Coaching & Philosophy
Coaching & Philosophy
The Examined Life
Our mission, at Coachwise, is to make it possible for everyone to fulfil their potential to live well. Coaching is our vehicle and our unique strength is a vision of a Coaching 2.0 — a better way for the world of coaching to work than the Coaching 1.0 that emerged in the early 1990s.
Part of our Coaching 2.0 vision is an understanding of the philosophical significance of coaching. We see how coaching, at its best, can enable people to live fully examined lives — lives where they’ve explored what they want to do with their time upon this planet, where they have clear strategies for realising considered ambitions, and where what they do from moment to moment is determined by their insights into how their life should be lived.
How Coaching Works
Another part of the Coaching 2.0 vision is an understanding of how exactly coaching opens up a path to an examined life.
The coach can use questions to direct the coachee’s attention towards the most important aspects of their current situation and how they’re handling them. By listening attentively, the coach can force the coachee to put in the quality of thought needed for them to come up with satisfying replies. As the coachee thinks, they see things afresh — they have insights — and if the coaching is properly structured the coachee’s insights will shed light on precisely the areas of their life where insight would be most valuable.
Good coaching also gets coachees to think things through in terms of the actions they themself can take and supports them in following through on the best courses of action imaginable.
By examining all the most important areas of their life, and acting upon their insights, coachees can arrive at a fully examined life. They can then be confident that they’re investing their efforts wisely. Many people — perhaps most people — have doubts about themselves and what they’re making of the opportunities life offers them. But by starting to live a more examined life, people can dispel such doubts, dissolving away the anxieties and depressions that self-doubt so often generates.
A Philosophical Significance
By providing a reliable mechanism for arriving at an examined life, coaching gains a philosophical importance.
For thousands of years, philosophers have been probing issues of what it means to live well. They’ve proposed theories that take human happiness as a yardstick for all ethical judgements. They’ve looked for rational reasons to support the moral codes of the philosophers’ religions. They’ve sought rules founded upon first principles that would differentiate between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ actions. But it’s unclear what, if anything, all this philosophising has achieved for philosophy hasn’t arrived at a way of understanding living well that all philosophers can agree upon.
One explanation for the lack of progress is that there’s a fundamental flaw in philosophers’ traditional way of working. Philosophers’ stock in trade is abstract thought. They seek flawless arguments and aim for universal truths — truths that would hold for all people at all times. But it could be that clarity about what living well means isn’t to be found in abstract universals, but in the concrete specifics of individuals’ lives. What’s needed would then be a reliable method for individuals to follow that would offer them a personal clarity, which is exactly what coaching, at its best, provides.
The Role of Philosophy
Perhaps philosophy shouldn’t aim at big theories. It’s role can simple be to shed light on the kinds of mental traps people typically fall into and to show people how they might escape those traps.
A common mental trap, for instance, is that of assuming that the world actually is just like the ideas we hold about it. Our ideas map out the world. It’s only by assuming that our maps are accurate that we’re able to navigate reality effectively. But our ideas exist in the realm of the immutable, unchanging abstract while reality itself is a constant flux of being and form. Our ideas are at best approximations and there comes a time when even our most cherished ideas no longer map out reality effectively.
Philosophy explains why coachees often need to make new maps of their world, escaping their old habits of thinking by having fresh insights into what the territory of their life is actually like. There are always new connections to be made. The coachee just needs to spend time with their attention moving from aspect their situation to another. The insights always come.
Philosophy can also remind coaches that their coaching needs to go beyond investigating what is the case and investigate what the coachee would like to be the case in the areas of the future that the coachee has influence over,
This is a fundamentally different type of question. Satisfying answers can’t be found by mapping out the reality of the experienced, observable world, for there is necessarily a subjective aspect to matters of what a person would like to happen — a sense of what would be valuable, or right, or in some other way desirable — and this sense of value exists primarily within the person’s head. Value doesn’t correspond in any simple way to features of the world that can be measured.
The subjective can be approached with just as much rigour as the objective. Incoherent thinking can be challenged and overcome. Coachees need to look beyond their existing ideas of what is right, or what is valuable, and consider what would actually provide the most desirable outcome.
Coaching can investigate subjective issues through guiding explorations that start with feelings and move systematically towards clearly expressed ambitions. A good coach can make sure that the investigations covers everything that’s relevant.
Living Examined Lives
By focusing on specifics and investigating both what is the case and what a person would like to be the case, coaching can help people find an invigorating clarity of direction. It can transform them into heroes who are fully aligned within the real life stories of their lives and who consequently spend their time engaged in meaningful action.
Coaching can help people work out how to play the role of the hero roles skilfully, performing adeptly where they most need to, and it can support them in seeing their good intentions through. It offers them genuinely examined lives.
Philosophy doesn’t have to provide answers as to how to live. It only has to show us where to look.
Responses