What happens when we stop busying ourselves just for a moment? What do we see when we put down the duster and stop tidying up?
There’s an early French & Saunders sketch that’s been hanging around in my head this week. Jennifer Saunders and her husband, Ade Edmondson, are hosting a dinner party for Ade’s boss.
Jennifer is desperate to play the genial host. Perfectionism doesn’t paralyse her so much as wind her up: cushions are plumped, air freshener sprayed everywhere, and a frantic energy takes hold — less hospitality, more control drama.
When guests Dawn French and Lenny Henry arrive, Jennifer goes into overdrive. The evening accelerates to near breaking point before the guests are ushered out — dinner untouched — Dawn having witnessed Jennifer’s near-breakdown in the kitchen.
The lesson here is almost imperceptible amongst the manic chaos: better to go with the moment than try and wrest control of it. Avoid striving to make everything perfect. Maybe sit instead with everything as it is at present. Ceasing dusting, plumping or freshening. Let things be. Let others be. Avoid the collapse that follows total control.
I imagine myself sitting in Jennifer’s lounge, observing what surrounds me. Air freshener on the table, a duster alongside. What I see is uncertainty, volatility, and one or two items in need of repair. The kitchen is out of sight but the endeavour looms large. This dinner party invite isn’t terribly well-timed, I’m not enthusiastic about it, and I’m not entirely sure how we’re going to get to the end of it. I cannot imagine the logistics of cooking, serving, and keeping conversation alive with two strangers. Wherever I look it’s not an especially pretty sight, and that mirror over the fireplace really needs to go.
The uncertainty is to do with work. Contracts are changing in ways that are counter-intuitive, new opportunities are promised. There is little real choice. I am being asked to have faith in the unknown. I need proof but there isn’t any. What little certainty there is extends to a day, or a week or a month, certainly no further. Just because someone says that things will remain broadly the same doesn’t actually mean they will. There are no guarantees.
At 53 years old this seems on the face of it a surprising position to find oneself in, and yet, if I steer myself away from the panic that would normally ensue thanks to early-life conditioning, it’s possible to determine, stuffed down the side of the sofa, a glimmer of excitement. Attached to it, like an old forgotten never-been-unwrapped boiled sweet, might even be trust. There is truth in what’s said about trust: it truly is the active engagement with the unknown.
It seems utterly ridiculous to spend any more time analysing Zoom calls, forecasting earnings, or speculating what the commercial strategies of companies I have zero-hours contracts with actually are. It’s interesting and slightly comforting, but one has to be mindful of over-indexing on it. Perhaps there’s no more cleaning up that is necessary in this room after all. Maybe we should just be in it and see what happens, see if the guests are even hungry, and spend time with them and get to know them. It’s not how the food is served that counts, so much as how it tastes.
Occupying this imaginary space offers a framework in which thoughts can be captured, observed and evaluated. This opportunity feeds the imagination and in turn brings an unusual energy to the thinking that not only arrives at a deeper understanding of what’s going on for me at this moment, but it’s also a self-affirming act — a creative experiment that yields insight and fulfilment.
Saunders is irretrievably in the weeds, acting tactically, control slipping inexorably through her fingers. Letting it do so would be so much easier than trying to hang on to it.
Here, insight in hand, the paradox inherent in the work I do as a coach. The coaching mechanism drives change. There must be an outcome – or so we’re told and so many others project on social media. There must be discernible and grand transformation. Yet in times of uncertainty that goal of change can be mistaken for reclaiming control or constructing certainty. That’s what the industry trades on: guarantees and promises, even if the coaching process demands a more flexible approach and surfaces a different outlook.
Yet the coaching mindset, in moments of intense uncertainty, can actually lead us to simply accepting things as they are — a process that demands not creating control but trusting in the unknown.
Noisy coaches lean into what they think people need — promising guarantees, a projection of quality illustrated by volume, quality or distinctiveness is much more difficult to convey. Such messaging casts shadow on the reality of the coaching process — the messy reality that often emerges when effective coaching takes hold. That is the risk the good coaches take — trusting that the quality will cut through the noise. This stance – trusting the possibility of the unknown – is a fragile thing to hold.