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THE WONDER OF LIFE: A PROFILE OF CHARMAINE ROCHE

by | Oct 29, 2021 | Articles, Features, Profile | 0 comments

This is a ‘dark time’ but we can be part of a revolution aimed at positive human progress, says leadership coach and researcher, Charmaine Roche.
Liz Hall reports

 

What is coaching serving? This enquiry is at the heart of Charmaine Roche’s work as a leadership coach and researcher.

“It’s very important that my work as a human being or a coach serves some social purpose, that it’s not just about personal fulfilment but is also about contributing to the direction – sounds a bit grandiose, but I do mean it – of positive human progress,” she says.

A former teacher, Roche is the founder of Speak Up Speak Out: The Ethics Matter Podcast, and of the Philosopher’s Stone Collective, set up to offer a safe space for those in the helping professions to connect and collaborate with others over our shared concern for the future of humanity on this planet.

Roche is also the co-researcher, with Henley Business School’s Professor Jonathan Passmore, of a report published at the ICF Converge 2021 conference last month (28 October), Racial Justice and Equity in Coaching.

The report calls for professional coaching bodies and coach training organisations to pledge to help bring about racial justice and equity in the profession. Recommendations include collecting data on the diversity of membership, including around race, and monitoring this over time (see News, page 7).

“The two papers up for peer review since the research completed could take up to 12 months before getting published. But the fact that Henley has been prepared to put it out in draft form is a positive step because we might be able to create a positive shift, and that’s really important for me.”

Making a difference has long been an aspiration and value of Roche’s, prompting her to become an educator, working as a teacher from 1984, before she got into coaching in 2014.

Because of her background in education, when she became a coach, she found she attracted many clients from that sector. “And this started to raise a question for me. Why are teachers leaving [the sector]?

“There was a big retention problem; a wellbeing crisis. What I found in my coaching experience didn’t match up with the rhetoric of the [wider] discourse. I thought: wellbeing [issues] are symptoms, not the cause, and that [many] educators treat kids as commodities, [based] on a model of education that [these clients] felt was reductionist within a culture of productivity they found attritional.

“At the heart of it, there was a clash of values. The teachers [her clients] were being asked to perform in a way that was damaging their sense of self, their purpose.

“I was coaching in the midst of this and asking myself, am I just stitching them back up and sending them back to the front line?”

This was one of a number of “critical questions” she was asking “about the purpose of coaching”. And she’s still asking these questions.

“They’re at the core of my work. What is coaching serving? Nobody [alone] can change the world but if you can make [someone] change, particularly in relation to critical questions, I’ll feel I’ve done something purposeful.”

 

Background

Undoubtedly, the emphasis in her family on the importance of education has been a factor in Roche wanting to create positive change.

Born in 1960 in Jamaica, two years later, her parents emigrated with Roche to Derby in the UK “for all the reasons people emigrate – to access better opportunities for work, for a better life for their kids, better access to education. In Jamaica, as with most ex-colonial countries, past the age of primary school, you have to pay for education. It’s a largely rural population living hand to mouth with very little opportunity to keep their kids in education past primary.”

Roche’s mother was proud that her own mother and stepfather had managed to keep her in education longer than most other families.

“She’s regarded as an educated woman. [They] found a shilling every week to keep her in school until she was 16 – she wrote letters for everyone in the church when we came here.

“So my parents came for those opportunities but it was a struggle. I regard myself as very privileged, in a middle-class occupation. I don’t want for the basics. But – and I remain acutely aware of the huge disparity in society, that I’m an exception – my success as a black woman in this country is the exception rather than the rule.”

Although she eventually chose to leave it, Roche was raised within a strict Pentecostal Christian household and community: “And you really did grow up in the community: you had a mother, a second mother, a third mother…it really was a village [raising] the children.

This community was nested in a white working-class community, where, she says, the white working-class children experienced the same sort of attitudes black people did around achievement, with a lack of pushing.

In Roche’s case, “my family was aspirational but didn’t understand the system, didn’t know how to navigate this. So school for me was a failure. I left school without any [academic] results. This was the fate of most of the kids in my school, who were predominantly white working class.

“It was only the faith of my English teacher, who put me into college where I got ‘O’-levels, and went on to university, despite my school [background].”

Roche became a teacher against a backdrop of unrest punctuating the mid-1980s in the UK, including the miners’ strike of 1984 and riots in Brixton and elsewhere, featuring black youths clashing with the police.

“The riots made me decide to become a teacher because I thought education was key. [However] I left in 2014, disillusioned – it was really the monetisation of education that drove me out.”

 

Into Coaching

At this point, she asked herself, ‘what do I still have to contribute?’

“I’d dabbled in coaching but hadn’t really invested in it. But I thought as a way of being, coaching had promise.”

She completed a Diploma in Coaching at the University of Warwick. “And I’ve never looked back. It was transformational.”

She’s currently in her third year at Leeds Beckett University working on her PhD: What are the ethics of coaching in social change in an oppressive context?

The context for her PhD is education but, she says, “the Report basically treats the coaching industry as oppressive for Black, Indigenous and People of Colour [BIPOC]. The coaching industry is like any other industry that reflects the system’s inequalities around race that are a feature of society… And it’s common that all organisations have policies and practices that create patterns of racial disparity. The coaching industry is very uncritical in respect of looking at how that shows up.

“Some people would say that in the context of socialising, the coaching industry doesn’t have a regulating framework apart from self-regulation, that it’s not fully fledged. I’m not saying that. [For me] the question is, if we’re professionalising, what kind of profession do we want to be in relation to social questions, to equality, justice?

“Hetty Einzig asked the question in her book (Einzig, 2017), how long will coaching be the Switzerland of the helping professions? Which I think is a very good question.”

 

Podcast and a community of practice

Roche launched her podcast in April 2020. She’d started her PhD and says she felt “I was really alone in asking the questions I was asking. The only other person I knew to be asking similar questions was Hany Shoukry who I recognised as a kindred spirit (Shoukry, 2016), whose PhD was on coaching for emancipation.

Although she admits at first she was “too scared to approach him”, Shoukry’s articles on coaching for emancipation, for social change, and as a social process are at the cornerstone of her work, she says. And he was the second guest on her podcast.

A series of articles in the Association for Coaching’s Coaching Perspectives magazine also helped her feel less alone, she says. She was successful in her requests for these authors to participate in her podcast, including Martin Vogel who’d written about coaching being political, and Zoe Cohen on the climate crisis.

“All of them challenged in different ways this idea of coaching’s neutrality.

“So the podcast started by ending my sense of isolation and made me aware that there is a nascent movement in the coaching community. I thought, wow, they are emerging. My podcast represents this emerging conversation, co-created in the moment. I love the way things emerged, then Martin [Vogel] said, why don’t you start a community?

“I didn’t want it to be just a podcast community but a place where people [could go] who in their personal and/or professional lives were struggling to find community.”

With the themes of alchemy and transformation resonating, in December 2020, Roche created the private Philosopher’s Stone Collective via the Mighty Networks platform.

 

Period of reckoning

As a ‘baby boomer’, Roche says she was able to “enjoy all the benefits of the Sixties, [borne out of] the labour and struggles of working-class women who fought out of World War Two and the Depression before that, saying ‘never again’. And yet here we are.

“Our kids and grandkids can’t be guaranteed to enjoy the social benefits, the principles and culture of that time – international solidarity, respect for self-determination, innovation… We’re in a period of reckoning [in terms of] the kind of future we want for our kids and grandkids.”

With much of the interview focusing on what she feels needs to change, Roche says she’d like to “end it on a positive note.”

“I sometimes feel our attempts to control things are part of the problem. I ask these hard critical questions in service with a real belief in transformation.

“We can be part of a reformation. I believe it’s present and it’s a source of hope. I remain eternally hopeful as long as we’re prepared to face [our challenges] and not run away from them.

“This is a really dark time. But I do have this view of the flow of life that in terms of the whole lifespan of the planet, we’re in a blip, and this moment is a blip in the blip. I still feel the wonder of life.”

 

 

 

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