Sophie Howarth's wonderful Department Store for the Mind arrives in the world today, and I'm thrilled that she asked me to write about the relationship between insight and coaching for the launch. I wanted to capture something of the exquisite possibility that arises when we meet someone who's dedicated to helping us see ourselves and our lives more deeply.Head over to the store to read more on insight by poets, scientists and philosophers, and to see the range of beautiful and inspiring things that Sophie and her team are bringing to the world.
Coaching, and the enigma of insight - for Dept. Store for the Mind
So much of who we are is invisible, hidden in the vast background of our minds, the familiar habits of our bodies, and the culture in which we swim. It’s as if the conscious mind, which we usually think of as ‘I’, is one tiny part of a deep and mysterious ocean that is more truly who we are. Because of this, insight can be difficult for us to come to alone. And so when we’re in difficulty we can benefit enormously from having a coach alongside us - another human being with the language, courage, and kindness to show us who we are, bring what’s hidden into the light, and help us work with what we find about ourselves in fresh and life-giving ways.
Years ago, a good friend taught me to look up more as I walked the streets of London.There is exquisite and fascinating architecture hidden, in plain view, above us.I remember how important it was to discover that I look at my own city in a very particular, habitual way that hides surprising and important features of the world. And if it's true for the way I look at a city, it's equally true of the way I look at people, including myself, and at life.There's so much that I miss, and so much I choose not to see. And when I'm bored, or stuck, or frustrated, or desperate, or exasperated with people, the surprising, exhilarating, troubling, mysterious features of the world that could liberate and illuminate are invisible to me.Not because they're not there, but simply because I'm not looking. 
There are, I was reminded this morning, really only two orientations to the world.One is fear. The other is love.And everything follows from which we choose.There are endless reasons to live from fear if we so wish, and almost anything can be its source. Our fear that we will lose people, property, identity, and all the ways we know ourselves. Our fear of illness. Our fear of growing old. Our fear of dying. Our fear of not being loved. And of losing love. Our fear of not having enough. And, this Monday morning in the cities of Europe, our fear of the world's instability and our own insecurity. And all the fear that arises when we see that we cannot control the world or what happens to us in it.I think it's necessary to allow ourselves to feel fear when it comes. To do otherwise is to deny our care for what matters to us. Our fear shows us our care for our lives, and for our society, and for the people we love. Our care for our lovers and partners and friends and children. Our care for our freedom.To deny our fear is to push part of ourselves away, into the shadows, where it can have much more of a grip over us than when brought into the light. When we don't feel our fear we easily find ourselves living from it, constructing our lives from the midst of its constricting, narrowing grasp and all of the reactivity and self-obsession it brings.I've come to understand that when I'm in the grip of unnamed fear, there's so much that I don't see. I don't see the stability and resilience of the society in which I live. I don't see what a blessing it is to sleep in my house at night safe from the terror of shelling and bombing. I don't see what a gift it is that I can meet with whom I choose and where I choose, and have the freedom to express my thoughts, feelings and commitments openly. That my children get to go to school. That we have food to eat, and water to drink, and systems to bring it all to us from across the world. That I have wide open choice about what work to do, and how to do it. That my family are cared for by health systems, and transport systems, and by a system of law and order that is so easily part of the taken-for-granted background. I forget that this is true even when terrible, frightening things are happening in a city only a few hundred miles away and, perhaps, in time, in my own city too. And I forget that in many parts of the world none of these blessings are a given.When I'm in the grip of my fear I forget how much more there is to bring to the world than worries about my own safety. From fear I hardly have any sense of the power and possibility of my own contribution. From fear my world shrinks to the tiniest of proportions.On this Monday morning in the cities of Europe, I am reminded how afraid I can be and how easy it would be to live this way.And it's for all these reasons, it seems to me, that it's our responsibility whenever we can, not to turn away. To feel our fear, and talk with one another about it. To see what it shows us about what matters to us, and then to respond as fully and as generously as we can - to ourselves and to those we meet - from love.
When you’re irritated or annoyed with someone for the way they’re being, you may think “I would never be like that”.But the intensity of your irritation could be a sign that you’re experiencing a shadow side of yourself – a part of you, seen reflected in them, that you deny and which you do your best to keep out of view.Pushing the other person away is an attempt to push away the part of yourself you’d rather not see.And instead of believing all your judgements, you could start to recognise that what you’re seeing in them is, indeed, just like you. And then you have the possibility of reaching out to them with compassion rather than hostility, learning more about yourself, and healing what’s pushing the two of you apart.
Finding out 
We'd had a testy exchange earlier in the week and by the time we met, I was sure that he really had it in for me.Except, he quite probably didn't. But I was quite sure of how he was going to be in this interaction, and who I was in response. And so I was careful, detached, defensive, and withholding of myself. And the more I was that way with him, the more his sense of distrust and discomfort with me was amplified. Pretty soon we were both spinning away from one another in a spiral of distance and mutual recrimination.And what's startling about this is not, perhaps, the obvious point that my story about all this shaped how I was with him. It's that my story about him also profoundly affected how he was with me. We don't just shape ourselves with the stories we tell ourselves. We shape one another, bringing each other forth even when we might think our stories and interpretations are private and personal.Seeing this opens up enormous possibilities.Firstly, and most immediately, that I might actively work to see what interpretation I'm bringing to people and situations, and believe my own stories less readily.And, secondly, we might start to question the highly individualistic accounts we have about what happens in our organisations. Because if the way he is with me is shaped by my stories, how much more so is the way we all are in our work shaped not just by our own stories but by the stories of all those we are around.In our organisations, and in our communities, we are all bringing one another into being. This renders many of our simplistic cause-and-effect accounts of performance and outcome very shaky indeed. And it ought to have us deeply question the way we give feedback, hold one another accountable, carry out performance reviews, explain success and failure, and blame others when things don't go the way we'd hoped.
I can think. I really can.I can think long, and hard, and deeply, about complex problems.And because I can do it well, I often live as if that's all there is to do in the world. To think, and to solve, and to work it out. As if this is what I'm here for.It's got me a long way. It brings many blessings. But it also creates great difficulty.When I live in this way, I have a propensity to believe the truth of my thinking, far beyond its actual truthfulness. I try to understand that which cannot be understood in this way - life, or relationships, or what I'm here to do. I think myself away from situations where what's called for is stepping further in. I seal myself away from the world with a shield of thought. And I judge myself mercilessly for not yet having thought enough or well-enough.When I live this way, my mind is never still. There is little room for mystery, awe, and wonder. I'm anxious (because no amount of thinking is ever enough). And because of this I'm working, hard, all the time, to work it all out.And what gets forgotten is that there are other kinds of wisdom upon which I can call. The wisdom of others. The wisdom of my heart. The wisdom of my body. The wisdom of breath. The wisdom of not-knowing, and of un-knowing. The wisdom that can only come from stillness.And my work, if I am to be fully in life, is letting go enough, surrendering enough, opening enough to let these other kinds of wisdom in.
What it takes to learn to walk:
Mostly we experience ourselves as separate from one another.We experience the way our bodies are separated from one another in space, the way our personal life history is distinct from that of others, and the apparent hiddenness of our inner world. And we conclude that in some fundamental sense the distance between us and others is unbridgeable, that we are alone.And it’s no wonder, because as well as what we see, the public discourse of the past 300 years or so has encouraged us to relate to life in this way. 
Our repetitive, habitual patterns – and our ability to create them – can be great supports in our lives. Who would want to have to reinvent every day the familiar paths we rely upon to get us up, dressed and fed? Or those that support us in navigating our way through our houses and cities, or in driving our cars? Or those that help us relate to the people closest to us?And yet there are times when our patterns become unwanted, because we’ve outgrown them or because they no longer serve the situations in which we find ourselves. Many of the changes we encounter in life – entering or ending a relationship, becoming a parent, losing a loved one, a promotion at work, changing career, stepping into a leadership role, growing from childhood to adulthood – require us to be able to identify the patterns that are no longer supporting us and let them drop away so that something new can be learned.But this can be far from easy. Often we don’t know our patterns well enough to be able to work with them. And even if we know them, we don’t always know what to do in order to break free.I'll be taking up this topic, as well as introducing