome.

Hetty 0:52

Thank you, George. It's a pleasure to be here. I basically think the broadest answer is to say I work with leaders wherever and whoever they are. So I work in leadership development, and my view of leadership is very much that you find it everywhere. Everyone has the potential, the possibility, and they are leaders in one way or another. I do this through executive coaching, but I also design and deliver programmes and facilitate groups and meetings and consult to some organisations over longish periods of time, helping facilitate and hold space for their own thinking. And I'm a writer. The last book came out some years ago now called The Future of Coaching, and I know that that's the title of today, so that's germaine, I guess it's relevant. I also teach the Irish Management Institute and run programmes, particularly in transpersonal, on my own accord, in transpersonal coaching, which is really where some of my roots lie. I'm a linguist. I studied languages and art history, so those feed into my thinking and I'm interested in the broadest possible definition, if you like, of coaching, in taking what I call an ecosystemic perspective, which must include obviously somatic and so on, but we'll get on to talk about that.

George 2:25

Fantastic, Hetty. Thank you. That was a beautiful introduction. And Jonathan, hello and welcome.

Jonathan 2:31

Hello, George, and lovely to be joining you again, Hetty, for another conversation about futures, about coaching, and about how our industry is growing, shaping, and developing. So a little bit about me. I am an executive coach, I am an author, researcher, academic, and leader in a digital coaching business. So a little bit about each of those roles. I've been involved with coaching since the late 90s as a leader manager, and then as a psychologist working in organisations, being involved with the formation of the special group in coaching psychology, and then developing that group and recently, last year, being the chair of the new division that was formed of coaching psychology within the British Psychological Society. As an academic, I have been writing and researching for the last 20 or so years. As a leader, I am the senior vice president at Coach Hub, which is a digital coaching platform. And I guess my areas of curiosity are both in that digital space, how we shape craft, develop coaching to operate, to enable it to be more accessible, to be democratised to the many, not for just for the few. And also I'm curious and exploring the whole ecological environmental with a particular focus around the value of blue-green spaces in coaching in my own practice.

George 4:10

Fantastic. Thank you, Jonathan. And there's already so much that us three have in common as well, which I'd like to go deeper into. But first, you mentioned that you've had some fascinating and abundant conversations already on this subject. And I'm holding a curiosity, and I imagine some listeners are, to hear some of the key headlines of where you two have got to already in your thinking about the future of coaching.

Jonathan 4:39

Well, I think Hetty and I go back, and Hetty might correct me here. I think we first had conversations back in 2005. Could it be about right? And Hetty kindly contributed a chapter to the first edition of Excellence in Coaching. And at that stage, I think we had had some conversations at that stage about the nature of coaching, how it was developing, and what chapters individuals might contribute to this first book. There was a book supported by the Association for Coaching and came out. And really, the vision behind that book was how do we draw together some of the excellent thinkers and ideas to think through what is this thing that we're doing? How do we set standards for it? How do we understand and engage with organisations and industries? How do we manage ethics? A whole host of things covered in that particular book. So my memory is that conversation started there and has progressed through many topics and themes, and has most recently been covering issues around race and about digital and about the changing nature and scope of coaching.

Hetty 5:56

And I realise that, of course, our paths have crossed also when you were doing some recordings of live sessions. And I guess it's the same conversation every time, in a way. We were talking about where does coaching need to go in order to truly serve and serve the widest population, not just a small niche of high achieving business people or those deemed to be problematic, and that was the two sides, weren't they, of the same coin in the early days of coaching. So we both go back a long way in terms of the early days of coaching, and as coaching was beginning to develop, and initially it was very much around those two poles, it was either specially reserved for high achievers who were doing really well, or for those who were problematic. And we had those conversations, and you had the great idea of actually recording a number of sessions in a range of different coaching approaches. I'm sure you did one on Gestalt approach and so on and so on. And John and I did the one on transpersonal, but that was the beginning of our conversations, and you know you've reminded me that, of course, since then I've become closely involved with the Association for Coaching, and I'm now the director of publications there and have been for the last sort of six years the editor of Coaching Perspectives. I'm now the executive editor. It's been a wonderful privilege over six years to read the range of articles, and you've written for us, and we've collaborated when you were at Henley and so on. So I think you and I share also a passion for demystifying research, getting more people involved in an ordinary, everyday kind of pleasurable way. You know, research can be fun and it can be useful. So, there's many touch points here. Yeah, I mean, we range over a lot of common areas of interest.

Jonathan 7:58

And you're right, there were those recordings again, still available from the Association of Coaching. People want to go and see those recordings. And you did one on transpersonal, Peter Hawkins, if I recall, a young Peter Hawkins, who was still in short trousers then, I believe. Did one on supervision, and there were a couple of others as well. And I can't remember what those other topics were. I think there were four that we did.

Hetty 8:24

Bringing it back, I mean, you know, this is great fun for you and me, but for our listeners, what's important to emphasise is that a lot of us were thinking very deeply, I think, from the early days about the potential of coaching to really serve a wide range of people in a wide range of circumstances, and what was needed in order to help coaching mature as a profession so that it could fulfil that potential. That's the nub of this conversation and bringing it sort of right up to the present day. That book is now what is it in fourth, fifth iteration or something astonishing?

Jonathan 9:04

Fourth edition just came out a couple of years ago. And it is about, for me, sharing the expertise of practitioners, giving people in a highly accessible way an introduction to the evidence, the science, and best practice that enables them to use that science in their own work, demystifying science, making it accessible for people, and that science becomes a foundation for the way that they engage in conversations, they coach, they practice. And if we can do that, that science isn't something that only academics can engage with, that we can all engage with. It drives and informs all of our practice, that makes for better practice, and I think that makes for better outcomes as well.

Hetty 9:52

And it won't come as a surprise to anyone to hear that I want to add in the art of coaching as well. I come from an arts background, and what I love about talking with scientists is how often they mention the word beauty and mystery and all sorts of things that we don't associate with science. But really important that one of the beauties of coaching is that's where the two can meet, and each coach brings their own artistry, their own voice, their own life experiences, their own talents and skills, and that kind of thing based on and incorporating some of the research that you're so passionate about and have been a leader on.

Jonathan 10:39

And we're seeing that in the last 18 months beginning to emerge much more strongly in coaching practice, Hetty. So I agree with you that idea of our people like Ho Law have talked about that for a decade or more. But we've seen in the last 18 months two or three books that have come out. So I've just been reading Andrea Watt's book about collage and how collage can be used as a medium to help in coaching conversations. Fabulous book, fabulous book. Uh, and Schaefer using art and art therapy concepts and ideas in coaching conversations. And in fact, at Henley, Anne came in and did an art coaching session with me, and we recorded that, and that's now up on the Henley Center for Coaching. And there's also some work that's being done by a number of writers that are probably an extension of art. You might include it as art, you might not, but about using nature and the environment to think about how we make sense of our world and using it for metaphor. So that's an extension of coaching in green and blue spaces. So Alex Burns, for example, is doing some work there, very interesting. And there's also some very interesting work about and that can extend into things such as, and maybe again it's not art, but it depends how you define art, Lego serious play, and the whole concept of play and improvisation. So Julie Flower is doing some interesting work about improv. And that's a flourishing really of some of the ideas that you were just talking about there, and you're probably familiar with many of those. I can see you're nodding as we're chatting in this conversation.

Hetty 12:22

Julie Flower's written an article in the July edition of Coaching Perspectives, and it's one of the things I think I'm most proud of with Coaching Perspectives is the diversity that we made it, we had a couple of principles. One was that we really reflect the global reach of the Association for Coaching and indeed coaching, and that we really highlight the diversity of voices and approaches. And I think that that will have come up, and I guess that's where this idea of how is coaching evolving. And one of the things I love about coaching, and I affectionately call it sometimes a mongrel profession, is how many different routes and pathways feed in to enrich what we call coaching. It's such a broad church in that sense, it's such a broad profession with that culture of mutual respect and encompassing that diversity. And another thing I think I'm I'm sort of proud of about coaching, or I think it's what I'm watching, the evolution, is how it's responding, how it responds to what's going on out there in the world and how it responds to the needs out there. So, you know, something that I read and and have been impressed by is the report that you and Charmaine Roche did around looking at racism in coaching and where our blind spots are. I think that's really, really important as we become better at talking about what we don't know. You know, it sounds like a contradiction in terms, but really admitting that, ah, yeah, no gosh, that really is a blind spot. We really need to look there because what I am seeing is how coaching is democratising, not just through technological methodologies, technological, you know, technologically assisted, if you like, the digital means, but also through broadening our own mindsets away from the dominance of what I would call, Western or Anglo-American performance-driven, goal-driven models of coaching, which served their purpose well and still do, but they're not the whole of coaching. Coaching is much more nuanced, much more sophisticated, much more varied than that. And I think your report with Charmaine and her work and others in this field, and there are many working in this field, are really opening our eyes to the different way of doing things. I've just come off of running a peer coaching session for common purpose, and it's a programme called Sky Blue. I commend it to everyone who wants to advance their leadership within the environmental sector, which is what Sky Blue is aimed at for leaders who work in the broader sense. Again, you have people coming from all sectors, and I was very struck by in my particular group that I'm facilitating, there were people from all over the world, and we had people from North Africa, and then we had a gentleman from Kenya, and I was struck at how beautifully he was able to take space and pace how we tend in the West to talk fast and furiously often, you know, and accumulate information and content in our sentences, and how different his approach was and how nourishing. You know, he really when it went off at a pause, he really took the pause to think and digest. He really took time to answer each question, and he thought slowly, and the quality, therefore, was sort of almost gem-like, was really beautifully thought through. And I was thinking how some cultures, some workplace cultures are very intolerant of anything that doesn't fit, that more extroverted, alpha, speedy, competitive, and how coaching used to be aligned with that and how we're broadening out now. And I love that, the richness.

Jonathan 16:40

I agree that there is a flourishing of diversity. And let me just pick up the point about the work that Charmaine of I have been doing. If colleagues who are listening to this call, if you haven't read the report, it's available for free on the Henley website. There's also an article that Charmaine and I have just published in Coaching an International Journal of Theory, Practice and Research, which is open access, and that's titled Anti-Racism in Coaching. So you could just Google that or whichever search engine you prefer, track it down, have a read of it. And the challenge that it, I think that we're trying to bring to us as an industry and why I got started on this on this pathway, really was triggered by an event that I went to before lockdown, a central London coaching event. And for those of us who are in the southeast, you get on a train, a tube, or a bus, and certainly in central London, but the whole of London, most of the southeast, we are privileged. It's fabulous because the whole world is on the bus or the tube with you. It's diverse, and you're able to see that reflected in the faces who are smiling back at you. And then I stepped, having walked on the street, again, diverse, walked in through the doors of this event, 500 coaches who were at this particular event in central London. And what struck me was how white it was, almost universally white. And when I did see a black face, I was embarrassed because the black faces who were there were serving us coffee. And that struck me as there's something rotten here in the state of Denmark. There is something rotten in coaching that we are not reflective of the communities that we're serving. We are not reflective. And there isn't a sense of inclusion. Although coaches are good people, there's a desire to be inclusive. And that triggered a thought in me that I wanted to understand why there was this difference, what was holding people back in what I had assumed thought that would be a profession that would be inclusive, that anybody can apply to go on a coaching course. Anybody can, there are no barriers to entry. So why are people not setting themselves up, joining, attending conferences, et cetera? And that then led to some conversations with a variety of people, led to the conversation with Charmaine, coincided with the PhD that she's doing at Leeds. And we agreed to collaborate on an ecosystem research study that looked at professional bodies, that looked at coach training providers, so universities and commercial organisations, also looked at providers of coaching services, digital and face-to-face providers, and most fundamentally listened to the perspectives of BIPOC. And what we decided, rather than to try and say we can cover the whole world, we chose a number of case study areas, recognising or in a belief that race plays itself out in different ways in different geographical territories. So the discourse and the experiences of a black American coach are different to the experiences of someone who might be in the UK. And that would be different again to South Africa, which was our third area, and last of all, Maori people and indigenous people in New Zealand. And so listening to those different perspectives from all of those stakeholders coming together, sharing their views, there was a strong sense from BIPOC participants that they felt excluded, discriminated, that there were barriers to entry. There were no physical barriers but were psychological barriers, sometimes unintended, sometimes biases that existed within the system. There was a complacency from professional bodies who really, and this is a generalisation, but we spoke to senior leaders in all of the large professional bodies across the world. And almost universally, there was either a, well, we do our best, we are pretty representative, that might have just been an off day, or alternatively, there's no problem, coaches are lovely, we want to include people, there's no problem here, sort of move along. And that was in conflict with what we're hearing from members of the BIPOP community. And then, last of all, listening to providers and listening to universities, some very interesting views from universities. Where they had black or indigenous faculty, they said they didn't experience a problem. But we spoke to other universities who said, they don't apply. That was true at Henley, that we were underrepresented. If you think in the southeast of England, where we were underrepresented in terms of the number of applicants, and that led us to take some specific initiatives to diversify our tutor team. And when we spoke to coach training providers, there was either a view of, well, we try our best and whoever applies applies, and others saying people don't come forward. Our clients are asking for more diverse panels, but we simply don't have those people applying. And that led to some recommendations, 15 recommendations in the report. But at the very heart of those is the point that you touch on, Hetty that each of us has some responsibility. Responsibility and that we're each exploring our blind spots, and that each of us needs to engage in the work. And that certainly includes myself as I have engaged in the research. It's made me think about my own experiences, how I engage, have engaged in the past, and what I need to continue to journey to learn and explore about myself as an individual. This research has created more interest than any other research that I have done. And that unfortunately, the research interest that we've had has not been always very positive. So I have received more challenges to the methodology on this research than on any other study that I've done. And I think, okay, I don't mind if you raise questions about was that the right method, et cetera, et cetera. You know, that's an academic discussion. But it's interesting. Normally, when I publish anything, if you get one email from somebody who's read it, I'm pleased. Here I've had quite a few, but I've also had abusive communications from people that have been anonymous, telling me that I shouldn't be researching this, telling me that this was inappropriate or that my recommendations were effectively wrong. And clearly, I don't know who was writing those messages, but it was very interesting that it has clearly struck a chord and hit people who are quite defensive about this topic. And I think that has stopped me and made me think about this research. And I thought at the very beginning, and I've continually thought, certainly when I've spoken about this issue, what right have I to talk about this issue? And then the counter-argument said, well, actually, unless we collectively work together and encounter it, do the work ourselves and talk about the issue and make it acceptable that unless we do talk about it, we can start to overcome those barriers. We won't make progress. Just hiding it, pushing it under the carpet, pretending everything is okay has not been the solution in the past. But it really has, and like that the 99 other papers that I've written, generated strong emotion and pushback in a way that nothing else has done.

Hetty 24:11

I think take that as as an indicator that you're on the right path. Something that I've written about is that coaching is a little bit used to position itself at the what I call the clean tech end of the helping professions. And what I'm pleased to be seeing, and I think this report's evidence of that, is rolling our sleeves up and getting messy. Because these are incredibly complex and emotionally charged, difficult, difficult areas to explore. And it would be much nicer, especially given your position as it was in Henley and as it is now, to say, oh no, that's for other people, you know, that's not for me. These are really important areas that we need to address. So, for example, if I look outwards from the coaching profession, it's a very disturbing to me that the whole discourse and sort of non-debate around transitional issues, around sexuality at the moment, is such a minefield that it's almost we can't talk about it, we can't go there because one you know, the no-platforming and the vituperation that people have become scared to say anything. And that holds back debate, it holds back education within society, and I think it's a real threat to the democratic space. And if I reflect back through the coaching profession, how many people are going to be brave enough to begin to properly explore this? And I think you know, that with Black Lives Matter, it got exploded in a sense. These issues became areas for for discussion, came big time. And I think, you know, what we're watching, aren't we, a lot of contested realities. So you and I were both brought up in a country where in the shadow, if you like, of the British Empire. And that's all being contested now, and enlightenment values as being thought of as broadly a good thing. Yes, there's some bad stuff that was done, but broadly a good thing. That's all being blown apart now. And if I go back to this whole exploration around sexuality, I think it's another indicator that societies are beginning to challenge all the norms, all the assumptions, all the things we thought we knew, the beliefs about, particularly in Western societies, and that's opening the door, right down to the roots. Like you would have thought that sexuality was almost such a sort of core sense of identities, and that's all being challenged and opened up now. And I'm really interested to see how coaching profession will respond, and whether we'll be able to bring the same challenge to ourselves.

Jonathan 27:11

So that's a really fascinating question, and you might remember, you've just triggered a thought in my mind that in the 2010 book by the Association for Coaching that I edited, Diversity in Coaching, there is a discussion about these themes. So there's a chapter about sexual orientation, and more recently, I've been doing some work with Matthew Bennett around these themes, around the role of coaching, identity, and how coaching can be a useful facilitator to help people to explore sexual identity and how they then bring that alive in the different aspects of their life in their home life as well as in their working lives. And I think that you're right that coaching has the power to step into these spaces. Its rogerian humanistic core provides an opportunity for people to bring themselves to be accepted for who they are, and at the same time, also brings a challenge and a critical lens, but in a loving way, to help people to think through how they want to make choices in their own life, how they position themselves, how they position their identity in this particular topic, or how they position themselves as a leader, whatever the topic may be. And you're right, maybe this is an issue that, as we're talking here, somebody who's listening to this could be a fabulous piece of research that could be done to further explore these issues, particularly in terms of gender identity, where I think there has been very little work done, at least that I'm aware of, and could be useful to engage that helps inform all of us as we think through some of those issues.

Hetty 29:08

I mean, another area that I'm very interested in, I see all of these as indicators of a world in turmoil, a world in transition, I hope, towards something a bit better. And I think it links in with the sort of widespread anxiety around climate change and anxiety and environment.

Jonathan 29:27

And Hetty, hasn't that always been so? I think that we often are troubled by the fact, oh, now is a time of turbulence and change, and we can look back to wherever moment in history, whether it's some some hunter-gatherer who's strikes the first flint and creates a fire, or the situation where you've got Luddites or you've got an industrial revolution, or you've got suffrage, civil rights movement in the 1960s. You know, there's always been turbulence and change. I think coaching can speak into those issues very usefully. But I also think that that is the way of the world.

Hetty 30:08

Yes and no. I think that there's a step change difference today in two things. One is the access, the overwhelm of information. It used to be that you got your information from a few channels, newspapers and so on, trustworthy or not, as they may be, eventually the radio and then perhaps television. Our access to what's going on in the world is exponentially developed in the last, let's say, ten years. I think that's a factor in creating what I call a sort of climate of anxiety. So it's not that the world is necessarily more frightening, but I would say the second factor is that for the first time we're actually beginning to contemplate, being able to contemplate the damage that we are doing to the world in terms of environmental degradation and climate heating and so on. You know, we've got the science to show the rise in in heating and so on. And I think that that acts as a sort of backdrop. I'm not suggesting everyone's going around being incredibly anxious all the time, but I think that that backdrop that if we don't actually radically reconsider the way we live on this planet and our mindset, a sort of, the planet's here really to serve us as humans because we're top of the food chain, we're bigger and stronger and smarter than anything else. If we don't radically shift that mindset, I think more and more people are aware that we're in really big trouble. I think the planet will be alright in the end and probably do fine without humans. But that environmental awareness, I think, acts as a backdrop and is provoking us, I think in a good way, I'm an optimist. It's provoking us to reassess and to rethink. And I can't think of a better, I mean, a coaching is just the best, one of the best ways to support people for those conversations, so that they don't become polarised, they don't become slanging matches or even worse, interviolence. So I mean I'd like to see obviously I'm sure you would too, coaching spread everywhere. I'm hoping that we will touch on a core area of my of interest is the transpersonal, is this idea of secular spirituality. How do we, in a sense, fall in love again with the earth and and bring back some sense of reverence, quiet space, and the role of coaching in that as well.

Jonathan 32:44

I'm probably a pessimist when it comes to the long-term future of humanity. And I would like to be an optimist and think that we can collaborate, we can solve our problems. And maybe, over the next 20 years, we can slow down the rate at which we're destroying the planet. But if I look forward another 10,000 years, the way that we are consuming the precious metals that we have, we're consuming population growth alongside this. Absolutely. Water, food production, a whole host of issues bring us towards a point that what we do at the moment, our consumption of raw materials, of goods, our constant chase of growth, we've always got to, it's always got to be more, it's got to be more, it's got to be more. It's unsustainable.

Hetty 33:34

Absolutely.

Jonathan 33:35

And it might be sustainable for the next 30 years, we might do some things over that time to make it sustainable over the next 300 years. Is it really sustainable over the next 3,000 years or the next 10,000 years? No, it isn't. We cannot survive, we cannot go on like this. And so I am pessimistic around the future of humanity, but I share your view, the planet will go on, it will get over, there'll be another top species. Maybe humans will go back to being something of what we were 10,000 years ago or 3,000 years ago, living more in harmony in smaller groups on the planet. And I'm talking maybe a thousand years or 500 years from now rather than 25 years from now. So listeners don't need to worry. But anyway, that it's not sustainable what we're doing. If we are serious, we need to make a significant step change over the next 50 to 100 years to completely refigure the way that we think about our consumption of world resources. And picking up your transport personal point, this is something that has an echo in my own heart. I come at it from a very different perspective as a Christian, and a real interest in finding those quiet spaces about connecting both with our planet and with other species, and also connecting with fellow human beings. And I do believe that in coaching, it's true that we are there to be of service to others. And I believe that that's true as leaders, we're in service of others. That should be our aspiration to create organisations, team spaces where individuals can thrive and flourish. But too often, organisations, because of their pursuit of other goals, let that sometimes slip. And coaching can help to bring that back into balance.

George 35:36

And Jonathan, you've touched on something which I think about and talk about a lot. And I for the AoEC, I co-created our climate coaching course, Coaching in the Climate Crisis. And it's a particular interest of mine as I think about the future of this industry. And often the nub of it seems to be a lot of coaches wanting to help in this way and wanting to have conversations about this, but not feeling it's their place and feeling a bit stuck by this idea that we need to only serve the client's topic that they're bringing. And I wonder if, thanks to what you've both mentioned about coaching serving a sense of chasing the organisation's goals for too long in its youth, I wonder if there's a wider step change in the conscience or the philosophy of coaching whereby it is more okay for the coach to raise and inquire and widen out the conversation to an ecosystemic viewpoint to explore all the stakeholders, which include subjects of of diversity, of planetary crisis, and all of the myriad and interconnected factors which include racism as well, which contribute to that.

Jonathan 36:56

So I think there is a legitimacy in us bringing questions into the coaching conversation. And there has been a naive assumption, a myth that coaching is non-directive. My presence in the room is directive. When I look in one direction or another, when I sigh, when I smile, whichever question, whichever summary or reflection I intervene with, I am directing the client's attention to that particular area. So I think it is legitimate to encourage people to think about their system, to think about the impact of the work they do in themselves, in their team, in their department, in their organisation, and how that impacts on stakeholders now and stakeholders in the future. And there's a lovely tool that people who are listening might have previously come across, which is called Seventh Generation, and this idea about asking people to think about what the impact would be seven generations from now, and just encouraging that consideration. So about 300 years maybe. What's going to be the impact in 250, 300 years? And I think back 250 or 300 years to who were the heroes that we were celebrating 300 years ago? Who were the people who we were putting up on pedestals? They were the slave traders. They were the people who were making massive amount of money by shipping human beings from Africa to the colonies and then bringing back goods to the UK to then distribute across the British Empire. And great wealth was made as a result of that. Great wealth is being made now by individuals, often without consideration of the consequences of that for future generations. And maybe in 300 years' time, when our ancestors look back on the behavior of some of us, they might judge us with the same sort of eyes that we now judge those people from 300 years ago, that we are ruining the planet. And it's not them, it's all of us. It's me too. I have a car, you know, I do stuff, I will get on a plane. But we need to collectively come to a very different view about the way that we set up our economic system. It's really hard to make a change. But unless we start to make that change, start to engage in those conversations and plan that change for the next 50 to 100 years, then we won't be able to have a planet, I suspect, in 500 or 1,000 years' time that has the same source of benefits for those generations as it has for us and maybe our children. I agree.

Hetty 39:33

I mean, I think we're all in agreement here, absolutely. I guess rather than, and I know this isn't your position at all, Jonathan, but the temptation could be just to pull the duvet back over the head and not get up in the morning. And that again, I think, is something is how do we hold the shadow without getting consumed by it. And for those of us who don't subscribe or are not embraced by a particular faith, just to sort of talk a little bit about the sort of secular spirituality that I've mentioned before, and you know this with me, this this bringing the transpersonal in seems to me an incredibly important if we are going to continue to engage actively and proactively with some of the challenges, with the big challenges that we face, rather than hide under the duvet, then what is it that sustains us? What is it that will sustain our energy, our sense of hope? And hope isn't the belief, as Václav Havel said, it's not the belief that it's all going to turn out well. It's the feeling that something is right and that we dedicate ourselves in service to doing the best we can, contributing our little drop to the ocean. And that sort of mindset seems to me incredibly important. And I mean it comes back also to what you were saying, this this nonsense that the coach is just simply there to follow the client agenda. We come with our stuff and we come with our affiliations, we come with our passions, we come with our sense of service to what we know what is it that we are serving. So I don't know, that was a bit of a mishmash, but love to have your take on whether you think coaches can help open broader mindsets. I mean, we all have families, even the big corporate barons have families, but they have different beliefs about what's going to secure the future for their families.

Jonathan 41:46

So I think it's all to do with what time horizon you look over. And I think if you're the chief executive or a board director on a listed company, your focus is on what are we doing this quarter? How are our sales, how's revenue going? And so it's quarter by quarter. And we need to move the time horizon, not from this month, this quarter, seven generations, the next 50 years to the next hundred years to the next 500 years. And of course coaching can play an important part in making individual change. I think coaching can make a difference at an individual level. I think it can help an athlete, for example, to improve their performance running around a track. So you take a second off and another second and another second, we get quicker and quicker and quicker. So we can reduce our carbon footprint as individuals. And of course, that makes a difference. But I think that the change that we need is systemic, is structural, is economic. It's a complete reinvention, a reformulation of our society and the economic structures that underpin it. Just making small changes will certainly extend the time horizon. But fundamentally, there is something wrong with the way that we are consuming raw materials that is unsustainable. And unless we start to engage in conversations over the coming few decades, by the time that we get to the end of the century, the end of the this century, there will be serious problems with water shortages, about food shortages, biodiversity loss, increased migration. Absolutely. All of those issues will be coming together. And the century after that will be super, super difficult for us as a species. And maybe the century after that is a time when either we see collapse or we see something else that happens that brings us back to a time where we would be a much smaller population on this planet, much more in tune because there has been some form of significant change. I don't like to talk catastrophe, but you know, that's one scenario. You know, other scenarios is we can get hold of it, but we need to have conversations. And I don't think coaching is by itself the only intervention that we have.

Hetty 44:17

No, I agree with you. I mean, you may know that Charmaine was part of the ecosystems supervision groups that I run with my colleague Martin Vogel, and we've been running them for a number of years, and that's precisely the premise is that we take an ecosystemic look, which is partly our immediate environment, partly the broader environment, but it also includes politics, social issues, social justice, and so on and so on. And I guess my question for us is how can coaching help shift the kind of conversations that get the people who have the power to change economics because there are plenty of different economic models out there: poor economics, donut economics, circular economy, and so on, and so, all brilliant and all would serve us an awful lot better than the neoliberal economic system that we have now. Milton Friedman has a lot to answer for, and so on. I mean, you and I are in fierce agreement, but we have to live our lives. We have to live our daily lives, and part of that is the sense of how do I personally make a contribution? How does coaching make a contribution? And those are the big questions that we're left with, really.

George 45:38

Thank you, thank you, Hetty. And you know, something I rub up against a lot in the work that I do in the coaching and and climate space is the fact that the coach is a stakeholder in the conversation and has emotions and has invested in it's I found it very easy to coach architects and to coach people that run an illustration studio and lawyers because I know nothing about those and I have no emotional connectedness to the the outcome a lot of the time. And yet in the climate coaching space it's so big, so scary, so systemic, that it takes an extra degree of self-management in order to be really present and to really help your client navigate through the topic.

Hetty 46:25

Maybe we're all activists now, you know. Maybe that's kind of where we're heading, in a sense, is you know, signing on the dotted line in a way. That's the wrong metaphor, but you know, putting a stake in the ground, actually sort of saying, I do care about this. This is not a neutral conversation. This something that we've all got to stand up and be counted on. And what we didn't talk about, of course, is the whole role of somatic wisdom, you know, body work in coaching, which is developing. I think that's a big thing on the horizon. As on the one hand, we're getting more digital, we're also getting more and more interested in the wisdom and intelligence of the body and the shifts that that brings about.

George 47:08

And as well, Hetty, the sort of other point of the triangle for me is connecting to blue-green spaces, as Jonathan said. And I'm very passionate about outdoor walking and nature-based coaching. Absolutely. Which perhaps we can explore another time because we are bringing our conversation to a close today. May I ask you to both close with one bit of advice you'd offer to our listeners to help them future-proof and adapt to the where coaching is going and needs to go.

Jonathan 47:39

So, my one piece of advice would be I think that digital coaching will continue to grow and will be a significant part of the coaching industry over the next decade or more. And I think coaches need to engage with that, get really savvy with digital technologies and digital tools to optimise the way they work with individuals in those digital spaces. And the reason why I think that is most coach training has been based on face-to-face, and very few courses take account of the psychology or think through how people set up their digital spaces, how they use those, and how they engage with digital tools. So we could all get much better in the way that we're using those digital spaces. That's my one tip.

Hetty 48:30

Great. I'm glad you went first because then I can say yes, and the converse, I believe, is also true. And my piece of advice would be to all coaches keep learning, make sure you keep learning and add to the depth of your understanding, go deeper, because in a digital world, the preciousness of time face-to-face, and the importance of place and location and locating ourselves in the environment, we talked about blue-green spaces, is going to become even more valuable. So I would suggest that the cutting edge of learning is, as Jonathan's just said, around digital and conversely around the body, becoming really good at including all of that somatic stuff which links in with the green spaces. That would be my piece of advice. And galvanise your courage. It could be a bumpy road ahead.

George 49:35

Jonathan Passmore, Hetty Einzig, thank you both very, very much.

Hetty 49:39

Thank you, George. It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Jonathan. Thank you.