Co-coaching for regeneration

2024-02-29

A few days ago I was at a meeting of the GRC and the idea popped up to use the networking time for collaborative coaching. Great idea, I thought. Then I started to do a little background web search and reading. To do justice to this topic, I'll need to do some more careful research, meanwhile I want to write down a few interim thoughts on the topic. These are my own ideas before having the benefit of detailed study. But let's have a go anyway.

What stands between the good intention and the effective action? In our highly complex world, it could be many things, and there is no one simple thing that will make the difference. So I'm reduced to some common-sense thinking, all of which either apply or did apply to me at some point:

• Too occupied with responsibilities in everyday life
• Lack of knowledge relevant to the desired goal
• Lack of skills needed to make progress
• Self-doubt, or lack of belief in self-efficacy
• Lack of an entrepreneurial mindset
• Not finding or connecting with other people able and willing to help
• Missing resources, notably, time and/or money
• Wasting time or energy focusing on ineffective or self-defeating activity
• Being distracted by other things, or inability to prioritise acivities needed for change, or “Attention Deficit”, lack of willpower, etc.

And, indeed, most difficult, which one or more of these is the problem?

There is one that sticks out as different from the others: not finding or connecting with other suitable people. It's different, because the other people, if they really fit the part, can give their opinion on, or sense of, which of these is the problem; how to tackle any one of them; who else could help, etc.

Now, for sure, there are “professionals”, those who make a living helping other people tackle some of these obstacles. And for some of the above that might be the best way forward, if you have the money to pay for their help. But it's worth also considering the potential problems with this, other than just money.

• They are working within the current socio-economic system, so will they be able to advise wisely on getting out of that system? Or will they be suggesting becoming more like them?
• Each individual has their own perspective. Good therapists, counsellors, coaches, careers advisers, even teachers, trainers and tutors attempt as far as possible to take their client's perspective into account, sure; but will one more perspective really shift what is a complex challenge?
• Is there a danger of becoming reliant on the professional, a kind of expensive symbiosis?

If it's not going to be professionals, then it's other ordinary people, and they aren't there just to help me (one could see that as a rather narcissist outlook on life!) therefore there has to be something in it for them. At a more practical level, we might be seeking partners of some sort, but for the moment let's focus on seeking support for some of the obstacles listed above.

Some people are lucky enough to find this kind of support among friends or family, or perhaps within a religious group where there is an ethos of helping each other. However, it's my experience that being well supported by family is not common. It is certainly not a universal solution. It may have been more so when society was much simpler and families were an essential aspect of survival, but now it seems rare for family members to share the same goals, ideals, vision. In our individualistic culture, everyone tends to take their own path.

There are a few peer-oriented approaches out there, and I'll list them below.

So, how would we find people who are motivated to come together to help each other create the change in the world that each wants to see? One obvious point is that the peer group needs to share some degree of vision, purpose, meaning, healing narrative. Let's come back to the difficulty of finding people later. One other way of motivating people would be to let them know – ideally, show them – the benefits of doing what I shall call for today “peer co-coaching”.

This is what I see as the benefits of peer co-coaching over paid coaching.

• People in the group are able to give several different perspectives from their own experience;
  • and the more different perspectives, the more it is likely to help us break out of boxes.
• It's better aligned to my values, more egalitarian, more inclusive.
• There's more potential for emergent collective wisdom.
• There is no pressure on individual helpers to be “right”, as it's only one voice among several.
• Even though we have different challenges, we can all share our experiences of responding in different ways.

If you can imagine the picture I'm building up here, compare this with what I have too often experienced in networking meetings — many people trying to sell their service or idea or course to everyone else — what I'm looking for feels completely different. To get this kind of well-functioning group requires certain attitudes from the participants, and certain group skills, as well as the shared vision or purpose. So I'll look at these next.

The participants in a peer co-coaching arrangement need, in my opinion, to be able to

• resist groupthink or following a guru
• listen with attention, empathy, and reflection
• convey a sense of trust and freedom from judgement
• have at least basic skills in practices such as
  • NVC — nonviolent communication
  • IFS — Internal Family Systems work
  • Some kind of circle practice.

We could add these to the list of skills needed for co-coaching in general. Then we can consider, how can we help people develop these skills? Can we find a way of doing that through peer learning groups, using freely available learning resources?

Needless to say, I do not know of any one place to go for all of this at present. But here are a few things that seem relevant to me. I will add more items, and links to them, as I find good ones.

• Parker Palmer's Circles of Trust, speaking of how we need company ¹⁾
• co-counselling between peer pairs
• residencies, or other deliberately developmental spaces, as advocated by Life Itself
  • these may mix led and peer-managed phases
• Going Horizontal, a book aimed at making business less hierarchical
• Follower guidance (my idea which I need to restore to my site)
• Techniques like Troika consulting from Liberating Structures
• My 2018 paper, Learning and development in a peer-to-peer world
• Inner transition, an offshoot from the Transition Network

This may all sound promising, but how could we go about

• getting people together who can really help each other
• finding people with the right skills and attitudes
• finding people with shared – what? ­– intention? purpose?

If you know what (but not who) you're looking for, the Web provides ample opportunity to search for it, if you have the time and patience. If you don't know what you're looking for, it's a challenge. And if you're looking for a person, it's a huge challenge. And, ironically perhaps, if you had a good peer co-coaching group, sharing knowledge and experience, and dividing up the tasks, would make it much easier to find such people. The chicken and the egg come to mind.

Then there's the issue of dissemination or scaling. To the extent to which my analysis above is useful, it would make sense to bring this kind of peer co-coaching to as many people as possible as quickly as possible, so that people can escape from a sense of powerlessness and frustration, and come into their agency and positive power (with).

If we are looking to seed some process that will actually make a significant difference, it will need to be set up to grow virally, or exponentially. I simply can't see how linear growth could possibly be adequate to tackle the fast growing and worsening problems that face the world.

The first challenge seems to be to find any small number of people to start the process off. If it has been hard to find the people in the first place, it is tempting just to enjoy them, and not look further. There seem to me two ways to continue better:

1. in the way of bio-mimicry, make sure that when a group sets up, it has the intention of spawning, budding or seeding a number of new groups
2. use a system like RegenCHOICE to allow people to find others to form new groups out of nothing.

Not knowing which of these two would be more effective, I would like to pursue both.

I'm just starting off here, so let me propose some starting ideas, to improve on.

1. Knowledge commoning: let's all try to create relevant learning resources where there aren't any, and index and cross-link resources that do exist; and make this into a usable learning resource, through creating a collaborative skills framework, enabling individual learning.
2. Networking: there are plenty of networking membership organisations around, not least the GRC for the world of regeneration — encourage cross-fertilisation, and collaboration around setting up co-coaching groups.
3. Setting up introductory courses: to train in the basic skills, where independent learning may not be effective (just like we need secure parenting, we also need some modelling and instruction to begin with).
4. Clarifying: that we all understand similarly the distinction between
   • spaces and networks for individual learning and meeting people
   • the circles for co-coaching and peer learning
   • working projects for dedicated collaborators.
5. Exploring existing methods like circles of trust and co-counselling.
6. Supporting the development of Web services to help like-minded people meet, to help each other along these pathways.