What gives life meaning? It’s a question often pondered by Aboodi Shabi, executive coach and co-founder of UK ICF. Coaching, he tells Liz Hall, can help us find that meaning – if we approach it with compassion and humility

 

Aboodi Shabi, independent executive and personal coach and former head of coaching and training for Newfield Network Europe, isn’t one for preciousness or earnestness. He’s irreverent, witty, eloquent and fond of asking questions others won’t. He’s passionate, too – about being of service, and making meaning of life for himself and for others.

Even when he was very young, Shabi was always one to ask questions others wouldn’t, and it was a tendency which carried on through university, where he read Politics and Philosophy, and beyond, into his coaching career.

These days, as coaching as a profession matures, Shabi’s piercing questions help us examine our sacred cows. For him these include believing we’re all special, that we all have the choice to create our dream life, that life’s always wonderful and that coaching can be the world’s saviour.

Shabi has played a leading role in the emerging profession, including as founding co-president of the UK International Coach Federation (ICF) in 1998, and as an ICF global board member. He’s a member of Coaching at Work’s Editorial Advisory Board. He’s also passionate about the positive impact coaching can have.

“Coaching offers an interesting way to help people improve their lives and make meaning. I’ve always been interested in what gives life meaning. I’ve had a curiosity and a hunger and been on a spiritual quest from an
early age.”

But Shabi hasn’t always viewed coaching positively. When he first encountered coaching in the mid-90s, thinking it would make for interesting personal development, he dismissed it as “a little bit too happy-clappy”.

“I thought it was over-focused on the positive, a bit too much like cheerleading, with lots of dismissal of the past and of emotions.”

However, in 2000 he came across coach training organisation and consultancy Newfield Network and specifically its founder Julio Olalla. And he decided “this is the place for me”.

He soon transitioned into coaching after a long career in the voluntary sector, in mental health, including supporting people coming out of psychiatric hospitals and managing projects. Although the work had at first “appealed to my values”, it had become “more and more bureaucratic”. So he was ready for a change.

Hearing Olalla speak, Shabi thought he made sense, not only professionally but of Shabi’s own personal journey.

“I grew up in a turbulent passionate Arabic background, with an alcoholic father and a depressed mother. I’d step out into the local streets in an area where retired colonels lived, and I attended British public school.
I attended the University of Liverpool, a city with lots of deprivation, where I studied Philosophy and Politics. I couldn’t make sense of it.

“Julio spoke about how coaching can be good for people in crisis, like modern-day shamanism. He talked about [mythologist] Joseph Campbell. And about cultural discourse.

“Newfield is grounded in philosophy and rigour. There’s not just the language and rational element, but the somatic piece too. And everything about that really fitted. That distinction between ‘this is how the world is’ and ‘this is how I see it’.”

Between the two men, there is the common ground of exile. Conceived in Baghdad, Iraq, Shabi was born in London to a Lebanese-Christian mother and an Iraqi-Jewish father. Olalla, a former lawyer to Salvador Allende’s Chilean government, fled to Argentina then the US after Chile’s 1973 coup d’état. The two sparked up a conversation and a connection.

“It sounds arrogant, but I’m very smart, good at reasoning things out, and at wriggling out of things! Julio threw me out of my comfort zone. I was bewildered. He took me to a place where most people don’t take me!”

After that conversation, Shabi was fortunate to then be taken on by Olalla as a client for the next few years, one of only three of four.

He trained at Newfield Network and when he suggested the organisation come to Europe, he was told, “We’d like you to do this.” Olalla then mentored Shabi to teach the programmes.

When Shabi first discovered Newfield, the backdrop included the Iraqi war and President Bush’s War on Terror. The idea that these conflicts take place partly because of how we hold different perspectives felt very pertinent to Shabi.

“Conflict between different tribes can be narrowed down to ‘this is how I see it’. It’s about understanding that people are steeped in their way of seeing.”

In light of recent terror attacks, Shabi reflects, “How can some people be so sure of their rightness that they will slaughter other people? People get so certain about their rightness …..we believe our way is the right one…and we’re prepared to eliminate people because they have different points of view. If we could understand that, the world would be a different place.

“People come to coaching and they really believe certain things are true, and never question them. For example, ‘the world is dangerous’, or ‘asking for help is wrong’. And our worlds are shaped by those beliefs. Coaching helps us unpick our core beliefs. This is an important part of coaching, otherwise you just generate more of the same. Then people learn to practise, for example, asking for help, generating more and more opportunities to stop doing the same-old same-old, as they start to see different perspectives.

“In an organisational setting, different perspectives are very much needed, for example, someone who is willing to go beyond and someone who pays attention to risk.

“Coaching is very fond of ‘build it and they will come’, but what if they don’t come? It’s very useful to have someone who says, for example, ‘what if it isn’t a success?’ ”

One of Shabi’s favourite books is Barbara Ehrenreich’s Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America & the World. The author attacks “the tyranny of positive thinking”, sharing how after being diagnosed with breast cancer, her anger at the disease was seen as unhealthy by some health professionals and fellow cancer sufferers. In the book, she talks about how people warning the financial bubble had burst were fired from the banks where they worked for their negative talk.

“We all love optimism in coaching. But as coaches we need to be aware of the value of questioning this optimism. We might have averted the financial crisis if the banks hadn’t fired these people.

“Coaching can validate different people’s perspectives. Nothing’s more dangerous than an idea when it’s the only one you have!

“Every new thing has to learn maturity, and that’s where coaching is at. We should never assume we’ve got it right. Coaching’s much more reflective than when I first started. It used to be ‘get over yourself and get on with it’. The world is different now to when it started in the dot.com world. I recently spoke to a couple of coaches who said they’ve been optimistic all their lives, but don’t feel like that now.

“Coaching is also listening more to other disciplines, being more willing to question its sacred cows. We’re all in danger of saying ‘this is the truth’. We’ve got to be willing to question paradigms. And I think we also need to become more comfortable with emotional worlds.”

A favourite book is the General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini and Richard Lannon, about the science of human emotions and biological psychiatry. “It uses science to explain why we need to connect. Relationships are magic and speaking is transformational.”

 

Choices and humility

Shabi has problems with the idea, particularly in coaching, that everybody has a choice.

“If coaching is to stay relevant, we have to move away from this idea. Lots of people are caught up in very challenging circumstances and may not believe they have a choice. The ideas of globalisation and prosperity for all are a little bit too caught up in ‘you make your own luck’. Sometimes people get caught with a bad choice because they only see that bad choice.

“Coaches need to become more humble, both as a profession and individually. We can’t change the world and we need to accept that, for lots of people, life is about accepting it’s challenging and tough – we can’t wave a magic wand. That humility might mean that we could engage more in challenging the status quo.”

Inspirational people for Shabi include Brené Brown, but he says,“We do love the idea of inspiring people and leaders; we’ll talk about the brilliance of people and I’m not against it, but there’s something about this message that reduces it to fads.

“It’s not that we need new inspiring leaders; we have lots around. There’s nothing new. We’ve always needed to go to shamans, or priestesses or whoever. We’re always looking for the latest thing rather than looking for what we can draw on, for something beyond the mundane. We have a constant hunger for newness. Coaching is just as bad as any profession in looking for the latest thing – we’re almost fetishist.”

 

Cancer diagnosis

More recently, Shabi himself was diagnosed with cancer – he’s currently in remission. It happened when his time at Newfield, after eight or so years, was coming to an end. Now he’s freelance, and doesn’t work full-time.

He says, “I had the opportunity to take stock and think about what’s important and meaningful. It made me more committed to my spiritual life – this is what helps me make sense of my life.”

He’s also more committed “to kindness, listening to Bob Dylan, reading poetry including of my hero T S Eliot, spending time with nature, doing Iyengar Yoga, playing the piano badly and being with people I love.

“And to being bolder, including in my coaching work. [I ask myself] what am I keeping myself safe for? What am I saving myself for?”

More than ever, these days, he lives his professional life “with a sense of curiosity”.

“I am really enjoying being curious, having different conversations with different people. I haven’t had such a sense of spaciousness before.”

Shabi was fortunate in that his cancer was caught early, but he says, “There isn’t a day that I don’t wake up and think it might come back. By the time this interview is published, it may have come back. It’s as raw as that. It’s a real reminder that life is precious and there’s a spiritual quality and urgency to live as fully as I can.”

But, he says, “I don’t want to be saying every moment is precious, that’s not who I am, I can’t bear preciousness and earnestness. I can veg out! But I am trying to live a life that is richer, more serene and less agitating.”

He’s stepped away from Instagram and Facebook, which had both become a source of agitation for him, although he still reads The Financial Times and The Economist for his news fodder.

Shabi meditates every day, even when he doesn’t want to. “Part of it is about taking myself away from the everyday, helping me re-engage more responsibly, which is vital for coaches and leaders.

“There’s the [Jewish] idea of Shabbat – a time of the week when we’re not engaged in work. If you go to Israel, Friday nights are quiet. And in Islam, the call to prayer comes five times a day. These are chances to step away and focus on something else. One of the worst things we did in the UK was to abolish the Sunday trading laws.

“For me, there’s something about the importance of a spiritual framework. I think we have a spiritual crisis. We can’t do without transcendence, and psychotherapists are in many ways the new gods.

“And part of what coaching can be is the chance for people to just be quiet – an oasis for the client. And for the coach, it’s about the importance of having an inner life. Introducing a quality like mindfulness.”

Quoting lyrics from the late singer David Bowie’s song, Memory of a Free Festival, ‘And we walked back to the road, unchained’, he asks, “How can we unchain ourselves from time to time?”

His spiritual practice has helped him become more accepting. “Much as I’m agitated by Trump, Brexit and the rise of the far right, there’s something important about acceptance.

“All that has happened to me has made me who I am – my alcoholic father, my depressed mother. My journey hasn’t been easy and smooth, but as I get older and thanks to my spiritual practice, I feel more accepting of that and can hold my part. I feel like I’m still learning. I feel profound gratitude for my life. My question is, how can I be of greater service – which comes from that gratitude.

“It’s a bit of a cliché”, adds Shabi disparagingly. “But sometimes I find myself reflecting on grateful as almost a way of being. It doesn’t mean I go through life saying everything is wonderful, it’s not that there aren’t things to be pissed off about, but I never forget how lucky I am.

“Last October, I went to Berlin. It was around the time of missile launches from North Korea, and I was raw emotionally at the end of the day. It was just after my sister had died. And I thought how lucky I am that I didn’t live in the Holocaust. It’s luck. And I can really connect with that gratitude.”

He quotes from a favourite film, Fight Club (1999): ‘You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else.’

“Coaching plays partly into that idea that we are all precious, unique snowflakes and deserve a nice life. We need to learn to hold ourselves as lucky humble beings who by any twist of fate could be living a shitty life somewhere. I don’t want to sound earnest or precious.

“One of the parts of my journey at Newfield was about the move away from the need to be the guru, to accepting that, ‘I’m just a guy doing work who gets fed up with the rain and the world’. There’s something about compassion and humility.

“Also, being human means having struggles. Life’s not a walk in the park, but then it shouldn’t be. I’d slap any coach who told me it is!” he jokes.

This time, he quotes from Bob Dylan’s song, Visions of Johanna, ‘We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it.’

“I see people who are a sea of calm, and I think, I wouldn’t ask you for advice! We’re no more sorted out as coaches than our clients!”

He shares how he recently watched Planet Earth 2: “And I took from that that animals can be very cruel to each other, territorial, and I thought, ‘we’re not really that different’. We fight, we don’t learn from history, maybe there’s a way to accept some of the horribleness. I’m not saying sit about in despair, but realise that we’re just barbaric savage animals sometimes. This helps me to take the world more lightly, by thinking, ‘oh, look at those humans’. I quite like those moments!”

He quotes from author Rudyard Kipling, ‘Take everything you like seriously, except yourself.’ And the Buddhist saying, ‘Act always as if the future of the universe depended on what you did, while laughing at yourself for thinking that whatever you do makes any difference.’

“I never want us to forget how lucky we are. I love being alive. But let’s bring some lightness. We’re all gonna die!”

 

• See also Coaching at Work’s 2010 profile of Julio Olalla: http://bit.ly/2nnJlWU