Discerning the True Voices
There is a fifth option that might be discovered with the assistance of a professional coach. We can attend to our voices from other rooms and seek out new forms of generativity. But this requires discipline—and a bit of help from a coach. In attending to these voices, we have to make important decisions about what we do with the messages that we receive. In attending to these voices, we do not necessarily have to do what the voices suggest. We have to listen, but don’t have to take the advice.
Discernment: During the Middle Ages, mystics attended carefully to the voices they received through contemplation and various mystical experiences. However, they realized that some of these messages might come from somewhere other than a divine source. The voices may come from their own personal ego, from other people, or even from the devil. As a result, these mystics devised methods for contemplation, transcendent experience, and determining which messages come from God and which come from elsewhere. They called this process “discernment.”
As mid-centurions, we have to discern the good from the bad voices. We must sort out the truth about our psyche from all of the false claims that swirl around us. This where a professional coach can be most helpful. We can always choose instead to ignore the voices. This is our first choice, which we described in some detail in the previous section of this essay. Our second choice is to listen to the wrong voices. We are lured away by power, money, security, prestige, status, pride—all of the temptations with which we are all acquainted.
Our third choice is to listen to the right voices. To be successful in making this third choice, we have to determine which of the voices seem to be responsive to our changing needs, values and life purposes. We must determine which voices seem to keep us stagnant and stuck where we are right now, which distract us from new-found pathways, and which turn us toward pathways that are destructive to ourselves and the people we love. A coach can ask important questions regarding the ultimate intent and direction offered by each voice. The coach can link voices to existing interests and purposes in their client’s life.
Coaching Questions: The distinctions are not easily drawn. This is why a coach can be of great value at this point. As mid-centurions, we usually know very little about the process of discernment. We are accustomed to living in the external world, making decisions based on data that exist out there in reality: “How much money do we need to pay our bills this month?” “Which of these technical training programs is likely to prepare our daughter best for her future life?” “Where do we want to plant that new tree?” The process of discernment requires that we attend to internal data and make decisions based not on rational argument and analysis but on deep searching for inner truths related to our hopes and fears. Perhaps we should start using the term Discernment Coach when considering those who work with the voices of mid-centurions.
The Discernment Coach must ask difficult questions about their client’s inner life and about possible roles of generativity:
- Which emotions are elicited when you think about enacting this long-deferred dream?
- Of what are you most afraid when considering a positive response to this invitation from inner voices?
- What is old, safe and stagnant in your current life?
- What is new, risky and generative in your emerging life?”
