Weeknotes #45: Ready to feel Everything?

On a success-metric that allows for the full spectrum of emotions

You are reading Coaching Weeknotes by Roxana Bacian: explorations at the intersection of inner-growth, coaching practice and organisational change-work.

‘Are you ready to give up making a difference?’
- Eight Fearless Questions by Margret Wheatley


I was watching Giselle by Akram Khan last night.

It was after a long day with both a supervision and a therapy session. As I sat watching the sea of people creating a myriad of patterns of movement on the stage, I thought about how my therapist both delighted and ennerved me. Years ago I would have seen it as a weakness, this ambivalence, but tonight it felt different. I thought to myself, what if a ‘good’ realtionship is one where you feel everything rather than a monotone experience. Often, we work towards goals that are imobile, but what if we aimed for highly mobile organisations, teams, outcomes?

This points to where I am right now with coaching - in a place of reorientation, or of redefining who I am and what I offer. This comes off the back of a long personal journey of healing in therapy that is still ongoing. My supervisor invited me to reflect on how emerging from a crevasse of profound trauma and learning to manage its effects might be a useful experience in supporting people and organisations in navigating seismic transformation.


‘Organisational and social change is an iterative developmental process.’
David Rooke and William R. Torbert, Seven Transformations of Leadership


It’s good to write about not knowing where the work is going and what the impact might be. Because it’s only one point in time, a point on the map where the coordinates vanish for a little while, only to be delivered on the other side with more depth, readiness for uncertainty and capacity to hold transformation as it unfolds. The coaching conversations I look forward to fill me with positive dread, a sense of terrifying unknown with a tinge of curiosity and a whole lot of confidence that the people involved have the capacity to utilise that unknown with humility.


‘Becoming clock-builders, instead of time-tellers.’
- Jim Collins, Level 5 Leadership Traits


So, are you ready to feel everything? About that relationship, project, team, outcome? To see where it takes you. To let yourself be surprised. I’ve lived my professional life, for a very long time, from the perspective I inherited from my father and others - that to know fully is the only measure of good work. But the more I do this work, I learn that so much about what makes transformation and change and growth possible is allowing ourselves to not know. Including not knowing whether we can weather this moment. Often, before I do a hard thing, I say to my therapist, ‘I don’t think I can do this’. And every time she sits still looking back at me, and all I hear back is love.

Maybe it’s okay not to know if we’ll make it through.

Maybe it’s the bravest thing we’ll do.

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I’m available for: 1-2-1 and Team Coaching contracts and roles. It’s for you if you are a person or team compelled by all the ways in which you still need to grow, who wants to hone in on presence and intuition in their work, solidify their vision and put it out into the world.

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E-mail: roxanabacian@gmail.com
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