The robust Irreverence of Coaching.

Much like millions of people around the globe, I was saddened to hear that Steve Jobs had lost his final battle all too early in what is an increasingly longer journey for the lucky ones. I remember back to the first time I viewed his Stanford Commencement Speech and the feeling of profound inspiration I took from his three simple messages. For those of you who have not seen it yet, I note the link. It is fifteen minutes and five seconds that could change your life. In many ways it has mine.

I am not a Mac owner but I have embraced my IPhone like a well worn book. It is a tool which enables your potential. It’s a tool which offers the possibility of non-conformity, to engage with the world in a different way of learning. It allows you to experiment and to build your own reality in ways undreamt of only a few decades ago.

I believe Steve Jobs vision and message goes beyond such tools as the Mac and IPod / IPhone/ IPad and we as coaches can take some learning from what Jobs set out to do with his ground breaking technology. That technology offered a certain freedom to do things differently. It allowed people to quote his slogan “To think differently” and indeed to have a different type of influence and a different type of conversation.

That different type of influence and that different type of conversation is at the heart of coaching which is about empowering people to become what they can and to have the type of influence which dispersed leadership is all about. It is about facilitating people to think for themselves.

Jobs while very private in his personal life also had an air of vulnerability and accessibility which appealed to people. He was famously known to answer customer emails personally. These are qualities which serve a coach well; who knows and understands who the expert is in any coaching conversation.

This air of vulnerability is somewhat paradoxical in terms of the robustness of any coaching conversation. It is important not to confuse vulnerability with an inability to have what I would characterize as real conversations where there is no hiding and where honesty and openness are the cornerstones of any move to empowerment. It is sometimes in challenge and indeed distress that the best learning can arise in a facilitated conversation where the coach him or herself has the experience and courage to stay with the process but always in the hope of a beneficial outcome. This is the irreverence I talk about where as Helen M. Luke said,

“We hurry through the so-called boring things

in order to attend to that which we deem more important, interesting.

Perhaps the final freedom (In the coaching conversation – my words) will be recognition that

everything in every moment is “essential” and that nothing at all is “important.”

For sure, it is only when we fully embrace the final uncertainty as Steve Jobs courageously did well before he encountered the reality and finality of it, that we can truly, in freedom, think for ourselves and write our own story whatever length it is. Steve Jobs certainly did that. Can we as coaches do that also for ourselves and those we work with?

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