Coaching in Conversation
Coaching in Conversation is a chance to discuss and explore, not just how we can keep developing and maturing as coach practitioners, but also to consider how coaching is evolving and its future potential and place as a powerful vehicle for human development in todays and tomorrow’s world. Tracy Sinclair, MCC will be sharing some of her own thoughts on these topics and we will also hear from some great guests from around the world who bring their unique experience and perspectives.
Coaching in Conversation
The Role of Coaches in the Re-evolution of Humanity with Janet Harvey
In this episode, Tracy has a conversation with Janet Harvey about the role of coaches and the re-evolution of humanity.
Janet M. Harvey, Best Selling Author of the award-winning leadership and coaching book, Invite Change — Lessons from 2020, The Year of No Return, is CEO of inviteCHANGE, a coaching and human development organization that shapes a world where people love their life’s work. As a visionary leader in the global professional coaching industry, Janet Harvey is an International Coaching Federation (ICF) Master Certified Coach and accredited educator who has engaged adults, teams, and global enterprises for nearly 30 years to invite change that sustains well-being and excellence. Being better humans together requires claiming a true self first and then choosing to live inside out as we transform, evolve and be resilient.
As Janet shares, “coaching in its many forms has at its root the effect of awakening consciousness and doing so in a highly accelerated fashion that sustains.” She uses her executive and entrepreneurial experience to cultivate leaders in sustainable excellence through Generative Wholeness™, a signature generative coaching and learning process for people, processes, and systems. Her colleagues, audiences and clients regard her as a bold, curious, provocative, articulate, and compassionate human being. Janet has served as a global board leader for ICF, as a director from 2009-2013, as past president in 2012, as Chair for the ICF Foundation 2013-2017, and more recently as Treasurer for the ICF Thought Leadership Institute 2020-2021.
Connect with Janet on social media:
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/janetharvey/
- https://www.facebook.com/invCHANGE
- https://www.instagram.com/invite_change/
Learn more about Tracy Sinclair and coaching at tracysinclair.com.
Learn more about Coach Advancement by Tracy Sinclair.
Follow us on social media:
Instagram | Facebook | LinkedIn | YouTube
Hello, my name is Tracy Sinclair. Welcome to Coaching in Conversation. Coaching In Conversation is a chance to discuss and explore, not just how we can keep develop. And ensuring as coach practitioners, but also to consider how coaching is evolving and its future potential and place as a powerful vehicle or human development in today's and tomorrow's world. I'll be sharing some of my own thoughts on these topics. And we will also hear from some great guests from around the world who bring their unique experience and perspectives. This time, I am joined by Janet Harvey. Janet is the bestselling author of the award-winning leadership and coaching
book, Invite Change:Lessons from 2020. And also The Year of No Return. She's also the CEO of Invite Change, a coaching and human development organization that shapes the world where people love their life's work. As a visionary leader in the global professional coaching industry, Janet is an International Coaching Federation, master certified coach and accredited educator who has engaged teams and global enterprises for nearly 30 years to invite change that sustains wellbeing and excellence. Being better humans together requires claiming a true self first, and then choosing to live inside out as we transform, evolve, and be resilient as Janet shares. In its many forms has at its root, the effect of awakening consciousness and doing so in a highly accelerated fashion that sustains Janet uses her executive and entrepreneurial experience to cultivate leaders in sustainable excellence through generative wholeness, a signature generative coaching and learning process for people, processes, and systems. Her colleagues, audiences, and clients regard her as a bold, curious, provocative, articulate, and compassionate human being. Janet has served as a global board leader for the International Coaching Federation as a director from 2009 until 2013. As past president in 2012 as chair for the foundation of the ICF in 2013 to 2017, and more recently as treasurer for the ICF Thought Leadership Institute from 2020 to 2021. Janet and I had an interesting conversation about the potential of coaching and also what that calls upon for us as coaches and instruments of our work. And so I have called this particular episode the role of coaches in the re evolution of humanity. I do hope you enjoy. Well, hello Janet and welcome to this conversation. Thank you so much for agreeing to spend some time with me today. Well, you are a human I deeply respect and have enjoyed working with over the years, so thank you for the opportunity to have this conversation with you. Well, thank you. And hopefully, you know that that is a reciprocated feeling, so I'm very excited. Just to ground the context a little bit for the conversation that we were just chatting about before we recorded here, is that in some ways, although there is a paradigm that is coaching as it's currently known at the moment, which is very much around a profession of integrity of advanced and deep communication skills, that has a set of wonderful competencies and people who. Hopefully well trained in evidencing those competencies. And you and I, both with the kinds of roles that we've played with the ICF over many years are deeply committed and involved in that part of our profession. And yet the kind of conversation I'm inviting us to have is slightly different, which is really thinking about what else could coaching mean beyond. I guess most known paradigm or way of thinking about coaching what, what could it really mean in the world? What could it become and what is the significance or role or impact of that in terms of our world, where our world is at, what our world needs and human development. So, big questions in a way. Really big questions, but exciting ones. And so, before we go into that, what I'd love to know, because I do think this will be part of it, I'd love to know what is it that compelled you perhaps to get into coaching, to become a coach, that still compels you and maybe that will take us then to what next. But I'd love to hear a little bit of the history for you. Yeah. I was talking with my coach this week about a new project I'm working on and I was trying to get to the one word that captures the way I've approached everything in my. And, I'm just kind of talking along and she picked out a key word, which just so love this about deep listening as the coach, but the word was stretch. And in the early nineties, I was part of a financial services organization on the west coast of the US and my role at the time was in the strategic planning area. And I did all the large scale change initiative. And I got one that was gonna change 6,000 people's lives and in a big way. And then of course, everything we did with our customer. So not a small project . And it was clear to me that we didn't really have enough of the right kind of mindset in technology. And of course I didn't have the language of coaching then, but it was starting to be something in the organization's development field. There were people who were realizing that we were not investing enough in the agency and autonomy that humans have in the workplace. And that maybe there was a different way to go about doing that. So that's what we did. We just created something that changed the dialogue. And the first big group meeting we had, we brought in a hundred people to work on the pilots in the design phase, I watched the paradigm of ask before telling just a really simple mindset and skillset. Level the playing field on the power dynamics. I watched a senior vice president sitting across from a receptionist from one of our branch offices in the Midwest having a robust debate about what would change in the customer experience if we were moving from customer service to sales. And it was clear that this senior vice president had no idea what actually happened when a customer walked into the front office and that receptionist was not gonna give up in helping him understand how deeply they cared about what that ought to be. But it was this leveling of the playing field that I was fascinated by because I figured if we could bottle that, if we could create a different dialogue inside of organizations, we would tap the potential that's in the workforce that is. By process and repeatability and consistency and efficiency, and causes us to be a little bit blind about potential and opportunity. And it definitely hooked me. I finished the project and I went to my boss and said, it's time for me to go be an entrepreneur. And I launched in 1996 and I've never looked back. I've been a coach and an educator and a leader development, human development professional all these years, delightedly so. I'm conscious as well as I hear you tell your story. It has so many parallels with mine in terms of, and I don't want to make this about me, but just in terms of background in financial services, major, large scale change projects focusing on the voice within the change and not just the technology and the systems and the processes. So lots resonating there. So, maybe to ask a slightly facetious question is, when you became an entrepreneur, you could have gone in many different directions, and yet you followed a particular path that somehow sometime brought you into coaching. What was appealing about that particular pathway compared to many other entrepreneurial pursuits you could have followed? I knew it was about people. Whatever I was gonna do in the world, it was gonna be about people and people having more joy, more love, more pleasure, more satisfaction in their work. And you know, this is, so the company I now own in Run is called Invite Change Shaping a World where people love their life's work. And I think there's so much that people don't. About their livelihoods. And that breaks my heart, right? We spend our waking hours in our vocations including being a parent, whoever the parent is, who's at home raising the kids. That's a vocation. And we are I think a little fractured as a human society around these questions. And I think that we have an opportunity to change the dialogue everywhere we go in this professional practice called coaching. And I'm a little heretical. I push the boundaries. That's that stretch stretcher stretching thing in me. And I went towards coaching because the world revolves around conversation and relationships. And that's what this skill is all about. So sometimes I was doing consulting and sometimes I was doing training, and sometimes I was doing facilitation and I was doing coaching, and I realized that, you know, everything goes better with a mindset that says the people I am with know something that I will never know unless I ask. And in asking, I am better for it. I'm a learner, and they are feeling respected in a way that doesn't show up a lot for them. The reciprocal prosperity in that is what keeps me going. It's my source of bliss in my work every day. I don't have a job. I get to change the world in every conversation. Awesome. Yeah. But you are reminding me of a conversation I had with someone just yesterday about. The joy of doing what you love and being paid for it, it becomes not a job, doesn't it? So really, I can really sense that from you. And I'm interested in this idea of the stretch that you talked about and we both know that, in the last 25 or 30 years, coaching has come a long way. It's become much more mainstream, it's become much more available. It's become quite prolific and increasingly recognized as a profession of integrity within all sorts of contexts. What's the stretch that's being invited? Oh, we won't have enough time today to cover all of this, so I'll drop a couple of things that have been what I've been thinking about lately. I actually think there's a little bit of a risk in the normalization of coaching in the world. It has become so present in the enterprise organizational contact. And as organizations do, they look for efficiency and productivity. And it has watered down what I perceive to be the potential for organizations in adopting a coach centered culture or applying coaching capability to how people managers operate. All of those things are great. I'm not dismissing, but we become numb to it. It's like, oh, that's our modus opera operandi and we miss the reason you do it in the first place, which is your very best consultants already live inside your organization, but you're not listening and coaching essentially lets them delegate that listening process. And they don't harvest it. They don't collect it. It's not actually seen in the C-suite. An acquired skill that is the game changer. If they wanna differentiate their organization from all the others that are operating in their industry, it resides inside their people because their people create their customer relationships. Now, this is not a new idea I'm speaking here, right? This is customer experience and employee experience, and we can read all the theorists who are writing about it, but the reality is there's something in the way. And this is where coaching, in my opinion, I think Tim Gallwey had it right when he said performance equals potential minus interference. Coaches work on the interference, which is often invisible, the norms that organizations don't pay attention to but are alive and well and cause all this diversity they're hiring in, in all it shapes and forms to assimilate. Coaching has a way of busting that paradigm up and saying, don't give up on your difference. Stretch into your authenticity and bring it because that's what the organization actually hired you for, is to be courageously challenging of the status quo to see. How do we rise to the complexity and uncertainty and the ambiguity of the environment? We all find ourselves on planet Earth today, right, and it's no longer just about can I do my job well? It's, can I see that I'm part of a system? Can I see that our organization is part of a system? Can I see that our industry is part of a system with all kinds of influences that ask us to step into perceiving that complexity without getting swamped by it. So to me, coaching needs to stretch into that level of courageous, challenging with our clients, and not get bought into the business of normalizing. Gosh. I love that. You know, what you've really reminded or made me think about there, Janet, is that one of the things that, that I'm noticing in my work with my own clients in organizations as a coach, but also the work that I do as a supervisor or as a trainer and a developer of of other coaches, is that you've evoke for me that I am sensing a theme where coaches are consciously or unconsciously being invited to be limited in that amount of challenge because the normalization is kind of smoothing off the edges so that, so that coaching does become this mainstream process. That is actually being encouraged to be shaped by the organizations and the culture within the organization, when in fact it's very edges that were the things that were making it valuable. So you've just crystallized that thought for me there, which is really quite interesting. So what do we do about that? That's of course the question that I'm appreciating that very much. I think noticing and naming is a big piece of the work we do as coaches and I've said for a long time my personal opinion is that coaching is about awakening consciousness and individual's consciousness, their own understanding of others', consciousness of the beauty that comes in being disturbed by another's point of view that doesn't come out of one's history or their current mindset that actually hold, carries the seed of the thing they're wanting next and didn't know they wanted it. But if we're not willing to step outside of the birds of a feather flocking together, then we're not gonna grow. And even more important, not going to rise to the challenge of what's happening. That's the terribly cliche of the frog in the boiling water. Right? The water just gets a little hotter that if I'm sticking around where it's comfortable, I'm not gonna recognize until it's too late. We're talking about heat domes in the planet today, right? So to me, I think we have an obligation to have a different conversation with sponsors inside of organizations. And if we're working in communities or education or government, it doesn't matter what the context is, I think we have an opportunity always be contracting. You and I as supervisors, we're always talking about this, always be contracting with clients to say, what are your belief systems? What are your values about human society? How do you think about money? How do you think about. Democracy. How do you think about ecology? How do you think about social justice? These are not conversations that you have to withhold because the client didn't ask about them. Why do we ever think clients know what coaching is? It's ridiculous. They're defining it through the lens of their history and they're seeking something emergent. So another paradox of. We have such a golden opportunity and the initial time that we're spending with sponsors, with bosses of the people getting coaching, of the people we're giving coaching to say, open up your camera lens a little wider. Let's look at the whole of your life, your worldview, your history as a family, as a, as a lineage, as a geography, as a culture, as a philosophy, as a religion. All of these things are operating in your life, whether you're claiming them or. Let's make them deliberate because they are shaping your worldview. Sorry, your mindset today, your frame of reference, your attitude, your beliefs, your values. Learn where that has come from. Who have you become today? And knowing that, who do you want to become tomorrow in a world you can't predict? I think in some ways that's the joy , but the spiritual path is about spontaneity. Can I rise to any occasion, be with any person, anywhere, anytime, because I'm at home in myself and I know how to stay centered and in my own grace and grounded, that's the promise in my mind of the method we call professional coaching today. I think that it is a deeply respectful conversation with another human being that allows us to loosen our grip on the status quo and the rules that we think we're supposed to live by, which are woefully out of date. Yes. Gosh, I almost dunno quite what to say next because I've got, my mind is firing off into so many different directions based on what you've shared. But the thing that was just really coming up for me from what you just shared there, and, I love all of those themes that you were bringing is the kind of opportunity that you seem to be presenting for what coaching can bring, which is that deeply respectful but also challenging, evocative. Probably quite often uncomfortable conversation also implies something beyond just competence and skill in the doing of coaching, doesn't it? There's something here about the practitioner that is the instrument self as instrument. There's something else that is needed there. And I know we've started to speak about that with our competencies. Competency too, for example, really is on the map, which I love. And also other things that you've talked about, the spreading the competencies around context, inclusion, equity culture, beliefs, circumstances, all of those things. What are we being called upon then? As practitioners around the work that we need to do on ourselves in order to be able to be in a position to meet other people and invite that in them. I think you are wisely going to the place of, the word that's coming up for me is catalyst, but it's not quite capturing what I mean. There's an activation necessary inside of each of us as practitioners where we're challenging our own assumptions, preferences, habits, and biases. And I'm so delighted that I chose to bring level three forward and to recognize that there is a an advanced development of the practitioner self is the instrument. And I'm excited to see what will start to show up in that field as people realize, oh, yeah, evolution, it almost a re- evolution, not revolution. I'm purposely putting the hyphen in there. It was an evolution when it came on the scene in the early nineties. Now that doesn't mean coaching hasn't been around on the planet forever. It has. But in the form that it constellated in the early nineties, we brought a structure and a scaffolding to it that's brought the ICF and EMCC and the other nine or so associations operating around the world. We're ready for the next free evolution because the world has changed. It's not as simple as it was in the early nineties, and we. I mean, gosh, just look at the web technology images of the galaxies and the black holes. We can see the enormity of what is outside of planet Earth is cracking our consciousness right now, and it's helping people make the bridge to, you know, it's not about buying a house with a white picket fence and raising two kids and having that be enough. It's not that it isn't enough, of course it is, but put it in context. I'm within a community and my community is within a nation, and my nation is within a continent, and my continent is with other continents, and it's shifting and moving. And when Greenland completely dissolves, where will we be? These are questions we need to learn to think about that. You know, not even 30 years ago, we weren't thinking about exceptance. Very small. It needs to be an everyday conversation and we need to learn how to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. We need to learn to be comfortable with saying, I don't know. And I think an awful lot of practitioners are seeking to be the best of they, the best they can be to be the top of their game. Okay. That's laudable. It's not useful. I'm actually working on dismantling anything I think I know. I can be receptive to see what's another way. What else can I bring into this dialogue with this amazing human being, my customer, and see what else we can have emerge that is more relevant to the time now. And that's, that's a self-acceptance, self-love, unconditional state of being. And that's work. That's personal work. I was just, there's so much coincidence. If coincidence is a thing, or not around this, in that, just yesterday I was listening to a science program on the radio. Goodness knows why I was listening to a science program cuz I'm not a scientist at all. And I couldn't understand most of what was being discussed, but it was absolutely gripping. With an astrophysicist that was talking about the multiverses as opposed to our universe. So, you know, just such a leap into a direct connection into what you are saying there. And the thing that was also really resonating with me is that one of the things that I've shared with a couple of people is that when I first decided to go into my mentor coaching process, my development process towards my MCC application the biggest, most impactful shift in my learning was not that I needed to get better at the competencies, but I needed to do work on myself. That actually, it was my own self-awareness. My sense of self, my own knowing of self and what I still don't know of self and what am I comfortable and not comfortable with, and many other questions. That was my work. And still is of course. I mean that's complete work in progress there. So that what you are saying there really resonates with my own personal journey and I'm wondering therefore, how if you were giving some kind of wisdom or message invitation to the coaching community out there, how might they engage with that re- evolution? Well one of the heartbreaks for me in the last few years, just the number of people who have come to me that have failed their demonstration review when they have applied for the MCC. I think it's interesting that you brought that up and to a person they've failed because they just did a better PCC demonstration somehow on their journey. They didn't recognize that what is asked of them is to put the competence in the background and put their presence and the quality of their being and what they're able to induct in their client and in the field that they're co-creating in the foreground. It changes what you pay attention to. It changes what you allow yourself to be impacted by from your client. And I think this is a failing, in my mind, in our coaching education. There isn't enough emphasis being placed on the being. You know, Marsha Reynolds a wonderful book about Coach The Who that's inside of us. Like how do we cultivate an inner coach who can recognize when we're getting absorbed into content and information that's not relevant at all to what will be beneficial for the client to recognize is motivating the way they're behaving. Now, I'm getting a little technical here, of course, and yet if we don't get technical enough about what the distinction is, what is the re- evolution? It's changing our job description. It's not good enough anymore to simply say, what do you wanna talk about and where do you wanna be at the end of our time together? Okay. That's a fine building block for skill building. It's not enough if clients are going to find their way from an authentic self. We must be available to witness the authentic self as it's emerging and draw the client's attention. That means we know what it looks like in us. How do we know when something new is emerging? You know, I know it when I get sick to my stomach, like I got a couple things I'm doing right now that are just putting me up, stretching to the edge of my capability to handle. I have no idea where I am. That's a good thing cuz the more I can stretch that rubber band, I have to have time to let it relax and integrate and absorb. What are we talking about? Learning. We must remember learning is what we're about. Without learning, we don't grow. Without growth, we don't change. You know, it's quite reassuring actually, hearing what you are saying there, because one of the things I can remember feeling uncomfortable about was. Again, in the last, I guess maybe two or three, probably three years or so, is in my quest to become the best coach I can be, the best practitioner I can be. I was finding my energy, every time I picked up a new coaching book, my energy would drain away. And my energy was going towards reading philosophy or spiritual documents. I've been reading the Quran, I've been looking at the Bible. I've been looking at the Bagga Gita the yoga sutures, which is a huge area of, of interest for me at the moment. Poetry. And I can remember many, many times berating myself, thinking, for goodness sake, Tracy, if you want to be better at being a coach, you want to be reading the next decent coaching book and not just naval gazing over someone's stoicism, which is another thing I'm really hungrily reading about at the moment. And yet I've trusted my energy. I've not gone to the coaching books. I've gone to the books on philosophy and theology and poetry and literature, and I'm trusting because it feels as though that's where I'm learning more about self. Authentic self. Yeah. What also strikes me about what you're being drawn to is the pattern of the human condition that is told through theology, religion, philosophy, poetry, all of the expressive arts, frankly. And there is a knowing that comes in that's larger than the temporal context that we find ourselves in. And one of the things that I've been drawn to is to return to the study of arche. Early on in my career, I just voraciously worked with Carol Pearson's work, Joseph Campbell's work, Carolyn Mac's work, and understood how valuable it was to see the pattern. The patterns of interactions, the patterns in the stages of life and what comes up. These were all really important to my understanding of seeing a human whole separate from the context they're in. Not to discount the importance of that, but it's seeing those in unity. And what's that interactional about? Which is actually what liberated me from ever needing to think. I had to understand, like you said, you listened to an astrophysicist, you didn't understand the astrophysics, that you understood the joy he was speaking about in understanding multiverse instead of universe. So I'm looking at archetype now, archetypes again because I want to understand, maybe this is the way we transcend other. I've, you know, othering others diminishes self, which is why I think we have so many unhappy people on the planet. We've gotten caught in this being judgmental, and in the process we've made discernment, critical thinking the enemy like, Ooh, need to un conflate those two things. And I think the language of pattern, and particularly the archetypes that are describing. The pattern of the planet, the pattern of this construct we call planet Earth, the pattern of human evolution. There might be something quite empowering there for us to, to bring resource to this complexity. No one human being will be able to understand the cascading crises that we're facing on our planet today. And we think we have the answer with some symptom we're trying to alleviate. And it just makes something else worse, right? I mean, look what we're doing with energy around the world. Fascinating. And so, this is a big subject, my friends. It's a very big subject and we I love this term. Just picking up, I'd love to just hear more about this other ring of others diminish his self. Do you want to say a little bit more about. So I've been as most of us have even before George Floyd, I was starting to ask the question, are we paying enough attention to the unconscious biases that has separate us? And, you know, I don't begin to know what it is to be a person of color. I can never know. I have a friend, wonderful colleague, African American woman who always says to me, Janet, if you woke up tomorrow black, would you know what to do? I'm like, I surely do not. And she said, if I woke up tomorrow white, I would know what to do because I'd had to learn in order to survive. And I think she's capturing the essence that our inability to see difference and joy, to see difference as something to learn from, to see difference as an amplifying effect rather than something to separate from. This is at the heart of the trouble we have right now around racism and social justice and all the systems that are holding oppression in all its forms into. So what I do know is I've been othered all my life. My parents had this really wonderful thing. They said, well, you're one and the same till I went to kindergarten and somebody called me a redskin. And I have watched microaggressions happen against me, both for the fact that I don't physically look like other people. I never have a companion in the room. And because I'm a woman and I'm a smart woman, right? I had a lot of strikes against me. Partly probably why I end up being an entrepreneur, because I just don't fit in anybody else's system. And it took me a long time in my life to get comfortable with that. But isn't that what everybody goes through? We all think we're different. We all think we have something about us that nobody knows because we other and when I can catch myself in it, I'm like, where am I unsettled in me that it's necessary for me to other someone else? And just that simple consciousness that one piece of consciousness can transform whether someone finds joy in their life or not. You are what you are describing there. I mean, it's just so powerful. Evokes such a lot of values in me. But I'm thinking about this idea of not realizing that we are othering. And the terms that I find myself using a lot for this is when we're asleep, we think we're awake and functioning in this world, and yet actually we're asleep because we are just on these automated patterns of othering and whatever else we might be automating about our exist. Everyone, I guess, needs to find their own way to wake up. I know I'm nurturing mine. I'm finding different ways to encourage and invite myself to wake up and know that sometimes I will still fall asleep. What are you learning for yourself that helps you to wake up and hopefully stay awake, you know more than being asleep. What, what is helping you? So every year I pick a word and I turn it into a set of intentions. So this year's word is voice. On the v stands for vitality prioritized. This is the most important thing to courageously examining where I'm asleep if I'm not rested, if I'm not healthy, if I'm not engaged in strength, strengthening my body my flexibility, if those things aren't happening, this is not a journey I can take. It's too vulnerable. I don't have enough resilience in my skin for it to shed the old one and be in the tender skin after we've shed. Right. Snake metaphor opening to what's emergent. I have to be willing to have my, my vision, the matrix I'm living in. And get a little wobbly . You know, I've been working with Ti Don, I can never say it right. And you know the gaze list gaze. Can I drop my energy into the earth and recognize that I'm in perfect merge with the earth in a gaze? Nothing to be worried about. Nothing to be worried about. Okay, if I can have that state, how do I remember what that feels like when I'm, you know, in the heat of the moment with some situation I'm working in. So that perceptual contrast becomes my own psychic gym. I is initiate loving intention, so being deliberate about bringing love, bringing my love, bringing unconditional. To myself and to whoever I'm with, and letting that infuse the way I see experience, receive, feel, the impact and influence of centering and grace. I'm not always gonna do it right, whatever right is, right. I will step my toe, I will make mistakes. I will hurt somebody unintentionally. It doesn't matter. It wasn't my intention. They were hurt, none the less. So to be able to be in a place of grace with myself and others so that we're in learning together. And then the last express courageously, and I'm saying things to you that, probably even five years ago, I would censor and, maybe try to make it fit the situation. And I don't know, something has shifted for me. It was starting before Covid, but Covid of course, accelerated it. What am I waiting for? That's ridiculous. I have a point of view and I wanna bring people into spaces together to share their point of view, cuz none of us can see where this is going. We don't have a rubric for the times we live in today. And only through our relationships and our ability to hear and deeply receive each other, will we find the way forward that's healthy and let alone get to thrive. let alone, yeah. Wow. Thank you so much for sharing that. I love that idea of picking a word and the richness that you've described in that. I might have to steal that idea myself, it sounds wonderful. We could talk for so long, Janet. I mean there's, you know, 19 action points here or follow up dialogue points that we could follow. Maybe for another time, even if you're willing. But maybe for now, as we start to bring this particular conversation to a pause, given the landscape that we've been exploring here, is there anything else that you would like to share for anyone who is listening to this, that feels important to give voice to? I think I'll follow on to your line of questioning about what do we as practitioners accept as responsibility for our re- evolution? And I think that this is a very personal. And challenging, maybe provocative inquiry to be in. Sometimes when I'm speaking to leaders, I will do an exercise with them around this question. What stops you each day from living fully potent? And I think this is useful for coaches as well. We can become so enamored with our processes and our tools and our methods and our assessments, and those aren't the point. They're servants. The master is, is us as instrument as you said in the very beginning. But I think there is an urgency I can feel around more coaches maturing in themselves. And I'm not declaring anyone as immature, it's not what I'm saying at all, but that the environment is going to, if it's not already, challenge us to rise bigger than we. You know, you and I witnessed Sir John Whitmore pounding the lectern about where were coaches when the financial crash happened because we were all working in that industry and nobody was saying, emperor has no clothes. Now I'm not gonna say nobody cuz I got a few eyes at it too. But I didn't say it in a way to our community of practitioners where we could have taken up the social mindset. Right. This is the mindset that can anticipate what the influence will be on the larger society of the decisions that we're making. And I think we lack a social mindset. I think we lack it as coaches. I think our customers lack it. And I think this is the opening that I hope we'll all step into and it is going to require the personal challenging journey of letting go of what we think success is, what we think contribution. And let go of trying to figure it out. The why of the survival of humanity on the planet in this time is big enough. We don't need another. Why ? I think we do need more voices. I think we need more spaces where we can be talking about the what's in the house with an integrity to the system of human society on planet earth. I think that's where I am. Yeah. I'm just having a real sense there, as I was listening to you describe that, on the one hand I was feeling a real sense of responsibility that we have if we want to really make a difference , we talk such a lot in coaching about transactional versus transformational conversations, and yet it feels in a way, as kind of taken transformational to another level, beyond the obvious, within the microcosm. That is one conversation. And there's a sense of real responsibility that we might have as, as practitioners and as a profession in that. But also, I feel excited too. I mean, what an enormous opportunity to really make probably the biggest needed difference that we have in humanity at the moment. I think the the opportunity is great. Yes. This is, this is the sweet potential of coaching in my mind and always has been. It's taken us a while to develop to this moment and I think the moment is ripe for us to nourish more people in this way. Hmm. Wow. Me too. Thank you so much, Janet. Always good to leave people wanting more and I know I definitely want more. So maybe we can pick up and have another conversation another time. I'd be delighted and honored to do that with you, Tracy. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Well, for now we'll press pause. Thank you again for giving up your time. I really appreciate it. You have been listening to Coaching in Conversation by Tracy Sinclair, a podcast aimed at exploring how coaching is a vehicle for human development in today's and tomorrow's world. You can learn more about coach training and development at tracysinclair.com and follow us on social. If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a rating and review and also share it with your networks to help us expand our reach. Thank you for listening and see you next time.