Hello, my name is Tracy Sinclair. Welcome to Coaching and Conversation. Coaching in Conversation is a chance to discuss and explore, not just how we can keep developing. And ensuring 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 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. Hi everyone, it's Tracy Sinclair here with another episode of Coaching in Conversation. This time I am joined by the wonderful Aboodi Shabi, who is an incredible coach, has been coaching for almost 30 years and has coached many individuals, and has also trained thousands of coaches around the world over the last 25 years. In the 1990s, he was actually instrumental in the setup of the UK chapter of the International Coaching Federation and has also served on the ICF Global Board. And more recently, he has been a lecturer for several years at in coaching at Henley Business School, and he has also received a lifetime award for his contribution to coaching from the Coaching at Work magazine. And I have the great pleasure of a conversation with Aboodi around several things, but particularly around how coaching perhaps is evolving, how it might need to evolve, how it could potentially evolve in light of the way the world is today. And this episode is called Spirituality of Coaching. I hope you enjoy it. Thank you for listening. Okay. Aboodi, thank you so much for having this conversation with me. I've been really looking forward to this because the thing that I think we are going to talk about is something that is very close to my own heart and is something that's, really interesting me personally, in terms of my direction. But before we go into that, let's just hear from you. What would you like to say to those listening and tell us about you? Gosh. Thank you first of all for inviting me to come on the podcast and I never quite know what to say about myself. It's I've been coaching a long time. Like 30 years. And I suppose, I don't want to jump into what we'll talk about, but I suppose one of the things for me about having been in a profession for such a long time is seeing how it's emerged and also. The questions that we have about what is coaching for and what is coaching, trying to do feels like a very different response than I would've had. 30 goes partly 'cause I was younger and different, but also because I think the world has changed and the profession is changing and evolving in the space of that. Yeah, absolutely. I love, I think that's a whole conversation in itself, isn't it? Just the evolution of coaching. Yeah. Thinking about that myself almost what is coaching now or what and what could it be? What does it need to be? That might take us into our topic then around your work that you are calling Coaching to the Soul. So Tell us about that. I suppose it, it came about quite accidentally, maybe when I first started coaching someone. I think I had a branding consultant and she talked about the word soul a lot. And I like the word, I've always liked the word I think, and, I got a lot of people saying, oh, you can't call yourself coaching the soul corporates won't like it. And I followed that really. And I was, I suppose in those days when I was trying to do more coaching work than supervision work, I was happy to park the name. As I've moved to doing more work with coaches, I just think there's something for me about. I do think coaching is a spiritual vocation and I'm increasingly vocal about that. And I think there's something about, this and I don't know, I dunno what soul means by the way. It's not like I've got a definition in my mind about it, but there's something about being authentically human, that coaching to the soul creates space for in a way that a lot of coaching for me is very performative and helping people improve their performance and set bigger goals and all of that. And I. I'm not particularly comfortable with that, and increasingly I'm less comfortable with that as the world evolves. And I think there's something else in there, which is a kind of like a hunger that the soul has for expression articulation. And we spend a lot of our lives trying to improve ourselves and achieve more. And I think something gets left behind, and that might be something that we might call soul. And you said. Just now you use that term that you've always felt that coaching is a spiritual location. Say a little bit more about that's really intriguing. I think and I'm not sure I felt this right at the beginning, but I had an interest in spirituality from, being a teenager. So it's been a big part of my life and I suppose, I think, that. Part of the reason I think Spirit coaching is increasingly offering itself as a spiritual vocation and it's increasingly needed is that. The old models or the old approach of getting more stuff and getting more status and achieving more is increasingly problematic in a world that's, going nuts. Every day something happens that makes that, but also it is connected with this idea of mortality. We'll all be dead soon. That soon might be 50 years, 20 years or next week. And then there's something there about. Coaching being something that helps us to navigate being alive and give life meaning and purpose rather than just about having relentless progress. And I think that, the old Marxist idea of religion is the open with the people. It provides su sucker and solace to people in their plight. And I think the plight of being human is something we're facing much more at the moment than we might have done 20 years ago. Coaching started around the time of the.com, boom. And there was all this sense of possibility and anything could happen. And the first coaching schools were talking about generating new possibilities, and it was all. Up kind of talk. And of course, humanity's in a very different place than it was at the beginning of the millennium. We, nine 11 might be a kind of turning point. There may be other turning points, before nine 11, before the.com bubble burst, before the world became increasingly polarized, there was a sense of a better future being available. And now we are seeing, climate change. We're seeing what's happening in the Middle East. We're seeing ai. All of these things are making life even more precarious. And in a sense, life has always been precarious. We're always dealing with what the Buddhist call impermanence, and I think that coaching is a space for people to come and get solace in their plight of impermanence. It's not about having more staff or about achieving the next great career transition, it's much more about how do I stay human? How do I stay connected to purpose? How do I find meaning in this world that's falling apart as we speak? Gosh, there's so much in there. This is very exciting. So I'm picking up so many threads here. Just maybe if I try to pick up on a couple of different things is you talked earlier about how the real focusing coaching was around performance. It was a performative, how could we behave better? How could we achieve more? How could we perform tapping into our potential, all of those things which often. Equates, doesn't it? To physical, behavioral delivery in life. How can I be a better leader? How can I be a better athlete or a better parent or whatever. But it's often associated with the things that we do and coaching seemed for so long to focus on doing things better. Yeah. Doing things more successfully. Yeah. And yet. What you seem to be really talking about here is the being. Sits within the human being that sits within the doer. Yeah, I think that's true. In fact, I, Karen Foy, who I know, from Henley, and she and I are doing a retreat in a few weeks, few months time, and we're focusing on the being of coaching and I, so the. The thing of being is very live for me, so it's nice that you've picked that out. I think there's also something else in, in what you've, the strand you've picked up, which is that if we want to be a better leader or a better parent or have a better life, there's some presupposition in there that we are not good enough. And I think that's a very capitalistic way of seeing human beings. It's like there's always something more to get, and that can be, the next iPhone. The iPhone that we have, however new it isn't as good as the one that's around the corner. And the life that we live is somehow insufficient. And again, I think it's very capitalistic notion that satisfaction isn't okay. And part of what I think this is about can we be satisfied with the ordinary human being that we are? Can we be satisfied and grateful for what we have? Rather than going, it's not enough. I need to have more. And that's a kind of almost anti consumerist place. And I'm just a much a consumer as everyone else. I want the next iPhone, I want to go on nice holidays, et cetera. But can we find contentment with the life that we have and peace with the life that we have particularly. When life is so precarious, which we're seeing all too clearly at the moment in the way the world is, and that for me is a state of being. And then it makes me think about. And I'm a big fan of Shabbat Jewish Day of Rest, and the whole idea of Shabbat is that it's one day a week when we are not producing and consuming or changing the world in any way. We're just, spending time with God if we're religious or resting or, having nice food and, doing things with other people. And six days a week we produce and consume, but we have one day a week when we are being. Not trying to change anything. And I think we've lost that. We don't have a day of rest in this country anymore. Ever since, the Sunday was trading laws came in the 1980s. It's rare that we have a socially enforced structure of being, and I think that's what people need more than anything else. And we're busy all the time and we don't have a day of rest. And, emails and WhatsApp and everything else are always demanding something from us rather than just being quiet and still, or content with what we have and enjoying something. And it really does seem, doesn't it, as though society or almost everywhere in the world, maybe more in some places in the west perhaps but even in the east. This complete obsession with consumerism productivity. Yeah. Yeah. Speed pace. Yeah. It feels almost as though contentment is not enough, isn't it? There, there feels as though there's such a societal shift. Away from the being and valuing the being of ourselves. Yeah. And every meal we eat has to be the best steak or the best tofu or the best coffee, rather than just having a good cup of coffee. And I'm a big fan of the work of Oliver Berkman. And one of the things he talks about in, I think it's in meditation for mortals, he says, who's to say that a life spent living simply and being kind to people around you. Isn't a meaningful life. Yeah, and of course we all want to have amazing lives where we fulfill our purpose and live the dream life and everything else, rather than just, I'm a useful citizen. I'm kind to the people that I'm coming into contact with. I do my job well. I don't have lots of ambition around it. That could be a really good life, and somehow that's not enough. And it's almost like people are being made to feel guilty if they have a okay life. And I remember actually when I first started coaching, like in the last century and I would, I was involved with a lot of American coaches at the time, partly 'cause I was on the ICF board and partly because, the coaching school I started with was based in the US and if someone said I'm okay, the coach would go and what would make it great. As if there's something not sufficient or not okay. About just being okay. And maybe this is a function of getting older. The older I get, the more I go. I just wanna have an okay life. Yeah. Obviously there's a certain amount of privilege that informs that, I've got a nice place to live and I don't have to struggle to put food on the table and I'm not living in Iran or Lebanon at the moment, but I just think there's something about. Being content with what we have, being maybe the state to get to if you like. And that is about, the being rather than the doing or the acquiring. Yeah, absolutely. And do you think. Do you think, me, we, maybe we are going off piece now from away from coaching. I always go off piece. We'll know where we go, right? Yeah. I was just thinking as you were talking there about, I'm hesitating 'cause I don't want to say this, but I'll say in anyway. Yeah, please do. Is it almost too late for humanity? Have we gone too far? Towards that place of obsession with materialism, consumerism, standards, performance, yeah. Et cetera. Can we find our way back to ourselves? I think, I dunno the answer to the question about have we, is it too late? That's a, this question way bigger than I can think about and have knowledge enough to know that and, ask that question. In 50 years time, I'll be a hundred and. But ask that question 50 times and we might have a response to that, but I think as an individual we can find our way back somewhere. And for me, that is spirituality, so I, live in the world like we all do. I get upset by the news. I get agitated by this. I get worried about that. Not just the world, I've got my personal circumstances and worry a little bit about money and you know what's gonna happen next week and everything else. And. In the midst of that, can I practice contentment? So when I go to a yoga class, for instance, and I'm just in my body trying to do, a decent trick on Asana or I am sitting with my cats in the morning when they come into my bedroom, and those are moments when. I do come back to myself and I think we lose ourselves all the time. That's what the world does. It pulls us away from ourselves, but do we have practices that help us come back to ourselves? And I know I've mentioned it already, but the practice about is partly about just saying, let me come back to myself. And one of the things I do most Saturdays now is I go for a Turkish bath. And when I go to the Turkish bath, I leave the world behind literally.'cause you arrive upstairs and then disrobe and you put on your wrap and you go downstairs and people coming in from all walks of life just leaving the world behind. And they come back to themselves and there's a David Bowie line from one of his earlier songs and he says, and we walked back to the road unchained. And I think we're unchaining ourselves, and then we go back into the world that unchange us again. The commitments that we're in, the concerns that we have. But when we go to a place of worship or we go to a Turkish bath, or we go for a walk in nature, or we lie on the sofa and we just gaze at the ceiling, we are coming back to ourselves. So I think we can, as individuals come back to ourselves, and I think that coaching offers people a chance to come back to themselves. It's a space away from the world. And for a lot of people, that's maybe the only space they get, so Alan Debo used to say that therapy is the new priesthood. And I think we could say it's same about coaching. It's a place to reconnect. Yeah. Yeah. I was thinking earlier when you were talking about. How some people might frame what we're describing here, or you are describing here as more of a therapeutic or a spiritual intervention as opposed to a coaching intervention. Yeah. Yeah. Which, and even the word intervention doesn't feel right here either. Yeah, it does take us back to this question then of how is coaching evolving and how might it evolve? The thing I'm thinking about is something that I always remember that got me into coaching in the first place was many years ago when I had my children and I was a bit bored with my business. It was just like a broad spectrum leadership development business. I thought I want to do something different. And I went to a conference, someone was speaking at that conference. Julio Aya actually. Oh yeah, I know Julio. Yeah. No. And he said he was doing a presentation on coaching and I thought, oh, what's this thing called? Coaching? And he said that he felt that coaching was not something that human beings had constructed One day in a coffee shop. He felt that coaching was something that was emerging to meet a need in society, to meet a human need. And back then that need was perhaps framed in a certain way. It feels as though the need has evolved and. Perhaps therefore what coaching becomes is also evolving. Yeah, I think Julio was absolutely right and he would say that a new practice emerges to address concerns that existing practices aren't sufficient to address. And, I spent a lot of time studying with Julio and working with him. And the things that he said about coaching did really inform. My view of the profession and I, before I came across Julio Elia's work and the work of Newfield Network, I had thought, I'm not sure I wanna stay in the coaching business because it felt too much about goals and having amazing lives and not having any problems and things like that. When I came across the work of Newfield and Julio Aya. I started to think there is a space that I can attach myself to quite comfortably. And I've never really gone that far away from it, even if I don't, teach ontological coaching the way that I used to. And I think the profession is emo evolving and has to evolve. And when I started coaching, there was a whole thing about there's no place for emotions in coaching. And now we're seeing enshrined even in the ICS core competencies, that the coach is able to be present to strong emotions in themselves and the clients. So it's it's evolving in that way, but I also think it is evolving to take care of the world as it is today, and the concerns that are in the world. And more and more people, if you think about what people are going to AI for, they're going for therapy and meaning and purpose are in the top three. Yeah, and I think more and more people are struggling to make sense of the world and sense of their lives in that world. And as as more and more people are discomforted in some way, whether that's financially or emotionally or politically, by the way the world is going, the promises of our generation work, work hard, and you'll have a better life than your parents. That's not true anymore, most people, young people are starting life. If they go to university, they're starting life with a big debt. Yeah. They've got university, certainly in the uk they've got student loans to pay off and also they may never be able to afford a place of their own, et cetera. So the promises that society gave. Are not there anymore. We don't know what maybe our young won't even live to their sixties because the world will change so fast and destroy itself. But even if they do, the promises of the previous generation are not there anymore. So it does raise the question. How do we stay sane in that? How do we find meaning and purpose in that when everything is so difficult, which it is for most people, you and I are very comfortable. We're at the end of our working lives. We're not trying to build something in, in a world that's falling apart. But how do people find their way through that? Sure. And again, it makes me think about religion as the opium of the people providing sucker and solace to their people in their plight. And I think coaching can do that 'cause it gives people a chance to think about. How do I find meaning in this world? Yeah. And how do I find meaning in adverse circumstances? And I'm thinking about perhaps the people that are listening to this. And people could be responding in many different ways. Some people could be thinking, they're very inspired by it and. They can now find their own sense of purpose and meaning in the work that they might do. What about if there are people listening who think, wow, this sounds amazing, but I dunno how to do that. Back to the doing again, because I'm just You mean coaches? Yes. Yes. I'm thinking about coaches that are listening because we do still seem to be as a profession, rather bound in. Competency models that typically describe behavior. Yeah. Even for the coach. And we're, we've already made this distinction, haven't we? Around? It's not, you know who you are. So who you are is how you coach. Yeah. We know that phrase. Yeah. So what would you say to the coaches who are sitting there? I get this, it sounds wonderful, but how on earth do I do that? It's interesting 'cause I obviously, I also hear that question a lot when I work with people coming on my workshops or when I was teaching at Henley, and I suppose, I think it's about being. One of the things I remember very well from working at Henley is we would teach a whole variety of models and we would do demos of Gestalt coaching and cognitive behavioral coaching and systemic coaching, and time to think. And when we were doing, most of them, students would be really paying attention and taking notes and observing and doing it quietly. When it came to time to think, I'd often notice the students were really restless and fidgety whilst the tutor was demoing. Type to think. And for those people who are listening who aren't familiar with time to think, it, it's based on the work of Nancy Klein and a lot of it, as she says, is pure generative silence. And so I would just be reflecting with the students after the demo. What was going on for you when nothing was happening on the outside, the coach would ask a question, what more do you think or feel? I want to say the coachee would speak for a little while, then there'd be long periods of silence whilst the coach was giving the coachee time to think and. I think there's something about how can we contain ourselves? How can we hold ourselves so that when we go in front of a client who is impatient or stressed and wants to get answers to their dilemmas, we don't have to jump in. We can be a solid presence. And I know that's not easy. I'm not saying it's simple, but there's something about, the inner state of the coach as you, quote Edna Murdoch, who, I love that quote of hers. Who we are as how we coach. The more that we work on the being that we are, the more able we are to hold people in that complexity. And not feel the need to jump in. And the client is impatient to get to a solution usually. And when I'm a client, I'm the same. It's not like I'm different from that even though I might have a strong spiritual practice. So if the client is. Aiming to get somewhere in a hurry and want solutions and answers, and the coach hasn't got enough bandwidth to hold the client and themselves in that space, then the coach will probably fall into techniques and models and jumping in. If the coach has a kind of grounded presence, then I think it becomes easier or simpler. I say simpler rather than easier, but it's about being rather than doing. I don't think the coach has to do anything. Yeah. Yeah, it, and I think not that I'm necessarily trying to take this to the AI conversation, but I do have a view on this, in that domain as well. In that if we as practitioners are stuck in the doing and the tools and techniques, that is then when I think our work is more compromised and challenged because. AI can quite effectively do a lot of those things, whereas AI is now coaching at A-C-C-P-C-C level already and I dunno how much longer it'll be before AI can't do even the deeper stuff because it'll get better and better at reading people's physiology, et cetera. So I think you're right. And the other thing I've been thinking a lot about AI, 'cause even people my age who are not, we grew up before the internet. And certainly grew up before AI came along. We're using AI more and more. And friends of mine are asking AI about all kinds of questions. And one of the things I'm thinking about is what can coaches learn from ai? And one of the things that AI is able to do really well is to hold all the projections. It doesn't take anything personally. So if we go to AI and we ask it, I asked it a question the other day about some technical thing and it was wrong. I said, you are wrong. And it said, yes, I am wrong. I'm sorry. And I said, why should I trust you anymore? I was sort playing a little bit with it and it said, I'm now going to model how to be trustworthy. And I said, you're just lecturing about trust. And it went, yes, I am. And I thought if I'd said that to a human being, all their resistance would come up. And it makes me think about when clients come and they're impatient for an answer and AI can hold their impatience. Yeah. And again, the work for us to do to is a little bit to learn from ai, even though I think AI is really problematic. There's something about AI not taking our projection seriously. Yeah. Or personally. I think that's part of the being of the coach is learning to, that's a lifetime's journey of course, to be able to contain projections. It never stops because we'll always get activated by a particular projection of a client. But that for me feels like a learning edge for all of us as practitioners. Yeah. Especially as people are more agitated and more stressed and under more and more pressure. Absolutely. So that's gonna happen even more, isn't it? Yeah. And one of the things that I notice is. And maybe it does come back to this being and the care of the practitioner is, coaches are still quite often focusing on their service to the client without necessarily recognizing that without doing that work themselves, there is going to be a limit to what they can offer to their clients. Yeah. And we're having to hold. Again, this is a theme I've been thinking about a lot and I've got my supervision session tomorrow, so it's on my mind. Partly 'cause I've been thinking about it and partly 'cause I wanted to talk about it tomorrow in my own supervision. But I've been thinking a lot about we are having to hold more and more people in more and more difficult flights. Yeah. And I was running a supervision group last week and the coaches were really suffering because of what they're having to hold in their clients. And I was working with a group of in fact I was working with a group of women business leaders from Turkey online last week, and we were talking about resilience and centering, and they were going, we can't center. We got missiles coming in. That's maybe a more extreme version of the plight that people are in, but people are facing incoming, whether it's, missiles being intercepted by NATO or it's just too much incoming into their lives and they're overwhelmed. And we need to be able to hold that. And as you say, if we're not grounded in ourselves and not doing our own work and getting our own holding, like having supervision for instance, and having our own spiritual practice, we are not gonna be able to cope. When the clients show as they're showing up. Yeah. Yeah. So if we were to offer one final thought to those listening What is it that you would like to share that we've not expressed? I dunno about one final thought, but I suppose I just remember what Sir John Whitmore used to say, the difference between a good coach and a great coach is ongoing work on yourself. And, I've worked, I've been working on myself pretty since I was 25. I went into therapy very young in my mid sixties now, and I've still got work to do. And I think if we are gonna work with other people, and this is something that Karen Foyer used to say, if we're gonna work with other people as practitioners, how can we do that if we're not doing the work on ourselves? Ongoingly facing ourselves, looking at ourselves, and I think so, yeah. Ongoing work on yourself, is the. This moment's final thought. You've asked me 10 minutes time. I have something else to say, but Yeah. Gosh I can't challenge or disagree with anything that you've shared today. Not that I would seek to do that necessarily. But yes, that's one of the reasons I was so excited about our conversation because what you've given voice to today, and thank you for doing it. Are things that are so current and present for me. And it feels like it's a challenge, but it feels like a huge opportunity here for what coaching can bring to people. That is something is really needed right now. So thank you for talking about that. Thank you for the conversation. I love conversations like this because they help to spark ideas and it's the interaction that makes it come alive. Yeah. Thank you again and thank you Tracy. Perhaps we'll have another one of these sometime. That would be really, I'd be more than happy to. Alright, thank you, ADI. Thank you, Tracy. 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@tracysinclair.com and follow us on social media. 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.