Universal Enquiries?
I’ll soon be running my fourth coaches retreat at Hazel Hill Wood. It’s an annual event in magical ancient woodland that I’ve really enjoyed creating. I’ve noticed that every year I bring the same set of enquiry questions for the group to work with. We explore in different ways, always using the trees as part of our facilitation team, but the questions remain the same. Am I just being lazy or might these in fact be universal enquiries?
Every year when I am thinking about this retreat, I realise anew that we are in challenging, uncertain times. The world seems less stable and the future more perilous. I sit with curiosity and imagination, thinking of the group of coaches who will be exploring and regenerating together…and the same questions emerge.
How are you doing personally in relationship to the unfolding environmental and societal situation we find ourselves in?
How is your professional practice being informed, challenged and developed in the face of the unfolding environmental and societal situation?
What role does, should or could community practice play as we move forward?
Three years in and these questions have served us well. The retreats have nourished and revealed, and participants have left with full hearts and minds. The questions, like the trees themselves, have been ever-present, acting as both witness of, and catalyst for, the work. I wonder if the combination might prove effective for professions other than coaching?
In fact the questions have changed a little in that time. The 2026 phrase I am using is ‘unfolding environmental and societal situation’, whereas previously I might have described the context as ‘climate crisis’ or ‘environmental challenges’. While I have always been cognisant of the interconnected nature of the various challenges we face – climate, environmental, economic, political, societal, technological, systemic – this is the first year where I’m more deliberately aware of my own relationship with the political and societal landscape. Until now I have steered clear of topics that felt non-core to the climate challenge, but that no longer appears tenable, and the struggle to ’save the planet’ seems to have regressed to a binary, rhetorical battle between ‘overly-woke activists’ on the one hand and climate change deniers on the other.
Regardless of beliefs, I think these three enquiries still stack up and might potentially be of value to a range of professional practices. And the order of the questions is deliberate. Start with an acknowledgement and validation that it’s actually OK to be struggling personally in the times we live in. More than that, it’s probably a sign of sanity to be suffering right now. So the first question is about attending to oneself as a human, a citizen, an inhabitant of this crazy planet.
The second enquiry recognises that if our professional offer remains static in this VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) landscape then chances are we can become out of step with what’s needed pretty quickly. This is about adaption of practice, regeneration of professional service toward what’s actually needed now. In my fields – coaching, facilitating, teaching – it’s not overly difficult to see the changes in our clients’ contexts and needs and we’re invested in staying relevant and in service. How do these, and other professions, need to adapt to meet the challenges we are already facing?
I’ve been reading a lot about the epidemic of loneliness, and the irony that in a fully connected world we have never felt more isolated. The third enquiry recognises that we need community, and now more than ever. We are herd animals, we need to belong to give our best. The challenges we face will not be solved by individuals, no matter how heroic they believe they are. It’s just too big and too complex. At the same time we are losing faith in formal institutions, political and economic, which is why I choose the word community to focus on.