E71. Mastering the Ethical and Existential Depths of Coaching with Yannick Jacob

Unlock the mysteries of ethical decision-making in coaching with the guidance of Yannick Jacob, coach and author, who brings his expertise to our table for a deep exploration of moral complexity. Let Yannick lead you through the philosophical terrain where rules are not just rules, but a series of vital, reflective questions that shape our integrity and effectiveness as coaches. Discover how a commitment to supervision and principled practice can profoundly elevate the space we hold for our clients, and why these ethical inquiries aren't just academic—they're the bedrock of trust in our professional relationships.

Yannick introduces us to the innovative coaching lab, a space for trainee coaches to observe and learn from the lived experiences of seasoned practitioners, blending theory with nuanced practice. Experience firsthand the adaptability required in coaching methods and how the seismic shift to online platforms during the pandemic has impacted the intimacy and dynamics of coaching sessions. 

As we wrap up, we wade through the existential waters of the human condition, contemplating life's profound questions and the angst they stir within us. Join us for a rich dialogue that promises to not only enlighten your coaching practice but also challenge you to communicate complex concepts with clarity and grace.

Websites:
www.existential.coach 
www.GoCoachingLab.com 
www.RocketSupervision.com

Podcasts:
Yannick is the host of Animas Centre for Coaching's popular podcast Coaching Uncaged, as well as his own podcasts Talking about Coaching and Talking about Coaching and Psychedelics.

Looking for leader and team development for your organization? Contact us today!
info@belemleaders.org

Until next time, keep doing great things!

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Well, hey there and welcome to Conversations where today we have Yannick Jacob, who is a coach, trainer and supervisor with a master's degree in existential coaching and applied positive psychology. He is part of the teaching faculties at Cambridge University, the International Center for Coaching Supervision, and he's the course director of the School of Positive Transformations, accredited Certificate in Integrative Coaching. Yannick presents at conferences internationally and his book, an Introduction to Existential Coaching, was published by Rutledge, committed to helping other coaches be the best coaches they can be. Yannick founded and hosts Yannick's Coaching Lab, which we're going to talk about, which gives novice and seasoned coaches an opportunity to witness experienced coaches live in action. He's a podcast host, which we're going to add those definitely to the show notes so people can connect that way with you. And for all you strengths, enthusiasts, yannick leads with adaptability, strategic relator, communication, responsibility and woo. Yannick, welcome to the show and where in the world are you today?

Speaker 2: 1:19

Oh, kelly, thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm in Berlin at the moment. I'm based here now. I'm always elsewhere. Home is where you are, I guess.

Speaker 1: 1:37

That sure is.

Speaker 2: 1:39

Yeah, I love Berlin, great vibe, great city. If anybody hasn't been, I really invite to soak it in.

Speaker 1: 1:47

I would love to visit, I really would. My mother's been there and I would love to visit someday, so I will look you up and we can connect. Well, I reached out to you. I saw you on LinkedIn and it was something around ethics and that really piqued my interest, especially as a coach, and I know that there can be times where it's a sticky place when we think about ethics. So I'd love for you maybe just to share a little bit about what ethics means to you in coaching and why that's important for coaches.

Speaker 2: 2:27

Yeah, there's a quote I really like about ethics which is by Michael Carroll, who wrote a lot about ethics, and it goes much is revealed about a person's I would say a coach's character by what appears or doesn't appear as an ethical decision. And to me that has been so true. What's an ethical decision? Well, essentially we're talking about what's right, what's wrong if we have it in that polarity. But everybody who's been thinking for five minutes about what's right and what's wrong probably realized it's a bit more complex than that.

Speaker 2: 3:09

Very often as a huge amount of gray, or it just depends on the context. It can be very challenging to navigate. And then also, by what standards do you decide right and wrong? The law, is it morals, culture? Then culture isn't necessarily the area where you live in or the country you live in the part of the world. But the house down the road has a different culture. The team next door has a different culture. The classroom on the other side of the hallway has a different culture. This friend group has a different culture to that friend group. This coaching relationship has a different culture to that coaching relationship.

Speaker 2: 3:48

So it's really very tricky to navigate what's right and what's wrong, what's the right thing to do here and I think one of the things I want to say straight from the bat that I think is really helpful and also makes things more complex so sorry, and you're welcome is that ethics isn't a set of rules to follow like the ICF's Code of Ethics or AC MCC. Every professional buddy subscribes to a code of conduct that gives you some guidance on what's right and what's wrong, what you should or shouldn't do in coaching. But I think it's only helpful as far it can offer some guidance. That gives you a bit of an idea, it draws a bit of a landscape, but once we're in the messiness of everyday coaching scenarios it can get tricky. So I think thinking of ethics as a set of questions you need to ask yourself rather than a set of rules to follow, is super helpful because that makes coaching a continuous inquiry and that's why I've been flying the flag for supervision and I'm enjoying the coaching lab so much, because you get to dive into these situations and reflect and explore why certain decisions were made, and I love asking questions. That invites a coach to consider why they have made certain decisions.

Speaker 2: 5:18

When, back to the Carol quote, maybe they hadn't even thought about that was a decision. Maybe they hadn't recognized that they were making choices here. They're just kind of into it from one moment to the next, as we often do as coaches. So slowing down, maybe rolling the tape back a little bit and thinking about what have I done there, what am I left with, what choices do I make? Where did these choices come from? The more we do that, the more we create a foundation of ethics as a coach, maybe even work on a set of ethical principles that we follow and that makes us so much stronger and so much more confident as coaches and the quality of the space that we hold when we are grounded in that kind of framework and that kind of principled set, it's just very powerful and there's an ease and the groundedness and the quality of space that is just lovely to be in the presence of. So I think it serves our clients and all this. They call this in coaching Absolutely. Go get me going right. Yeah, no.

Speaker 1: 6:28

I think it's terrific and those are definitely words of wisdom, and before I move on to what was sparked, I do want to say that, if coaches have not been ever in supervision, it is such an amazing place to be and to find out more about yourself and to have people who are aligned with you, whether it's one to one supervision or in a group supervision really important for coaches to be able to step into that, and that's something that I had never even thought about until I started with teams but individual coaches, co-coaches, team coaches definitely. So I'm just making a plug for supervision because it's yes, we need many more plugs for supervision.

Speaker 2: 7:18

That's also one of those things where I'm like, well, how can this not be on the radar of every single coach? But you know different cultures and also that's why I've been so, so happy to see the work and I think this is how we connected right Through the coaching ethics forum, because the work that Wendy and Smith, for example, david Klauterbach, a number of others have done a lot in this space and Wendy's been telling me it's been exploding in popularity right, they put on the conference and they had like hundreds of people running their door in where before, you know, just a couple of years back, would have been like 60, 70, 80, you know. And now there's a whole global community that engages not just each other but also a much wider community of coaches in ethical reflection. So a couple of new books on the market, you know there's communities out there, there's reflective spaces, lots more supervision, drop-in sessions. So there's plenty of opportunities to really hone in on your ethical framework and I hope that a lot more coaches follow that call.

Speaker 1: 8:27

What are you finding in supervision or just in your day-to-day? Even you as a coach Are some maybe things that people aren't thinking about that are ethical decisions, or things that maybe can position a coach into a better ethical position with their coaching practice.

Speaker 2: 8:49

Yeah, so there's a lot. So some things. The first thing that came to my mind was, it's true, things that we often don't think about. For example, I've heard some coaches talk about writing a recommendation, or I've had an interesting situation the other day where a coach had asked me whether I could. They applied for an award and they wanted me to confirm that I'm their supervisor, and then I got a whole forum that basically asked me to write a recommendation for them, you know, or a little statement of why I think they deserve the award, which it's not what I had signed up for. And it was a bit tricky and I think many coaches may not think about that twice and just like, of course, I'm going to recommend them because I value them as a coach and I do value them as a coach, but I thought it was a potentially a tricky situation because now I'm in another role and I'm kind of leaving my role as a supervisor and I'm tuning in through a different lens and if I do it for this person, would I not have to do it with all other people? You know? A recommendation on LinkedIn, a request for a recommendation on LinkedIn, you know? Or a testimonial of some sort asking for an introduction with someone, and now plenty of coaches. I don't think twice. About course I'm going to introduce it to everybody. But like that can also be tricky.

Speaker 2: 10:27

You know, there's so much more at play here. The dynamics might slightly change. You run a supervision group or a coaching group and one member of the coaching group reaches out to you outside of the group and starts a somewhat different relationship. Now a coaching client wants to get you involved in some work they're doing. Is that a? Of course, yeah, sure, and I'm easy to navigate and handle. I'm not really having any concerns. But you know, have you thought about the implications of leaving, you know, the agreed coaching space, at which point you need to re-contract, at which point to super simple clients asking for some advice and you happen to have some good advice, but the agreement was for a more facilitative coaching style where you hold space. So if you just were to just give the advice, then you change something in the dynamics. Now Right, and if that advice doesn't work out, then it's on you, or at least you bear some responsibility. And if the advice does work out, they don't fully own the results. So is that something you think about? Many coaches will Some coaches want. So there's all of these kind of situations that they have many, many layers and I found that if you start tuning into the layers of the decisions that you make, you always go deeper on what your ethical principles are, what your ethical code is. You know it doesn't mean that something is unethical, that you know you acted wrongly if there are some concerns that you hadn't thought about. But I think it's helpful.

Speaker 2: 12:14

Some might say now, well, you do too much. You know, do we need to think about everything at that level of depth? And I guess some of it is a fair concern because we want to. We want to remain able to be agile in the moment and move and follow our intuition. So it can also be a bit in the way of a fluid conversation, but that's why I guess we have spaces like supervision or reflective spaces for an individual coach.

Speaker 2: 12:44

Afterwards I had a colleague who said I asked him where that intervention came from. He talked to me about having made an intervention and it seemed unorthodox and I said well, where did that come from? Like what was operating in the background, like I often do in the lab as well. Right, and he said I often have no clue where my interventions come from. You know that's what the supervision is for. I'd like try to make sense of it afterwards, like where was that grounded? Where did that question come from? Or, you know, was that right? Did I not think about something? So I mean, he was drawing on 20 years of practice and it's a bit easier to just follow your intuition. But I know a lot of people who follow their intuition quite blindly and never really take time to question their intuition because they trust it so much and I think some of it can be potentially harmful. But I believe that whenever we reflect on why we do the things we do and why we have done the things we've done, we become more grounded practitioners.

Speaker 1: 13:52

Absolutely yes, yes and yes. All right, I feel like I'm throwing, so much stuff at you.

Speaker 2: 14:00

I think maybe I need to get a couple of gears down and take some breaths.

Speaker 1: 14:04

No, it's good because it's important information and this gives the listener time to take a pause and really reflect, if you will, on the words that you're saying and aligning that. Okay, is it aligned with what I do? And really asking themselves the question, as they're listening and that's what this is about. So it's important and no, you're great. Yeah, but I would love to switch gears and go into this coaching lab. Tell us about this coaching lab that you have founded. Come on, bring it on.

Speaker 2: 14:41

Well, yes, yes. So where do I start? Well, I think to just make this as valuable as possible, right, I think what was missing was to really connect theory to practice. I love theory, but I have heard coach after coach after coach say, when I asked him, hey, what was the most valuable part of whatever practice training you've just experienced? And the overwhelming majority tends to say, well, it was actually seeing somebody who's experienced in this do it Right.

Speaker 2: 15:16

There's this desire of well, I want to know how it's done and I think most coaches in training they get to see a lot of their peers coach and they get to coach a lot of their peers, but they are everybody's just starting out and then there's maybe a short demo by an experienced trainer, but it's a very artificial kind of setting and everybody's a coach and you know it's often quite kind of softball coaching sessions and everybody just looks at what's the positive and everybody's new to this. So it's difficult to be critical from a position of not knowing anything about what's going on there. So what do you do? I went to YouTube and other places to just see what's out there and it was. You know, most of it is kind of disappointing. Often you learn a lot from a coaching session that isn't done well, you know, or where it just doesn't really work. And sometimes we have that in the coaching lab too. It's a lab for a reason, right, but I think it's that reflective space afterwards and I kind of ties it back in with supervision and reflective practice and ethics, you know. So I wanted to have somebody coach for a whole session. 45 minutes would argue that longer would probably be useful, but also the event is already three hours long. So full session, let's call it that 45 minutes and then have another 45 minutes to really take it apart.

Speaker 2: 16:38

You know, to be critical, I like being critical. Maybe it's my German roots, you know, but like I, I I like to believe, I'm gentle but also inquisitive. You know, I think the most elegant way to challenge someone is curiosity, and I'm really curious about where the hell did that question come from? What theoretical model, if any, was operating in the background? What was going on during that silence? It's like, how did you experience that silence, client? You know now, like I had, I got the feeling that you got a bit annoyed at this moment with the coach or with the question. I don't know what it was Like do you remember that moment? What was going on for you?

Speaker 2: 17:18

You know, so would you share your notes? What did you write down? You know this is so you really get an inside look under the hood of what experienced coaches do, and I think that's so rare. Right, we then go practice, play out a new technique, try something out, even as a very experienced coach. Like when do you get to try something out and experiment? Like, maybe not with a paid client, you know, especially if you had a level where you get paid, quite well, maybe you don't want to try out the strength model that you've just learned about in a CPD, maybe that feels inappropriate to try it with a new client, you're not quite confident with it, or you know everybody has that with a new model, new approach, it feels clunky at the beginning, then you internalize it, but it takes some time to try some new things out. So I tell all the coaches that come to like CPD is even very experienced one where I just get a practice client. But I have a feeling that very, very few actually get a practice client for free or for a very low cost, with the understanding that I'm going to try something out, and I haven't tried before.

Speaker 2: 18:25

I think people don't really do that, and so having a space where you can just try something out, see how it lands, and if the whole thing explodes or does nothing, then sometimes we learn the most. You know, that's where the science, lab come, character comes from. Now, sometimes in the experiment we make sense of why nothing happened and that's how we learn Right. So never quite know what's going to happen in the lab, but we're going to see someone do a thing. I even moved away from do your thing because it implies that coaches have a thing Now and I think some coaches do. They have a niche to have an approach or methodology, but most coaches are find, especially at experience levels. They adapt to what the client needs in that moment, you know. Then, yes, I get asked to demo existential coaching, but then sometimes I start talking to a client and we have a conversation and there's an existential lens I'm bringing, but it's not really existential coaching because it's not what they need right now.

Speaker 2: 19:24

So we had a somatic coaching session and the client said they wanted to go into their body and work with it, but in practice they just didn't do that. Every time the coach gently invited them to pay attention to what's going on in their body, they went straight to a cognitive level and so they didn't really push them into the body because that felt unethical to the coach. So after a couple of gentle invitations, they just went with the client and that was turned out not to be a somatic coaching session and just making sense of what just happened, what the hell just happened. It was really eye opening and you learned so much about the coach's ethical stance, how they made decisions when to push, when not to push. You know what kind of techniques they had considered that weren't even spoken or invited. So you can tell right, I love getting to see people coach, that I talk about coaching very much, but I don't actually have a clue about what it actually looked like when somebody who wrote this beautiful book is actually in a room doing the thing.

Speaker 2: 20:33

And that's what I wanted to give people a platform, because it's rare, it's really intimate. You know, it's such a privilege, mainly for me. I think I'm probably the most excited about this because there's nothing wrong with that.

Speaker 1: 20:46

You need to be passionate about what you're bringing into the world and that that radiates to others, and so I think it's fantastic when did you start this?

Speaker 2: 20:57

Oh, we started. Well, the vision was to be in a small London theater. I was living in London for at the time, and the vision was that we're going to be in a small theater. There's lots of them and many of them have capacity, and then at some point, the stage lights would go off and the audience lights would come on and we would have a conversation about what just happened, and so we wanted to start that January 2020. And then we moved the launch out to March 2020.

Speaker 2: 21:26

And, as people will remember at this point or anyone in the future, that was high pandemic time. Everything closed down. So we've been, we've been online ever since and I like it to be honest, I'm kind of glad that it happened like that. I still want to do in person events, but you know, on Zoom you can just have the audience disappear and after a few seconds or minutes, usually the coaching client completely forget that it's there, and so you know you really get to an as real as possible given the audience setting coaching session. You know where it feels like two people on Zoom, they're having a conversation and if it's in the theater, it's always going to feel a little staged.

Speaker 1: 22:12

Staged in the theater.

Speaker 2: 22:14

I get that Indeed. Yeah right, it kind of comes with the territory.

Speaker 1: 22:18

It does. Yeah, there's some risk that's involved in stepping into that, I imagine Just thinking about that, yeah.

Speaker 2: 22:28

I thought it was going to be a lot more uncomfortable. For example, we weren't recording the first couple of sessions because I felt like now we have a huge vault like a modern resource. I was like no way, because I want people to feel as comfortable as possible so that we get to see as real coaching as possible. So I'm like let's not record. And then at some point we started. We found some ways in which we can give coaching clients an opportunity to just veto the recording going out, which occasionally happens. But I thought people would be a lot more hesitant to step into such a vulnerable space and really open up and there would be a lot more protected. And so that's why I didn't consider recording, because I didn't want them to be protected, I didn't want them to feel protected obviously.

Speaker 2: 23:21

They're protected by the contracting that we have in place and the confidentiality agreement with the group. It's still contained, but as soon as the audience disappears, people really get into it and I'm amazed and really grateful for the kind of openness that people come into the lab with and that they allow other coaches to learn from the encounter that they're having with a coach. It's obviously also a fantastic opportunity to work with somebody who might sometimes have decades of experience for a free session that otherwise might have cost thousands of dollars. So I think there's also value in there for the client. Oh, absolutely.

Speaker 1: 24:05

And some relief of the energy of the group.

Speaker 2: 24:08

They're like oh, this is exciting and maybe there's a voyeuristic element to be seen in this world where everybody seems to be seen but it still can feel very anonymous to so many people. So I think there's wider societal aspects of this that could be interesting to achieve and into.

Speaker 1: 24:31

No, that's exciting work you're doing, for sure. And how does that take place? And we'll be sure to put that in the show notes. People can connect with you and you'll give us that information at the end and we can pop it in the show notes. But just to be clear, is it a membership that people? Is that what you call that?

Speaker 2: 24:50

We started with individual tickets. We did establish a membership model and so members have access to the recordings, which I think is a huge part of the value and also that allows us we have very small operation right. It's me and a couple of freelancers that work with me that helped me with administration and logistics. You can imagine it's a lot right, so this is not a moneymaker. Hopefully we get it to a stage where we can run several labs a week. Perhaps I could do them every day.

Speaker 1: 25:20

How often are they?

Speaker 2: 25:22

At the moment I once a month, every first Tuesday, and I'd love to get to a point where we can run specialized labs. At the moment you get to see such a broad range of what coaching can be and it really expands the idea of what coaching is right, because coaches work so differently. I mean, some just really lean into the mentoring or consulting element or psychoeducation, and so we have some coaches who really just move into a teaching mode and just own that, because really there's no rules about what you can and cannot do in coaching. So ethics come back here.

Speaker 1: 25:56

Right, yeah, and the whole contracting, as you said earlier, or recontracting, and that can happen on the spot.

Speaker 2: 26:04

Oh yeah, some contract a lot in the beginning and others just dive straight in. So it's always fascinating to me to what extent people do or do not contract at all, and if you have somebody very experienced some of them, I asked them questions and they hadn't considered it. But usually they know what they're doing, they're doing it intentionally, so it's really interesting. So sometimes we had a sessions that I'm like well, this is, that was a therapy session, wasn't it? So what made this coaching? And to see the different perspectives on the line between coaching and therapy, or coaching and mentoring, or consulting, or teaching, or just being a friend or just guiding someone through a meditation. So we've seen all of the styles, which is great, so I always want to keep that going. But I'd love to have an existential coaching lab. Just 12 existential coaches over a year really hone in on the craft.

Speaker 2: 27:06

Live psychology coaching, leadership coaching, performance coaching, nutrition coaching like that has a million different kinds of coaching and so you can really get the community together off that particular community of practice right as a word I got introduced to a little while ago and I love that as a framework for it A community of coaches that comes together who are committed to working at the top of the game, who are committed to growing and expanding their practice, the idea of how it's practiced, and I think if we bring niche coaches together, it says a special energy. At the moment we bring coaches together that just love to expand their idea of coaching. You always pick up a new technique or something from any coach that you watch live. But yes, that's where I see it going and for that membership system just really works because then we're not so busy marketing every event. You know people commit to being a part of that community of practice.

Speaker 1: 28:08

That is fantastic. Well, we're going to shift again, because you've used the word and I know that your education is around existentialism, and so I'd love for you maybe to just unpack what that is, because I know that some of the listeners they may say, yes, maybe they've heard it, maybe they haven't. So what is existentialism and what is that?

Speaker 2: 28:31

when we look at that through the coaching ones, I always have to smile a little bit when I think existentialism in a nutshell, because it's, it's yeah, it's complex, I think I'd like to believe over the years I kind of got okay at narrowing it down to the essential of what it is. So, essentially, existentialism as an, as a branch of philosophy, it's a philosophy of human lived existence, of the experience of existing, the experience of being human, right being human as well. What do we know about being human when we strip all of the all of the kind of labels away? Right, when you just think about being there. That's what we are. Hi, daga Sartre, albert Camus, this Kazun, kierkegaard, fritich Nietzsche, you know there's a lot of these philosophers that started thinking about what does it mean to just be there, you know, not be a coach, not be German or American, not be right wing, left wing, republican, democrat if you strip all of that away man, woman, like parents, what's left when we are just there? That's the human condition.

Speaker 2: 29:50

The human condition is characterized by anxiety, not the kind of anxiety that you get maybe ahead of a presentation or public speaking gig, but the existential anxiety, the anxiety that you get as a result of just being human in the world, with other humans. It's characterized by certain tensions, by certain conflicts that nobody can escape unless they stop existing or they continuously keep themselves busy and distract themselves from the human experience. We have that people after 20 years of work they're like who am I now? Where did all of this time go? Just keep busy. When we become still, sometimes we notice it bubbling up and then often we distract ourselves with something.

Speaker 2: 30:41

So, for example, we like to not think about endings, endings, temporality, death as perhaps the ultimate ending, at least as far as we can know. Things with what you believe is about what comes after death or not. I know I'm talking to someone with a particular perspective on this, but it doesn't matter so much what you believe comes after. What we know is that it's a significant ending, perhaps the most significant endings of endings of all. Maybe it's just black, or maybe there's some sort of paradise, maybe there's some sort of afterlife, but it is a significant change in human experience and endings are everywhere. It's not just death, but everything is temporal. We always move into different phases. Every change process requires an ending and a new beginning.

Speaker 2: 31:33

So endings are part of the fabric of human existence and we need them because deadlines help us to get you done. So many people rely on them. But also they cause some anxiety. We don't really want to focus on things ending, especially when they're nice, but it offers meaning and purpose to our life. It does something. So we have this paradoxical relationship with endings. Same thing with relating to other people. Barbara wrote that hell is other people. We naturally compare ourselves to others, but we're social animals. We need the group. We couldn't survive without the group. So we love the group, we hate the group. We need the group and it's causing us so much pain and suffering. So it's both and it's paradoxical.

Speaker 2: 32:24

It's tension, but we feed off that tension. Absurdity, meaninglessness it's a third existential given. If there is a meaning of life we couldn't know, we can have faith, but we can't know it. We can create meaning in our life. We can choose things to be meaningful, we can create meaning and suffering, but an overarching meaning to our existence. The best we can do is believe in it. So existentialists have argued that well, there's absurdity in life. That is just one of the givens. Because meaninglessness we cannot make sense of certain things, at least not with certainty. So that's part of the human existence. We have meaning-making machines, always make meaning, we always make sense of things, quite naturally, but we cannot ever be sure whether that's correct meaning. So many different meaning structures.

Speaker 2: 33:25

What I believe is right, somebody else thinks is despicable. What saved the children from cancer? Are you crazy? Have you thought about overpopulation? Okay, some people say we need war and destruction because that is a natural way of balancing out the production. So it's important that we're fighting. I'm not sure I'll think about that, but I could see the argument.

Speaker 2: 33:53

And then freedom. Freedom is often hailed as this uber-positive thing that everybody should be striving for. But you give someone way too much freedom and they're going to experience what Zeran Kukugo, one of the first people, wrote about existentialism, danish philosopher talks about as the dizziness of freedom. Very simple experiment that was done. Once You're in the supermarket, you offer people a free mommelade, free jam. You offer them three, people leave happy. You offer them 23, and they leave many leaves. The majority leaves with oh, there could have been a better choice. Oh, I have chosen correctly. I have made the most out of this opportunity. Oh, they can't. I mean, I've been to a supermarket once wanting to buy cereal and left without buying a cereal because I didn't want to go through the choice. I think most of us have been there despairing over what to pick from the lunch menu, because you can never ever go back.

Speaker 2: 34:55

You can never go back and make a different choice at that moment in time. So every choice excludes all the other opportunities, all the other choices. You can only choose one out of the gazillion choices that you have and think about choosing a romantic partner or a job or a career where to study. So huge choices, small choices. There's always existential anxiety if you pay attention to it, because you've got to own it.

Speaker 1: 35:23

You've got to own your choice.

Speaker 2: 35:25

Yes, and you need to come to terms with never finding out whether a different choice would have been better or worse or just different. You will never, ever know, because you can never go back and make the other choice. Absurdity, freedom, death, isolation that's kind of been framed as the existential givens, what characterizes the human condition. Existential coaches learn to listen to their client's relationship with these givens. I think in that when we listen to that, when we pick it up and it can be very subtle, what can be very much in your face. I've learned in my coaching practice that whatever a client brings into the coaching room the presenting issue, if you will it's always connected to one or more of these existential themes, of these bigger questions in life. Why am I here? For? What am I doing with my time? Is there a God? What does he, she it, want me to do? What's my purpose? How can I live a meaningful existence, how can I be happy?

Speaker 2: 36:38

There's big questions in life that don't have one answer. They have many answers, possibly, but people need to find their answer. There's no certainty whether that's the right answer. These bigger questions, they're always there underneath the surface. Sometimes they're very much in your face. As an existential coach. I like to make those connections because it opens up different conversations than if I were to just jump on what the presenting issue is and let's create a goal and action plan out of that.

Speaker 1: 37:14

Very interesting, so that it seems to me that that would be a very rich coaching conversation as you process through those things, for sure.

Speaker 2: 37:25

Yeah, it can be. Now I'm quite branded as an existential coach. I talk about it quite a lot. I think that heightens the tendency that somebody comes to me with a big question to start off with and we have sometimes a philosophical discussion about what does it mean to be authentic?

Speaker 2: 37:46

as a leader or as a parent or as a friend, have a conversation about dilemma and paradox and tension, conflict. But I've done quite a lot of work with an agency, for example, in New York, working with a lot of tech startups at the East Coast, at the West Coast, and there's a lot of people coming in. They're not interested in a philosophical debate, they're not interested in any philosophical concepts and we never mention anything existential. But these are human issues. They're always in the room. Questions around belonging, for example. It's almost always in the room in some way or another and sometimes it's the client's dominant conflict and it influences all of these things that they bring into the coaching room, even if they have never mentioned the term belonging.

Speaker 2: 38:37

I'm quite big picture, so I pick up on some of these broader themes and with an existential lens and a big picture lens, I can invite a conversation about a bigger theme. But that's not necessarily necessary. We can also. I can also just notice them and if it keeps coming back, I'll put it on the table and probably invite a conversation about it. But I'm not making every conversation existential because it's not needed.

Speaker 2: 39:06

Like I mentioned earlier, sometimes you do an existential coaching demo and you set out to have an existential conversation and it just doesn't go that way. And because how much time do you have and what do you want to achieve? If it's something that is quite tangible and the client wants to have that conversation, well, there's probably other clients that I might be a bit more excited about. And if we're together and, as the existentialists invite us, just commit to the thing that you're doing now. If something's boring, as long as soon as you commit to it, it just stops being boring. So not every existential coach has philosophical conversations. It just means that it's a lens that offers more possibility to have different kinds of conversations. And not every systemic coach will talk openly about the influences of the system, but we also will always notice them, right, right, and that just adds more.

Speaker 1: 40:05

Right For Christian coaches. Now, if I'm with a client who is Christian and they're open to exploring that avenue, that's fine. But I'll still use the same principles of Christianity with a corporate client. It's the same thing, I'm just I'm not verbalizing with a Christian lens, so I get that. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 40:26

Yeah, and one thing that's probably worth mentioning to maybe predominantly Christian audience is that existentialism sometimes gets a reputation of being full of atheists, and there's probably a trend towards when you hear nothingness and absurdity at the center of the human experience, I'm sure it would wrap a lot of Christians the wrong way. Yeah, but really and actually there's been quite a lot of existentialists who come from theism who had a very strong personal relationship with God. You know, I think all existentialists, they're critical towards dogma, right. So they would encourage people to question where your beliefs are coming from, right, and evaluating stories that you have just been handed down and build your own relationship with them.

Speaker 2: 41:21

But that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to stop believing in God. It just means that, oh, maybe you're going to break with organized religion. So that's what Sirin Kierkegaard, for example, that happened. He broke with the church, but he was a devout Christian. So as a whole book, christian existentialism, it's a very good book for anybody who's listening to this that has that kind of lens, and I like the philosophy, because everybody who's human seems to really get it, because it's about the human experience.

Speaker 1: 41:55

Right.

Speaker 2: 41:57

But it doesn't tell you this is a right or wrong way to live. It just means it just invites us and encourages us to question, to doubt, to be critical, to create your own thing, even if you are critical and you're doubting and you're questioning, and then you arrive exactly where you left off, at least. Now it's sunken in and you've challenged it and you decided that this is something I can own. And the experience of having gone through a process like that doesn't necessarily mean you're making a lot of changes in your life, but it means now the experience is one where you really own your life and your decisions and you take responsibility for the choices that you make, rather than life happening to you. You're now there in this, you're the captain and some things there. We call it facticity. You can't choose which language you're going to grow up with. You can't choose some of your physical features. I mean you can choose a lot of physical features nowadays.

Speaker 1: 43:02

Nowadays yes.

Speaker 2: 43:03

Modern surgery. But there are certain things you just can't change, and coming to terms with that is really helpful. So what can I change, what can I not change? And then owning responsibility for our choices what have I chosen? What have I chosen? Not to choose? Where have I chosen to not take any action? Where have I chosen to sit back and see how things play out? That's a choice. So, ah, so you chose not to choose, you know. And just that frame is really helpful.

Speaker 2: 43:35

And to me it helped to take all of these coaching tools, interventions, questions, lines of inquiry, models and integrate them into an existential grounding, because existentialism offers a way of understanding my relationship with myself and with the world and with others. And within that it's quite fertile ground to draw in my positive psychology background, for example, or draw in something from psychodynamic, or draw in something from TA or, you know, a systemic we mentioned. There are so many coaching approaches out there. It's compatible with quite a lot of them and in conflict with some others, but I just I love that as a foundation because I feel at home there and it allows me. It's solid enough to work as a foundation and it's flexible enough to allow me to evolve.

Speaker 1: 44:35

Wow, well, thank you for that. Thank you for just unpacking that at the level you did. So it's understandable for people to not just hear the word, but to have a better understanding about what it is and how they can connect with that. So thank you for that. Well, yannick, I would love to be able to point people to you. How can people connect with you? Maybe they've heard something today, maybe they've heard about that coaching lab and they want to check that out or just learn more about you and the services that you provide. How can we point them in your direction?

Speaker 2: 45:14

Sure, so coaches can ideally go to rocketsupervisioncom. I could go into rocket metaphor. I love that as well. Rocket supervisioncom, as you would spell it, is my hub for coaches, with all the resources. There's also a link to the coaching lab, or you can go to gocoachinglabcom directly, and my other work I do with non-coaches, so to speak, is at existentialcoach, so wwwexistentialcoach, and find me on YouTube, linkedin. I'm out there if you Google me.

Speaker 1: 45:53

Okay, and then where can people find your book?

Speaker 2: 45:58

Oh, an introduction to existential coaching. I think it's an all major bookstore.

Speaker 1: 46:02

Srouled.

Speaker 2: 46:02

Litch is a pretty spot on publisher, so you have no problem finding that.

Speaker 1: 46:06

Okay, good, very good, we'll make sure that those go in the show notes. Well, thank you so much for joining us on Conversations Today. It's been a rich conversation. I learned some things and I appreciate that, and I love that we kind of went around the block with quite a bit of information during the session. So thank you for that Brilliant.

Speaker 2: 46:29

Kelly, thank you so much for the platform, really appreciated being here and I feel there's so many questions that I could ask you. So I think we might need to have another one of these, because I feel there's a lot more that you could offer in response or in dialogue. You know, and coaches love dialogue, so sometimes I fall into this interview mode when you give me the right question and I mean you just witnessed it. I just kind of go for a while, especially when it's a complex concept.

Speaker 1: 46:58

Yeah, it is a complex concept, but you were able to break it down and I appreciate that. It's important, especially for this platform. For people not to you know, things can be pretty lofty, and so it's important the work that I do. I'm a very simple person. I don't use big words. I like things broken down so I can understand them and then I can explain them better to other people. So I appreciate you and until next time, you keep doing great things and we'll see you soon.

Speaker 2: 47:28

Thank you.

Speaker 1: 47:29

You're welcome.