Attention and Ease: What Yoga Taught Me About Coaching (and vice versa)
Have you ever experienced coaching or practiced yoga? Perhaps both are integrated (seamlessly?) into your life and your work or maybe you’re curious about both and how they might inter connect.
I’ve practiced yoga for 9 years now and I can honestly say it has had a huge and positive impact on my life and my coaching. As I see it, there are subtle synergies between yoga and coaching, and when you bring the two practices together, new possibilities open up for how you relate and connect, how you make meaning in your work and life and how you take action in the world.
Noticing: The first doorway to change
I met Helen at her Marple yoga class, when I moved to the town and wanted to find ways to connect with my new community. I’d tried yoga before and had a sense I ‘should’ like it, but I’d never really been able to connect with it fully. This was me having another go.
Almost straight away, I knew Helen’s class was different. The language she used resonated with that I used as a coach, words like noticing, attention, enquiry, awareness.
We’d stand chatting outside the doorway of the class long after it had finished, and very soon my life and my coaching practice began to shift, subtly and positively. I became more present and aware and better able to draw on the inner-resources needed to utilise what is described in the coaching world as ‘self-as-instrument.’
Soon, I’d invited Helen to offer yoga based somatic enquiry into my first outdoor coaching retreat for coaches in 2018. This was the first time Helen and I worked together and it led to many other collaborations (as well as a wonderful friendship!), including a Creativity and Connection workshop and further outdoor coaching programmes. I was delighted when this month, Helen invited me to offer a workshop on listening to her Evolving your Practice programme for yoga teachers. What a joy that has been!
Where it begins
Both yoga and coaching begin with noticing. Noticing how we are. Noticing breath. Noticing patterns of thinking and the quiet signals our senses offer us before we rush to try to interpret and understand.
In yoga, this happens moment to moment. In coaching, it begins with noticing ‘self’ in relation to our clients and the systems in which we both operate; what’s said, what’s left unsaid, what’s emerging in the space between us and the client’s future possibilities.
Noticing is far from passive. In both yoga and coaching, it’s the very foundations of choice.
Enquiry
Yoga invites enquiry that is curious or playful rather than analytical or cerebral, and coaching mirrors this beautifully. We ask questions that open things up for our clients, highlighting assumptions which may well ‘be lived as true’ (thank you for this useful phrase, Nancy Kline!) and inviting choice into what comes next. This is not always comfortable, as one of the participants on the listening workshop pointed out. Questions can soften the grip of certainty while at the same time opening up paths which may on the one hand feel unchartered and unknown and on the other, emergent and fresh.
Enquiry through questions helps leaders hear themselves more clearly, through their bodies and their intuition as well as their thinking. Questions help refine our thinking and move towards positive change. When we offer our full attention as our clients respond, it becomes the way in which they are able to listen meaningfully through the noise.
Attention and ease
In the listening workshop for Helen’s yoga teachers, I spoke about two components of Nancy Kline’s Thinking Environment, Attention and Ease. In coaching, we recognise that the quality of the attention we offer our clients impacts the quality of our clients’ thinking. It’s a transformative gift; it’s generative and comes for me, from a place of humility and presence.
If we try to force attention, apply it scientifically like a microscope, we miss so much, including the wider systems and context, the nuance and the patterns, and are unable to support our client in bringing awareness to those things for themselves.
In yoga, we are balancing the qualities of sthira, a kind of steadiness, alertness and attention, and sukha, which is ease, lightness, spaciousness. We need both in balance, so we can avoid too much effort, rigidity and need for control or too much apathy and disengagement.
Can we inhabit both simultaneously, in both coaching and yoga – full attention and ease? It seems to me that centuries apart, Nancy Kline and Patanjali, the author of the yoga sutras, are noticing a similar truth, that attention and ease are about a balance which is essential to both our inner wellbeing and what we bring to the world through our actions.
Self‑Awareness as a deliberate, lifelong practice
The yogic principle of svādhyāya (self‑study), sits at the heart of yoga and is also a thread woven throughout coaching. One of the participants in the listening workshop commented on how hard we can be on ourselves as humans, something you might recognise for yourself. It’s important therefore, that self-study doesn’t become self‑critique, self-improvement or chastisement but rather is full of compassion and an ongoing relationship with who we are becoming.
For a coach, this might show up as reflective practice and a continuous commitment to practice coaching with honesty, integrity and humility with the system in mind. In yoga, it’s the steady returning to breath, body and universal connection.
The radical act of slowing down
In a world that links productivity to action, impossible deadlines and a steady stream of social media distraction, the invitation to slow down can feel counter-cultural.
In this context, it can be easy to believe that stillness is passive and the absence of something (movement/doing) rather than the presence of something (awareness/insight/knowledge). To slow down and be still is indeed a radical act.
When we slow down, we’re able to access a kind of knowing that goes deeper than what we know in our thinking (which we know can become distorted and unhelpful), and taps in to the intelligence of the senses, the emotions, the subtle shifts of energy that shape how we show up in the world.
In slowing and stillness, we’re creating conditions for truly listening to ourselves, what’s happening in our relationships and in our connection with the systems within which we exist. It’s from here we can make choices which are informed, aligned and values-led.
Energy and emotion
Yoga teaches us to notice the energy in our being and our relationships, how it flows, when it’s stagnant or blocked, how to free it and where boundaries might help. Coaching is similar in that it can bring awareness to patterns of energy and burnout, enthusiasm and fatigue, those that support wellbeing, decision making and planning.
In the western world, emotions can be seen as superfluous in the workplace, and yet to ignore our emotional responses to relationships, work and decisions is to miss a trick. To paraphrase Susan David, emotions are signposts and we ignore them at our peril. When we bring awareness to what we know through our emotions, we’re giving ourselves (and our clients) the opportunity to have more honest conversations, to build teams that feel safe and to navigate risk using multiple intelligences. Honest curiosity, compassion and non-judgement are key.
Being not doing
Over the years, Helen and I have discussed how both coaching and yoga focus on being (rather than doing); we don’t ‘do yoga’ but instead yoga is how we are. Those of you who have trained with me will know I often return to Edna Murdoch’s phrase, ‘who we are is how we coach’; we are, in how we show up, offer attention, bring compassion and curiosity, our values, ethics and authenticity, the essence of coaching.
In both practices, we invite through our relational presence a space that brings awareness and resourcefulness. This is hugely powerful, because from here emerges genuine choice about how we really want to be and act in the world.
I’d love to know your thoughts if you’re a coach, a yogi or perhaps both or curious about how the two connect.
And if you love yoga and would like to learn a little more about coaching, you can so so at my July ‘Foundations of Transformational Coaching Conversations’ workshops. Check them out here!