This piece was originally published by the Critical Coaching Group in a collection of essays, Coaches Becoming, on what it means to become a mature coach. Also published in Organisations and People, June 2024.
What is the price of Experience? Do men buy it for a song?
Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price
Of all that a man hath.
– William Blake, The Four Zoas
1)
I first came to appreciate William Blake’s work as a young man, drawn to his idealistic sentiments expressed in vivid imagery.
Now, in what may be called my maturity, I read his verse anew with the disenchantment of experience.
I recognise the allure of what he calls “the easy thing” – “to talk of patience to the afflicted/To speak the laws of prudence to the homeless wanderer.”
I shudder at my collusions with the glib language of organisations – the promises of wellbeing, social responsibility and inclusion.
Within a society that can’t decently house its people and seems resigned to the resurrection of food banks.
As humans burn the world.
What does it mean to be a mature coach at such a time?
A question posed by my participation in the Critical Coaching Group’s “becoming” project.
The notion of becoming evolved out of the group’s explorations of coach maturity.
But becoming and maturity are not equivalents.
Maturity suggests arrival, the possession of wisdom – acquired, as Blake attests, at some cost.
Becoming suggests transition and speaks perhaps not to maturity but to ageing.
Some of us in the CCG’s discussions have reached a stage in life where moving on from a full working career is on the agenda.
But moving on to what?
These questions of maturity and becoming are pertinent for me, having recently reached my sixties.
Enjoying the maturity of my practice, I nonetheless contemplate whether, when and how to draw my professional coaching life to a close.
This raises the possibility of becoming, of course – a transition to something new.
But, more pertinently, there is unbecoming.
A hesitance to let go inhibits my becoming.
What am I, if I am ceasing to be a coach?
2)
Becoming a coach in the first place was an act of maturation.
I came to coaching having been a journalist.
My development as a coach, in middle age, was a synthesising of life experience with new skills in pursuit of a practice of service and entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurship is a self-aggrandising term for the business-building that accompanied the unfolding of my professional practice.
“Wisdom,” said Blake, “Is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy.”
I certainly paid my dues in that place.
In time, buyers came.
Nonetheless, through 16 or 17 years’ practice, my professional identity was that of a coach becoming – always in development, never arriving.
Then something changed and I began to notice the exit.
During the Covid lockdowns, I began to feel disconnected from the coaching profession and the professional questions it was addressing through CPD workshops, courses and articles.
To some extent this was a reflection of prospective retirement, however distant, and a consequent diminishment in the impetus for continuing professional development.
But I was also feeling that CPD, and the attendant debates in the profession, were not meeting my needs as a mature practitioner.
Maturity can signify a harvesting of wisdom, but it can also signify ossification.
Perhaps both these dimensions were present in my disposition.
I was noticing a confidence in my intuitions and instincts, borne of experience.
I was also feeling that the broader social and political currents that inform debates around coaching were reflecting the preferences of a younger generation.
Perhaps it was time for me to step aside.
If you recall that some of the debates that came to the fore around this time concerned climate change, racial equity and gender identity, you should not read into this any particular interpretation of where I stand on these issues.
What I was detaching from was the stridency with which colleagues in the coaching community – and indeed the wider corporate world – were colluding with new and only partially thought through orthodoxies.
My professional practice champions resistance to received thinking and advocates space for thinking through questions for oneself.
If this space was closing down in the supply and demand for coaching, I wondered how much longer this would be a profession in which I could thrive.
3)
The Critical Coaching Group – described by its convenor, Daniel Doherty, as a confederacy of mavericks – provided a forum in which I could continue to pursue professional development while indulging a doubtful mien.
Their exploration of maturity and becoming, at just the time when I was questioning my path, addressed my need for deeper, more spacious developmental enquiry.
Among the words that reverberate in our conversations are prodding, provoking, curiosity, challenge, enquiry, transgression, iconoclasm, non-conformism.
There is also a collective identity of being practitioners at the top of our game.
This is the territory of maturity and it resonates with me.
To a point.
Implicit in the construct of maturity is a conviction that one has reached a degree of mastery and can settle into a more fluid, spontaneous style of practice.
I indulged in believing this of myself for a while.
But I find mastery to be a dangerous and self-deluding bauble.
It poses great risk to a practitioner if it induces suspension of (self-)critical thinking.
The moment of greatest knowing is when we become most oblivious to our blind spots.
If I had reached a point of self-proclaimed mastery, this was surely another signal that my useful life as a coaching practitioner was nearly spent.
This is a contradiction of my maturity: the completion of my becoming a coach incubates the seed of a new unbecoming.
4)
In retrospect, my whole becoming as a coach was an act of unbecoming.
Not only did this entail the unravelling of the identifications of my previous career but of the constructs of coaching that I brought into my initial formation and those I acquired further along the way.
To begin with, I bought into stuff about goals, plans and solutions.
They reflected my belief in a world that was manageable and susceptible to well-intentioned human intervention.
Nowadays, I hold these ideas lightly if at all – dispelled by years of mendacious leadership, political chaos and inertia on climate and biodiversity.
Also along the way, I have integrated ideas from other domains about which I am now more sceptical.
These include mindfulness, psychodynamics, critical theory.
On the other hand, a constant through my working life has been an attachment to story.
Our drive to narrate believable stories seems to me to be core to how we structure reality and make sense of a complex and sometimes disorderly world.
Beyond cognitive sense-making, telling and witnessing stories are acts of social connection and thus emotional and existential validation.
It is the relational act of storytelling that gives coaching meaning.
My facility with this dimension of my practice is not something I will let go, however my commitment to being a coach evolves.
5)
In our collective reflections in the Critical Coaching Group, we have wondered if maturity might be viewed as the reaching of a terminal point in one’s professional development.
I find this a relevant insight.
No longer becoming a coach, I am a mature coach.
Yet still becoming.
While unbecoming.
If my earlier drive to acquire development as a coaching practitioner has diminished, this does not signal an end to development per se but a shift of focus.
I’m drawn to a post-coaching existence that doesn’t eliminate coaching from my life but integrates it in a looser way.
My desire to work as a coach is balanced by an awareness of unfinished business in other parts of my life to which I want to attend as I enter my Third Act.
The gifts that coaching can offer have always struck me as too narrowly distributed.
And not just that.
Insofar as coaching functions as part of the repertoire of corporate life, I find it has insufficient impact on the values and practices of corporates.
Organisations are best construed as artificial intelligences impervious to the ministering of a peripatetic professional coach.
Coaches might earn a living through them but they may have more impact on the world by conducting their practice elsewhere.
It is this pursuit of impact that interests me now, admittedly because the exigencies of earning a living are less pressing at this stage of life.
It turns out that maturity is a function of economics as much as experience.
Vogel Vault 