Coaching and the Human Condition
Coaching and the Human Condition
Life’s Big Questions
It’s amazing being human, but not always easy. We can turn our minds to almost any topic, even to the odd mystery that this universe of ours exists with us as part of it, or to questions of how we should be living our lives. Getting good answers to question about what living well means can feel profoundly important, for we all want to be sure that we’re good people — people worthy of love and admiration. Yet it can be hard to find satisfying answers to such questions.
Where should we look for answers? In the ethical systems of ancient religions? In our own common sense? In the opinions that circulate on social media? In the opinions of our friends?
With it being so hard to find answers that we can fully trust, it’s not surprising that so many people feel doubts about how they should be living — doubts that, when someone is really serious about living well, can leave them feeling the all-pervasive vertigo of existential anxiety.
Feeling Stuck
With modern life being so busy, most people don’t spend much time asking life’s big questions. Their life narratives already give them good enough answers to be getting on with. They already have a sense of who they are, and of what to do, and why.
Sometimes, however, the momentum of our life narratives peters out and fails to provide us with the clarity we need. Our heads might be abuzz with secret hopes or fears. Our options for action can be kaleidoscopic and hard to think through. Or we might feel we have no good options at all.
Most people encounter times when the flow of their life narratives runs dry and they feel stuck or unsure.
Socrates had already turned 70. He’d lived a full life. He was sentenced to death by drinking hemlock and he willingly accepted his fate.
Overcoming Existential Anxiety
It can be tempting to try to overcome existential anxiety by finding new ideas to believe in — there are certainly always plenty of ideas swirling around — but this rarely provides a permanent solution to what Kierkegaard called ‘the dizziness of freedom’. We might cling excitedly to the new ideas, but that doesn’t mean that the ideas will help us find meaningful and satisfying paths through life.
A more reliable approach comes from tapping into the ability of our flexible minds to engage constructively with questions of what it means to live well within this universe of ours. Coaching can help. A suitably skilled coach can guide an inquiry that draws on the coachee’s knowledge of own life, and their ability to think imaginatively, and provides the coachee with the clarity they need.
There are two aspects of what living well means for such inquiries to explore. Both look at the ways that the coachee’s actions can generate value.
- Beauty. The inquiry can look at the intrinsic value of their actions — the value that resides in the qualities of the actions themselves.
- Meaning. The inquiry can look at the extrinsic value of their actions — the value that resides in the futures that the coachee’s actions could help bring about.
Living Meaningfully
A sense of meaningfulness doesn’t come from a belief in abstractions, but from connecting with the concrete specifics of the world. A person’s narrative imagination can weave together all they know about the world and their passions — their loves, fears and hopes — can fill these world pictures with significance.
Coaching can support this process by guiding a structured inquiry that examines what the person would most like to happen and why. As they becomes clear about the possible futures that they’d like their actions to bring about, and about the difference in value between those futures and alternative futures, the person builds up a sense of what’s at stake and new strands of life story ignite.
The coaching process can then help the person learn to connect their actions from moment to moment with these big-picture narratives. It can help them define clear ambitions, make plans, and become sufficiently organised to act out their plans efficiently.
The more the person connects their actions with their life narratives, the more they will sense what they do as meaningful.
Living Beautifully
Coaching can also help people connect with the qualities of the moment.
It can prompt people to explore how the activities they engage in can be done well in their own terms. What does it mean to perform the activity beautifully? How can success be achieved elegantly, with a minimum of effort and complexity?
Such inquiries examine the specifics of the activity, unveiling what precisely needs to happen for success, discovering how a sense of jarring — of ugliness — can appear, and investigating how the coachee can fulfil their potential to act beautifully.
The coaching can also explore how the coachee can spend time in the state of flow — a state where their aesthetics will quite naturally shape their actions.
Flow has the additional benefit of being the state in which we find what we do most enjoyable. We immerse ourselves fully in the details of action and discover a stream of rewarding possibilities.
Harmony
By pursuing beauty, a person can find a harmony with the human condition at the level of the local and immediate. They can affirm the strange mystery of this universe by connecting with the wonders around them and by embodying some of what’s wonderful in their own actions.
By connecting with desirable futures, coachees can come into harmony with the human condition at the level of the enfolding wholes that subsume us all. Acting meaningfully affirms existence by helping to make this rich and intricate universe richer still.
When a person feels stuck, or when they have doubts about themselves or the world they find themselves in, they can be tempted to grab hold of easy solutions. They might get swept up by a political movement or make impulsive life choices. But there’s a more reliable alternative.
The person can follow a process of inquiry that clarifies what exactly living well would mean for them — as a unique individual in a unique situation. As what is meaningful and beautiful for them comes into focus, their doubts are likely to dissolve. They are likely to feel themselves coming unstuck and find their existential anxiety replaced by a profound existential ease.
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