Decolonising Coaching?
based on a recent event I attended
Hi. My name is Heather. I’m a Colombian-USer, born and raised in the United States, and then spent 17 years in England.
I’ve been living in Colombia for the past five years.
My background is that I taught economics at colleges and universities in New York, and then worked in education for sustainability in England.
There, I founded an organisation for refugees and asylum seekers, and did climate change activism with Extinction Rebellion.
And, for the last five years, I’ve been working in the area of anti-oppression as a coach/consultant on issues around colonialism, racism, and ableism.
My most honest job at the moment is coaching students in English all over the world who are trying to upgrade their English for professional or hobby reasons.
I proudly meet six of the seven of the US government’s NSPM-7 indications of extremism.
And I’m also very proud to be living in a country where the president speaks out forcefully against genocide and for migrants, having been one myself three times.
Speaking as a non-certified coach, with no formal coach training, I would say that I give support and I give advice, ideas, strategies, and perspectives.
People who come to me often feel gaslit about reality, which is why I don’t ignore the system and the role that empire, colonialism, imperialism play in their pressures, angst, and worries.
I think “coaching”, as a profession, as a practice, prompts us to ask what kind of world do we live in where we need to seek out possibly strangers across the world to ground us in reality?
For those of us with privilege, there’s a sense of powerlessness in the face of everything that we are aware of,
…which can lead to guilt over not doing anything or enough and being focused on our own well being, and how we survive under capitalism and rising fascism.
And I think all of these elements not only deserve to be present in a supportive conversation with someone, but deserve to be grappled with, explored in a way in which the person feels held.
Because: they didn’t choose to be born into this system with whatever privileges or challenges they have. This deserves a lot of tenderness, a lot of reality checking.
And I like the word accompaniment.
So I think my basic approach speaks to the topic that we are exploring today.
I never started out doing this accompaniment in a way that wasn’t grounded in reality,
in a politically educated, politically informed way.
And we all have oppressive tendencies because of the environment in which we were raised and or educated, (given that we have access to zoom and access to the networks that told us about this event).
These privileges aren’t something to be ashamed of, but instead something to leverage.
And there could be so many things getting in the way of this, very personal obstacles,
like fear of of disapproval from people around us, very basic topics that don’t seem to be related to colonialism and Empire, etc.
And, yet, these are obstacles to liberation,
not just for us as individuals,
but for all of life on this planet,
because we aren’t separate from life on this planet.
We may think we are, but then that would make us not human if we weren’t connected.
Because part of what it means to be human is to be in relationship with everything and everyone around us,
and when we cut that off, we further harm ourselves and everything and everyone around us,
which perpetuates the patterns that we see in white supremacy culture, colonialism, patriarchy, Empire, imperialism, genocide.
So that is my grounding in this work.
Love this!