Yannick Jacob: Existential Coach, Psychologist, Coach Trainer/Supervisor & Mediator

A conversation with existential life and leadership coach Yannick Jacob explores the intricacies of existential coaching. 

In this episode Yannick reflects on the symbolism of endings and their importance in giving meaning to experiences. Yannick's journey into coaching began with his quest for a career that wouldn’t become monotonous, leading him from psychology to positive psychology, and eventually to coaching. 

He discovered existential philosophy as a grounding framework, enabling him to integrate various approaches like positive psychology, cognitive behavioral therapy, and others into his coaching practice.

The podcast explores the role of existentialism in coaching, focusing on the human condition, the inevitability of anxiety, and the concept of living with paradox. 

Yannick emphasizes the importance of acknowledging life’s complexities, such as the impossibility of complete understanding between individuals and the constant presence of existential anxiety.

The discussion also touches on the significance of phenomenological inquiry in existential coaching. Yannick describes this approach as setting aside preconceptions to fully engage with the client's experience, enabling the emergence of new meanings.

Furthermore, Yannick and Alex delve into the potential applications of psychedelics in coaching, discussing the transformative experiences they can facilitate and the importance of integration work post-experience. 

Yannick highlights his facilitative role in this process, emphasizing the importance of preparing clients for psychedelic experiences and helping them make sense of them afterward.

The episode further discusses the intersection of transpersonal psychology with coaching and the evolving nature of coaching as a profession, particularly in its systemic impact and integration with diverse philosophical approaches. 

Transcript

Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee
Yannick Jacob

(interview blurb)

Yannick: I see a lot of coaches and supervision where their ego totally gets in the way of doing the best job possible. And if we are calming the ego down, we tend to be a lot more present with someone. The more present we are, the more we’re able to pick up, and so if we can quieten that stuff down or if we can recognize it and acknowledge it and then not let it interfere with the process and really refocus, be present again, then we just do much better jobs and we suffer a lot less as coaches.

(intro)

Alex: Hi, I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of Coaching.com, and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. My guest today is an existential life and leadership coach. He’s the Program Director of the Accredited Certificate in Integrative Coaching, and the author of An Introduction to Existential Coaching. Please welcome Yannick Jacob.

(Interview)

Alex: Hi, Yannick.

Yannick: Hey, Alex. Good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Alex: It’s great to have you. Let’s start where we always start on Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. What are we drinking today?

Yannick: Well, I just had a little chuckle when I realized that it’s, what? Eight in the morning?

Alex: Nine.

Yannick: Nine in the morning, because it’s six in the evening here and when I got asked the question, at first I thought, obviously, coffee, but then I thought, well, it’s six in the evening and also the drink that came to my mind, there was something around endings that was very alive for me as I had just filled out the form around the existential coach, the existential framework. Existentialists are known to love talking about death and really what we love talking about is endings and temporality and I had been holding on to this bottle of 16-year-old Lagavulin whiskey and you can see there’s that tiny little rest in this bottle and I was holding on to it and I didn’t want it to end so I figured what better occasion than talking about endings and actually celebrating an ending because they are there to give meaning to what is and so I figured, let’s drink the rest of that. And then add a little chocolate, I thought, maybe you’ll match us.

Alex: You know what I’ll do? I have my coffee here. Haven’t even had breakfast today. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to — I want you to enjoy your 16-year-old so I’m going to match you with a 12-year-old Hakushu that I love so I’m just going to do a little pour here. I’ve actually had some investors reach out to me when they saw an episode where we had something alcoholic and they said is it a good thing for you to be drinking and posting it on LinkedIn and I am so responsible and I don’t really drink that much and stuff so I thought I think it’s kind of fun. So I love it when — I think they understood it was totally, perfectly fine so it’s not like we’re getting drunk and then you got to go to work. It’s a little to share. Part of why I liked the format of sharing a drink with someone at a distance is because it brings you closer together and I think that it’s even more fun if you do something kind of like a fun whiskey and at a distance, I don’t know, we’re 7,000 miles away and we’re sharing a drink and it makes you feel more connected. So I like it. We’re not going to pour the whole bottle, we’ll pour a little bit, we’ll have fun. It’ll be great.

Yannick: Yeah. Do we capture video, by the way?

Alex: We do capture video and we don’t use it all the time but maybe this one’s going to be one that we actually put the video out there so people can look at how cool your bottle is — your glass.

Yannick: Well, yeah, the glass is actually a special. It’s a classic whiskey glass but what I had done I had a crest engraved into it because, at some point, I bought a square foot of land in the Hougun Manor and I’m now officially a lord. 

Alex: Oh, wow. You have one whole square, that is awesome.

Yannick: I have a square foot so I could technically change my driving license to Lord Yannick Jacob and I don’t think many people know that but I thought that’s a fun thing and I have my own lord whiskey glass.

Alex: That is amazing. 

Yannick: Never whiskey without water, never water without whiskey, as the Scots apparently say. So whiskey really changes when you just put a few drops of water in. Not everyone but that’s just for the connoisseurs out there. So, cheers, Alex.

Alex: Yeah, and I agree, and I forgot my little water so I’m going to have to take it as is but, cheers, Yannick. It’s kind of fun. Let’s do it. Awesome. Okay, I don’t think I’ve ever had whiskey for breakfast, that’s fun. We’ll keep the pour to a minimum. Okay. So, existentialism, such an interesting kind of philosophical approach, really kind of looking at meaning, values, why are we here, kind of looking at death from an interesting perspective. So, before we delve into that and I ask you about existentialism and coaching and existential coaching, would love to learn more about your journey. How is it that you ended up sipping whiskey with me today on Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee and focused on kind of passions, I think, that are around this philosophical approach and its application to coaching? Tell me about that journey. 

Yannick: Yeah, wow. How long do we have? It’s a long story. I guess I could say I was sitting there at some point after school, I come from a generation where the general message was, after school, you need to pick something that you want to do for the rest of your life. That’s anxiety provoking choice. So I was sitting there trying to figure out what the hell, how could I do something like that and make that choice. I was already quite a reflective person and I like deep thinking and I spent a lot of time with the question of who am I, what I knew about myself is that I need a lot of novelty in my life. I tend to move on once I figured out what the system is and just you climb a tree a little bit and then you see where the tree ends and you just have to put the work in to climb to the top and then I usually climb a different tree. So I kind of knew that about myself and I figured what could I do that’s not going to get boring. So my way into psychology was kind of a selfish one at the time in my late teens, early 20s and I figured, well, psychology, like people never get boring. Why don’t I study people? Psychology is perfect for understanding people. And the idea was probably to go in the psychotherapy counseling direction because I like deep conversation, I like meaningful conversations, I like a space where people really open up. I also learned about myself that people find it easy to open up to me about some quite personal stuff quite quickly so there was something about now I say how I hold space but, back then, it was just like, well, there’s something about me that people seem to trust me quickly. And so that seemed to be a good career track. And then I, long story short, I fell into positive psychology because the second master’s in the world just happened to be at my university. And then I thought, well, the science of optimal human functioning and happiness and positive emotions and hope and flow, like that’s, I’ll do it, for sure. That feels quite rebellious, it feels quite new. And then I found coaching through that, because the science overlaps with what coaches care about and what clients of coaching care about. And then another long story short, I figured, well, a lot of my positive psychology colleagues, they actually may be a little bit too positive and I needed something that really grounded this approach. I needed something that would acknowledge, an approach to coaching that would acknowledge that life is hard. It’s full of anxiety and paradox and dilemma and impossible choices and we cannot have any certainty before we make choices and every choice excludes all these other possibilities and there’s no one answer to the big questions of life so we really have to figure that out ourselves and I felt positive psychology wasn’t quite doing the trick on its own. So, in existentialism, existential philosophy, I found a framework that deeply grounded me that was solid enough so I could feel this is something I can stand on and, at the same time, it’s fluid enough and flexible enough to really integrate all this good stuff from positive psychology, and also from cognitive behavioral and from psychodynamic and Gestalt and narrative and NLP even, like whatever you come across in coaching, I think it’s so naturally integrative. And since balance and integration have always been a theme in my life, whether that’s in DJing, or in sports or in friend groups or in psychology, I figured, well, that makes really good sense, existentialism, this fertile ground to integrate things from other coaching approaches in psychology into something that I find deep and meaningful so I found my home in what I might call positive existentialism and I really love coaching, started teaching, started holding spaces, not just for people, not just for leaders, but also for a lot of coaches nowadays. And so here we are. I love talking to coaches and I love creating spaces where coaches hopefully get inspired to ask some more profound questions about the way that they work and generally help more people make important decisions. I think it makes the world a better place. The more coaches we can have, the better.

Alex: Thank you for sharing your story. Let’s break down what existentialism is and how it interplays with coaching.

Yannick: Yeah, so it’s difficult to put it in a nutshell because there isn’t really a Freud, there isn’t one thought leader, there isn’t this person who defined the whole field. It’s a lot of thinkers who, loosely, under this umbrella term of “existential philosophy,” started asking questions about what does it mean to be human? What is existence? What is this human condition? Where —

Alex: The small questions.

Yannick: Yeah, exactly. If we strip away all of these labels that we have, that we’ve created, I am German, I am a coach, I’m a husband, I’m a father, when we get closer to this experience of just being there, Heidegger talks about dasein, a German term for just being there, then what is that? And what that is, if we use philosophy as a process of knowing things that cannot be measured, what we get closer to is an experience that is full of anxiety. There is this existential anxiety that is just never going to go away unless we stop existing or we continuously distract ourselves from it. So to be human is to live in tension, to live with paradox, to live with anxiety, and there’s no way around that. It’s inevitable, these existential givens of freedom and endings, death, I mentioned it, it’s a big one, isolation, we can never really — nobody can really fully understand what it’s like to be me, I can never fully understand another person fully. I can never know what it’s like to be Alex, just impossible, no matter how many songs you sing and how many coaching conversations we have. So that’s what the existentialists agree on. And we look at these existential givens, there’s questions around meaning, we can never quite know what the meaning is, we can only choose meaning. We need endings, for things to be meaningful but we also don’t want to focus on endings. We tend to avoid endings a lot. We need to belong. We are social animals, but such a role to tell us other people there to remind us that we’re different. And that can be a difficult experience. It can feel quite lonely philosophically. We like to connect but also other people remind us of how we’re different and we like to have certainty, we like to have peace of mind, we like to be sure before we make any decisions, but we can never really be sure so that’s just kind of laying out in a nutshell what some of these paradoxes are and these givens that are woven into the fabric of existence. And that’s, I guess, existentialism in a nutshell, as best as I can put it. 

Alex: I think it was Heidegger with one of my favorite quotes, that anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

Yannick: I think that was Kierkegaard.

Alex: It was Kierkegaard. I knew it, but I was like I thought it was but, no, yes, and I was kind of thinking Danish for some reason.

Yannick: Yeah, yeah, he’s Danish, yes. Heidegger —

Alex: Yeah, maybe because I’m hungry I thought maybe it was coming up, oh, maybe I want a Danish but, no, it’s because he was Danish. Your whisky is already kind of taking an effect on me. I’m like, yeah, I just know it’s not Heidegger.

Yannick: Heidegger would have said something that you read 15 times and you still don’t quite know how to make sense of it.

Alex: You know, my favorite philosopher, and I want to tap into kind of how is this relevant to coaching, but before we do that, my favorite strain of philosophy is very different than anything existentialism because some of the nuances that existentialists kind of get, like you’re already talking about that, well, we’re different, like there’s some very definite ways of looking at the world. My favorite strain of philosophy, and you’re sitting there in Berlin, is German idealism so Hegel, which is also one of those that you’re reading and you’re like what is this? He’s my favorite philosopher. There’s very few things in life that I enjoy more than sitting and reading Phenomenology of Spirit, or mind, depending on the translation. It’s just such a trip.

Yannick: See which two coaches found each other. 

Alex: There you go. There you go. Maybe I will need to drink the whole thing. 

Yannick: There’s actually a lot of meeting points because Heidegger was deeply influenced by Hegel’s writing about phenomenology, and phenomenology for those people who can’t even think about the word without having a knot in their tongue, it’s really the study of experience. It was radical at the time because, at the time, a lot of philosophy and a lot of psychology, definitely therapy, was really around knowing things and finding some kind of more universal truth. And I think I get it. It’s attractive to have this positivistic stance of like, well, there is an answer out there and I can know it and I just need to ask the right question or find the right process and then I can get to the thing, and that’s going to be the truth.

Alex: There is an absolute truth and everything that comes out of that is kind of relative truth so then you have these two kind of perspectives on, yes, there is something that’s absolutely true and then there is this process or experience that comes from that truth in the way it relates to itself and that creates absolutely everything. And I just find it to be like the philosophical strain that — I like these meta theorists, so Hegel is a whole universe of looking at the world. I mean, for me, it’s incredible how someone, especially back then where I think Western mind was less aware of a lot of the fluid the of the Eastern thought. I mean, right now, it’s very easy to meditate and to kind of think about paradox, things that were just not ingrained. 

Yannick: That wasn’t a thing back then, yeah. 

Alex: So for me to think about Hegel sitting there in the 1800s thinking about how there’s the absolute and how the absolute’s relationship to itself leads to absolutely — I mean, it’s really the phenomenological, he really broke down the experience, essentially, of what you can call God. How is that thing that was there before there’s anything relate to itself and create everything from that relationship? I mean, it’s just unbelievable. He’s talking about the absolute, he’s talking about consciousness, I mean, it’s just such a trip. And then he applies that to the development of history and how history unfolds. I mean, it’s just such a brilliant piece of work. I’ve always, always loved Hegel. 

Yannick: Can I just throw in? 

Alex: I can’t just say that and then ask you another question. So, yes, please go ahead. 

Yannick: Well, depends on the question.

Alex: That is very true.

Yannick: People might sit out there and think what the hell does it have to do with coaching? And I think it’s a fair question because if you just take the last two, three minutes out of context, you’re like, oh, yeah, they’re just like nerding out on philosophy in some way. 

Alex: They had a little too much whiskey.

Yannick: Or too little. 

Alex: Good point.

Yannick: But I think it’s so relevant and it’s important to me because, in existential coaching, the main tool really that we have is phenomenological inquiry. So, in a nutshell, and, again, it’s like there’s whole volumes written on it, there’s generations of philosophers been interested in phenomenology, but, really, in a nutshell, as I would understand it and I would apply it to coaching is if you just take all of your stuff or everything that you think you know, you put it in the box, and you put the lid on, and every time it rattles or jumps up and down because you think you know something and just put the lid back on and put it back in the corner and in this time period, however long it lasts, just really tune in to your client’s experience, whatever phenomenon that is. If it’s walking into a building or procrastinating about something or feeling fear or holding a glass of whiskey, all of these are phenomena, so if you tune in to that experience, and bracketing everything that you think you know and really invite your client to describe whatever experience it is that they’re having, then usually new meanings emerge from that. And so you’re not tapping into your client’s preexisting interpretative systems, you’re not asking why, you’re really trying to bring out new meanings from this. And this is a wonderful coaching method. And it’s harder than it might sound because, yes, of course, every coach kind of brackets their assumptions in some way. But to really take that to heart, it’s a lot harder than it sounds and I do that in a lot of existential coaching trainings and, usually, people struggle. But when you learn to switch that on and off, open the box, and there’s tons of good stuff in there from your coach training and from what you know and it’s fine to use that, but if you learn to forever time — however long you choose to just really be with your client’s experience and bring out new meanings, it’s a phenomenal thing to do.

Alex: Tell me about process that you went through to connect these two. Were you able to find people that have been working on existential coaching? What was that journey like and where is that part of the field today?

Yannick: Yeah, so at the time that I had mentioned where I was in positive psychology and I looked for, well, coach training, I want to study coaching, I want to become a coach, I think it’s a skill set I want to have, I also already knew I want something that goes deeper. So I had been looking for integrative coach counseling or coach therapy programs, something that would cover both worlds, because I wanted to go into depth, I wanted to be able to not necessarily having to refer clients a lot. I wanted to cover the whole spectrum of what people can experience. Because, sometimes, people who are really resourceful have a crisis and sometimes people who really carry a lot of psychological weight, a lot of baggage, they’re well to just figure out how to move forward with something and create something. So, at the time, there was no integrative training. Now there’s a couple and there’s a couple good models, there’s a couple good trainings, there’s several master’s programs. At the time, there was nothing and the closest thing I found and this was thanks to a former mentor and friend of mine, Nash Popovic, who now runs one of those master programs in integrative coaching and counseling, he at the time before this was conceptualized, he said, “There is a new master’s in existential coaching and I know somebody who studies at the school, I think this will connect with you and I think you might like it,” so he had a hunch of some sort and so I connected to that person and then I had a conversation with the program leader, the person who designed the program, and I’m like this is great, this is exactly what I was looking for, and I really connected with the existential philosophy bit but really only later that I connected with the bit that covered a whole range of human experience without necessarily pathologizing people. It’s just a lot of what is labeled these days as depression, I think it’s just a common experience of just it’s difficult to be human and the time that’s ever changing. So, yeah, that was the closest thing I found to an integrative coach counseling degree. And then this lady said, like Monica said, “Well, you would only get a coaching qualification,” but then a third of our textbooks were psychotherapy, existential psychotherapy, because there was — the nature of the questions often opens doors into territory and the gray area so ever since I’ve been thinking about and helping other people figure out how far can coaches go? How far into depth can we go while still being competent and ethical and moral? What do I call my work? And the range of coaching is enormous and the range of therapy is also really large so, yeah, that was my motivation. Do something that is integrative. 

Alex: When you’re working with clients, how do you balance the coaching approach versus something that, as you’re digging deeper, may be perceived as more on the kind of psychotherapeutic side? 

Yannick: Yeah, so like where’s the line? How do I tell the difference? 

Alex: Yeah. 

Alex: One is there’s an embodied feeling that I get when I’m closing in on my zone of competency. I get this feeling in my stomach area where I’m like I don’t think I’m the best person to work with anymore and this is the same if it goes into therapy or if it goes into consulting or some form of teaching or mentoring. If I feel I’m no longer the right person to work with, if they would benefit a lot more from working with someone else, sometimes I have the skills, I think they probably should work with someone else, I think they would be doing better work, then that’s a big sign for me. Supervision is my go-to when I’m unsure. Really listen to what my experience is, really listen to what thoughts are circulating there, pay attention to whether the client is getting what they want, and lots of lots of contracting. Really have that agreement of how far am I willing and able to go? And that’s I think the key question for coaches, for any practitioner. How deep or how far or am I willing and able to work with this person? Willing and able. It can be a difficult decision. It might not be very clear. And then you might have to make some really difficult decisions and I want to always include my client in that decision. Very occasionally, I’m like, no, regardless of what you want, I’m just — that’s not me. This is not okay. But in coaching, we work in partnership so I put quite transparently on the table what’s going on for me and if I have any doubts whether I’m the right person, I tell them, “I wonder if I’m the right person. I wonder what do you think about that?” So, occasionally, I had people who said, “Well, you’re the best person available to me right now, and to be honest, I’m not going to look for another coach because it took me ages until I found you so I appreciate that you are — that there’s a bit of discomfort but I’m okay with that. If you think there might be somebody better to work with, would it be okay if we continue working together?” And so I think that’s partnership, if we put on the table what’s going on for us and then we make this decision together.

Alex: One of the things I like about your work is that you kind of like to go through the fringes and kind of explore. I know that you’ve been doing a lot of work on the intersection of psychedelics and psychedelic research and coaching. I’ve had conversations with people in this podcast about psychedelic use, two, three, more kind of like in the psychotherapeutic realm but we haven’t talked too much about its implications to coaching in any of our episodes so been looking forward to just ask you that question. How are the advances in the use of psychedelics impacting coaching today?

Yannick: Yeah, it’s a big question so I wonder from what angle I tackle that.

Alex: We only do big questions here at Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee.

Yannick: Yeah, I mean, it’s in the title.

Alex: Especially this special episode of Coaches on Zoom Drinking —

Yannick: Whiskey.

Alex: A little bit of whiskey. 

Yannick: Because Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee, it really doesn’t quite point to the big question in life.

Alex: Yeah. It’s really Coaches on Zoom Drinking Irish Coffee. For breakfast.

Yannick: My dad always said it’s red wine. Red wine, it’s usually, it’s like two in the morning, the red wine comes out and then the philosophy starts is what he used to say.

Alex: Two in the morning, red wine, I would last two minutes in that conversation.

Yannick: But, yeah, psychedelics. So very brief history of how I started looking into this because I think it’s important. I mean, I had my own experiences and never thought about that professionally. I knew that it opens something. It can really open doors into your mind. It’s opened a bunch of things up for me, I had like major insights, and I grew a lot from those kinds of experiences. I didn’t think about it professionally but then I started reading research. I came across a study in 2016 by Roland Griffiths, just phenomenal results, taking people’s death anxiety away in late stage cancer, like most people just lost their fear of death. It was incredible, like —

Alex: For an existentialist, I mean, that is like a really great thing to hear. 

Yannick: Yeah, and then treatment resistant depression, this is like a clinical term of like the kind of depression that just doesn’t respond to any treatment and with one psilocybin session in combination with some therapy, just a couple of sessions, people were depression free, symptom free, for months for the first time often in decades. And like an incredibly high number, like 60, 70 percent reported incredible results. So I’m like, whoa, from an academic perspective, this is mind blowing, there must be something wrong with it is what you think when you read those numbers as an academic. And so I looked into this a little bit more and started reading a few more papers and then I thought with my positive psychology and my coaching brain, my attitude, my perspective, my lens, but what about all the people that are not suffering? What about all the people that are not in need of treatment and healing? What about growth and learning and transcendence and just getting insights? Because that was my experience. I didn’t suffer from clinical depression, I didn’t suffer from any diagnosable mental conditions or psychological challenges, but there’s so many people who could really benefit from this kind of process. And that’s when I started thinking, well, how could coaching and psychedelics make sense together? So we started an interest group, we started — first, it started with me and a colleague of mine just doing a symposium online, getting some people in, check what the interest is. Make some difficult decisions for me and see if I want to be out there advertising an event where I’m talking about psychedelics as a branding thing and an identity thing and I wondered, well, who is in my Facebook network, really, and how many of my Mexican family might be able to see that I’m talking about drugs, essentially? But if you come in from a research perspective and you come in with personal growth rather than recreational, this is not a drug, per se, this is a substance that alters states of consciousness, but this is a substance that you can use to really gain insight into yourself and others and the world. Stanislav Grof, who’s the founding father of transpersonal, psychology, psychiatrist for like 50 years or so, he famously wrote that the potential of LSD for psychology and psychotherapy is comparable to the impact that the microscope had on biology and the telescope had on astronomy. And let that sink in. That’s huge, because it really opens up pathways into exploring the unconscious and into exploring — like psychedelics translated means mind revealing, mind manifesting, so that’s really my perspective and my experience of it as well. Whatever’s going on in my mind tends to manifest in some way. And there’s other perspectives that the mushroom will tell you what you need to see and Mother Ayahuasca is showing you things or you download the knowledge from the aliens, there’s a lot of stuff out there and it’s easy if you had an experience like that to make sense of it in this way. For me and what we know from Western science now, having studied it for 15, 20 years or so, it’s clear to me that stuff that is on my mind will come out in some way and it’s difficult to control it or to predict what would come up so it’s quite common that doors open that you didn’t know were there and then people would really benefit from more therapeutic approach, like there might be some sleeping lines in your subconscious and you spend a lot of time suppressing them unconsciously and you don’t actually know that there’s a lot of stuff there that you better take a look at. So when you have that kind of experience, that’s where these, what are often called bad trips and I would say challenging trips can come from. It can be a really, really difficult experience and some of this experience make people never go back and touch any of that stuff. So it’s really not for everyone but I think with good integration work and good preparation work, you can really minimize the risk, the health risks. We haven’t found the kind of health risks that would tell us don’t do it in a therapeutic or a coaching setting, controlled, with support, in a legal setting so there’s legal environments, as in the Netherlands, for example, there’s legal retreat centers, there’s psychologists on call, I don’t give anybody substances, I don’t tell anybody to take them, I don’t convince anybody to use it, I don’t even suggest anybody to do it, even if I feel that they would really benefit from it. People need to make that decision on their own and then I think coaching can really help people to hold a space where they can learn. Many coaches will tell you information and how to approach this. I’m very facilitative when it comes to my work with psychedelics, partly because of my existential lens but also because it’s a lot of responsibility if you guide or share information. So, really, what —

Alex: You do it with clients?

Yannick: Yeah, I do it with clients. I’ve done it for a few years. It’s not a significant part of my work but there’s a good number of clients that I’ve helped prepare for experiences and, often, people had experiences that they’re trying to make sense of and then they bring it to a coach and I got to say, I was a bit disappointed. I thought it was going to be very different kind of coaching and I found that, in terms of coaching skills and process, it’s the same as helping someone to make sense of a difficult other experience, breakup of a relationship or, I don’t know, going down the mountain at 100 miles an hour, or death experience in a plane crash or losing your dream job or just having a really weird experience with someone. Some crazy guy comes up and just seems to really see something in you that they shouldn’t have. Some people who are psychotic, they can really see things, like they can tell you’re pregnant when you don’t even know yet. Things like that, it can really freak some people out. So if you have a weird experience, you’re trying to make sense of it, you take it to your coach, for whatever reason, and that coach helps you to make sense of that experience. You don’t need to be ill for that, you don’t need to be suffering, and so in terms of coaching skills, I’m like that’s the same. It’s just the content can be very weird and difficult to kind of relate to, but when you use a phenomenological approach, I don’t need to relate to your content, I just need to hold space for you to make sense of what your experience is and how you want to move forward with it. I don’t take responsibility or guidance in that process. 

Alex: You mentioned transpersonal psychology and it’s an area of psychology that I enjoy. Our listeners know that I’m a big reader and maybe even some people could say fan boy, don’t love that term, of Ken Wilber.

Yannick: Oh, yes, I really like Ken Wilber too. 

Alex: I love Ken’s work. And the intersection of growth, understanding the difference between stage development and state experiences and how they can inform each other has always been, I think, an area of interest for me. And the understanding of human development and the intricacies of it in coaching is very interesting and I think we’re early stages in terms of really, at large, being able to have coaching be more and more informed with some of these deep adult development currents that I think perhaps are a little bit more utilized in psychotherapy, in other approaches, and I think there’s a lot of coaches I know that are very well versed with adult development and other coaches that maybe are a little less so. I think it’s an area of tremendous potential to really have coaches be more well versed with adult development and some of these undercurrents. And, for me, transpersonal psychology is so interesting because we were talking about positive psychology earlier, transpersonal is — positive psychology opens such an interesting pathway to think about human experience from a different lens and psychotherapy not only focused on disorders and focused on a population that perhaps is struggling beyond what the normal human experience should be. Transpersonal psychology, for me, was one of those areas of psychology that elevates the focus of therapy into kind of those upper bounds of kind of higher developmental stages so I’ve always found it fascinating. Tell me a little bit more about your experience with transpersonal psychology and how you’ve applied it to your coaching.

Yannick: I’m not really coming from a transpersonal perspective so I’m not an expert in transpersonal psychology. For me, there’s some aspects of it that I’m still making sense of. There’s a strong connection to, for example, Jung’s collective unconscious, like there’s something much larger, it has a spiritual dimension to it, that a lot of people really, really connect to and I guess because of my own spiritual beliefs and my introduction into existential philosophy as well, I don’t think people need to necessarily connect to that. It’s difficult to prove any of it anyway. I think it’s extremely powerful when people do connect to something that is so connected, so much more than you. I believe in us being part of ecosystems and there’s an intricate balance and, in that way, we are all connected, but there’s something more to transpersonal psychology that I found difficult to connect to yet. We’ll see where that journey goes. I have a little toddler so there’s a lot of books still on my shelf that I think will open that up a little bit more. And I don’t think I need to go there in order to hold space for my clients. So I’ve seen some transpersonal coaches work, we had one in the coaching lab recently, we had one on the Talking About Coaching & Psychedelics podcast where we specifically talk to people in that field and so I really liked these people.

Alex: I would think so because that spiritual kind of realm of — thinking about the spiritual realm in the scope of therapy and psychology had some correlates to the experiences that you were describing with psychedelics.

Yannick: Yes, and it’s easy to have those experiences and really feel — because, often in psychedelic experiences, the ego either comes down or sometimes even disappears. And when your ego comes down or disappears, you really feel connected. I think people need egos because, otherwise, we couldn’t really survive, we need to take care of ourselves, but when it gets too prominent and I think especially in the West in this day and age, egos become too prominent, so I think it’s extremely valuable to connect to something that is bigger than you but I don’t think we need to go as far as transpersonal psychology seems to go. So I can feel connected as part of an ecosystem in an entirely kind of secular way where I feel when I do something differently, my system and my nested systems that I’m in will be affected. It seems that the transpersonal coaches I’ve met, I mean, I’ve met a few, there’s a range, one was literally just downloading stuff from the universe and then kind of resonating it into the coaching space and I’m like are you picking up on something that is really deep and meaningful and —

Alex: Downloading from the universe, I like that phrase. It’s a little ethereal. 

Yannick: See, I don’t really like that phrase because — 

Alex: I like how it sounds but I know, it’s — by ethereal, I mean, it’s —

Yannick: Ethereal I really love —

Alex: — it’s far away from the realm of science. But, interestingly, when you were talking about the ego, if you dissolve the ego, you can either get more connected or also you can get more disassociated. 

Yannick: Yeah.

Alex: It’s just the ego is just such an interesting thing to work on and, in coaching, I don’t think I’ve ever talked in this podcast about the ego. It is not something that comes up a lot in coaching conversations but a lot of the coaching dynamics are dealing with ego. I mean, at work, the political nested structure of organizations, I mean, so much of it is like ego and working with other people’s ego, being careful not to maybe say something to someone in your organization because you might be actually kind of tapping into something that is unresolved, that’s related to the way they relate to themselves. I mean, it’s all kind of part of those set of relationships. But, in coaching, in my experience, it’s not something that comes up a lot. 

Yannick: It comes up all the time, it’s just people don’t really talk about it or acknowledge it. When I started hanging out with who’s now my wife and I told her that I’m a coach, I felt it was kind of mocking, I don’t think it was mockingly but she talked about, “Oh, yeah, coaching is this ego to ego thing.” 

Alex: Ego to ego thing.

Yannick: Because she’s Lacanian psychoanalyst so they really work trying to get access to the unconscious and really bring out all of the stuff that is underneath that. If you look at Freud’s psychic apparatus, the ego, the id, the super ego, there’s these — without getting all up, ego comes up all the time. Whenever you are more focused on what’s going on for you or if you ask a question because you’re curious or if you start getting a bit defensive or you start getting into a debate with a client or if you find working harder than you usually do, usually, there’s something that your ego responded to and there’s a lot of stuff going on between you and the client. And I see a lot of coaches and supervision where their ego totally gets in the way of doing the best job possible. And if we are calming the ego down, we tend to be a lot more present with someone. The more present we are, the more we’re able to pick up and so if we can quieten that stuff down or if we can recognize it and acknowledge it and then not let it interfere with the process and really refocus, be present again, then we just do much better jobs and we suffer a lot less as coaches.

Alex: To me, there’s also a strong correlation to self-awareness. And a lot of what we are trying to do in coaching is to create awareness and a lot of the assessment and feedback process is really like, hey, this is how you see yourself, this is how others see you so there’s all that interplay between being able to create certain levels of awareness in certain areas that primes someone to see a pathway for development, to say, “Okay, I see that I’m here, maybe I thought I was at a different level or I operated differently or maybe I wasn’t aware of how I’m coming across to others.” I mean, opening those gates to say, “Hey, I think if I’m able to get these other types of feedback next time I do a 360, I’ll be a lot more effective,” so there’s all these layers of interconnection that, to me, in coaching primarily, I think about like self-awareness when I think about ego and I don’t think I’ve ever kind of said the word “ego” in a coaching session but it permeates absolutely everything you’re doing. It’s very interesting. I like that you tapped deep into this and I can see with your wife, you guys probably have very interesting conversations at the dinner table.

Yannick: Yeah. Also, she became a leadership consultant so there’s so much more overlap. She now does actually quite a fair bit of coaching, which is nice how these worlds connected.

Alex: That is awesome, and I think speaks to the evolution of the coaching professional as well as being seen as something kind of woo-woo, completely disconnected from something that would be perceived as valuable in the business and organizational community to where we are today, which coaching is an indispensable tool to develop individuals, groups, teams, and also set forth the fabric of the culture that you want in an organization. I mean, for me, one of the things that appeals about coaching is that even in its one-on-one form, if done right in an organization, coaching should have systemic cascading impact and I don’t think there’s too many things in the world that can have that type of effect. When you’re looking at all these wicked problems we’re trying to solve in society at large, going from those conversations with people that are dedicated to helping other people expand their understanding of themselves, how they relate to others, find development pathways, you have to think that that cascades to some pretty large impact over the course of, let’s say, a decade, a century. So, to me, it’s no surprise that coaching has become so prevalent. 

Yannick: Yeah. And no surprise that team coaching has taken off like it did. 

Alex: Oh, yeah. So tell me about that. 

Yannick: I’m not big in team coaching. I’ve worked with a ton of groups but I mainly run supervision groups, I would jump on the opportunity if somebody says, “Hey, I have a group of people and they’re working towards a common goal. They need some help.” I would love to do that. 

Alex: Well, we have a great team coaching program here and —

Yannick: I know you do.

Alex: — we’re announcing a new version of that pretty soon so you’ll have to stay tuned, we’ll give you a good discount and you can work with our partner there. 

Yannick: That’s the one with Peter, no? Peter Hawkins?

Alex: Yes. 

Yannick: He’s amazing. Every time I hear him speak, it’s just so inspiring. I always leave just wanting, first of all, being reminded that this systemic lens, for me, it’s still a lens that I put on and it makes me curious about other things than I was previously curious on, but like the existential lens and the positive psychology lens, they’re so ingrained, I don’t even need to put them on and off. The systemic lens, it’s getting more ingrained now and so whenever I leave conversations with Peter, I’m just like, “Oh, yes, there’s so much more that can be brought into a space,” and that’s how we make that kind of difference in the world, that generative difference. It’s not just one individual at a time, I think that can work, especially when we work with people who are in positions where they can make decisions that affect a lot of other people, which is technically everybody, but people in leadership positions, they carry the weight of the human condition a little bit more. They can arguably make a little bit more difference than somebody who’s the head of their body or the head of their family but I really appreciate that coaches now not just work with individuals but also work with systems and when we can talk to multiple people at the same time and really facilitate a conversation of what’s the work that needs to be done here and not tell people and teach people but really hold a coaching space but for large groups, it’s fascinating. And very complex.

Alex: It really is and I love Peter, always brings it back to responsibility. When you think about systems, you realize the responsibility that you have to be able to enact change and positively impact that system. So, yeah, systemic thinking is a wonderful way to think about things because of the interconnectedness of the world that we operate in. One of the things I really like about Peter is if you go to his library, he has just an incredible ability to go and get deep with very philosophically oriented streams of thought and then connect that with a very practical way to think about how those big ideas and that knowledge connects with just day-to-day coaching, whether it’s individual or team coaching. So, yeah, stay tuned for that. 

Yannick: By the way, I invited him to teach a module in a course I designed and, in his module, he mentioned Ram Dass, which is a very famous psychedelic teacher. He didn’t mention the word “psychedelics” but he did quote Ram Dass and I’m like, “Ah, there’s more to you than I had thought.” That makes a lot of sense, actually.

Alex: That’s so interesting. Yannick, it was so great to have you on the podcast. Time just flew by. I’ll let you kind of sip the rest of your whiskey in this afternoon over there in Berlin. I am glad I poured a little bit, just a little bit, because now it’s 10 a.m. here and I got a lot of things to get done today. But next time, we’ll do it at a different time and we’ll have a little bit more. It was wonderful having you in this episode of Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. Thank you for joining me.

Yannick: Thank you, Alex, for having me and really good to nerd out with someone on philosophy so I’ve really appreciated that. Speak soon again, I hope.

Alex: Yes, always fun to kind of bring a little bit of philosophical kind of layers to a coaching conversation. We’ll talk soon.