Julio. I will not use the word love for only one reason, because it’s so heavily loaded in our times, but I will use the word care. Don’t even initiate coaching if you don’t care, if it is only because you have to do it professionally. When I coach, I do use the expression, I fall in love, and the reason I use it is that I deeply care. It’s impossible for me to engage with someone if I don’t care. What kind of conversation could we have if I don’t care? What happens is that caring is a force in the conversation. It’s not just simply a feeling of mine. Care is informing my intuition. Care makes me sharp in my observation. Care brings commitment to a higher degree than ever before. Care allows me to create a field of safety for you that otherwise wouldn’t exist. Care is a force.
Very often, if care is well established, you will see that the conversation goes in spite of yourself Really, the conversation escapes you; it goes ahead of yourself But if you believe that coaching is an intelligent conversation, you are in trouble because, in that case, you will have to be “informed, educated, thoughtful,” and so forth. You can be all of that, but if you don’t care, it’s irrelevant.
Bill. I love your phrase, “in spite of yourself” You seem to be saying that, in effective coaching conversations, you abandon that sense you have of self because the self just got shifted because of this specific conversation. So, the formal, stiff, coaching conversation that goes nowhere is one where I need to preserve my sense of self and not let you screw around with it.
Julio. This issue of caring precedes commitment. Caring is a very fundamental, and, I think, a very basic human issue. If the relationship is purely utilitarian and only a professional one where I don’t care about any but my own issues and how I’m doing or looking to you, then I am betraying the client. We are in territory where we cannot fly together. But caring deeply for the person I have in front of me informs that person. It produces a realm of possibilities that otherwise simply will not be there. We use different expressions to refer to that. But, for instance, when I do care, care also is an invocation. The exercise of caring is an invocation to other forces, to other realms. When I care, and I’m in a conversation with you and coaching you, my caring literally is an invocation. I am inviting gods and goddesses to come to support us.
Bill. In some ways, it’s agape. I just conducted a Socrates Cafe that focused on love. One of the things we explored was the issue of agape. This term has been misunderstood. Agape is often not just about God, but also about our relationship with our children and with others because that relationship is about a greater purpose. We love our child not just for the child but also for what that child and we can be in our world. It sounds like that’s the kind of love you’re talking about.
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