Reflections and practice from the first gathering of outdoor coaches in the world
Working with nature has been part of my coaching practice since my very first session, many years ago.
I remember walking with my client along a beach, and then sitting facing the sea. We explored her desire for greater inner confidence, and reflected on how this would grow her ability to do more for Nature through her job, as well as increase her sense of peace. Watching waves come and go seemed to soften her inner critic, and reinvigorate the relationship with the marine environment she cared so much about.
Since then I’ve been connecting with other coaches who have some form of nature connected practice, and developing my own thinking and experiments here at The Natural Coaching Company. It has, at times, felt like a lonely niche. So it was joyful to join like-minded coaches at the first Outdoor Coaching festival at Henley Business School in July. Some of these folk I have been meeting online, and it felt emotional and very meaningful to finally meet in person. Not least the inspiring Diana Tedoldi, who I have collaborated with for years but never met in ‘real life’!
The world’s first conference of ‘outdoor coaches’
Hosted by the Coaching Outdoors Podcast, this was quite possibly the world’s first conference of ‘outdoor coaches’ and coaches interested in learning about this way of working. It was packed with a dizzying array of coaching approaches – oceans, team systems, mindfulness, embodiment, nature play, nature connection, adventure and more. Anna-Marie Watson, Alex Burn and Paul Jefferies have my greatest respect and admiration for convening more than 70 hours of conversations with outdoor coaches from around the world, and in being so vital to the establishment of this new movement. The UK ICF is shortly to publish an article I wrote with Anna-Marie, that reflects more fully on the importance of the event, and a call to action.
I led a workshop at the event about compassion. I’m very grateful for the positive feedback from the participants, and the requests for a copy of the story I told, in which I asked them to ‘imagine I am the River Thames’. You can find it below with a practice.
First, here is a little more background as to why I think compassion is so central to what I call ‘nature based coaching’.
Compassionate coaching
Too often we think of Nature as another human resource. A utility, a set of services, something we can use for our own benefit. Clearly, there is a vital set of practical and existential human-nature relationships. But we will have failed, I think, if we simply view ‘nature’ as a container for traditional coaching practices, or a unidirectional wellbeing resource. There is an ‘othering’ involved in this worldview – and if we are part of nature, then Nature cannot be ‘other’.
Diana Tedoldi and Tabitha Jayne are highly experienced coaches who have reflected similar views, as have ecotherapists like Martin Jordan and Mary-Jane Rust. In fact, humans have been consistently failing Nature through our utilitarian and dominionistic approaches. Our ‘biophobia’, and its literal and metaphorical paving of paradises and putting up of parking lots. We need a different way of thinking, being and doing.
This new way may actually be an old way – remembering the importance of relating. Carl Rogers, a forefather for modern coaches, believed that change comes about ‘through experience in a relationship’. In this case our relationship with Nature. I believe that nature based coaches – in fact all coaches – need to grow and strengthen the dendrons and tendrils involved in relating to Nature, as well as their inner natures and their clients’.
‘Imagine I am the River Thames’
The workshop approached this from the point of view of a river as the client. As we might listen to a client’s story, what story would the River Thames tell us? What could we understand from it, that might inform new awareness, and action?
Compassion requires listening in order to understanding. To feel into someone’s suffering, so we might be moved to kindness and action. Nature based coaches may, directly or indirectly, benefit their client’s wellbeing and satisfaction with life. By working with compassion, they may also help their clients relate better to Nature. And enable them to tread more lightly and more positively on the earth. Research has shown that people who develop nature connection through pathways such as compassion take more action for the environment in daily life.
‘It would seem then that, ultimately, we each have to serve as judge and jury for our own actions. And that cannot happen unless we develop an affection for Nature and its processes.’
Partha Dasgupta, 2021
If you are interested in learning more about nature based coaching, drop me a line. I am currently planning online training and you can register by messaging me here.
Planet & Person – Exploring Compassionate Coaching
James Farrell, Outdoor Coaching Festival, Henley Business School, 12 July 2024
Why are we interested in compassion?
Why are we interested in compassion? It doesn’t show up in the ICF, EMCC or AC competencies. It isn’t a professional measure of how good we are at coaching. So why? Because we probably all feel that compassion is fundamental to a good and happy life.
2Compassion it is a separate emotion, functionally distinct from empathy, or love. It involves a pair of qualities, acting together which Zen priest Dainin Katagiri calls Karuṇā (suffering) and Maitrī (loving kindness).
As coaches, we feel the sadness and suffering of our clients (Karuṇā) in a way, hopefully, that avoids us becoming entangled – but motivates us to help. Not to fix, or to rescue, but to act with Maitrī – loving kindness.
Compassion is also one of 5 key ways we can find a new relationship with nature – the others being via our emotional responses, senses, the beauty of nature, and the meaning we make. One of the Pathways to Nature Connectedness, that has been shown to deepen our sense of oneness with the natural world.
As nature coaches, our system includes not just the humans in front of us. We are all part of Earth’s system – ourselves, our clients, their communities and ours, other humans and all non-human earthlings.
We could consider Earth to be a ‘client’ of ours. A being for whom we can also feel compassion.
To be compassionate, we need to understand. To understand, we need to listen. Often when I do meet a new client, I ask them to tell me their 2 minute life story.
Imagine I am the River Thames, your client, telling you my story. I invite you to listen with compassion, and seek to understand.
A liquid history
“I shall call it a ‘liquid history’, as did the MP John Burns at the start of the last century.
It is a long and winding history, which began 30 million years ago.
Back then, I was a child of the great river Rhine – but a small tributary and trickle when this island, Britain, was not yet an island. Much more recently, during the great ice age, I changed course and pushed through the hills of the Chilterns. Life was free and easy and I had room to grow.
When the first humans arrived to settle on my banks 10,000 years ago, I was a powerful being, 10 times larger and faster than I am today. I cut through the land as sea levels rose and fell, and I settled into my current meandering form.
In the last 3000 years I changed greatly. People have come and gone. The Romans who established the new town of Londonium, the Vikings who tore it down, and the Normans and Tudors who built it up again.
My forests were felled for agriculture, and later for shipbuilding and fuel. This place, Henley, greatly benefited from the Parliamentary enclosure of common land. The gentry employed famous designers such as Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown and Humphrey Repton to ‘improve’ my landscapes.
This is not a ‘natural’ landscape. The Victorians exerted their own romantic version of ‘biophilia’ – views of water, trees spaced for sight of imaginary predator and prey. Places of status, prospect and refuge, like this Villa. They were also driven by ’biophobia’ – the control of undesirable plants and ‘pests’. The removal of my water meadows and woods for ‘pleasure grounds’. The straightening and tidying of my scruffy edges.
I am at my core a being that dislikes control. I need to breathe in and out – to spill, expand contract flow and pulse. To flood. But urbanisation and landscape change squeezed me in. Walls, embankments and engineering schemes protected people from my worst tempers and allowed them to develop on my margins.
This development came with consequences. I got sick. In 1816 people rode through a flood in the Great Hall of the Palace Westminster amongst dead and dying fish. Parliament was closed in 1857 due to my stink. By 1957 I was declared biologically dead.
I still feel the suffering of the creatures that used to be alive in me before the 1960s. It was a deeply lonely time – can you imagine such a great river completely bereft of life?
Fortunately there were people who listened and understood. Who also felt this suffering, and who took action as a result – especially action to protect people from the unsanitary conditions they had created.
I am grateful for these actions.
There are now more than 125 different species of fish swimming in me, otters sighted along my banks and salmon swimming to spawn.
There is now a greater awareness than ever of the importance of clean and healthy water environments for human life, and for the life of other earthlings.
That is my story, but what do I want for the future?
Like you, like everyone, I want to be happy and healthy.
I want to be free to stretch and grow, to accommodate change. I want to support and nurture others who depend on me as I depend on them. To live. To be a healthy and diverse home to beavers, water voles and dragonflies. Paddlers and swimmers. Boaters and walkers.
Change is possible. The changes since the late 1950s have shown that with a will there is a way. Ask the eel, the lamprey, the sea trout, the seal and the otter. Ask the rare snails that live on my islands, and the countless birds that use me as their second winter home at other end of global migrations.
Ask the people who fought to stop my marshes in East London from being developed for a theme park, places now protected and nurtured for people and wildlife. The super sewer that will tackle sewage overflows from London.
Compassion is what I want. For my suffering to continue to be noticed, and for continued action to restore the health and wellbeing of everyone and everything that is within my influence.
Natural compassion practice: ‘Find, Focus, Feel’
Find A place where you can be comfortable and safe
Focus On the Nature around you. On your connection with the place, the landscape, or particular features like a tree. On the emotions arising. On nature’s suffering.
Feel Compassion for more-than-human-life. River, birds, trees, moss and insects in the grass. Compassion for ourselves and people close to us.
Ask yourself What is mine to do?
References
Coaching Outdoors Podcast (2024). Coaching Outdoors Live 2024 Highlights https://coaching-outdoors.com/coaching-outdoors-live-2024-highlights/
Dasgupta, P. (2021), The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review. London: HM Treasury
Farrell, J. & Tedoldi, D (2021) Let Nature Be Your Coach, TEDx Aston University https://youtu.be/EBwuk0BlWMY?si=FZMmsmA_7nwH6v7D
Katagiri, Dainin & Martin, A. (Ed.) (2017) The light that shines through infinity: Zen and the energy of life edited by Andrea Martin. Boulder: Shambhala
Lumber R, Richardson M, Sheffield D (2017) Beyond knowing nature: Contact, emotion, compassion, meaning, and beauty are pathways to nature connection. PLoS ONE 12(5): e0177186. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0177186
Rogers, C.R. (2015) Becoming a Person, Two Lectures. Martino, CT, USA.
If you are interested in learning more about nature based coaching, drop me a line. I am currently planning online training and you can register by messaging me here.