Performance Consultants International

By Sir John Whitmore

Where do we begin? Most of us begin with our parents, so I will start with mine. I was lucky, very lucky, for neither of them had an ounce of greed or spite within them, and both devoted their lives to what they saw as the common good. My father was 65 years old when I was born. He was a Victorian landowning aristocrat and he ruled his estate and his family as a benevolent dictator. Though Norwegian and half his age, my mother's caring and authority were comparable. In my child's eyes they successfully and single-handedly defended England against the Huns during World War II. In their roles as leaders of the district Home Guard and Red Cross respectively, they were indeed renowned and honoured for the contributions they made in material and morale to the war effort.

My father was indeed a caricature of a benevolent dictator. He was at times disappointed by the lack of benevolence shown by some of his aristocratic colleagues and by many of the ambitious "nouveau riche' who rose to commercial or political power when the war was over. Nevertheless he was unable to comprehend the rise of socialism because he cared for his hundred or so employees as if they were his family. They had everything they needed � except for the one thing they might have wanted, choice and self-determination. He was incapable of understanding why they would want that. Most of them probably didn', but other less well-treated workers certainly did.

The long era of unquestioned autocratic leadership by the elite was drawing to a close. Post-war management followed the military model but the troops of industry were less compliant and subservient. The working class didn't work as it had before. For another half-century business leaders and their staff shadow boxed with the old order, and respect for leadership and authority waned. By 1980, however, a new and more democratic style of management was gaining credence. Coaching became a buzz word at business gatherings, though the concept of encouraging the inner authority of employees was regarded with considerable scepticism at first - by management and even by some staff.

For centuries the authority of church leaders remained unchallenged, both in terms of power and of knowledge. Even kings deferred to the bishops. That they were corrupt sometimes mattered not for God was at their side. For millennia in the East, the God within or inner authority was awarded much more credence. Here science replaced the church in time as the font of all knowledge and scientists became the new priests. Rationality and scientific reductionism reduced the mystery of life to waves and particles. Christianity survived, but with less influence, and science became all-powerful. While these two realms maintained contradictory world-views, Eastern philosophy represented a more holistic world-view in which spirituality, religion and psychology were merged, and the God within not only survived, but began to appeal to many Westerners too.

The decline in the attention granted to any outer authority in the West, including that of moral leadership, invited the emergence of inner authority, but instead there was a vacuum. The Humanism and liberalism that filled that vacuum were attractive alternatives to external authority but they soon degenerated into narcissism and licence while the God within slept. The combination of permissiveness, pornography, unashamed greed and consumerism and the phoney moral authority of political correctness looked like freedom but acted like a prison. Is it surprising that even to an Islamic moderate the West looks like a den of inequity? Add to that the absolute outer authority of a bin Laden and the clash of perception is explosive.

Now that we have become accustomed to 'permissiveness and anything goes' any challenge to it looks like old-fashioned right wing moralising. The Church feels obliged to sanction gay marriages though most liberal priests secretly are far from comfortable about it. How low does the age of consent have to drop for gays or straights before it becomes paedophilia? There will always be a lobby group claiming the liberal moral high ground for their open stance, and trying to push the age down some more.

Who or what dares to say,'that is enough'? Only when the inner authority dormant in all human beings begins to awaken will we find the courage to resist the tyranny of political correctness. Only when we can separate ourselves from our fears of peer rejection and reconnect with the still small voice within each of us will we gain the inner authority to strike a true balance between outer desire and inner freedom. In today's culture of licence, the concept of obedience evokes images of Oliver Twist or public school caning, but the obedience of which I speak is a very high spiritual state. It is obedience to the voice of the soul. It is the point at which the personality becomes an expression of the soul. It is the at-one-ment between the soul and the personality. It is unity with the God within.

Coaching is a tool.

Coaching is a tool that is used in the metaphors of business, sport, parenting, education or training whose express purpose is to help the coachee to learn to come in contact with, listen to, trust and obey their own inner authority. This takes time; we may distort the messages and deceive ourselves at first, and we may deny, ignore or reject what we hear. In time we will reap the rewards of greater self-awareness and self-belief that cannot fail to surface in every one of us for that is ultimately what we are. Coaching is a simple and simply named tool that is not hard to learn and to use with self or others. However it has a universal purpose and application that is infinitely greater and longer lasting than the world of business that it serves today. Coaching is here to stay.