Down to Earth

Katherine Long is on a holistic journey. When she isn’t exploring spirituality or shamanism or even equine-facilitated coaching, she can be found running barefoot, engaging in dialogue with the earth. Liz Hall catches up with her.

Winning the Coaching at Work Best Practical Article award (see page 14) was a surprise for Katherine Long – she feels she is best known for her ideas and frameworks. Yet her ability to dance with concepts is matched by her knack, and desire, for grounding them in practice.
Spirituality, somatics, shamanism, focusing and mindfulness, equine-facilitated coaching, the Paleo Movement, barefoot running and getting back to nature, emergence and transformation. Our conversation touches on all of these areas.
“Part of my journey around spirituality has involved frustration with purely cognitive approaches to coaching, and seeing the powerful transformative impact of more somatic approaches, which tap into the metaphor held within the body,” says Long, who among other things, is director of development and supervision for The OCM.
Spirituality is central for Long. Increasingly, she works explicitly with it with clients. She believes that unless we have practices that keep us grounded, we risk losing touch with it.
“What’s become clearer to me, partly through the supervision I receive from someone who’s been involved in the whole spiritual movement pre-coaching, is this intuitive sense of the importance of where the somatic piece fits in – and I would include mindfulness in there. If we’re not making contact with our bodies and really getting into the most basic primitive sense, I think spirituality is in danger of not being grounded and being too cerebral, what my supervisor would call ‘very floppy’. Spirituality can be thought of as feel-good – something to aspire to in the organisation – whereas actually it’s about how we engage every day and learn from adversity.”

Long traces her commitment to working within the spiritual space to one cold November evening in 2010. She’d travelled to London where City business leaders were gathering to reflect, meditate and listen prayerfully as a response to the financial crisis. However, as she arrived she discovered the event had been cancelled due to a tube strike, but neither Long nor one other ‘out-of-towner’ had been told.

“After the initial frustration, we decided to stay in keeping with the aims of the evening, and took ourselves off to Starbucks – which ended up as an intense sharing of hearts and journeys – in which I heard myself make a statement about wanting to create safe spaces in my professional community to share and learn from the spiritual dimension of our work.”
Since then she has been running workshops and CPD events based around this exploration, and has developed a framework, the Refraction model, which offers a set of lenses such as Presence, Love and Meaning, through which to explore spirituality at work (see “The S Factor”, vol 8, issue 2).

“It’s significant that it’s not just individual practitioners who are curious, but that it has also been received by internal coaches, people building coaching culture, and those leading coaching programmes, who are seeing what the framework is speaking to around how they change the culture of their organisation or how they support CPD for internal coaches, for example. ” She says there is an aspect to the framework that wants to “include the somatic and the shadow – the more challenging side. Otherwise we can become very idealistic.”

Somatics
Long sees ‘somatic intelligence’ as something that has been ‘lost’ to much of the Western world. “There’s so much we have to learn from indigenous peoples – the impact of which is apparent all the way from how organisations behave, make decisions to how tey treat the planet.”

Long is passionate about helping to restore this type of intelligence. For the past two years, for example, she has been training as a Practitioner of Focusing, as developed by Eugene Gendlin. “Focusing has strong parallels to mindfulness, but normally involves partnering with a Listener who holds the Focuser’s process in presence. The emphasis is on bringing a welcoming curiosity to whatever emerges and providing space for that.”
The physical side is important to Long too. Running forms a large part of her personal self-care and wellbeing practice. Those up early at last November’s European Mentoring & Coaching Council conference in Bilbao may have spotted her running with fellow barefoot runners, David Megginson and Tim Bright.

“I enjoy the actual sense of contact and grounding that dispensing with shoes brings. For me, building somatic intelligence is also about connection with the planet – if you think about it we are all from the earth and will go back into it at some point – so it’s nice to engage in some ‘dialogue’ in the in-between phase.”

Inspired by champions of the Paleo Movement, such as Mark Sisson, she adopts what she can of a ‘Stone Age’ lifestyle, getting in touch with her “inner cave girl”, she jokes. “I don’t want to be overly evangelical, but there is lots we can learn from hunter-gatherers in terms of diet, exercise, working with circadian rhythms and living in reciprocal communities.”

Equine-facilitated coaching is emerging as another dimension to her practice. “This came from the living metaphor of a ‘scary horse’ I came across in a field on my running circuit. I recognised there was something symbolic being represented to me about the scariness of getting through the field, and what I needed to learn about managing my own state.”
She contacted Andrew McFarlane of LeadChange, and developed as an equine-facilitated coaching practitioner.

“Horses bring a powerful dimension to coaching as they play back our emotions, intention and congruence with pinpoint accuracy… And it’s also humbling and refreshing how much about ourselves can be revealed by inter-species interaction,” she says.

Supervision
Much of Long’s work is in coach development and supervision, and in supporting organisations towards a coaching culture. She developed with The OCM’s Angela Hill, the Certificate in Organisational Coach-Mentor Supervision. The qualification was one of the first to be accredited under the European Mentoring & Coaching Council’s new ESQA process and, and as far as she is aware, the only programme focused primarily on developing coaching within the wider system, as well as supporting practitioners.

“It’s been a huge privilege and learning experience to support internal supervision within a number of organisations – Ernst & Young, Open University, O2, RWE nPower and TJX,” says Long. She will also be facilitating on Warwick University’s new Masters in Coaching, “which takes a completely action learning/ supervision-driven approach”.
Long’s own model, Coaching and Mentoring Supervision, takes a holistic view of the coach.

Inspirations
Long’s heroes include Doug Silsbee, author of Presence-Based Coaching (Jossey-Bass, 2008), for bringing mindfulness and presence to the forefront of what can make coaching so powerful. Also, Danny Dreyer, author of Chi Running (Pocket Books, 2008), “for showing that going with the flow is the key to effortless and injury-free running – a great metaphor for life”, and Mark Sisson “for his dream of impacting the health and wellbeing of 10 million people.”

Kay Hoffmann, her teacher and mentor in focusing “is an amazing role model of what it means to be real, vulnerable and honest”. She also includes her parents – missionaries who “made life choices which shunned wealth and stability to follow their most cherished values and beliefs”.

Emergence
Spirituality and somatic work naturally engages us with a systems ways of working and thinking, she says, “which moves away from a mechanistic Cartesian approach to coaching”.
“It’s about learning to contract more openly around process rather than outcome. For example, contracting to work with C Otto Scharmer’s Theory U as a model of emergent change. It’s more about noticing what you’re noticing. It’s not goal-driven, and change grows really organically.”

Citing Simon Western’s Four Discourses of Coaching (in Coaching and Mentoring, SAGE, 2012), which include Soul, Psy, Managerial and Network coaches, she places herself firmly in the Soul and Network (systems) domains. “I sometimes wonder whether all that I do meets the narrow definition of coaching. But what really fires my enthusiasm is working at the level of transformation, with people evolving into the next version of themselves. This is the type of work I find inspirational.”

She says that for a lot of coaches, there is something of a shamanic role “about being on the edges”. “Shamans live on the outside of their communities, which means they are both in and not in the system, and from that place can help mediate between different worlds. Being a coach can involve taking on a shamanic role – there is a privilege in that, and also a cost.”

Long grew up in Japan, where she was somewhat of an outsider. She still had a sense of this in the UK, particularly in the reaction of some to her parents having worked as missionaries. At the time, this “felt like a disadvantage, but I now see that it’s a core part of what resources me, and where I can contribute from”, she says. “It’s about helping people transition into the unknown.” 

References
T Bachkirova et al, Coaching and Mentoring Supervision, OUP, 2011
C O Scharmer, Theory U: Leading from the Future as it Emerges, Berrett-Koehler, 2009

Coaching at Work, Volume 8, Issue 5