Julio Olalla, the founder of ontological coaching, said society had given birth to coaching to help it address a major breakdown in how we know and how we observe.
In his keynote address, “A good life versus a better life”, at the AC conference, the former Chilean government attorney, and founder of coaching organisation Newfield, said: “Coaching was born like any other practice – because societies invent new practices when the old practices can’t address emerging concerns.”
He highlighted a number of current crises in energy, the economy and health, suggesting coaching has a serious contribution to make in changing the way we observe the world. He said one problem we face arises from having divided the world into “inner” and “outer”.
“We’ve never been able to put it together again. What happened after that division? People who were really spiritual began to leave this to one side, to say meaning and purpose is not my job. Suddenly the world began to be meaningless – no client who comes to me isn’t deeply affected by this, even if they don’t articulate it.”
He said “it’s not what we know, but how we know” and that “we’ve forgotten wisdom”.
The dichotomy between inner/outer, matter/spirit, objective/subjective “has created a sense that we’re living in a place that is not quite our home”, he said. For him, coaching represents the “extraordinary possibility to open conversations to allow us to observe the observer we are and only then to choose a different perspective and different role”.
Olalla said all too often the purpose of learning has only been to predict and control. He asked what it would be like not to predict and control, but to dance, to let the world manifest, to be together in a different way?
He said coaching is about recovering the emotion of gratitude, about being in touch again with the simplest things that make a good life a better life.
“I couldn’t agree with Katherine Tulpa more that coaching is bigger than coaching,” he said.
Coaching at Work, Volume 5, Issue 3