Weeknotes #44: Welcome to Just Beginning
Making progress by circling back: an ode to choosing growth over complacency
You are reading Coaching Weeknotes by Roxana Bacian: explorations at the intersection of inner-growth, coaching practice and organisational change-work.
‘Those who profess to favour freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.’
- Frederick Douglass via Dismantling Racism
I’ve been drawing numerous Four of Cups, Seven of Pentacles and Nine of Wands in recent tarot readings. These cards all hint to hard work that seems to never end. Oftentimes referring to burnout - keeping going when you feel there’s no fuel left. Butler’s words sum it up well: ‘There is not end to what a living world will demand of you.’ And the most enraging version of this feeling is my therapist asking me to look at yet another blindspot when I had just landed the learning from the last one.
So welcome to just beginning. Again and again.
It’s what I experience in my coaching practice, too. As another autumn arrives, I find myself circling back to old questions such as ‘How do we navigate boundaries as healthily as possible in coaching?’ and new ones such as: ‘What in team coaching can most positively impact a team?’
And I think we’re just arriving at the point of this post, which is continously choosing to grow over complacency. Because we can stop any time, and many times we do. Because life happens, and life is hard. And yet, that’s exactly where organisations become numb or fail. When people stop trying. Either because it’s too hard, too lonely, too ugly, too much of the same. Again and again.
What keeps us moving towards growing? What makes some teams more willing and capable to reach this state together? How much are we really open to influencing each other? How willing to allow things to take longer, to turn out differently, to impact us?
‘In many ways, large and small, as we live our lives, we find ourselves confronted with a brute fact about how little we can know about our futures, just when it is most important to us that we do know. For many big life choices, we only learn what we need to know after we’ve done it, and we change oursevelves in the process of doing it. I’ll argue that, in the end, the best response to this situation is to choose based on whether we want to discover who we’ll become.’
- L.A. Paul, The Vampire Problem
In two weeks’ time I’ll be seeing my supervisor yet another time to bring up the question of boundaries, of responsibility, of care, of understanding where my capacity as coach is over-stretched and where I’ve let it get too loose. Also, in the next few weeks I will continue to work with teams in coaching, supporting people as they continue to choose to grow. These are the teams that have a chance, not at winning, but at experiencing a sometimes-joyful attempt at making a future experience of our systems and relationships infinitesimally more equitable.
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I’m currently available for: 1-2-1 and Team Coaching contracts and roles. If you enjoyed reading this post, let’s continue the conversation:
E-mail: roxanabacian@gmail.com
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