Inner Coaching

Faith is an important word for many of us. It is a word we wish to keep and utilise because it resonates to the very heart of our being. It shapes our lives, gives energy and focus, faith gives deep meaning and a sense of place and destiny. It is something which joins us with thousands of other people in their own spiritual community and quest. Some, probably secular modernists will be surprised when I say that the word ‘faith’ is so often a uniting rather than divisive thing. For over a decade I worked with people of diverse faiths and from all corners of the world. It was our diverse faith which gave us so much in common and which enabled us to work together for environmental and global peace and justice. As a Christian I feel very comfortable and able to walk into a mosque, temple, gurdwara or synagogue and there find a welcome as a person of faith.

But for many, faith is a very uncomfortable word linked negatively with institutional religion, with overtones of brain washing and narrow mindedness. Certainly at each point in world history people of faith stand accused of such poor behaviours and religious bigotry. But there is so often a narrow mindedness and negative assumptions/cliques found in secular agnosticism and atheism which show a profound misunderstanding and maybe distrust of faith and religion. I can quite understand distrust caused by painful experiences at the hands of religions institutions, but so often ignorance is at the heart of this distrust. I have even found this in those who speak for spirituality and coaching. I hope to devote a chapter in this journal about how we might coach people of faith, but for now I want to ask how we might speak about faith in the exploration of spirituality and coaching.

My original intention in this journal chapter was to try and broaden an understanding of the word faith and argue it is a word which can be appropriately used in religious and secular context alike when discussing spirituality. I wanted to conclude that an enquiry into coaching and spirituality can legitimately use the word faith. But after writing this journal chapter I have now decided the word ‘faith’ is so associated with religious institutions and world religion that I need to expand my vocabulary. But how? How can we talk about faith collectively in the world of coaching?

Faith as universal Human meaning making To do this let’s draw on the work of James Fowler (1981). Although his work is now rather dated, it is grounded on well respected social psychological theory which still stands today.

He discounts faith being exclusively about religion and belief. By drawing on the social psychology of Erik Erikson (1963), the psychology of education of Jean Piaget (1976) and the theory of ‘moral perspective taking’ of Lawrence Kohlberg (Psychology Today 1968), Fowler suggests faith is a universal human phenomenon based on the human need to find or make meaning. He argues, faith ought to be a verb as it is an active way to trust and give shape to our experiences of life (1981 p16). Through our early primary relationships and subsequent psychological development, he says, we learn to trust and find meaning through centres of value and power.

Fowler develops this idea by suggesting these centres of value and power, (most often shared with others in the family or community and which can be largely unconscious), not only order and give meaning to our lives but deepen so that the human is able to image symbolic ‘ultimate environments’ of value and power which then give shape and meaning to life (p25). An ultimate environment is “our image of that largest theatre of action in which we act out our lives……. Our images of the ultimate environment determine the ways we arrange the scenery and grasp the plot in our lives’ plays” (p29). So an ultimate environment might be a concept of God, heaven or enlightenment for those with a ‘religious faith’, but it could easily be a deep sense of environmental justice, a sense of universal love, the unity of all things, that one’s family is of uttermost importance, that the world is an unsafe or safe place. Fowler says our transcendent images of ultimate environment change as we age because we develop new psychological and relational skills (p37ff). I have shown previously how young people of no faith hold fast to non-religious ultimate environments which give meaning to their lives (see Clapton 1993, pp113ff).

So Fowler broadens the word faith by identifying psychological processes which create centres of meaning for all humans. He continues, in his theory, to propose that because the way the human psychologically learn, develop thinking skills and integrates socially into communities, their faith (or transendent centre of value and power) develop in quite predictable ways through childhood and adolescence into adulthood through sequential stages which can be identified. It is interesting he concludes that those with a religious faith usually settle around stage 3 and that to move onto stage 4 or stage 5 the individual would most probably need to leave the institutional religion (p175ff).

I feel sure that Fowler does offer the coach some tools here to helpfully examine and identify the meaning making and ultimate environments woven in client’s life and described in their coaching conversations. He provides a developmental structure for the coach to discern how their client might move forward in their meaning making and how this moving forward is facilitated by crisis (p100ff).

I had hoped Fowler would provide of a way whereby we can all talk about faith and mean something more that religious faith, but the hurdle is too high, there will still be too much misunderstanding. Lets talk about centres of value and power and ultimate environments and how these help us to make meaning in the world. At some point I will need to explore Jungian archetypes as these might well be another route to understand how we create ultimate environments in our spiritual lives.

Clapton, T. 1993 The Religious Experience and Faith Development
of Secular Young People. Unpublished Masters Degree Thesis. Oxford
University

Erikson, E. H. 1963 Childhood and Society Norton. New York. pp269-274

Folwer, J. 1981 Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning. Harper & Row, San Francisco

Kohlberg, K. 1968 The Child as a Moral Philosopher Psychology Today September pp25-30

Piaget, J. 1967 Six Psychological Studies Random House, New York.

1976 The Child and Reality Penguin Books, New York.