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Dear friends
For years we ran Thirdspace programmes in person, and there was so much that was beautiful about it. People would travel from all over the country, and the world, to join us at venues in London for our Foundations of Coaching and Professional Coaching Course (PCC). There’s no doubt that there was frequently something magical about being in physical proximity to one another, and in creating the shared sense of safety, mutuality, and intimacy that makes learning possible.
When we rapidly moved our programmes online in March 2020 in response to the pandemic, we had no idea that a totally new and unexpected kind of sacred space for learning would present itself. But 18 months on, and in an October where we’ve just completed two sessions with different PCC groups completely on Zoom (with support from WhatsApp, Slack, and Thinkific), we are more and more sure that this 'online' way of being together opens up extraordinary possibilities that simply aren’t available with in-person programmes.
I think all of this comes about because of the way we human beings are able to relate imaginatively to space and in our ability to ‘bring things near’ even when they are far away. We can, for example, bring things close by the way we choose to pay attention, for example in the way a painting in an art gallery can become closer to us, as we take it in, than the glasses on the bridge of our noses. We can bring our loved ones to our minds and hearts even when they are far across the world and, in this way, people who matter to us can be very close to us even across large physical distances. And we can bring ourselves near to others by making ourselves available to them. Through our generosity of speaking, sharing, and expressing a person who is physically ‘far’ can feel and be nearer to us than someone sitting in the seat right next to us. All of these ways of nearness to one another are quite distinct from ‘physical nearness’ and can be cultivated and practiced intentionally. We’ve learned to put a lot of attention and care into this in the way we open, invite, and facilitate all the Zoom spaces that our programmes are taking place in these days.
There are some features of Zoom that lend themselves very beautifully to creating intimate space in which supportive, responsive, safe-making communities of learning get made. In Zoom space, everyone is equidistant - there’s nobody ‘closer’ and nobody ‘further away’ from anyone else which, with the attention to bringing close that I wrote about above, gives us all the opportunity to be and feel close-in to one another as we learn. Because of this, nobody has to raise their voice to be heard, and everyone can see one another face-to-face, which is immediately impossible with our nearest neighbours in a physical room even if we’re sitting in a perfect circle. It allows for a deeper kind of noticing, welcome and attention to one another. And Zoom has many other features which can help create a strong sense of community and connection - breakout rooms that everyone can choose for themselves and move freely into and out of with dignity and autonomy, the ability to switch between speaker-view and gallery-view which allows a dance between being ‘close in’ and ‘all together’, and the ‘spotlight’ feature which allows smaller groups of people to step into the centre for a conversation, demonstration or exercise. We’ve also become very deliberate these days about constructing our programmes so that everyone can always be seen on a single Zoom screen, so that everybody is always included at every moment.
We're finding that Zoom can make learning together much more inclusive. Everyone gets freed from the need to have substantial resources for travel and accommodation available to them, and the extra time and energy that’s required for moving from place to place. And many people are finding that their home spaces can, with the right preparation, be extraordinarily supportive environments for the kind of openness, generosity, and deep learning about being human that our programmes invite.
All of this, of course, calls on each of us - participants and programme faculty alike - to be purposeful, attentive, and deeply caring in how we use the extraordinary technology that connects us, and we think it’s exactly this kind of exquisite care that produces the deep, vibrant and loving opportunities for learning that are emerging afresh in our work. Our conclusion? It’s not Zoom that causes fatigue or aliveness but our relationship to it - specifically the intention, care and practices that we each bring to it. And the consequence of this is that Zoom can be the source of something wonderfully life-giving, which is quite a different story to the one that’s told about online participation in many other places and settings. Indeed, participants on our programmes keep on telling us that they’ve rarely experienced anywhere else the kind of vibrant aliveness, connection, love and safety to learn in programmes that they are experiencing with us 'on-line'.
And so, as we head into the last part of 2021, we’re deeply committed to continuing to run our transformative programmes online in the way we began 18 months ago. We have a Professional Coaching Course that begins on Zoom in December, a two-day Foundations of Coaching coming up in early November, and an extensive programme of learning and community for our growing group of alumni. And we’ll be so glad to talk with you about any of it and to welcome you through our Zoom doors into something life-giving, inspiring, and extraordinary. With warm wishes
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