Seasons

This essay, originally written for my newsletter Words Make Worlds, reflects on the experience of posting at a regular cadence as I struggled to figure out how find an approach that worked for me. I am keeping it published in my ‘essays’ collection in hopes it might be useful for others struggling with similar questions.

A few folks have asked me what happened to the newsletter and I’m writing to let you know it’s still here! By way of explanation, I was in Argentina for a month and gave myself permission to step out of the newsletter cycle which allowed me to realize two things. One, that what I had written so far felt complete. And two, the newsletter itself is nowhere close to done. Complete in that the first 15 issues largely focused on some of the foundational elements and there isn’t much more I want to say about that (for now). And nowhere close to done because there so much more I want to say about coaching.

It took permission and time away to see this. And to understand that the sticky wicket of disconnect between complete and done lay in the structure of the newsletter itself. The structure was the last thing I questioned after weeks of doubting myself and my abilities as a newsletter writer. It was the structure that got in the way of being able to listen closely to what the essence of Words Make Worlds wanted to be as a living creation, beyond what I thought it should be as a thing.

I have learned a lot about structure and permission. I have learned that structure is important but it has to be held lightly enough to become part of the creative process. And I have learned that we have to give ourselves permission to not fully know what something is, to open to mystery and to be in conversation with our creations, to let them evolve and change while allowing ourselves to be simultaneously changed in the process.

In hindsight I realize almost everything I have read about newsletters comes from the world of marketing where structure, consistency, and automation reign. Where creating a content machine is how the marketing engine works.

But I am not a machine, despite an obsession with cyborgs in my early twenties. I am a messy, joyful, creative, curious human. And what I make—newsletters, courses, essays, collages, poems—are equally messy, joyful, creative, and curious. These things have a life within them that wants to be expressed. And I have to be able to listen to that life, to be in conversation with it, so it continues to grow. If I can't listen, if my ideas of what something should be take over, then that life is extinguished and the creative energy disappears.

In a more pragmatic way, Donald Schön sees this conversation as an essential part of making, whatever the materials may be. He writes,

Out of musical materials or themes of talk, they make a piece of music or a conversation, an artifact with its own meaning and coherence. Their reflection-in-action is a reflective conversation with the materials of a situation.

Those of us from the world of software may look at this and draw parallels with the product development cycle, but this is a mistake. For Schön, the reflective conversation requires the ability to “listen” to the surprises that reveal “new moves that give new meanings and directions to the development of an artifact.” Product development, on the other hand, is an iterative, repeatable process of delivering something that is feasible, usable, and desirable. If there is any conversation to be had, it is not with the materials of a conversation but with the profit logic that mediates between the business and the market.

The goal of a firm is to make and retain a customer. To create and capture value. This is the profit logic that drives the product development cycle and all other processes within a firm. Once a company finds product-market fit, the business model snaps into place ensuring value is continuously captured. There isn’t room to listen to what a product might want to become because the product was born of the market and will always serve in this capacity.

Compare that to what David Bohm believes drives composers, architects, and scientists:

The artist, the musical composer, the architect, the scientist all feel a fundamental need to discover and create something new that is whole and total, harmonious and beautiful. Few ever get a chance to try to do this, and even fewer actually manage to do it. Yet, deep down, it is probably what very large numbers of people in all walks of life are seeking when the attempt to escape the daily humdrum routine by engaging in every kind of entertainment, excitement, stimulation, change of occupation, and so forth, through which they ineffectively try to compensate for the unsatisfying narrowness and mechanicalness of their lives.

It is this narrowness and mechanicalness that mature firms seem to embody and require of their employees, and that the product development cycle serves. Now I'm not claiming that this newsletter is whole, total, harmonious, or beautiful (I have aspirations!), but it certainly took on narrowness and mechanicalness when I followed the shoulds.

You may have noticed that should has made an appearance a couple times already. I have learned that these shoulds are important. Listen for them. Should is a sign that mechanicalness is creeping in, that the oxygen is dwindling and the fire of creation is getting weak. That a narrowness is preventing the ability listen to the faint beckonings of wholeness and beauty. Letting go of shoulds is a compassionate act of permission—to not fully know what a creation is and to allow ourselves to be in conversation with it so we can grow and evolve together.

The structure that got me into trouble—Idea + Practice—comes from my strong belief in experiential learning. That ideas themselves aren’t enough, we have to put them into practice, to live them, so that we can come closer to an embodied understanding of what it means to coach. Like many things, you learn to coach by coaching, not by reading about coaching. And so I thought every issue of Words Make Worlds should (there we go again!) exemplify this approach.

But this structure turned out to be unforgiving. I couldn’t see it at first, instead telling myself I was a bad newsletter writer because I wasn’t hitting the mechanical markers of success I thought I should (ahem). It wasn’t until I gave myself permission that I began to see how structure was getting in the way of creative and meaningful work.

Leader as Coach has offered similar lessons in permission. In the last year and half, eight cohorts have completed the program. And each offering has been different, based what I learned in conversation with both the students and the offering itself. I mean look, my first attempt at designing the course was BIG—I dreamed up a 12 week program that went deep into the world of coaching. Full blast, everything and the kitchen sink. No chance of listening because I knew exactly what it should (again!) be. Maven, the platform that I run the program through, was like “So hey we've seen this a lot and our suggestion is to start small and go from there—like, a one week program.”

12 weeks became one. I got clear on the essence of what I wanted to share and ran that version three times, listening closely as I went. By the third cohort it felt like there was a there there, that I could feel the life of the course, and the next step was to expand into a six week offering.

I was in the middle of the second six week cohort when storms knocked out my internet 30 minutes before class. I hauled ass to a nearby coffee shop where I ran into everyone else in my neighborhood, and in short order we brought down the cafe's wifi.

I couldn’t hold class and had to push everything back a week. I was mortified and upset—the weekly cadence was important! Turns out everyone loved the break because it allowed folks to get in extra practice time. And so Leader as Coach turned into a seven week course, with a break in the middle.

I share this anecdote because, again, permission. Letting ourselves off the hook for needing to have everything figured out at launch. Listening for the surprises and letting them inform what something becomes, not just what we think it should be.

The idea of being in conversation with something is increasingly important for me and my work. This newsletter, Leader as Coach, and just about everything else I do is an offering that comes from my heart. This world is chaotic, complex, crazy, and at times terrifying. But despite this, or maybe because of it, we have an opportunity to amplify goodness, love, and care. To reorient ourselves away from the world of things and ground ourselves in a world of relationality and reciprocity. We are not isolated, individual, and alone. We are connected and interdependent. To steal a phrase from Carlo Rovelli, we are “networks of kisses, not of stones.”

Coaching teaches us how to remember this. How to prioritize and be in relationship with others. How to know and see the world primarily as one of co-created realities and to tend to that co-creation intentionally. As Anaïs Nin astutely observed, “we don't see things as they are, we see them as we are,” and coaching is the way we can see that process in action. When we begin to clue in that the world isn't “just so”, that we are active participants in its creation, things begin to shift and new possibilities emerge. And all of this against the backdrop of work!

This has always been the remarkable part for me. That work can be place of deep personal and communal transformation. There is so much energy caught up in defending our default ways of being. Coaching brings awareness to these patterns of behavior, an awareness that brings release, and when this happens that trapped energy becomes available for true creation and collaboration.

Coaching not only supports others, but the coach as well, and I think this is where the true magic happens. To be a coach, or to inhabit a coaching posture, is to be curious, present, and aware. Of ourselves, of others, of the situation, of the environment. A coaching orientation invites us to hold our perceptions lightly, to name what we are seeing and feeling, and to wonder about what we might be missing that others can add. And to do that in conversation, in relationship, so that we can begin to get a greater sense of the emergent and evolving situation.

Coaching isn’t just a skillset, but a way of leading and of living life.