When the Covid crisis hit, I wanted to find a way to help folks in my world. One of the ways I did that was by hosting Friday afternoon virtual check-ins open to anyone who wanted to join.
I’ve run peer coaching groups in the past. These are supportive spaces where people facing similar challenges can come together to be heard, sustained, and encouraged as they navigate change. But those groups had always met face-to-face. I wasn’t sure whether the peer coaching model would hold up in the land of Zoom.
I offered the invitation not knowing whether anyone would show up. But every week for 10 weeks, a small group of women signed into the meeting. Some became regulars while others dropped in as schedules allowed or as they felt the need for some extra support. They logged in from as far away as Texas and Rhode Island. Participants ranged in age from their early 30s to their 70s. Some had been furloughed from their jobs, and some were working frantically to adapt to teaching or conducting business online. Some were “essential workers” while others were retired.
Zoom isn’t a perfect platform, and we had a few technical difficulties. Nonetheless it is possible to build rapport and do good peer coaching work in the virtual environment. I tweaked the structure a little as I went along. Each session offered folks a chance to share our deepest anxieties and our heartfelt gratitudes. We could ask for a little support or share wisdom around particular issues. Sometimes, the best we could do was say, “You are not alone in feeling that way.” And that helped.
After the first couple of weeks, I developed a list of touchstones to guide our interaction. Based on the touchstones developed by Parker J. Palmer and the folks at the Center for Courage and Renewal, the touchstones helped create a circle of trust for the folks who joined our conversations. Among these were reminders that we should be committed to listening to each other, but that we should not engage in “fixing, saving, advising, or correcting.”
As the weeks went by, the touchstone that became paramount was this one: “Seek to respond to each other with open-ended questions rather than advice. In this way you make space for the other person’s ‘inner teacher.’”
In coach training, one of the first things I learned was the listening is an interaction. At first that seemed counter-intuitive to me, but I can to understand that listening is not a passive process. It is an action. And one of the most important elements of active listening is asking questions.
Not all questions are created equal. Some kinds of questions are very directive. They tend to invoke narrow perspectives or even to make the person who is questioned feel defensive. Open-ended questions, on the other hand, invite a person to approach a problem from a new direction or to use a new lens to look at a situation. Open-ended questions are powerful, so powerful that in coaching, we call them “powerful questions.”
Each week in our virtual check-in groups, I watched as individuals shared deep concerns and frustrations, and other members of the group responded with powerful questions like “Tell me more.” “What did that mean to you?” “Can you say more about ____.” The questions made the speaker feel heard and helped her think about problems in different ways. On several occasions, someone would say, “You know, that question that so-and-so asked me last week really got me thinking about this challenge in a new way, and that was very helpful for me.”
Powerful questions also helped the listeners better understand. In one call, after several rounds of questions, one listener said, “As you talked, I really grew to understand the many layers of this issue. It’s really complicated.”
Last week, I happened across a beautiful description of power of the powerful question in Irish poet-philosopher John O’Donahue’s posthumously published collection called Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World. He writes:
One of the most exciting and energetic forms of thought is the question. I always think that the question is like a lantern. It illuminates new landscapes and new areas as it moves. Therefore the question always assumes that there are many different dimensions to a thought that you are either blind to or that are not available to you.
I was struck by that image of the question as a lantern that illuminates new things. That was what I saw happening in those virtual check-ins when folks listened to each other with care, curiosity, acceptance and support.
The Covid crisis is not over, but now our nation is gripped by a new crisis, one that is just as deadly and one that is just as challenging. In this time when so many Americans feel like their voices are not being heard, it might be helpful if we all used the lantern of our questions—honest, open-ended, and genuinely curious questions—to help us understand each other and begin to heal our wounds.