November 26, 2025 • 36 mins
In this episode, Claire Pedrick and Dan Tyndall explore the parallels between coaching and the Christian season of Advent, exploring themes of faithful waiting, holy anticipation, and embodied hope.
Dan shares his journey from being a vicar to embracing coaching, emphasizing the importance of presence and allowing insights to emerge naturally. He describes coaches as companions in the journey of discovery, offering support and witnessing the birth of new insights.
Contact:
- Contact Dan through https://www.148coaching.com/ or dan@148coaching.com
- Contact Claire by emailing info@3dcoaching.com or check out our Substack where you can talk with other listeners.
Further Information:
- Subscribe or follow The Coaching Inn on your podcast platform or our YouTube Channel to hear or see new episodes as they drop.
- Find out more about 3D Coaching and get new ideas and offers in our weekly email.
Coming Up:
- The Power of Eldership in Coaching with Bob Singha
Keywords:
coaching, Advent, faithful waiting, holy anticipation, embodied hope, personal growth, presence, insights, journey, support, transformation, discovery, vicar, coach, Christian season, mindfulness, empowerment, reflection, spiritual growth, community
We love having a variety of guests join us! Please remember that inviting someone to participate does not mean we necessarily endorse their views or opinions. We believe in open conversation and sharing different perspectives.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hello, we're coming to the end of the year.
We're coming to the end of Season 5, actually, of The Coaching Inn.
And today's episode, I'm in conversation with a friend of mine, Dan Tyndall who's apriest, who emailed me a year ago at this time of year and said, isn't coaching a bit like
(00:25):
the Christian season of Advent?
where we're faithfully waiting, watching with holy anticipation and embodied hope.
And we agreed to have a conversation here with you listening in because we wanted tounpack this and uh see what you think and see what connections you make between waiting,
(00:55):
anticipation,
and embodied hope.
with coaching and with what we do in our conversations.
whether you have a faith or no faith or wherever you are in the world, have a listen andwe would love to have a conversation with you.
(01:15):
So email us info@3dcoaching.com and let's keep the conversation going.
Hello and welcome to this week's edition of The Coaching Inn.
(01:38):
I'm your host, Claire Pedrick.
And today I'm in conversation with somebody who I have known for a very long time, who isalso now a coach.
I thought I'd tell you that I've known him for a long time, because you'll work it outotherwise very quickly.
Might as well be honest, name the elephant, as we say in coaching.
Dan Tyndall, welcome to The Coaching Inn.
Thank you, Claire.
(01:59):
Very good to see you.
So a year ago, Dan sent me an email and said, Claire, I've been thinking it feels likecoaching is a little bit like the Christian tradition of Advent, which is, I will get Dan
to tell you about that.
So I said, oh, come to the coaching in next year so that we can share that at thebeginning of December.
(02:23):
So what a delight to be
online with you.
Last time we met we met at music festival.
We did, we did.
We had a lovely conversation then.
And the sunshine and the sun was going down and getting a little darker and colder, I seemto remember.
But it was good.
and we suddenly realised after that, when the conversation was over and your friends andyour wife came to get you that it was dark.
(02:52):
We do have the ability to natter.
I'm slightly worried about keeping this to 30 minutes, but there we go.
we go.
We will.
We will.
tell us a little bit about you and about how you have recently found yourself in coaching.
So I have been ordained for over 30 years and I spent the last 12, 13 years as Vicar of StMary Redcliffe in Bristol.
(03:15):
It's a large church with a staff team of some 25 people, a turnover of 1.5 million.
We have a heritage asset building, they have a heritage asset of a 14th century Gothicbuilding which is just the most splendid thing to walk into.
But that is set within one of the most deprived neighborhoods in the city centre ofBristol.
(03:39):
So trying to manage that um moment where uh visitors, worshipers, parishioners all cometogether with a staff team was what we were about.
And we did that under the strap line of singing the song of faith and justice.
So I used an awful lot of the coaching techniques that you taught me.
(04:02):
20 years ago.
And now I have taken my pension.
We've moved to London.
We live, we've downsized on speed into a what we consider to be a very small house.
I know a lot of people live in houses this size, but for anyone who's ever lived inChurchwind and Vicarages, you'll get a sense of what I mean.
um In Battersea, my wife now walks to work rather than commuting on God's wonderfulrailway.
(04:30):
And I am
Well, my strap line now is I'm trying to make a different difference.
So I'm leaning into the coaching and my aim is to...
My passion has always been about what goes on beyond the church walls.
Now I find myself beyond the church walls and I'm wondering how far out I can push mypassion for those who are on the margins, whose stories don't get told, whose voices
(04:59):
aren't heard and how I can use coaching.
to enable people to give voice to what's within them.
Nice.
So that could be a completely different podcast, couldn't it?
Changing direction, bringing everything that's in you from the work that you did both as apriest, but also as a kind of leader of a small to medium enterprise.
(05:23):
But let's stay with what we agreed, if we possibly can.
So just explain to us, what is the Christian...
Festival tradition of Advent.
Okay, so let's just add yet another thing onto that list of things we could spend anotherpodcast talking about, which is the Christian theology of Advent, which is not Countdown
(05:49):
to Christmas, despite what the commercial world does.
I understand that Advent calendars have to start on the 1st of December and then on 25th,because otherwise it'd be commercially unviable to produce them.
Advent does not start, except occasionally,
on the first of December.
It starts on the first Sunday in the season of Advent.
(06:10):
So it's not a countdown to Christmas, but what it is, I don't think we've got time to gointo either, which is the preparation for, as Christians would describe it, the second
coming of Jesus, when God will be revealed in all God's fullness.
There'll be judgment, but not the bad kind that we always think of when we think ofjudgment.
(06:30):
And there will be...
all things have been made right.
think it's worth just pointing to three people.
uh Fleming Rutledge called Advent the midnight of the Christian year, a season of hardhope and paradox, of incarnation and second coming, of light and darkness, of judgment, of
(06:55):
hope and of resistance to despair.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was writing from prison in the Second World War, frames Advent asa radical waiting.
He said, the door is locked.
and can only be opened from the outside.
And Jürgen Maltmann talked about a future-oriented hope that changes the present.
(07:17):
So there's something about, know, it's all kind of, for Christians, it's all brought alivein those wonderful open new worlds of John's gospel, the light shines in the darkness and
the darkness shall never overcome it.
So those are the things that came out last year from a sermon preached by my
colleague at the time, Laura, Laura Verrall-Kelly who spoke of Advent as a watching withfaithful waiting, watching with holy anticipation and watching with embodied hope.
(07:51):
which made me wonder how you might think of those overlaps with the coaching world.
How do those align with ICF core competencies?
How do they align with Whitmore's GROW model, with Nancy Kline, with your own work?
Which is why I sent you that email.
(08:12):
you
isn't it interesting because I think I talked in Simplifying Coaching about coaching asbearing witness.
But I think it was and I think it was just it was a line.
And then I think we talked about it again in The Human By and the Coach.
And I'm noticing that either I'm talking about it more or people are are liking thatdefinition of the work that we do.
(08:40):
which is the being with and the bearing witness.
And in the context of bearing witness, what beautiful facets those are.
know, faithful waiting.
What was the second one?
Anticipation.
Yeah.
in the Christian context or faith-based context, you spell H-O-L-Y, but I don't see anyreason why it couldn't be spelled W-H-O-L-L-Y.
(09:14):
Yes, whole anticipation, that sense of presence and agency in the conversation.
We are anticipating something happening.
And it's that notion of waiting.
You had a conversation with em I'm never going to remember these names of people you'vespoken to, but he it was a really long one that you did over three or four sessions.
(09:39):
Was it possibly?
And he was talking about the pregnant pause.
And when he talked about the fact he didn't like the notion of pregnant pause, I recoileda bit listening to that.
And it was really interesting because in the next episode you had viewers
Listeners comments on it and a woman came in and said I was Very surprised that he talkedabout a pregnant pause as being something that was not a good thing And I was really
(10:09):
pleased to hear that because I'm I'm aligned more with her than with him that sense of apregnant pause is just so It's so sticky in a moment of just kind of going something is
going to to pop
If we wait long enough, and I guess just putting those two things together makes mewonder, how do we know that we're not getting stuck in a conversation, but it's a pregnant
(10:39):
pause, not uh just a stuckness?
love what you said there because it reminded me I, I had, because I forget what I talkabout, as you know.
But I've talked a lot about sticky silence.
But as you're talking, there's something isn't there about sticky waiting?
(11:02):
And, and there's something about believing and trusting that something is going to emergehere.
And that our
job, our role, our place is to bear witness while that happens and not to poke.
(11:23):
Because I think many humans have uh a predisposition or a desire to poke to see whether wecan speed it up.
So I'm the person who I have a, have an, family say have an addiction to fire.
because I love candles and fires and all those things and I just want to poke them to getthem to do the next thing.
(11:49):
And actually what you're describing in faithful waiting, holy anticipation and embodiedhope is that all of that comes without poking.
And you've already mentioned being with, that sense of accompaniment and the embodiednotion of being present.
(12:11):
And it's interesting, a couple of weeks ago I put a note out on LinkedIn just saying wewere going to have this conversation and asked people for their comments.
And a number of people said, well, it's all about being with, isn't it?
That notion of God with us, the incarnation.
This is the...
the Christian terminology for Jesus being born as a human being.
(12:32):
But the incarnation means that God is with us.
Immanuel means God with us.
And therefore we are as coaches, we are by no means God, but we are alongside and we arewith and we are on your side.
And I think that's one of the elements of the hope of the Christian story and that thehope that the coach brings to their clients is that we are on your side.
(12:57):
We have no axe to grind in this conversation.
We have a huge, huge empathic interest in the outcome.
But also it doesn't matter a rap to us.
uh We hold that tension of the centrality of what is going to be, but without anyself-interest and without an axe to grind.
(13:26):
It's not our stuff, as you say.
It's a conversation between two people.
Well, one person's stuff.
And it's so hard when we've been in other roles, I think, to learn to back off um and tolearn to bear witness.
Every day I'm in rooms with people who go and I train to whatever it is, be a doctor.
(13:53):
I train to be a fixer.
I train to be whatever it is.
And it's so hard.
And yet it's in the...
silence and the waiting and the believing that the thing emerges.
(14:13):
But it takes such a lot of nerve, doesn't it?
We were watching our new favourite binge watch on TV yesterday.
uh I can't think, I think it's called Annika.
It's based in Scotland.
She's a detective, of course, because this is me in my leisure time.
So of course she's a detective.
(14:36):
And there's a moment in this episode, which is a side, it's not a spoiler, because it's asort of side to the whole, you know, it's nothing part of the main part of the plot, but
somebody goes, somebody goes into labour, when she's the only person with her on thisremote Scottish island.
And Annika is not the, I don't think she's the first person you choose to be with if yousurprisingly went into labour to have a baby.
(15:04):
And what's interesting is she just is there because she can't, because she can'tintervene.
Then there's a moment where she goes, oh, look, I think the baby's arrived.
So she's, she's the cheerleader.
She's the bearing witness.
She's the, she's the, she's faithfully waiting with this woman and keeps on ringing theambulance to hope the air ambulance will come and save her, but it never does.
(15:31):
But there's something in that, that she's not an expert midwife, and she also doesn't knowthis woman.
And yet she has the skill and the capacity to be alongside and to be with and to bearwitness.
So how, that's really interesting.
I don't think I've seen that.
(15:53):
But where that leaves me, thank you very much.
Where that leaves me is wondering how Annika, if that's her name, can bring hope into asituation where she has no relationship with the woman and no skill as a midwife.
(16:17):
What is it about those of us who find ourselves alongside people?
And here let me just fly a flag for clergy, pastors, ministers, uh faith leaders of allpersuasions and dialects, faiths, denominations, because we do find ourselves in the most,
(16:37):
I'm not saying with any people, but we often get bad rap.
We often find ourselves alongside people.
and entering into conversation where we've no idea where the conversation is going to go.
And in that moment, we have to find what is it about that moment in Annika that enabledher to be the person that she needed to be?
(17:04):
Again, from my world, I'd want to say, well, that's something about the divine spark inall of us, reaching out to the divine spark.
in the other.
And somehow that connectivity between us, because we all share our humanity together, ishow that is held.
(17:29):
And I think the other thing that's fascinating is that there was also something about thebroken bit was the bit that she brought to the holding.
Because there's a, again, this isn't a spoiler, but there's a narrative through the wholeof series one and series two that she has a very bad relationship with her child.
And you watched all that last night, you?
(17:49):
No, in the last week and a half.
Yes, our brokenness is...
uh Our brokenness is what makes us whole.
Yeah and it was her but it's absolutely for sure her brokenness because I think herbrokenness made her know that she didn't know what to do.
(18:17):
Well, again, can I just link that into the Christian narrative as well?
I mean, I know this isn't about Advent, this is about Sunday, this is about sharing breadand wine.
Some Christians call it the Last Supper, some people call it Mass, some people call it theEucharist, some people don't do it at all.
And I'm not making any judgment about that.
But for me, we are made whole as Christians by the very fact of sharing and receivingsomething that is broken.
(18:44):
And we can only be whole.
by receiving someone else's, Jesus's, brokenness in a piece of bread, a sip of wine.
And I think there is that notion of knowing deep within ourselves that we have to wait tobe made whole by the other.
And I guess that takes us back to holy anticipation.
(19:08):
Our clients are waiting for their insights, their new idea, their new understanding ofwhat their question is.
But we're not unchanged in the encounter by any means.
And I find myself being able to remember the formal coaching conversations I've had overyears in a way that only very, very particular conversations I've had about dying, about
(19:38):
funerals, usually those things of oh ultimate significance to either the individual or thefamily.
They're just large.
They are forming me as a human being, as I am being useful to someone else's self-forming.
um
(20:06):
reminded as we're talking of there's a Brene Brown quote which I can't rememberspecifically but it's something about being a midwife and when you're a midwife you can't
have the baby all you can do is stand next to the person and be there for them becausebecause you can't have the baby
(20:30):
And that's the same in coaching, isn't it?
We can't do the thing and we can't have the insight.
And I think one of the things that I often talk about with coaches is as you can see theinsight coming over the hill.
You can't say, here comes the insight, because as soon as you say, here comes the insight,it's gone.
(20:51):
They start looking for it, don't they?
Yeah.
In fact, my therapist did that with me the other day.
She said, so I said something and then she gave me a look and I went, she's very good atthe look.
And I said, sorry, what do you mean?
And she said, well, what did you just say?
And I said, I just said this, but what do you mean?
(21:11):
Because I hadn't stayed with what I'd said for long enough to realize what I'd said.
And so she'd said, that's the meaningful bit.
And I'm going, what does, I don't know.
I don't know what that means.
And it took me days to get to it.
I did get there in the end.
So I think when that insight is coming, we just need to back off and let them accept itand welcome it in.
(21:40):
you've had a thought.
well, I love the notion of focusing on the midwife, partly because of the great OldTestament story about shipper and poo-wop, which we'll come back to that later on.
But actually mainly because it just shifts the dial on male-centered power and dynamic.
(22:01):
even, you know, obviously it is mostly women who have babies in all animal spheres.
but in our UK society, it is mostly women who are midwives.
We had a male midwife for our first child 30 something years ago, but that was extremelyunusual then, and I would imagine it's still fairly unusual now.
(22:26):
So even just the very fact of talking about the importance of and how we can use theanalogy of being a midwife, for those of us who are male, pale and stale, it says...
You really aren't everything in the room, you know.
And that's not a bad thing for us to be reminded of.
(22:47):
And it's about humility and control, isn't it?
Because the midwife's job is to make sure it's not out of control.
But also, you're in that space between not being out of control and not being fully incontrol, which is exactly the coaching space.
And you've had another thought.
(23:09):
And you don't have all the skills.
So midwife knows when to point on to somewhere else.
We've got a C-section that needs to happen here.
I've got to get the surgeon in.
Yeah.
And I'm really clear.
We are all clear as coaches.
We are not therapists.
(23:29):
We are not counselors.
We are not psychoanalysts.
We are not anything other than conversation partners.
We will be with you for as long as it is useful and we will tell you, we will find outtogether if I'm not the right skill set for the question you're asking yourself.
(23:58):
I'm not quite sure how that links to Advent, but it's an important point to make.
And the art of the midwife is that they almost always know that in advance of ithappening.
So they can see it on the horizon, can't they?
They can see that there's a, I think so.
I think they can see on the horizon.
(24:18):
Yeah.
And I think back to those moments when I've gone to someone, I really wonder whether I'mthe right person for you to...
And in clergy terms, I've said to people, I can give you priestly counsel, which is how Iframed it, but I'm not a counselor.
If you want proper formal counseling, let's go and find you something somewhere.
(24:42):
So it's all about boundaries.
It's all about boundaries.
Absolutely.
Faithful waiting.
I'm going, I'm taking us back to your email.
Faithful waiting, holy anticipation and embodied hope.
I think the embodied hope one is interesting because um there's something for me there,Dan, about it can't be in our head.
(25:13):
It has to be in our whole body.
And it's the thing about being, what I would call being attentively not bothered.
And that's why we do the improv training so that people can get more robust in theembodied not botheredness.
(25:34):
Because people smell, people can smell when we're freaking out inside, even though wethink we're completely concealing it, can't they?
Yeah, when I've made enough money through this process of being in doing my business, I'mgoing to do the improv course with you, but I want to it in person.
that'll be next year.
I just think it sounds so, it just sounds so exciting, so much fun.
(26:01):
But you're right.
are you?
Right.
Well, let me know.
Let me know.
How is it?
Okay.
Not London.
Not yet.
Okay.
never.
Embodied hope, yes.
And I think there is something about that, which is the both now and not yet.
(26:25):
So we sit in that moment of saying, I can be hope for you for this present moment.
And you can be hope for you as whatever the insight is going to emerge.
emerges.
So it's also it's not about what I do or what you do, it's what we do together.
(26:50):
And that hope is is given more, it's given greater, it's given another dimension.
And that dimension is then added unto by the fact that we don't operate, that the cloakedand the client don't operate oh in a bubble, we operate in society.
(27:11):
So we are saying to our clients, now, why are you going to take this?
Because the time, not the hour, but the time in which we're doing this, is the time ofyour being within society, within community, within work, within family, within whatever.
And in order for this to be really, really embedded, hope, it needs to now embed not in meas the coach, but in a relationship beyond.
(27:42):
So we're saying something about that notion of community and the essence of our humanitybeing found in society and community with one another, which takes us back to incarnation
for Christians.
And don't know what's going to happen.
As you're talking, it reminds me of a coaching session I did last week.
(28:04):
And afterwards I sent her a message and I said, I loved it when you said this.
And she said, I don't remember saying that at all.
She started off the conversation by...
relating some wins from the thing that we talked about last time we were coaching.
And she said, you know, Claire, the thing that happened was I allowed me to.
(28:30):
So that was our final session and I just sent her a message and said, you know, I'vereally enjoyed working with you, da da.
And I loved it when you said, I allowed me to.
She said, did I say that?
Yeah, you did.
But isn't that a beautiful thing?
Because that is exactly what we're talking about here, isn't it?
To enable the thing to allow themselves to do the thing.
(28:55):
Well, I don't know if I'm stretching the point out a little bit too much here, but let metry and go back to the very start of the Advent season, which is that Jesus is going to be
born, so Jesus has to be conceived.
Jesus is conceived in this kind of miraculous way with Mary being a, let's go with thetradition, a virgin, and she says yes.
(29:23):
to the angel who brings the message from God that she's going to be the God bearer, givebirth to Jesus.
And it's in Mary's, yes, that all the rest of this unfolds.
Was that an example of allowing myself to be something?
(29:46):
An empowering moment?
she had no idea what she was saying yes to, did she?
No, A young woman, yeah, I mean, but that's another long conversation about all thatstuff.
But it does, there's an overlap there for me about that sense of your client from lastweek saying, I allowed myself to, and actually we often feel like we have no agency.
(30:17):
And I spend, not in my coaching.
time and more in my clergy time, just encouraging people to lean into the agency that theydo have rather than the powerlessness that they feel, which is often very real.
I started off by explaining my passion for things going on beyond the church walls.
(30:43):
And a lot of people who lived in the middle of Bristol really aren't.
They have very little agency.
to exercise any change.
But that doesn't mean to say they have none.
And therefore, coming together and my little bit of agency going with yours and with hersand with hers and with his, um we end up having just enough agency to, well, one example
(31:09):
like I did years ago, to hold the police superintendent to account for the policing on theestate.
That's why we don't lead in coaching because we want the other person to be able to havetheir agency and grow their agency.
(31:31):
And it's so easy, I think, when it feels as though they're not able or not doing, notstepping in, it's easy for us to step in instead.
And actually, I think what we do then is we reduce their agency when actually ourintention was to increase it, but we accidentally take it away a little bit more.
(31:51):
Yeah, absolutely.
I'm just trying think of an analogy whereby you intervene to seek to increase something,but by your very intervention it necessarily decreases.
I can't think
(32:12):
I'm thinking about a bubble.
And if the person is growing inside the bubble, reaching in to help them bursts thebubble.
Yeah, Well, that's midwife, pregnancy, birth.
I mean, it's all.
a psychoanalyst listening to this, I don't think I want to know what you're thinking.
(32:35):
Yes, but yes.
But there is something about coaching, is about giving birth to new insights or beingalongside someone who gives birth like a midwife does.
Because as you say, midwives can't give birth.
(32:58):
And therefore all the analogies are going to come trotting out on there in terms of uhpregnancy and birthing and things.
I would love to talk to you all day Dan, but I'm also aware that this lovely listener ontheir way to work or on their dog walk has things to do.
(33:22):
Yes, absolutely, absolutely.
So how would you like to finish?
em I don't really have a strong view on that.
What would be useful?
(33:42):
Just go back to those three sentences.
I think that would be a lovely way to finish.
So my colleague Laura Verrall-Kelly in a sermon almost at this time last year, said thatthe Christian season of Advent is watching with faithful waiting, watching with holy
(34:04):
anticipation, and watching with embodied hope.
It's not an idle waiting, but it's alert and it's expectant.
It begins in darkness.
And we have the candles lighting the way towards the end of Advent.
(34:25):
And there's something about that where in coaching whereby we mark those same stages ofprogression towards that ultimate lighting of the light of the new insight that comes.
For me,
(34:46):
as with so much in coaching, it's more about the question that we're talking about in thisconversation than the answers.
The exploration is the journey.
who said that?
R.S.
Thomas, wasn't it?
That sense of, know, and then we'll find ourselves at the beginning of journey and findourselves at the place we always knew.
That's a terrible, terrible misrepresentation of what he put beautifully.
(35:10):
But it's that first sliver of awareness to the birth of something new.
And it's always just a moment of great extraordinaryness, isn't it?
I find.
Thank you.
And I've just realised that we totally didn't take any notice of watch with, which ofcourse underlines one of the greatest skills of coaching, is to notice and to look, but
(35:36):
that's not for now.
But I just, as you said that, I thought, oh, we took the end of every phrase.
Watch with.
Damn, Tyndall.
Well, that's the whole great Advent theme, isn't it?
Watching the great Advent antiphons and that yearning and that watching and that yearningand longing for whatever is going to come.
(36:01):
Thank you.
Thank you, Dan, for coming to the Coaching Inn today.
Thank you, everyone, for listening.
We'll put Dan's LinkedIn in the show notes so you can contact him if you'd like to dothat.
And yeah, we wish you faithful waiting, holy anticipation, and embodied hope in thisseason.
(36:23):
Thank you, everyone.
See you next time.
Bye-bye.
Hello, we're coming to the end of the year.
We're coming to the end of Season 5, actually, of The Coaching Inn.
And today's episode, I'm in conversation with a friend of mine, Dan Tyndall who's apriest, who emailed me a year ago at this time of year and said, isn't coaching a bit like
(00:25):
the Christian season of Advent?
where we're faithfully waiting, watching with holy anticipation and embodied hope.
And we agreed to have a conversation here with you listening in because we wanted tounpack this and uh see what you think and see what connections you make between waiting,
(00:55):
anticipation,
and embodied hope.
with coaching and with what we do in our conversations.
whether you have a faith or no faith or wherever you are in the world, have a listen andwe would love to have a conversation with you.
(01:15):
So email us info@3dcoaching.com and let's keep the conversation going.
Hello and welcome to this week's edition of The Coaching Inn.
(01:38):
I'm your host, Claire Pedrick.
And today I'm in conversation with somebody who I have known for a very long time, who isalso now a coach.
I thought I'd tell you that I've known him for a long time, because you'll work it outotherwise very quickly.
Might as well be honest, name the elephant, as we say in coaching.
Dan Tyndall, welcome to The Coaching Inn.
Thank you, Claire.
(01:59):
Very good to see you.
So a year ago, Dan sent me an email and said, Claire, I've been thinking it feels likecoaching is a little bit like the Christian tradition of Advent, which is, I will get Dan
to tell you about that.
So I said, oh, come to the coaching in next year so that we can share that at thebeginning of December.
(02:23):
So what a delight to be
online with you.
Last time we met we met at music festival.
We did, we did.
We had a lovely conversation then.
And the sunshine and the sun was going down and getting a little darker and colder, I seemto remember.
But it was good.
and we suddenly realised after that, when the conversation was over and your friends andyour wife came to get you that it was dark.
(02:52):
We do have the ability to natter.
I'm slightly worried about keeping this to 30 minutes, but there we go.
we go.
We will.
We will.
tell us a little bit about you and about how you have recently found yourself in coaching.
So I have been ordained for over 30 years and I spent the last 12, 13 years as Vicar of StMary Redcliffe in Bristol.
(03:15):
It's a large church with a staff team of some 25 people, a turnover of 1.5 million.
We have a heritage asset building, they have a heritage asset of a 14th century Gothicbuilding which is just the most splendid thing to walk into.
But that is set within one of the most deprived neighborhoods in the city centre ofBristol.
(03:39):
So trying to manage that um moment where uh visitors, worshipers, parishioners all cometogether with a staff team was what we were about.
And we did that under the strap line of singing the song of faith and justice.
So I used an awful lot of the coaching techniques that you taught me.
(04:02):
20 years ago.
And now I have taken my pension.
We've moved to London.
We live, we've downsized on speed into a what we consider to be a very small house.
I know a lot of people live in houses this size, but for anyone who's ever lived inChurchwind and Vicarages, you'll get a sense of what I mean.
um In Battersea, my wife now walks to work rather than commuting on God's wonderfulrailway.
(04:30):
And I am
Well, my strap line now is I'm trying to make a different difference.
So I'm leaning into the coaching and my aim is to...
My passion has always been about what goes on beyond the church walls.
Now I find myself beyond the church walls and I'm wondering how far out I can push mypassion for those who are on the margins, whose stories don't get told, whose voices
(04:59):
aren't heard and how I can use coaching.
to enable people to give voice to what's within them.
Nice.
So that could be a completely different podcast, couldn't it?
Changing direction, bringing everything that's in you from the work that you did both as apriest, but also as a kind of leader of a small to medium enterprise.
(05:23):
But let's stay with what we agreed, if we possibly can.
So just explain to us, what is the Christian...
Festival tradition of Advent.
Okay, so let's just add yet another thing onto that list of things we could spend anotherpodcast talking about, which is the Christian theology of Advent, which is not Countdown
(05:49):
to Christmas, despite what the commercial world does.
I understand that Advent calendars have to start on the 1st of December and then on 25th,because otherwise it'd be commercially unviable to produce them.
Advent does not start, except occasionally,
on the first of December.
It starts on the first Sunday in the season of Advent.
(06:10):
So it's not a countdown to Christmas, but what it is, I don't think we've got time to gointo either, which is the preparation for, as Christians would describe it, the second
coming of Jesus, when God will be revealed in all God's fullness.
There'll be judgment, but not the bad kind that we always think of when we think ofjudgment.
(06:30):
And there will be...
all things have been made right.
think it's worth just pointing to three people.
uh Fleming Rutledge called Advent the midnight of the Christian year, a season of hardhope and paradox, of incarnation and second coming, of light and darkness, of judgment, of
(06:55):
hope and of resistance to despair.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was writing from prison in the Second World War, frames Advent asa radical waiting.
He said, the door is locked.
and can only be opened from the outside.
And Jürgen Maltmann talked about a future-oriented hope that changes the present.
(07:17):
So there's something about, know, it's all kind of, for Christians, it's all brought alivein those wonderful open new worlds of John's gospel, the light shines in the darkness and
the darkness shall never overcome it.
So those are the things that came out last year from a sermon preached by my
colleague at the time, Laura, Laura Verrall-Kelly who spoke of Advent as a watching withfaithful waiting, watching with holy anticipation and watching with embodied hope.
(07:51):
which made me wonder how you might think of those overlaps with the coaching world.
How do those align with ICF core competencies?
How do they align with Whitmore's GROW model, with Nancy Kline, with your own work?
Which is why I sent you that email.
(08:12):
you
isn't it interesting because I think I talked in Simplifying Coaching about coaching asbearing witness.
But I think it was and I think it was just it was a line.
And then I think we talked about it again in The Human By and the Coach.
And I'm noticing that either I'm talking about it more or people are are liking thatdefinition of the work that we do.
(08:40):
which is the being with and the bearing witness.
And in the context of bearing witness, what beautiful facets those are.
know, faithful waiting.
What was the second one?
Anticipation.
Yeah.
in the Christian context or faith-based context, you spell H-O-L-Y, but I don't see anyreason why it couldn't be spelled W-H-O-L-L-Y.
(09:14):
Yes, whole anticipation, that sense of presence and agency in the conversation.
We are anticipating something happening.
And it's that notion of waiting.
You had a conversation with em I'm never going to remember these names of people you'vespoken to, but he it was a really long one that you did over three or four sessions.
(09:39):
Was it possibly?
And he was talking about the pregnant pause.
And when he talked about the fact he didn't like the notion of pregnant pause, I recoileda bit listening to that.
And it was really interesting because in the next episode you had viewers
Listeners comments on it and a woman came in and said I was Very surprised that he talkedabout a pregnant pause as being something that was not a good thing And I was really
(10:09):
pleased to hear that because I'm I'm aligned more with her than with him that sense of apregnant pause is just so It's so sticky in a moment of just kind of going something is
going to to pop
If we wait long enough, and I guess just putting those two things together makes mewonder, how do we know that we're not getting stuck in a conversation, but it's a pregnant
(10:39):
pause, not uh just a stuckness?
love what you said there because it reminded me I, I had, because I forget what I talkabout, as you know.
But I've talked a lot about sticky silence.
But as you're talking, there's something isn't there about sticky waiting?
(11:02):
And, and there's something about believing and trusting that something is going to emergehere.
And that our
job, our role, our place is to bear witness while that happens and not to poke.
(11:23):
Because I think many humans have uh a predisposition or a desire to poke to see whether wecan speed it up.
So I'm the person who I have a, have an, family say have an addiction to fire.
because I love candles and fires and all those things and I just want to poke them to getthem to do the next thing.
(11:49):
And actually what you're describing in faithful waiting, holy anticipation and embodiedhope is that all of that comes without poking.
And you've already mentioned being with, that sense of accompaniment and the embodiednotion of being present.
(12:11):
And it's interesting, a couple of weeks ago I put a note out on LinkedIn just saying wewere going to have this conversation and asked people for their comments.
And a number of people said, well, it's all about being with, isn't it?
That notion of God with us, the incarnation.
This is the...
the Christian terminology for Jesus being born as a human being.
(12:32):
But the incarnation means that God is with us.
Immanuel means God with us.
And therefore we are as coaches, we are by no means God, but we are alongside and we arewith and we are on your side.
And I think that's one of the elements of the hope of the Christian story and that thehope that the coach brings to their clients is that we are on your side.
(12:57):
We have no axe to grind in this conversation.
We have a huge, huge empathic interest in the outcome.
But also it doesn't matter a rap to us.
uh We hold that tension of the centrality of what is going to be, but without anyself-interest and without an axe to grind.
(13:26):
It's not our stuff, as you say.
It's a conversation between two people.
Well, one person's stuff.
And it's so hard when we've been in other roles, I think, to learn to back off um and tolearn to bear witness.
Every day I'm in rooms with people who go and I train to whatever it is, be a doctor.
(13:53):
I train to be a fixer.
I train to be whatever it is.
And it's so hard.
And yet it's in the...
silence and the waiting and the believing that the thing emerges.
(14:13):
But it takes such a lot of nerve, doesn't it?
We were watching our new favourite binge watch on TV yesterday.
uh I can't think, I think it's called Annika.
It's based in Scotland.
She's a detective, of course, because this is me in my leisure time.
So of course she's a detective.
(14:36):
And there's a moment in this episode, which is a side, it's not a spoiler, because it's asort of side to the whole, you know, it's nothing part of the main part of the plot, but
somebody goes, somebody goes into labour, when she's the only person with her on thisremote Scottish island.
And Annika is not the, I don't think she's the first person you choose to be with if yousurprisingly went into labour to have a baby.
(15:04):
And what's interesting is she just is there because she can't, because she can'tintervene.
Then there's a moment where she goes, oh, look, I think the baby's arrived.
So she's, she's the cheerleader.
She's the bearing witness.
She's the, she's the, she's faithfully waiting with this woman and keeps on ringing theambulance to hope the air ambulance will come and save her, but it never does.
(15:31):
But there's something in that, that she's not an expert midwife, and she also doesn't knowthis woman.
And yet she has the skill and the capacity to be alongside and to be with and to bearwitness.
So how, that's really interesting.
I don't think I've seen that.
(15:53):
But where that leaves me, thank you very much.
Where that leaves me is wondering how Annika, if that's her name, can bring hope into asituation where she has no relationship with the woman and no skill as a midwife.
(16:17):
What is it about those of us who find ourselves alongside people?
And here let me just fly a flag for clergy, pastors, ministers, uh faith leaders of allpersuasions and dialects, faiths, denominations, because we do find ourselves in the most,
(16:37):
I'm not saying with any people, but we often get bad rap.
We often find ourselves alongside people.
and entering into conversation where we've no idea where the conversation is going to go.
And in that moment, we have to find what is it about that moment in Annika that enabledher to be the person that she needed to be?
(17:04):
Again, from my world, I'd want to say, well, that's something about the divine spark inall of us, reaching out to the divine spark.
in the other.
And somehow that connectivity between us, because we all share our humanity together, ishow that is held.
(17:29):
And I think the other thing that's fascinating is that there was also something about thebroken bit was the bit that she brought to the holding.
Because there's a, again, this isn't a spoiler, but there's a narrative through the wholeof series one and series two that she has a very bad relationship with her child.
And you watched all that last night, you?
(17:49):
No, in the last week and a half.
Yes, our brokenness is...
uh Our brokenness is what makes us whole.
Yeah and it was her but it's absolutely for sure her brokenness because I think herbrokenness made her know that she didn't know what to do.
(18:17):
Well, again, can I just link that into the Christian narrative as well?
I mean, I know this isn't about Advent, this is about Sunday, this is about sharing breadand wine.
Some Christians call it the Last Supper, some people call it Mass, some people call it theEucharist, some people don't do it at all.
And I'm not making any judgment about that.
But for me, we are made whole as Christians by the very fact of sharing and receivingsomething that is broken.
(18:44):
And we can only be whole.
by receiving someone else's, Jesus's, brokenness in a piece of bread, a sip of wine.
And I think there is that notion of knowing deep within ourselves that we have to wait tobe made whole by the other.
And I guess that takes us back to holy anticipation.
(19:08):
Our clients are waiting for their insights, their new idea, their new understanding ofwhat their question is.
But we're not unchanged in the encounter by any means.
And I find myself being able to remember the formal coaching conversations I've had overyears in a way that only very, very particular conversations I've had about dying, about
(19:38):
funerals, usually those things of oh ultimate significance to either the individual or thefamily.
They're just large.
They are forming me as a human being, as I am being useful to someone else's self-forming.
um
(20:06):
reminded as we're talking of there's a Brene Brown quote which I can't rememberspecifically but it's something about being a midwife and when you're a midwife you can't
have the baby all you can do is stand next to the person and be there for them becausebecause you can't have the baby
(20:30):
And that's the same in coaching, isn't it?
We can't do the thing and we can't have the insight.
And I think one of the things that I often talk about with coaches is as you can see theinsight coming over the hill.
You can't say, here comes the insight, because as soon as you say, here comes the insight,it's gone.
(20:51):
They start looking for it, don't they?
Yeah.
In fact, my therapist did that with me the other day.
She said, so I said something and then she gave me a look and I went, she's very good atthe look.
And I said, sorry, what do you mean?
And she said, well, what did you just say?
And I said, I just said this, but what do you mean?
(21:11):
Because I hadn't stayed with what I'd said for long enough to realize what I'd said.
And so she'd said, that's the meaningful bit.
And I'm going, what does, I don't know.
I don't know what that means.
And it took me days to get to it.
I did get there in the end.
So I think when that insight is coming, we just need to back off and let them accept itand welcome it in.
(21:40):
you've had a thought.
well, I love the notion of focusing on the midwife, partly because of the great OldTestament story about shipper and poo-wop, which we'll come back to that later on.
But actually mainly because it just shifts the dial on male-centered power and dynamic.
(22:01):
even, you know, obviously it is mostly women who have babies in all animal spheres.
but in our UK society, it is mostly women who are midwives.
We had a male midwife for our first child 30 something years ago, but that was extremelyunusual then, and I would imagine it's still fairly unusual now.
(22:26):
So even just the very fact of talking about the importance of and how we can use theanalogy of being a midwife, for those of us who are male, pale and stale, it says...
You really aren't everything in the room, you know.
And that's not a bad thing for us to be reminded of.
(22:47):
And it's about humility and control, isn't it?
Because the midwife's job is to make sure it's not out of control.
But also, you're in that space between not being out of control and not being fully incontrol, which is exactly the coaching space.
And you've had another thought.
(23:09):
And you don't have all the skills.
So midwife knows when to point on to somewhere else.
We've got a C-section that needs to happen here.
I've got to get the surgeon in.
Yeah.
And I'm really clear.
We are all clear as coaches.
We are not therapists.
(23:29):
We are not counselors.
We are not psychoanalysts.
We are not anything other than conversation partners.
We will be with you for as long as it is useful and we will tell you, we will find outtogether if I'm not the right skill set for the question you're asking yourself.
(23:58):
I'm not quite sure how that links to Advent, but it's an important point to make.
And the art of the midwife is that they almost always know that in advance of ithappening.
So they can see it on the horizon, can't they?
They can see that there's a, I think so.
I think they can see on the horizon.
(24:18):
Yeah.
And I think back to those moments when I've gone to someone, I really wonder whether I'mthe right person for you to...
And in clergy terms, I've said to people, I can give you priestly counsel, which is how Iframed it, but I'm not a counselor.
If you want proper formal counseling, let's go and find you something somewhere.
(24:42):
So it's all about boundaries.
It's all about boundaries.
Absolutely.
Faithful waiting.
I'm going, I'm taking us back to your email.
Faithful waiting, holy anticipation and embodied hope.
I think the embodied hope one is interesting because um there's something for me there,Dan, about it can't be in our head.
(25:13):
It has to be in our whole body.
And it's the thing about being, what I would call being attentively not bothered.
And that's why we do the improv training so that people can get more robust in theembodied not botheredness.
(25:34):
Because people smell, people can smell when we're freaking out inside, even though wethink we're completely concealing it, can't they?
Yeah, when I've made enough money through this process of being in doing my business, I'mgoing to do the improv course with you, but I want to it in person.
that'll be next year.
I just think it sounds so, it just sounds so exciting, so much fun.
(26:01):
But you're right.
are you?
Right.
Well, let me know.
Let me know.
How is it?
Okay.
Not London.
Not yet.
Okay.
never.
Embodied hope, yes.
And I think there is something about that, which is the both now and not yet.
(26:25):
So we sit in that moment of saying, I can be hope for you for this present moment.
And you can be hope for you as whatever the insight is going to emerge.
emerges.
So it's also it's not about what I do or what you do, it's what we do together.
(26:50):
And that hope is is given more, it's given greater, it's given another dimension.
And that dimension is then added unto by the fact that we don't operate, that the cloakedand the client don't operate oh in a bubble, we operate in society.
(27:11):
So we are saying to our clients, now, why are you going to take this?
Because the time, not the hour, but the time in which we're doing this, is the time ofyour being within society, within community, within work, within family, within whatever.
And in order for this to be really, really embedded, hope, it needs to now embed not in meas the coach, but in a relationship beyond.
(27:42):
So we're saying something about that notion of community and the essence of our humanitybeing found in society and community with one another, which takes us back to incarnation
for Christians.
And don't know what's going to happen.
As you're talking, it reminds me of a coaching session I did last week.
(28:04):
And afterwards I sent her a message and I said, I loved it when you said this.
And she said, I don't remember saying that at all.
She started off the conversation by...
relating some wins from the thing that we talked about last time we were coaching.
And she said, you know, Claire, the thing that happened was I allowed me to.
(28:30):
So that was our final session and I just sent her a message and said, you know, I'vereally enjoyed working with you, da da.
And I loved it when you said, I allowed me to.
She said, did I say that?
Yeah, you did.
But isn't that a beautiful thing?
Because that is exactly what we're talking about here, isn't it?
To enable the thing to allow themselves to do the thing.
(28:55):
Well, I don't know if I'm stretching the point out a little bit too much here, but let metry and go back to the very start of the Advent season, which is that Jesus is going to be
born, so Jesus has to be conceived.
Jesus is conceived in this kind of miraculous way with Mary being a, let's go with thetradition, a virgin, and she says yes.
(29:23):
to the angel who brings the message from God that she's going to be the God bearer, givebirth to Jesus.
And it's in Mary's, yes, that all the rest of this unfolds.
Was that an example of allowing myself to be something?
(29:46):
An empowering moment?
she had no idea what she was saying yes to, did she?
No, A young woman, yeah, I mean, but that's another long conversation about all thatstuff.
But it does, there's an overlap there for me about that sense of your client from lastweek saying, I allowed myself to, and actually we often feel like we have no agency.
(30:17):
And I spend, not in my coaching.
time and more in my clergy time, just encouraging people to lean into the agency that theydo have rather than the powerlessness that they feel, which is often very real.
I started off by explaining my passion for things going on beyond the church walls.
(30:43):
And a lot of people who lived in the middle of Bristol really aren't.
They have very little agency.
to exercise any change.
But that doesn't mean to say they have none.
And therefore, coming together and my little bit of agency going with yours and with hersand with hers and with his, um we end up having just enough agency to, well, one example
(31:09):
like I did years ago, to hold the police superintendent to account for the policing on theestate.
That's why we don't lead in coaching because we want the other person to be able to havetheir agency and grow their agency.
(31:31):
And it's so easy, I think, when it feels as though they're not able or not doing, notstepping in, it's easy for us to step in instead.
And actually, I think what we do then is we reduce their agency when actually ourintention was to increase it, but we accidentally take it away a little bit more.
(31:51):
Yeah, absolutely.
I'm just trying think of an analogy whereby you intervene to seek to increase something,but by your very intervention it necessarily decreases.
I can't think
(32:12):
I'm thinking about a bubble.
And if the person is growing inside the bubble, reaching in to help them bursts thebubble.
Yeah, Well, that's midwife, pregnancy, birth.
I mean, it's all.
a psychoanalyst listening to this, I don't think I want to know what you're thinking.
(32:35):
Yes, but yes.
But there is something about coaching, is about giving birth to new insights or beingalongside someone who gives birth like a midwife does.
Because as you say, midwives can't give birth.
(32:58):
And therefore all the analogies are going to come trotting out on there in terms of uhpregnancy and birthing and things.
I would love to talk to you all day Dan, but I'm also aware that this lovely listener ontheir way to work or on their dog walk has things to do.
(33:22):
Yes, absolutely, absolutely.
So how would you like to finish?
em I don't really have a strong view on that.
What would be useful?
(33:42):
Just go back to those three sentences.
I think that would be a lovely way to finish.
So my colleague Laura Verrall-Kelly in a sermon almost at this time last year, said thatthe Christian season of Advent is watching with faithful waiting, watching with holy
(34:04):
anticipation, and watching with embodied hope.
It's not an idle waiting, but it's alert and it's expectant.
It begins in darkness.
And we have the candles lighting the way towards the end of Advent.
(34:25):
And there's something about that where in coaching whereby we mark those same stages ofprogression towards that ultimate lighting of the light of the new insight that comes.
For me,
(34:46):
as with so much in coaching, it's more about the question that we're talking about in thisconversation than the answers.
The exploration is the journey.
who said that?
R.S.
Thomas, wasn't it?
That sense of, know, and then we'll find ourselves at the beginning of journey and findourselves at the place we always knew.
That's a terrible, terrible misrepresentation of what he put beautifully.
(35:10):
But it's that first sliver of awareness to the birth of something new.
And it's always just a moment of great extraordinaryness, isn't it?
I find.
Thank you.
And I've just realised that we totally didn't take any notice of watch with, which ofcourse underlines one of the greatest skills of coaching, is to notice and to look, but
(35:36):
that's not for now.
But I just, as you said that, I thought, oh, we took the end of every phrase.
Watch with.
Damn, Tyndall.
Well, that's the whole great Advent theme, isn't it?
Watching the great Advent antiphons and that yearning and that watching and that yearningand longing for whatever is going to come.
(36:01):
Thank you.
Thank you, Dan, for coming to the Coaching Inn today.
Thank you, everyone, for listening.
We'll put Dan's LinkedIn in the show notes so you can contact him if you'd like to dothat.
And yeah, we wish you faithful waiting, holy anticipation, and embodied hope in thisseason.
(36:23):
Thank you, everyone.
See you next time.
Bye-bye.
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