6th Relational Coaching Conference: Love Over Fear, hosted by Ashridge Centre for Coaching, 14 October 2021
by Lindsay Wittenberg
The Ashridge Centre for Coaching 6th Relational Coaching Conference addressed how coaches can help in the context of fractious organisations, ugly politics and immense pressures on leaders.
Keynote speaker Marina Cantacuzino MBE, founder of The Forgiveness Project (which uses restorative narratives to transform lives, supporting people to overcome unresolved grievances, and building a climate of hope and empathy), opened the morning with Forgiveness: as mysterious as love. She explored how forgiveness and humanising narratives can break cycles of conflict, transform relationships and be part of a creative and restorative dynamic. It was moving and eye-opening to hear through Cantacuzino’s vivid stories how pain is the great motivator to forgive.
David Owen’s workshop on Love and fear in professional relationships invited participants to engage with our own love and fear, and explore how both can guide the coach’s work.
Robin Shohet’s thought-provoking and humble afternoon keynote highlighted the shame in acknowledging we’re frightened, and the fear that can manifest in judgment, blame and making ourselves right – a dangerous place, which makes someone else wrong. Somewhere underneath everything, he suggested, is love – and shame blocks it. He reminded us that forgiveness means we can let go of being right.
Shame was a theme too in Simon Cavicchia’s workshop Love and power: shame and the need for balance, in which he contrasted love and will, corresponding with other contrasts: feminine and masculine, relationship and directing, I-thou and I-it. A balance is needed constantly.
Organisations tend to start, at their founding, with the positive aspects of love (compassion and relationship). As they mature, they drift into love’s negative aspects (like lack of accountability), from there into the positive aspects of will (which provides direction and gets things done), then into its negative aspects (harsh judgments and over-demanding), and back to the positive aspects of love. Shame shows up when individuals fail to deliver on the ‘will’ agenda.
For me, it was both powerful and liberating to explore the place of both fear and love in coaching, particularly at a time when our societies seem burdened by ‘difference’, separation and hostility to ‘the other’.
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