Paying for wisdom

Once upon a time I participated in a poetry workshop led by Robert Berold. He mentioned two things which struck me, and have reverberated to this day: the first was a rhetorical question designed to show us how he thought about poetry. He was reading a poem by one of us. He stopped, looked up and asked quietly, apparently of no-one, "What is the energy of this poem doing? Where is it going?".
Those two questions taught me how to leap beyond words to the energy that permeates words.

The second thing that he said that afternoon was a criticism of my own poetry. He read something I had written, pondered for a moment, turning it inside -out, and then said, "Poetry isn't about wisdom."

It baffled me at the time, but the more I have thought about it, the more I agree. I don't really know what poetry is about, essentially, because whoever writes poetry has an singular fingerprint for each poem, and you have to read with the intention of grasping that which moves at a pace beyond verbal understanding.

I begin to have the same appreciation for coaching. The essential activity of coaching is communication, and the purpose and meaning of the communication also imprints singularly and uniquely. If the coach comes with a system, the system may work well or not at all. If you read a novel or watch a movie knowing in advance the nuances of the plot, the quirks of characterization, the tension of dialogue and the final outcome, most of the fun disappears.

I've said before that I don't really like the label "coach" because it implies that I can do something better than you can, and thus you pay me to tell you my secrets. My secrets are for free, my time is valuable.

So what is the valuable crux of communication in the executive, life, health, educational, spiritual, creative coaching that spans the bridge between professionalism and industrialization? I would answer in two words: truthfulness and wisdom. Put more practically, by this I mean that truthfulness is that you know what's going on, and wisdom means you know how to deal with what's going on.

Why would you want someone to tell you what's going on in your own business and what to do about it? Why would you want someone to tell you how to go about living your own life? Or how to relate to others?

One of my psychology tutors remarked, "If we had more friends, we'd need fewer psychologists."

Perhaps, if we had a more free-flowing truthfulness, we'd use fewer coaches. Perhaps, if we communicated with each other less in terms of roles and more from our places of wisdom, we would hone our purpose of  the moment more quickly and sharply.