Aboodi Shabi

Towards the end of her life, my mother, who grew up and lived in Baghdad until she was in her late thirties, developed Alzheimer’s, and started to forget herself during her conversations. Whenever we spoke on the ‘phone, or when we met, she would ask me what I did for a living, and I would try to explain.

It’s never been especially easy for me to quickly sum up just what it is that I do, but explaining coaching to someone whose English wasn’t fluent, and who couldn’t remember anything anyway, was especially trying.

Occasionally, however, she would get it.

And then, she would look at me with a slightly astonished expression on her face, and say “They pay you? To talk to them? Are they mad?”

It’s a story I often tell, and it points to something at the heart of why I do what I do.

We live in an increasingly rational culture, one that believes, in its rationalist way, that there is a solution to every problem. This has penetrated our culture in ways I couldn’t have imagined as a child. Go to any bookshop, and you’ll find rows of shelves devoted to “self-help” books; look on the internet and you’ll find advice on how to deal with any problem you can imagine, and some you can’t.

And yet, despite the mass availability of good advice, of information on how to deal with our problems, of workshops on how to make money, find or maintain relationships, live powerfully, etc, we are still seeking something.

Something else that I often say is that “if self-help books worked, how come we need more than one?”. It’s not that the information out there is bad, or that the courses offered aren’t any good, but it seems there is something missing. Something that people will, despite my mother’s protestations, pay for and which they value.

That something, I think, is listening. Sounds simple, but it’s almost as if the more solutions there are out there, the harder it is to simply be listened to. When we talk to our friends about our challenges, or to our colleagues, then what we often get is advice – “read this book”, “do this course”. Or, worse, we sometimes get told that we should “just deal with it”, or “get over it”.

In other words, we don’t really get listened to – we get “fixed”, or “told what to do”, but we don’t get listened to in the sense of being legitimised in our own experience – we don’t get seen, we don’t get witnessed, we don’t get that connection. We get information and advice instead.

Those of you who have dogs will know that, if you throw a stick for a dog when you are out walking with it, the dog will run after the stick, and then bring it back to you and drop it at your feet for you to throw it again. The dog doesn’t simply want the stick, it wants the connection, the relationship. Information and advice are a bit like the stick.

It’s not that we don’t need advice, or solutions to our problems – of course we do, but often in addition to, and sometimes even instead of, advice or solutions what’s needed is simple listening. In fact, I’d say that’s something that’s so vital and so rare. Sometimes we miss the obviousness of simply giving someone the gift of listening.

I know, from my own experience as a coach, and also from the experiences of the coaches I have trained and worked with, that often the coachee will say that, in coaching (and also in counselling), they have been able to speak of things they have never spoken about before, and that the simple act of being able to speak those things was sufficient.

In the excellent book, A General Theory of Love , the writers Amini, Lewis and Lannon, argue that one of the main benefits of counselling (for which you could also read coaching) is the connection between the counsellor and the client – the limbic connection between them is the healing, not the content.

In summary, I think we can say that the human soul longs, perhaps more than anything else to express itself and be heard or seen. It doesn’t need to be fixed, or told what to do next, or given a solution. It simply longs to be witnessed.

This need has been around since ancient times – Joseph Campbell used to talk about “sacred space” – a space where people would gather to speak of their important matters, and where the act of speaking would in itself be transformative.

I think it’s that space that people are seeking – the space where they can hear themselves, and be witnessed. And, for that, no, I don’t think they are mad to pay.